Africa Will Accept Us If We Remain Faithful to Her: Métis Boys, Schooling, and Masculinity in Late Colonial, Dakar Senegal
Posted: 26 Mar 2014 Last revised: 29 Jul 2014
Date Written: 2014
Abstract
As the population of metis reached between 3,000-7,000 across Francophone West and West-Central Africa in the 1940s, some African intellectuals forwarded the idea of a centralized African identity based on blackness. Concurrently, French colonial society debated the contradictions of the metis problem, the conundrum of if mixed-race persons not legally recognized by their French fathers could be legally and culturally recognized as French based on the brownness of their skin. This paper analyzes the building and management of a live-in school for mixed-race boys operated by a mixed-race Senegalese man in the colonial capital city of Dakar from the 1940s-1960s. Rejecting the French missionary model of placing metis children in orphanages, Nicolas Rigonaux sought to cultivate metis boys into literate future professionals who would be versed in mores of French civilization, language, and culture, as well as maintaining links with their black mothers and the varied ethno-language communities from which they came. In emphasizing affective ties with natal African societies and cultural and intellectual ties with the French society, Rigonaux educational experiment was to create African men who were intimate with both sets of cultures. This paper analyzes the meaning of belonging in late colonial Francophone Africa through the intersections of masculinity and race.
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