French Colonial Legacies: Assimilatory Education and the Relevance in 21st-Century Race and Power Relations (2021)

This project reviews the comparative history of the French colonial education system in Morocco, Senegal, and Cameroon and considers what indigenous Africans today are saying about its persistent negative impacts. The project shows how educational policies enacted by the Federation of West Africa during the late-19th century to the mid-20th century instilled harmful ideas of French nationalism at the expense of African self-identity; how colonial schooling aimed to maintain social order among Africans and produced harmful racialized assumptions on entire peoples; and how assimilatory policies were internally contradictory. Additionally, this essay incorporates my experience as a white researcher conducting interviews in Morocco from January 2020, and the relation I detected between race and power dynamics. My own racial literacy as an Africanist demanded their acknowledgement.