Harry Gamble's Contesting French West Africa presents an overview of policies of, and reactions to, French colonial schooling. It focuses especially on the period between 1903, when colonial officials implemented plans to shift education away from missionaries, and the first years of the Fourth Republic, founded in1946. Over eight chronological chapters focusing on specific moments of ‘struggles over education, the colonial order, and the shape of the future’, Gamble demonstrates how debates over education can be used to understand mechanisms of colonial rule, notions of citizenship, and the discourses and practices of the ‘civilising mission’ (9). The book aims to foreground the voices and perspectives of African elites, and it considers the differentiated impact of and responses to colonial schooling in various urban and rural locations throughout French West Africa (FWA), with an emphasis on Senegal's Four Communes.
Gamble argues that ‘rather than becoming marginal to the new colonial order, the Four Communes actually served as dynamic urban nodes, radiating out into interior regions’ and that they are therefore key case studies for tensions over education policies and colonial control (20). Chapters One and Two analyse how contests over rights, citizenship, and schooling are linked by focusing on the originaires between the late nineteenth century and the early 1920s and their responses to the ‘bifurcated approach to schooling’ and covert racial segregation (25). These two chapters both present an overview of key dates and important actors, such as William Ponty and Blaise Diagne, and demonstrate how citizenship laws were refracted through school policies and racialised understandings of ‘subjects’ and ‘citizens’. Chapters Three and Four investigate how colonial administrators in Paris and FWA sought to manage the colony through education after the First World War, with an increasing emphasis on the interior through an extended network of rural schools. The originaires’ increasingly vocal demands made colonial officials anxious about West African's teachers, who they saw as ‘moving beyond their assigned roles’ and at risk of being ‘uprooted’ (déracinés). In an effort to suppress these perceived dangers, officials depicted the interior as a placid ‘Afrique paysanne’, a trope that they used to justify adapted schooling and the oppression of rural populations, including forced labour (99). Considering the received wisdom that presumes that French had always been the sole language of education throughout French African colonies, Gamble's choice to highlight the debates over the use of ‘local languages’ in rural schools and at the École William Ponty in the 1920s and 1930s is particularly welcome. In Chapter Five, Gamble takes Léopold Sédar Senghor's mobilisation on education issues as an example of African elites’ reactions to shifting definitions of citizenship. A similar format is used in Chapter Six to discuss the period between the start of the Second World War and the fall of the Vichy regime in FWA. Although explicitly aiming to discuss African elites' activism, the chapters also deal at length with different colonial administrators and their impact on policies and implementation, which constitutes a rich source of materials on teacher training and curriculum design. Questions of race and citizenship continue as key issues in Chapters Seven and Eight with an exploration of French policy in preparation for and after the 1944 Brazzaville Conference, as well as renewed struggles over rights and access after 1945.
The book is particularly strong on offering archival materials and angles from which to reflect upon the realities of colonial rule beyond the stereotypes of assimilation and association, with Gamble paraphrasing Robert Delavignette in stating that ‘it was pointless to look for ideological consistency in something as hybrid as French colonialism’ (96). The chronological coverage, which spotlights a series of historic moments and educational initiatives to illuminate other issues is particularly useful; this approach provides not only detailed materials for the specialist scholar, but also reflection points for researchers working in other geographical areas or on later periods. By drawing occasional comparisons with contemporary policies in British West Africa and metropolitan France, the author avoids depicting FWA as exceptional. Nonetheless, although other parts of FWA are mentioned, only Senegal benefits from an extended treatment.
Contesting French West Africa is an excellent overview of the existing primary and secondary literature, making a strong case for the importance of considering the formulation of, implementation of, and responses to education policies in order to understand the structures and practices of colonial rule. Its wide scope, from the role of language to questions of race and constructions of ‘Africa’, is combined with nuanced and detailed contextual analysis over the longue durée. This makes the book extremely valuable to scholars and students of colonial history, including those working on other regions of Africa. Gamble's work will also be of interest to those working on postindependence constructions of language, race, education, and belonging and wishing to understand the historical context of these dynamics.
