Slaves for Peanuts by Jori Lewis

Author:Jori Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press

36

The Propagation of French Culture?

“You are all aware of the devastating catastrophe that befell our mission last year,” Walter Taylor wrote in the annual letter to his subscribers in Bordeaux in early 1882. The loss of the Golaz couple had affected the congregation in Saint Louis, as well as the whole mission society, a cruel tragedy that compounded all of the mission’s other losses and struggles.

But one bright spot remained, Taylor said. The runaway woman and child—the ones who Georges Golaz had hidden away—well, they had obtained their freedom and were still counted among those affiliated with the mission. The child was a boy of about five years old, and Golaz had given him a nickname, calling him Jacques Golaz. After Golaz’s death, the boy’s parents decided to keep it. “I hope that in memory of our dearly departed comrades,” he wrote to his subscribers, “that you will remember Birama and Awa Dhiajaté and their child Jacques Golaz Dhiajaté in your prayers.”

The young Jacques Golaz was a sharp little boy, according to Taylor, and was soon attending the mission’s school. The school had always been one of the main ways that the mission conducted its outreach to the people of Saint Louis, teaching local boys and girls to read French and do their sums.

Most colonial schools at the time were run by Catholic missions that were so heavy on religious education that many Muslim residents remained reluctant to enroll their children. Instead, they would send their children to learn the Koran with a knowledgeable holy man. As the French increased their territorial ambitions in Africa, the colonial government started paying more attention to the role that French-language education could play in the cities and territories it controlled, seeing schools as a means to disseminate French habits, traditions, and values. It was an idea that transcended political orientation, creed, and confession, and the idea of “civilizing” Africans by exposing them to French culture was a palatable one to most French officials of the time.

Some Muslim parents must have ceded, as Taylor reports in 1882, “A good number of native families, while holding onto their religion, are also interested in providing their children with a good French education so they can cope with the current situation.” That situation was the ever-expanding maw of French domination in their territories as part of a global empire. At the time, Taylor said he had at least two Muslim children, the sons of a rich trader, boarding with him and attending the school.

The Protestant mission’s school was much smaller than those run in Saint Louis by three separate Catholic orders, but it soon drew the government’s attention as a possible vehicle for the propagation of French culture. As for its curriculum, French Protestants were a religious minority and tended to support policies of secularism since they were aware of the dangers of using the state to sponsor religion. Muslim parents in Saint Louis could send their children there for primary instruction without any Bible or catechism classes.

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