Colonial ‘gimmicks’ of French cultural education

Abstract

It is widely known that French cultural policies in the colonies were designed to make the natives pass as French. The truth of the matter is that those policies hampered their cultural emancipation. As much as there was a desire for assimilation, there was also much apprehension that the educated natives might turn the knowledge acquired in schools against their tutors. To prevent the inevitable, policies in favour of indigenising the curricula were incepted, allegedly to amend the failure of the policy of direct assimilation, when in fact their inception represented the means by which, it was hoped, the cultural emancipation of the natives and their claims for equal rights – and eventually for self-determination – would be halted. Thus, two cultural experiments characterise the cultural policies adopted in French colonies; none of them was perfectly executed nor managed to avert the cultural alienation of the colonised.