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Educat ion as Po l itics
Af­r ica and the D i ­a s­p o ra
His­t ory, Pol­i­t ics, Cul­t ure

S e­r ies E d­i ­t o rs

­Thomas Spear
Neil Ko­desh
Tej­u­mola Ol­a­niyan
Mi­chael G. Schatz­berg
James H. Sweet
Education as Politics

Colonial Schooling and

P o lit ical Debat e in Se ne g al,
1850s –1914

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

The University of Wisconsin Press

 Publication of this book has been made possible, in part, through support from
the Department of History and
the College of Humanities and Social Sciences
at Rowan University.

The University of Wisconsin Press

1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor
Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059
uwpress.wisc.edu

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Copyright © 2015
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of
this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—
digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the Internet or a
website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to
rights@uwpress.wisc.edu.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Duke Bryant, Kelly M., author.

Education as politics: colonial schooling and political debate in Senegal,
1850s–1914 / Kelly M. Duke Bryant.
pages   cm — (Africa and the diaspora: history, politics, culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-299-30304-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-299-30303-7 (e-book)
1. Education—Senegal—History.  2. Education—France—Colonies—History.
3. Senegal—History—To 1960.   4. Senegal—Politics and government—To 1960.
I. Title.   II. Series: Africa and the diaspora.
DT549.75.D85   2015
370.9663—dc23
2014030776
 For
M at t, Isa bel, and Ow e n
who make life beautiful
 C ont ent s

Lis t of Illus trations ix

Acknowledgment s xi

Introduction 3

Part I

1 Education and Authority: Avoidance of Colonial

Schooling in Senegal 29
2 Claiming the Qur ’anic School: Regulation and
the Limits of Colonialism, 1857–1913 49
3 The Politics of Protection: French Schools and
the Emergence of Colonial Chieftaincy 70

Part II

4 French “Fathers” and Family Trees: Family, Patronage,

and the School for Sons of Chiefs and Interpreters 93
5 Access or Exclusion: The Politics of Race in the Schools
of the Four Communes, 1900–1910 117
6 The Young Senegalese: Colonial Schooling and Youth
Politics in the Election of 1914 138

Conclusion 163

Notes 171
Bibliog raphy 215
Index 229

vii
 I llus t rat io ns

Map of colonial Senegal 13

Building that housed the School for Sons of Chiefs and Interpreters 98
Former General Council building, Saint-Louis, Senegal 131

ix
 Acknowledgme nt s

This book is the culmination of more than a decade of research, writing, and
intellectual conversation, and it emerged from work—and time—in three
countries. Numerous people and institutions have supported this book in various
ways, and I am humbled by their generous contributions. I can only begin to
thank them here.
My research would not have been possible without financial support from
several different sources. A Scott Kloeck-Jenson predissertation travel grant
from the University of Wisconsin and grants from the Institute for Global
Studies and the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University allowed
me to take exploratory trips to archives in Senegal and France when this project
was only an idea. I spent all of 2007 conducting the bulk of the research, and
this work was assisted by a fellowship from the International Dissertation Field
Research Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council with
funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, by a Fulbright-Hays
Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant, and by a TIAA-CREF Ruth
Simms Hamilton Research Fellowship. Rowan University generously provided
funding for subsequent research trips to Senegal and to France. I am enormously
grateful to all of these granting institutions.
In Senegal I spent many hours in the reading room of the Archives nationales
in Dakar, and archivists and staff members there were gracious with their time
and expertise. I would especially like to thank former directors Saliou Mbaye,
Papa Momar Diop, and Babacar Ndiaye, as well as staff members Mamadou
Ndiaye, Ibrahima Mbengue, and Mossane Diouf, for helping make my research
time both productive and enjoyable. Babacar Ndiaye suggested useful files to
consult and provided a number of contacts for interviews. Mamadou Ndiaye
brought me numerous files and helped me think of less obvious places to look for
documents. And Mossane Diouf offered her assistance and friendship. I would
also like to express my thanks to the current director of the Archives nationales,
Fatoumata Cisse Diarra, for granting permission for the use of several lengthy
direct quotations. They have helped bring this study to life. I wish to thank

xi
xii Acknowledgments

Ngor Sène of the Service régional des archives de Saint-Louis for sharing his
ideas. My interviews were assisted by Sidy Diop in Saint-Louis, by Amadou
Issa Sall and El Hajj Amadou Gallou Diop in Louga, and by Pape Niang in
Mouit. Thanks to all of them.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Ndiouga Adrien Benga, professor of
history at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar. He has supported this
project from the beginning, and, during my stay in Dakar in 2007, he took time
out of his busy schedule to discuss my research with me on several occasions.
His comments and thoughts helped the project take shape, and his continued
interest in my project has helped guide its completion. Professor Ibrahima
Thioub met with me at a critical moment, and his wise counsel helped me fruit-
fully refocus my research. Professor Boubacar Barry opened up his home and
his library to me. I greatly appreciate the staff at the Institut fondamental
d’Afrique noire (IFAN) for their assistance, especially El Hadji Birame Diouf,
who facilitated my use of the William Ponty notebooks. I would also like to
express my thanks to Professor Ousmane Sène and to the West African Research
Center, which he directs.
Senegal is an incredibly welcoming place, and I have treasured the friends
who have enriched my experiences there. I will always be grateful to the Kandji
family, whose friendship means so much to me. Mamadou and Fatou Kandji
opened their home to me the first time I went to Senegal, and they, along with
their children—Badou, Cheikh, Bass, Xuba, and Aïssatou—and their children’s
families, have continued to offer kindness and encouragement. The Kandji
family, and our friendship, spans the Atlantic. Thanks to Pape Cissé and Aby
Cissé for providing me with a home in Louga, to Gora Ndiaye for his able driving
and navigation, and to Jean-Jacques Bancal for his support of my research in
Saint-Louis. Aminata Fall provided endless encouragement, and Fatou Kandji’s
Wolof classes and translation assistance were invaluable. Jërëjëf ! Thanks to
Rachel Petrocelli, Tim Krupnik, Hannah Gilbert, and Sarah Hardin, all of
whom shared their living spaces with me. Their company, conversation, and
friendship made life in Senegal a lot more fun.
My project has also benefited from research in France. I would like to thank
the staff of the Archives nationales d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence for making
my research there possible. Catherine Atlan, Maître de Conférences at the
Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille, helped orient my research in Aix and
shared numerous contacts in Dakar. Amandine Bouvard and Laurent Iglesias
were the best next-door neighbors one could hope for, and they have become
good friends. I spent too few days working in the Archives générales de la
Congrégation du Saint-Esprit in Chevilly-Larue, France, and I am grateful for
Père Gérard Vieira’s assistance in making them productive. My research also
 Acknowledgments xiii

benefited from the superb collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in

Paris and from the expert assistance of the library’s staff members.
Numerous present and former colleagues at several institutions have sup-
ported this project. I am lucky to have found a home in a history department
that is not only collegial but also genuinely supportive. I would like to thank all
of my colleagues in Rowan University’s history department for the enthusiasm
they have shown for my work, for their willingness to read and engage with
drafts of multiple chapters of this book, for their helpful comments about my
research, and for their insights into the publication process. I would like to single
out Katrinka Somdahl-Sands for additional thanks, both for her friendship and
for her role as organizer of the writing group that helped keep my work on
track early in my time at Rowan. I also wish to thank Francis Accardo, now a
Rowan alumnus, for making the map of colonial Senegal, Zachary Christman
for putting me in touch with Francis, and Sonia Spencer for assisting with some
difficult French translation work. Peter and Becky Rattigan provided me with a
home away from home near Rowan, and I am eternally grateful to them for
their friendship, support, and hospitality.
Prior to landing at Rowan, I had the good fortune to pursue my PhD under
two wonderful advisers in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity, Sara Berry and Pier Larson. Their insights, probing questions, and guidance
made my time at Hopkins enormously productive and have had a significant
impact on this book. They have remained supportive and helpful in the years
after I completed my graduate work, reading drafts, offering pointers about
publication, and encouraging me to finish the project in a timely manner.
While a student at Hopkins and as an occasional participant in the weekly Africa
Seminar in the years since I graduated, I also benefited from the comments and
advice of Randall Packard, Elizabeth Schmidt, Jane Guyer, Lori Leonard,
Matthew Bender, Claire Breedlove, Alice Wiemers, Kristin Lehner, James
Williams, and other Africa Seminar members.
Some of the questions that found their way into this book first arose at
the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where I did my master’s work. Florence
Bernault and Thomas Spear contributed to a stimulating program at the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin, and I would like to thank them both for introducing me to
the study of African history at the graduate level. Dan Magaziner and Naaborko
Sackeyfio were among my cohort of Africanist graduate students at UW, and
they have remained very supportive. I will always be grateful to Clifton Crais
for initially piquing my curiosity about Africa during my years as an under-
graduate student at Kenyon College and for his continued interest in my work.
A number of generous individuals have offered insight, constructive criti-
cism, and informal discussion over the years. Many thanks to the late Jim
xiv Acknowledgments

Searing, whose careful reading of early drafts of chapters 2, 3, and 4 helped me

take them in more productive directions. I also wish to thank Hilary Jones,
Butch Ware, Gregory Mann, Emily Osborn, Cheikh Anta Babou, Ibra Sène,
Brandon County, Sarah Zimmerman, Bruce Hall, Sarah Hardin, Rachel
Kantrowitz, and Larissa Kopytoff for sharing their thoughts about various
aspects of my research. Elizabeth Foster provided critical assistance and advice
several times along the way, and I am enormously grateful to her. I appreciate
the thoughtful comments and suggestions from the anonymous reviewers for
the University of Wisconsin Press. And I would also like to recognize the series
editors; the acquisitions editor, Gwen Walker; the staff at the University of
Wisconsin Press; and copyeditor Jerilyn Famighetti for their support and assist­
ance in bringing this project to completion. I alone bear responsibility for any
shortcomings that remain.
I wish to thank Cambridge University Press for granting permission to
include previously published material in this book. An earlier version of chapter
5 appeared as “‘The Color of the Pupils’: Schooling and Race in Senegal’s
Cities, 1900–1910,” in the Journal of African History 52, no. 3 (2011): 299–319. It is
reprinted here with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Finally, I would like to thank my family and my friends for all the love and
support they have given me throughout this process. Thanks to Darcy Phelan-
Emrick and Hannah Gilbert for their friendship. Thanks to my parents, Kerry
and Becky Duke, and to my in-laws, Beth Bryant and Bob Bryant, for their
encouragement and confidence in me. I could not have finished this book with-
out help from my mother and from my mother-in-law, who ensured that my
children were loved and cared for as I finalized the manuscript. Above all, I am
grateful to my husband, Matt, whose patience, thoughtfulness, and love sustain
me, and to our two children, who make every day more meaningful. Matt has
helped me think through some difficult conceptual issues and arguments in the
project and has provided constant support. More important, he and our children
keep me grounded and remind me of what is truly important. This book is
dedicated to them.
Educat ion as Po l itics
 Introduction

O n 10 May 1914, Blaise Diagne made history, becoming the first black man
to serve as Senegal’s deputy to the French National Assembly. Born in Gorée
in 1872 to a domestic servant and a cook, Diagne was exposed to the colonial
education system, which took him down a path that differed markedly from
that of his parents. After attending secondary school, he accepted a job with the
colonial customs service. His first posting, in 1892, sent him to Dahomey, and
over the next twenty or so years he worked across the empire but never in
Senegal. Instead, he held positions in French Equatorial Africa, in the Indian
Ocean colonies of Réunion and Madagascar, and in the Caribbean colony of
Guiana. Thus, when he returned to Senegal in early 1914 to run for the deputy­
ship, he was virtually unknown to most voters, though some political activists
had encouraged his candidacy. He began to gather a following by speaking at
political meetings and rallies and by publishing articles in the privately owned
newspaper La Démocratie, whose editor ultimately endorsed him. He also devel-
oped a platform that spoke to the concerns of black voters by emphasizing the
protection of blacks’ citizenship rights, tax reforms, better social services, and
more and higher quality education. Furthermore, he won the support of the
Young Senegalese, a relatively new political party in Saint-Louis with a mem-
bership dominated by employees of the colonial administration and of private
commercial firms. In the first round of voting, Diagne took more votes than
any of the other eight candidates, but he failed to win outright. In the second
round, competing against two others, Diagne received enough votes to win the

3
4 Introduction

election, though he beat the second-place candidate by fewer than two hundred
votes.1
It is well known that the election of 1914 was a turning point in Senegal’s
political history, bringing black candidates and voters into the political arena in
a new and significant way. Others have analyzed the campaign and election as
events that galvanized black voters and political activists, encouraged black
voters to break free from the influences of powerful métis (mixed-race) or French
political patrons, and forever changed the landscape of electoral politics in
Senegal by demonstrating that black candidates could run, win, and serve.
Indeed, as G. Wesley Johnson has famously claimed, the 1910s were an era of
“African political awakening.”2 But the 1914 election, as important as it was for
electoral politics in Senegal, also represents a culmination of decades of colonial
education policies and initiatives, which not only prepared Diagne to run for
office and allowed his supporters to carry out a successful campaign but also
reshaped African understandings of politics. In this book, I examine the broader
history of French educational institutions and policies in Senegal and of African
reactions to them, exploring the relationship between African strategies vis-à-vis
colonial schools and larger-scale political change. This investigation has much
wider resonance, however, since Senegal served as a test case for colonial edu-
cation policies that ultimately applied to all of French West Africa. I argue that
everyday negotiations surrounding colonial schooling transformed African
power relations and gerontocracy, shaped colonial politics, and produced racial
discourses in early colonial Senegal. Furthermore, African engagement with
colonial schooling and the societal changes it brought about made possible the
1914 election of Blaise Diagne.
Unique among French colonies in Africa for its electoral institutions, Senegal
received representation in the French National Assembly in 1871. Yet, signifi-
cantly, voting was limited to residents of the most important coastal towns,
called Communes, which had a long-standing French presence and to which
Paris had granted a status and organization similar to those of French munici-
palities. Although voting rights applied to French nationals, mixed-race (métis)
residents, and Africans (called originaires) who had been born in the Communes,
few Africans stood for election, and even fewer won elected office before the
turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, French nationals monopolized the
deputy­ship until 1902, when François Carpot, an attorney who belonged to a
prominent métis family in Saint-Louis, used his connections to local people and
his familiarity with the Wolof language to garner enough support for a victory.
Carpot represented Senegal until Diagne defeated him in 1914.3 Diagne’s elec-
tion in turn marked a watershed moment, since it invited blacks into formal
political participation in unprecedented numbers. And, significantly, all of
 Introduction 5

Diagne’s successors as deputy, from his death in 1934 to Senegal’s indepen-

dence in 1960, were black.
Colonial schooling figured prominently in the campaign and election of
1914. Indeed, in a report on the election in which he explained how Diagne had
managed to win, Lieutenant Governor Antonetti repeatedly pointed to Diagne’s
education as part of the appeal that had drawn various groups to him. Incor-
rectly identifying Diagne as Lebu, an ethnic group that had recently lost to the
French substantial landholdings in and around Dakar, the lieutenant gover-
nor said Lebu people had supported Diagne because he was one of their own,
“but educated, eloquent, holding an important job.” They were impressed by
Diagne’s educational achievements, and, Antonetti implied, they hoped he
would seek redress for their lost territory. Members of the Saint-Louis–based
Young Senegalese, on the other hand, saw Diagne as a role model. For them,
Antonetti believed, Diagne provided an example of someone who had success-
fully used his colonial education to obtain work with a Saint-Louis newspaper,
to take on the political establishment, and to stand up to white racism.4 Educa-
tion helped to define the identity of many members of the Young Senegalese
and was an important priority for members of the group. Thus, it is not sur-
prising that many of them were drawn to Diagne at least in part for his ability
to use his literacy and eloquence productively.
Diagne’s educational credentials were in fact remarkable, as he was one
of only a small number of black Africans of his generation to have completed
both primary and secondary schooling. Significantly, he obtained a portion of
his secondary education in a metropolitan school, an experience that provided
additional prestige. He attended primary school in Gorée, at the public school
run by the Brothers of Christian Instruction, and then received a scholarship
from the colonial government to allow him to attend the École Professionelle
Fabre in Aix-en-Provence, France, a preparatory school for the national trades
schools. In March 1889, however, Diagne and three other Senegalese students
had a falling out with the school’s director that led to their expulsion and re-
patriation. Back in Senegal, Diagne finished his education at the Saint-Louis
secondary school.5
In addition to its role as part of his biography and his credentials as a candi-
date, colonial schooling helped to define Diagne’s political platform. He wanted
to add opportunities for secondary schooling, increase the number of African
teachers, and ultimately make schooling mandatory. As I discuss in chapter 5,
a controversial education reform undertaken in 1909 had galvanized many
local politicians, parents, and students. In its original form, the policy would
have greatly restricted if not eliminated African access to secondary schooling
in the colony, but the firestorm that it provoked led officials to undertake a
6 Introduction

compromise. Even so, the issue of school segregation and access to quality
secondary education for blacks reemerged in 1913 and would continue periodi-
cally to do so well into the interwar period. It is thus likely that Diagne’s em-
phasis on schooling truly resonated with voters. A postelection complaint by
François Carpot, the incumbent and one of Diagne’s main opponents, suggested
that this was in fact the case. Carpot accused Diagne and his supporters of pro-
moting “race war” by telling black voters that the French and métis candidates
thought of them as “nearly like slaves” and stood against “their emancipation
and their instruction.”6 Regardless of the accuracy of his claim, Carpot clearly
acknowledged the potency of colonial education as an issue.
The implications of the 1914 election were most significant in the Communes,
but the issues debated during the campaign and Diagne’s victory resonated in
the rest of the colony, despite the fact that most people who lived there could
not vote. As I discuss at greater length in chapter 6, many residents of the pro-
tectorate, considered to be colonial subjects rather than citizens, followed the
election closely and became more involved in colonywide politics. It seems
possible that some joined with the Young Senegalese organization to support
Diagne since, according to Antonetti, the party included about four hundred
originaires and about the same number of nonvoters who had been born outside
the Communes. Chiefs and elders in the protectorate watched with alarm as
their youth became more politically active. And some marabouts, especially
those who belonged to the Murid brotherhood, gave financial and moral support
to Diagne’s campaign. It is likely that many of these marabouts were subjects
and therefore not eligible to vote, yet they still professed an interest in the cam-
paign. These resonances suggest that we need to consider not only the ways
that colonial schooling affected politics in the Communes but also how it re-
shaped power relations in the protectorate areas. As I show in the pages that
follow, in both Communes and protectorate, colonial schooling remade power
relations among Africans and helped define their relationship to the colonial
state. Various trajectories of change came together in the 1914 election, and an
exploration of the politics of colonial schooling in the preceding decades goes a
long way in explaining how this came to pass.
Indeed, the 1914 campaign and election raise important questions about
the effects of colonial education policy on African families and communities.
Diagne and at least some of his supporters came from families that had adopted
colonial schooling fairly early on. Yet, in contrast, most parents, especially
those who lived in the protectorate, simply were not interested in colonial
schooling, a complaint made by many teachers as they tried to work around
parental resistance and to address chronic shortages in supplies, facilities, and
 Introduction 7

funds.7 Why, then, did some Africans choose to attend a colonial school, even
as most continued to turn away, and how did these decisions affect local power
relations? Scholars have often observed that most parents were not initially
interested in enrolling their children in colonial schools, but they have left
largely unexplored parents’ decision-making process, an issue I focus on in
chapters 1 and 3. Although some scholars have suggested that chiefs often sent
their slaves to school in place of their own relatives, my research in Senegal
demonstrates that at least some of the time, chiefs were eager to send their rela-
tives to school and that a few attempted to benefit by acquiring influence over
the new institutions. These chiefs, I contend, saw French schooling as a resource
that they could attempt to control and then use in support of their own authority.
Clearly, there was no single response to the expansion of colonial schooling in
French West Africa, and, as Jean-Hervé Jézéquel has recently argued, scholars
need to consider individual trajectories and experiences.8 This is the approach
that I take here in exploring the motivations of parents and chiefs in Senegal’s
interior as they engaged with and made sense of the expansion of colonial
schooling. In this book, I push beyond Jézéquel’s description of the multiple
strategies and priorities of African students and their families to consider the
longer-term political import of their choices.
The significant role played by French-educated activists in the 1914 cam-
paign also prompts questions about how colonial schooling affected African
politics and the extent to which it created new political opportunities for Afri-
cans. Although scholars have demonstrated conclusively that French, British,
and other European officials used education as an instrument of colonialism,
they have mostly overlooked corollary questions about the politics behind Afri-
can decisions about and reactions to colonial schools.9 How, for example, did
local power dynamics shape African responses to the expansion of colonial
schooling? How did resources—including money and labor—and their role in
local power relations affect parents’ and young people’s decisions about school
attendance? How did education figure into African responses to the racism
implicit in the notion that Africans required French tutelage? In this book I
contend that many Africans envisaged French schooling as a significant new
resource that they could deploy in local political debates and competitions and
that they could incorporate into their interactions with the developing colonial
state. Sometimes this resource was financial, while other times it took the form
of patronage, prestige, or specialized skills. Schooling also gave Africans an
arena in which to contest colonial policies that they found disagreeable or
oppressive, and it encouraged them to embrace a new vocabulary of race and
racial equality as racism came increasingly to inflect their interactions with
8 Introduction

Europeans. Ultimately, schooling prepared Africans to participate in colonial

electoral politics as voters, activists, and candidates and, in 1914, to deliver the
deputyship to Diagne.
Others have done much to expose the workings of the colonial state, focusing
on its various institutions and exploring how Africans engaged with and shaped
them. And scholars of colonial schooling in Africa have recently begun to move
beyond the simple assertion that education contributed to colonial power by
serving as a vehicle for indoctrination.10 My study seeks to take these insights
farther by showing not only that Africans influenced the practice of colonial
rule but also that at least some Africans worked to make its institutions their
own. As such, in Senegal at the turn of the twentieth century, colonial schools
figured prominently into efforts by chiefs and marabouts to remake their au-
thority in the colonial context, became the basis for social networks constructed
by young people to circumvent their elders, served as the focal point for debates
about racism and segregation in the colonial city, encouraged young men to
assert themselves in urban electoral politics, and aided in the election of Blaise
Diagne. Indeed, the reactions to schooling of all Africans—those who sought to
capitalize on the new opportunities the French schools presented and the many
others who turned away from French schools altogether—represent some level
of engagement with an emerging colonial political sphere. They also reveal
African strategies to jockey for power in their own communities even as colo-
nialism intensified around them.
This discussion returns us to the central concern of the book: the dynamic
process of negotiation between French education policies and various African
responses, which, I argue, produced new and explicitly colonial spheres of poli-
tics and power in Senegal. It was within these colonial spheres of politics and
power that Blaise Diagne earned the right to represent his fellow Senegalese in
the National Assembly. By bringing ordinary people, especially children, into
contact with an institution of the state, colonial schooling helped delineate the
framework of colonial rule. Although French policies and political aims are
certainly part of this story, the book focuses primarily on African actors rep-
resenting a range of ages, backgrounds, and interests, and it explores how the
French school figured into their personal and political strategies. As they navi-
gated and responded to these new institutions, many Africans avoided or re-
jected French schools. Others, however, found schools to be useful resources in
challenging African hierarchies of authority and, sometimes, in calling into
question the power of the colonial state. Although, as I demonstrate in chapter
6, these trends can perhaps be seen most clearly in the election of 1914, they
emerged over several decades as Africans determined how they should respond
to French schools. Thus, in chapters 1 through 5, I explore how parents, young
 Introduction 9

people, Islamic teachers, chiefs, and politicians engaged with colonial schooling
and, in doing so, reconfigured African politics in both the Communes and the
protectorate in the decades leading up to the momentous election.

The Political Potential of Education

Although this book makes the case that African engagement with colonial
schooling remade politics in early colonial Senegal, it is hardly novel to point
out the broader linkages between education and politics, both past and present.
Indeed, given that most governments around the world currently provide some
level of free, compulsory public schooling to the populace and that many citizen-
ries have an opportunity to vote on issues related to education, it seems self-
evident that education falls within the domain of “the political.” Yet, as scholars
have concluded for a wide variety of times and places, this link was not auto-
matic but in fact resulted from numerous historical contingencies. In a trend
that began in Western Europe and the United States during the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries before spreading to other parts of the world, govern-
ment leaders began to provide mass public schooling as they attempted to
consolidate the nation-state and/or to establish more thoroughgoing control
over the populace. In doing so, these leaders claimed a power or privilege that,
in many cases, had previously been the domain of the Church. Leaders of many
Western European countries, France included, envisioned the primary school
as a place where students would learn about loyalty, patriotism, and civic duty.
They also hoped schools would help train productive workers who could use
their skills in the service of the developing industrial economy. Thus, the politics
of the nation-state became closely linked to the provision of public schooling
through much of the Western world, and by the later twentieth century this
association had become a global phenomenon.11
In colonized areas of the world, in contrast, formal schooling served quite
another purpose, aiming to groom obedient and useful colonial subjects rather
than patriotic citizens of a nation-state. This distinction meant that the civic
and political functions of schooling differed rather significantly between metro-
pole and colony. The dissimilarity applied even in Senegal, though to a lesser
extent in the Communes because of the citizenship rights claimed by the origi-
naires.12 Colonial officials and European missionaries generally sought to satisfy
some combination of the following impulses by creating public schools: pro-
moting “civilization” among an indigenous population that they found to be
backward, training literate and/or skilled workers for the colonial administra-
tion or the local economy, and encouraging acceptance of—and even loyalty
to—the colonial state. In an attempt to avoid alienating school leavers from
their agricultural roots or encouraging them to see themselves as equal to the
10 Introduction

colonizer, most colonial schools offered only rudimentary academic training.

In addition, these schools tended to focus rather heavily on vocational or agri-
cultural education, seen as more practical and more appropriate for colonial
subjects.13
This limited approach to education in the colonial world led numerous
scholars of Africa, particularly those writing several decades ago, to interpret
colonial schooling as merely a form of indoctrination that produced school
leavers who were alienated from their cultures.14 There is no question that colo-
nial governments planned to use schools in support of colonialism, but such
conclusions about the impact of this seem to suggest that Africans had no say
in the matter. Indeed, in their efforts to condemn the colonial policies they
found so offensive, some scholars effectively overlooked African agency in the
education process. More recently, however, as scholars have explored African
strategies under colonialism in considerable detail, a more useful model of
colonial schooling has begun to emerge. This model, which I adopt and modify
here, portrays schooling as a space for and a product of negotiations between
colonial officials and interested Africans.15 Scholars of Africa and of other
world areas alike have made the case that no matter the government in question,
public responses to and engagement with schooling have effectively limited the
government’s ability to control its meaning, purpose, and even content. Rather
than the simple imposition of a government’s policy, schooling has been the
product of complex and multifaceted negotiations among political leaderships,
interest groups, and wider publics.
This book, however, offers more than a discussion of how negotiation and
pressure from Africans impacted education policy. Indeed, I add to these impor-
tant issues an exploration of how African interactions with colonial schooling
affected the structures of colonial rule, how they influenced power dynamics
among Africans as colonialism established itself in the region, and how they
ultimately allowed for the significant turning point of the 1914 election. The
limited educational capacity of the colonial state, which I explore in chapter 2,
gave Africans numerous opportunities to shape schooling in the colony. For
some Africans, colonial schooling served as a new resource in a bid to keep or
obtain authority. Chiefs, for example, could curry favor with French officials
by cooperating with their education initiatives. Young people could challenge
gerontocracy using the social networks, training, or status provided by the
school or the increased financial independence that often accrued to graduates.
Colonial schooling—both its character and access to it—also became a political
problem that intersected with larger concerns surrounding power, race, and
citizenship. Thus, as they discussed, debated, and reacted to colonial schooling,
Africans certainly developed opinions about the utility of the institution for
 Introduction 11

their children and families, but they also weighed in on such issues as the
emerging role of the colonial chief, the authority of Islamic leaders and teachers,
the hierarchy of generation, the meaning of race and racism, and the relation-
ship between citizens and subjects in the colony. In this way, colonial schooling
played a central role in political debate in Senegal at the turn of the twentieth
century.
The political potential of colonial schooling derived in large part from its
ability to enter into the intimate domains of family life, socialization, and child­
rearing. As such, an analysis of schools as points of intersection between African
families and the colonial state reveals much about how African families shaped
and were shaped by colonialism.16 In their efforts to increase school attendance
and develop the education system, officials and teachers brought ever larger
numbers of people into some sort of contact with the colonial state, allowing
the government not only to interact with subjects on a more personal level but
also to obtain more information about them by maintaining registers and
detailed records of enrollment, attendance, school performance, and the like.
These are important issues since, as Michel Foucault so perceptively argued,
schools, along with hospitals and prisons, allowed for the development of a new
and much more intimate kind of state power. Surveillance and regular exami-
nations became central to the institution of the school, and these functions
contributed to a new technology of power that states used to their benefit. This
study considers such connections between schooling and the power of the state
as well as the limitations to state power that schooling revealed. Yet it mostly
attempts to move us past this insight to understand why, especially when school-
ing was not compulsory, Africans chose to attend or to send their children to
school. Significantly, I find that their motivations extended far beyond schooling
and stemmed also from concerns about politics, power, and the impact of colo-
nial rule in their own communities.17
If colonial schooling is a relatively straightforward concept, “politics” is
much less so, and I would like to clarify how I use that term here. In the Senegal
colony at the turn of the twentieth century, a period when most people were
unable to vote and elected officials operated as power brokers alongside chiefs,
interpreters, and other colonial employees, it would make little sense to limit
“politics” to such events as elections, legislation, campaigns, and the like. Instead,
one might take cues from Michael Hanchard, who proposes the notion of
“quotidian politics” in an attempt to capture a wider range of activities within
political theory and to move political scientists and other scholars beyond the
notion that politics must always have something to do with the activities of the
state. Hanchard’s concept is appealing because it expands our understanding
of political activity to encompass the experiences of subordinate groups, yet it is
12 Introduction

problematic in its assumption that such political activities must—whether

intentionally or not—involve some kind of resistance or at the very least, contes-
tation of authority.18 I do not limit the power relations in question to those that
involve resistance per se; indeed, I sometimes address the efforts of previously
powerful Africans to retain their power and status under colonial rule, often by
cooperating with the administration. Yet I do accept the most basic assumption
made by Hanchard, which is that politics is—at root—a question of power
relations. I use this insight to explore how colonial schooling affected relation-
ships among fathers, mothers, and children; chiefs and colonial officials; Islamic
teachers and their followers; and elders and youth. In this study the terms
“politics” and “political” encompass the shifting strategies Africans employed
and the debates in which they participated as they sought to obtain or retain
power in a changing world.

Colonial Schooling:
French Politics, French Policies
This book focuses on African interaction with colonial schooling in Senegal
from the 1850s to 1914, beginning with a decade that set the tone for the expan-
sion of French schooling beyond the Communes and ending with Blaise Diagne’s
election. This period bridges an era of commercial empire that came before and
one of cultural nationalism and, ultimately, anticolonial struggle that came after.
But it is also significant in its own right. Encompassing conquest, the imposition
of French rule, the multiplication of colonial bureaucracies and personnel, and
new efforts to curtail citizenship, this period presented Africans with numerous
opportunities to respond creatively and strategically as they encountered colo-
nial institutions and expectations, often for the first time. Also in this period, the
French articulated the goals of colonial education, established many schools,
and developed a framework of policies governing schooling that would remain
in place for decades. Significantly, education policies reflected the priorities of
the French presence and the nature of their relations with Africans.
From the early eighteenth century to about 1848, Atlantic commerce
structured the interactions between Africans and Europeans and drew coastal
people in particular more fully into the Atlantic world. The demands of long-
distance trade and the desire to turn a quick profit motivated French men to
sojourn in Gorée or Saint-Louis for relatively brief periods. Opportunities to
trade with Europeans fueled African settlement of these territories and also
guided the economic decisions of the rulers of traditional states in the interior.
Africans, métis, and Europeans negotiated, certainly, but these negotiations
centered on economic issues—terms of trade, advances of merchandise for sale
upriver, the cost of slaves or gum arabic—and on intimate or domestic ones.
 Introduction 13

Map of colonial Senegal, ca. 1900–1920. Created by Francis Accardo, 2014.

Indeed, lacking regional connections and frequently suffering from tropical

diseases, many French men took up with African women, and all French com-
pany employees depended on Africans as intermediaries and trading partners
and for access to inland areas. Thus, relationships between Africans and Euro-
peans could be deeply personal. Significantly, although origins and occupation
figured into social hierarchy, the mutual reliance of the French, métis, and black
African residents of these towns made racial segregation impossible.19
Africans living outside these coastal towns would have had little occasion to
interact with Frenchmen directly, though their rulers benefited from the Atlantic
trade. Although they occasionally supported one side or the other in conflicts in
the interior, French traders, officials, and military men mostly remained in Gorée
and Saint-Louis, both of them islands that had not been settled prior to Euro-
pean arrival. French interests also included several trading posts (escales) along
the Senegal River and the southern coast. After 1818 and especially during the
1840s, the structure of this regional trade began to change as French merchants
worked to cut out African and métis middlemen, as officials tried to stabilize
gum arabic prices, and as the French state in 1848 abolished slavery in all of its
colonies. These changes gave French officials and merchants substantially
more economic clout on the coast and encouraged them to turn their attention
14 Introduction

inland, setting the stage for colonial conquest. Yet, even so, prior to the 1850s,
France possessed neither extensive territory nor significant political authority
in Senegal.20
Because Senegal served commercial functions and because the resident
French community was quite small, French-style schools were not available
for most of this early period. Only after the Napoleonic Wars, in an effort to re-
establish and strengthen French control over territory lost to the British during
that conflict, did French officials begin to focus on schooling. Jean Dard, a
Frenchman, opened a mutual school for boys in Saint-Louis and received his
first students in 1817, and a Mr. Pécarrère established a boys’ school in Gorée
at around the same time. The Sisters of Saint-Joseph of Cluny took charge of
girls’ schools in the colony, welcoming their first students in 1819. At this early
date, French officials had not developed a set of policies or goals to guide the
development of schooling, and schools were limited to these two coastal towns.
In line with the role of Saint-Louis and Gorée as trading enclaves, boys’ schools
generally served to train trade intermediaries and to encourage local support
for the French presence, while girls’ schools aimed to teach white, mixed-race,
and eventually black girls to be good mothers, homemakers, and domestic
workers.21
In 1841, the Brothers of Christian Instruction (also called the Ploërmel
Brothers), a Catholic teaching order, took charge of the public schools for
boys at the request of the governor of Senegal and of the French minister of
the marine and colonies, who had become frustrated by frequent turnovers in
personnel, intermittent closures, and other problems. Reflecting the recent
shifts toward a more permanent French presence, these schools more overtly
pursued a civilizing mission. The Brothers designed them to promote French
civilization; to spread the French language; to teach academic subjects includ-
ing mathematics, history, and geography; and to provide vocational training.
School leavers tended to pursue work in commerce—as bookkeepers, clerks, or
traders—perhaps the most lucrative professions held by Africans and métis at
the time. Schooling also prepared them to take up positions with the develop-
ing colonial government. Girls’ schools were even more practically oriented,
focusing on French, history, sewing, and other domestic tasks. Though they
taught academic subjects and practical skills, perhaps the most important mo-
tivation of Catholic personnel and their superiors in France was to use the
schools to gain converts to Christianity. Not only was conversion their mission,
but also they viewed it as critical to the process of civilization. Accordingly,
these schools catered especially to métis and to Christian blacks, though Muslims
always attended and they predominated in the evening classes that the Ploërmel
Brothers began to offer in 1857.22
 Introduction 15

Further growth of colonial schooling in Senegal awaited conquest in the

mid to late nineteenth century. Indeed, because officials envisioned schools as
instruments of colonial rule, they often rushed to establish schools in newly
acquired territories. French territorial expansion in Senegal began in earnest
during the tenure of Louis Léon Faidherbe as governor (1854–1861 and 1863–
1865), slowed during the 1870s because of the resource demands of the Franco-
Prussian War and its aftermath, and gathered steam again especially during
the 1880s and 1890s. Colonial conquest, achieved by signing treaties with African
rulers and by launching military initiatives to pressure rulers who did not readily
cooperate, changed Senegal’s status from an outpost of France’s Atlantic trade
to a colony requiring a bureaucracy and a structure to administer it. Although
this shift had begun several decades earlier, when Paris, instead of a monopoly
company, claimed the right to appoint Senegal’s governor, Faidherbe’s mili-
tary and interventionist policies differed markedly from what had gone before.
His priorities, closely aligned with the goals of the French merchants who had
had a hand in his appointment to the position, included increasing French com-
mercial control in the region, the elimination of trade duties required of French
merchants by African rulers, and the encouragement of free trade. His efforts
to accomplish this agenda increased French military involvement and territo-
rial possessions in the region, exemplified by the annexations of Waalo in 1855
and of parts of Futa Toro a few years later.23
During the 1850s, Faidherbe and other officials more clearly articulated a
vision of colonial schooling that aligned with their efforts to turn Senegal into a
territorial colony. Officials began to promote this vision by working through
the Ploërmel schools and, ultimately, by establishing an entirely secular public
school. Though officials and teachers had, for decades, hoped that schooling
would encourage local appreciation for French civilization, its political poten-
tial emerged much more clearly in the 1850s, as Governor Faidherbe contem-
plated and then pursued territorial expansion. A report issued by the school
inspection commission of Saint-Louis in 1859, for example, noted that although
many of the subjects covered in primary schools were unnecessary for the
jobs students would hold in the future, commission members approved of the
curriculum because it helped pupils to understand the “benefits of a paternal
Government” and to realize that a “new era begins to transform their country
and rises up from the wreckage of the old order of things.”24 This belief that
education could, in addition to its practical purpose of training the workforce,
engender support for French rule and the changes it produced helped make
education a cornerstone of the colonial endeavor. As such, officials and teachers
focused more intently on recruiting additional students, especially Muslims. In
an attempt to attract more Muslim students, Governor Faidherbe created a
16 Introduction

public secular school in Saint-Louis in 1856–1857 and issued the first in a

series of regulations of Qur’anic schools, topics that I discuss at some length in
chapter 2.25 Furthermore, officials established French schools along the Senegal
River in the years following the 1855 annexation of Waalo in an attempt to
spread French influence there. By 1871, however, all of these schools had closed
because of the funding cuts necessitated by the Franco-Prussian War.26
Following Faidherbe’s precedent, later governors and military leaders
acquired additional territories for France. Though the precise history of colonial
expansion varies from region to region, some combination of treaties, shifting
alliances, and military conquest ensured French control of nearly all of modern
Senegal by the mid-1890s.27 And schools advanced just behind territorial con-
quest, since officials hoped these institutions would help them gain influence
over the residents of their vast new territory by training them to become loyal
and economically productive colonial subjects. Hence, as I explore in more
detail in chapters 1 and 3, schools in Senegal’s protectorate multiplied during
the 1890s, especially following the creation in 1892 of a distinct protectorate
budget that designated funding for the endeavor. By March 1895, seventeen
schools had opened in the protectorate, and twenty-one operated there by 1907.
Despite the challenges of low attendance, shortages of well-trained teachers,
and chronic underfunding, the schools established after about 1890 operated
on a surer footing than their short-lived predecessors.28
In the Communes, on the other hand, school attendance had grown substan-
tially by the late nineteenth century. Many Muslims had begun sending their
children to French schools not so much because of French policy but because
they had come to associate colonial schooling with advantages in employment.
Also in the late nineteenth century, Dakar and Rufisque became important ports
and centers of trade with growing populations of French, métis, and African
merchants. By 1887, both of these towns had joined Saint-Louis and Gorée in
attaining the status of Communes. The growing economic and political impor-
tance of Dakar and Rufisque necessitated the provision of education in these
towns, and schools were permanently established by 1876 in the former and
by 1883 in the latter. The administration also oversaw the creation of several
postprimary institutions, including a secondary school, a vocational school,
and a school devoted to training relatives of chiefs from the surrounding
areas. By 1903, the administration funded the following institutions in the four
Communes of Saint-Louis, Gorée, Dakar, and Rufisque: a secondary school, a
normal school/school for sons of chiefs, a professional/vocational school, and
ten public primary schools (five Catholic schools for boys, one secular school
for boys, and four Catholic schools for girls). In that year, the ten primary
 Introduction 17

schools enrolled some 1,841 male and 668 female students, up from more than
700 male and far fewer female students in the early 1860s.29
Although the French approach to schooling in the Communes varied
somewhat over time and according to individual opinion, officials consistently
considered it to be an important part of the civilizing mission, the idea that
France had an obligation to spread its civilization and values among purportedly
“backward” peoples. This impetus had animated colonial projects since the
eighteenth century at least, as Alice Conklin suggests, and it drew on ideals of
the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and republicanism.30 Prior to the
late nineteenth century, especially in the Communes, many colonialists linked
the civilizing mission to the goal of “assimilation,” a concept that in its ideal
form implied cultural, political, and administrative incorporation of a colony
into the metropole. Yet the French were never willing to fully assimilate the
political and administrative structures of the Communes, despite the provision
of citizenship rights and elected institutions there. The concept of assimilation
therefore tended to manifest itself culturally, and as such it profoundly shaped
schooling. Curricula in the Communes generally approximated what metro-
politan schools offered and strongly emphasized French language and culture.31
By the 1850s, for example, the Ploërmel Brothers had begun providing a “Latin
Class” for the most advanced boys in their Saint-Louis school. In 1857, the
school’s director noted that fifteen students studied Latin and Greek in addi-
tion to their other academic subjects.32
By the end of the nineteenth century, however, many French officials had
moved away from assimilation. New, supposedly scientific theories about race
suggested that racial “character” was inherent and immutable, positioned
peoples in static racial hierarchies, and challenged the validity of using education
in an attempt to improve colonized peoples. Some sociologists and colonial
theorists proposed that colonialism should not alienate “natives” from their
own cultures, and this prompted shifts in rhetoric about the civilizing mission.
No longer focused on assimilation, the civilizing process would now help Africans
“evolve” in ways appropriate to their own cultures and customs. At the same
time, the French not only completed their conquest in Senegal but also con-
tinued to expand east, in 1895 forming the French West Africa federation to ad-
minister all of France’s West African holdings under one Government General.
Officials certainly never intended to offer citizenship rights, elected institutions,
or even full-fledged French culture to the millions of Africans in these new terri-
tories. They instead incorporated these Africans as colonial subjects, and, though
residents of the Communes retained their rights and political status, these
changes encouraged officials to call these privileges into question.33
18 Introduction

The conquest, the accompanying extension of bureaucracy and infra-

structure throughout French West Africa, and new ideas about race and culture
necessitated a renegotiation of relationships between Africans and Europeans.
As French officials established control over new territories, their priorities
shifted from wielding economic influence in the region to ruling efficiently and
effectively. Indeed, no longer merely a commercial empire with several out-
posts along the Senegal River and Atlantic coast, France had become a colo-
nial state that claimed the right to administer the entire region. Given the
extent of the new colonial possessions (French West Africa measured more
than 1.8 million square miles), colonial ideology began to promote economic
development, or “mise en valeur,” which entailed improved exploitation of agri-
cultural and natural resources and the development of a public health infra-
structure to help ensure the availability of healthy workers. The transition to
formal colonial rule thus brought numerous interventions in daily life for Afri-
cans outside the Communes—ranging from the imposition of the indigénat (a
system allowing officials to administer punishments for a wide range of infrac-
tions), to new regulation of chieftaincy, to forced labor for the state or mandatory
cash crop production, to taxation, to colonial schooling.34
Given the focus of colonial rule in the late nineteenth century on economic
development and the questioning of assimilation that accompanied it, officials
intended the schools created in the protectorate to function rather differently
from their counterparts in the Communes. During the 1890s, these schools
operated under the auspices of the director of political affairs at Saint-Louis
and do not seem to have been subjected to thoroughgoing regulations. These
schools, limited to three (or fewer) grade levels, offered only very basic primary
instruction, rather than a metropolitan curriculum. In the Dagana school in
1893, for example, students focused on French language, literacy, writing, and
arithmetic, and they studied history and geography for about an hour per
week. The school provided a course in agriculture as well. In contrast to the
Communes, where teachers tended to be Europeans who at least sometimes
held degrees, African teachers took charge of the schools in the protectorate.
An 1893 decree indicated that the possession of a basic school-leaving certificate
(the brevet de capacité ) would qualify applicants to teach in the protectorate.
Teachers were also supposed to be literate in Arabic, but the administration
did not immediately enforce this provision. While these standards reflected the
realities of recruitment in a colony where the number of educated Africans was
still very small, they also confirm that colonial officials thought only rudimentary
instruction appropriate for the protectorate schools.35
Governor General Roume’s 1903 education decree created a single edu-
cational system and hierarchy for all of French West Africa that codified the
 Introduction 19

distinctions in quality and approach between the schools of the Communes

and those of the protectorate. The decree categorized most schools in the
protectorate, along with their counterparts in rural areas across French West
Africa, as “village” schools where students would receive “adapted” education.
Students would primarily learn spoken French, though reading, writing,
arithmetic, agriculture, hygiene, and Arabic (in Muslim areas) would be covered
in a more cursory way. The decree established “regional” schools in more
important population or administrative centers outside the Communes. Here,
African instructors would assist European directors, and pupils would include
the best students from the village schools as well as local children. Regional
schools would also offer “adapted” education, though their curriculum was to
be slightly more varied, including subjects such as history, geography, and
science in addition to those offered in the village schools. Courses on agricul-
ture and manual trades completed the still very basic and practical curriculum.
In contrast, the schools in the Communes fell into the new “urban school”
classification and, in recognition of the preferences of French, métis, and “assimi-
lated” families, retained their metropolitan curricula and European teachers.
Yet even these schools served a practical purpose—training future clerks, tele-
graph operators, customs workers, and other low-level employees of the colo-
nial state. To facilitate this, the 1903 reform also called for the establishment of
a normal school.36 Though subsequent reforms provided for minor alterations,
this organizational structure formed the backbone of colonial education for the
next few decades.
Even if the ideology behind colonial education changed over time, French
schools clearly contributed to a politics of colonialism from their inception.
Officials consistently depended on schools to spread the French language and
an affinity for France among the populace and to facilitate and justify colonial
rule. Furthermore, school curricula tended to reflect the goals of the civilizing
mission and the practical considerations of the colonial administration, by, for
example, stressing the French language and emphasizing the supposed superior-
ity of French cultural, economic, and political achievements.37 Yet, despite
their dedication to using the schools in support of colonial rule, French officials
faced a considerable obstacle: the needs and priorities of Africans themselves.
During this period of significant flux, when colonial rule and the schools that
accompanied it remained new, some Africans seized the opportunity to use the
schools for their own political ends. By bringing colonial schooling into various
contests over authority within their own communities, Africans stymied French
efforts to control its significance and meaning. At the same time, the embrace
of French schools by some Africans changed the political landscape in the
colony, increasing the power of black voters in the Communes and of young,
20 Introduction

educated men across the territory and preparing the way for Diagne’s election
in 1914.
The interwar period ushered in more changes and offered new opportu-
nities to renegotiate relations between Africans and Europeans. Thousands of
Africans participated in World War I and II, and their status as veterans became
a basis for new claims on the colonial state. Furthermore, intellectuals from
French West Africa and the French Antilles engaged in the radical cultural
project of Negritude. Negritude thinkers worked to invert racist assumptions
about Africans and people of African descent and, in doing so, to reveal the
positive attributes and contributions of African cultures. Politically, these thinkers
tended not to call for political independence but instead to seek equality with
the French and additional opportunities for political participation within the
French empire. Even so, they put pressure on the French, pressure that was
compounded by the more openly anticolonial politics of a few Africans, like
Lamine Senghor. Following World War II and having realized that the in-
creasing politicization of colonial subjects and a declining world tolerance for
colonial rule posed serious threats to the French empire, French colonial officials
and planners began to undertake significant political and economic reform.
From 1946 to 1958, several laws did away with the distinction between citizen
and subject, gradually extended suffrage, greatly increased the autonomy avail-
able to each West African colony at the local level, and ultimately allowed each
territory to vote on whether or not to join a new French Community, which
would take the place of the empire. While Guinea became independent in 1958,
after its citizens voted against membership in the French Community, the
other colonies accepted France’s invitation. These colonies became independent
in 1960 as the French Community fell apart.38
Education policy reflected these larger political shifts. Although adapted
education came into its own during Georges Hardy’s tenure as the head of edu-
cation in French West Africa (1912–1919), officials redoubled their efforts after
World War I. Suspicious of the political ideologies of African intellectuals and
some veterans, officials placed greater emphasis on adapted education in order
to limit future numbers of educated elites. Even so, a metropolitan-style cur-
riculum remained available in at least some of the schools in the Communes.
Governor General Carde’s 1924 policy underscored the importance of adapted
education, increased the number of rural schools offering the most basic levels
of education, and reserved the better schools for select children, mostly sons of
important people. These reforms corresponded to concerns about educated
elites and to a renewed focus on the administrative potential of the “traditional”
chieftaincy. In 1930, Governor General Brévié undertook another school reform,
further promoting adapted education by requiring students in rural schools to
perform agricultural work for half of each school day. Despite their unpopularity,
 Introduction 21

these rural schools that Brévié created functioned into the World War II era.
After World War II, however, faced with the risk of losing the empire altogether
and understanding that they would need to work with educated Africans to
undertake necessary political reforms, the French significantly improved edu-
cation in French West Africa. Postwar plans for promoting economic develop-
ment in the colonies included expansion of education and designated addi-
tional monies for this purpose. By the late 1940s, the education system in French
West Africa was organized like a French académie, and a 1950 reform created a
postsecondary school in Dakar that was linked to universities in Bordeaux and
in Paris. In 1957, this institution became the University of Dakar, preceding
Senegal’s independence by three years.39
The changes brought by two world wars, colonial policies that supported
investment in economic and human development, increased pressure from
Africans for full political inclusion, and the cultural nationalism of the Negritude
movement led Africans and Europeans to a new set of negotiations. These
negotiations involved not only the nature of the relationship between colonizer
and colonized but also the terms and future of colonial rule itself. The wars had
laid bare French dependence on the colonies and had provided Africans with
substantial leverage in seeking concessions from their rulers. Furthermore,
colonial schools had been around for several generations by this point, and
educated elites took up the mantle of cultural nationalism, underscoring the
importance of African identities and cultural contributions and at the same
time suggesting that Africans deserved full inclusion within French political
and national space.
Thus, a distinguishing feature of the 1850–1914 period is the newness of
colonialism. Indeed, it was precisely this newness and the dependence on Afri-
can intermediaries that it entailed that gave such punch—and even power—to
African reactions to institutions such as colonial schools. As such, during the
period before 1914, colonial schools presented innovative Africans with many
opportunities to respond creatively and productively to colonial rule. African
responses to these institutions reshaped politics in their own communities and
in the colony as a whole, they contributed to the emergence of a language of
race, they unsettled generational hierarchies and long-standing voting blocs,
and they ultimately made possible the campaign and election of Blaise Diagne
in 1914. It is to these African actors, their goals, and their strategies for attaining
them that the rest of this book now turns.

Toward an African Politics of Colonial Schooling

A basic premise of this book is that French officials were not the only ones who
envisioned colonial schools as political resources. Indeed, as they sought to
come to terms with—and possibly benefit from—the changes brought about
22 Introduction

by colonialism, Africans attempted to use new institutions such as schools in

pursuit of their own varied and sometimes competing goals. Africans from a
variety of backgrounds viewed schools as a potential source of political and
social capital that could allow them to retain at least some of the authority
they had long possessed or to challenge long-standing hierarchies of power.
At the same time, debates about colonial schooling reflected larger issues of
concern to local communities, such as the nature of colonial chieftaincy, the
future of Qur’anic schooling, the increasing racism of white residents and offi-
cials, and the changing relationships—and tensions—between generations.
Through these negotiations and debates, Africans reconfigured politics in the
colony.
In an effort to capture the multiplicity and complexity of African responses
to and manipulations of colonial schooling, this book offers a variety of case
studies, each based on the experiences of numerous Africans as represented in
their letters, in administrative reports, in General Council debates, and in oral
sources. It explores how chiefs, teachers of the Qur’an, elders, parents, young
people, politicians, and others responded to the expansion of colonial schooling
and how they incorporated this schooling—as an issue or as an institution—
into everyday political contests and power struggles. In some cases, the indi-
viduals discussed embraced colonial schooling with something like enthusiasm,
perhaps envisioning it as a new opportunity that would help make sense of the
changing colonial world. Others reacted in a more modulated and hesitant
way, deigning to send their children to school only after considered reflection
or pressure from the French. Finally, although some Africans saw opportunity
in the French school in the period before 1914, most avoided it or rejected it
outright. I consider such responses in some detail, even though the main focus
of my study is the minority of Africans who attended school and the political
implications of their decisions to do so.
Both formal education and politics were gendered male in Senegal at the
turn of the twentieth century, and, as a result, this book is a predominantly
male story. Girls certainly did attend school, especially in the four Communes
and in southern towns (Sedhiou and Ziguinchor) where Catholic influence had
been strongest. But enrollment at girls’ schools never came close to rivaling that
at the boys’ schools because most families preferred to train girls at home to
fulfill their future roles as wives and mothers and because Muslim families
opposed such schooling on religious grounds.40 Furthermore, despite the fact
that many French officials claimed to support girls’ education, schools were
simply not available to most rural girls during this period. At the same time,
though women and girls likely possessed the kind of soft power—exercised
through influence over their male relatives—that Emily Osborn describes in
her recent study, they only rarely figured into the more public political struggles
 Introduction 23

and debates that are the focus of this book. Not surprisingly, the archive is rela-
tively sparse with regard to female participation in or reactions to schooling
and politics. Though I discuss girls and women as the sources allow and as their
experiences seem relevant, the book focuses on boys and men. Thus, terms like
“Africans,” “elders,” and “young people,” among others, should be taken to
refer to boys and/or men, unless otherwise specified.
Part I of the book focuses on how specific adults—all of them possessing
some sort of local authority—initially reacted to the expansion of colonial
schooling into their communities. Their reactions made clear that more was at
stake in this expansion than the socialization and training of children. The first
chapter takes a rather different approach from the rest of the book, attempting
to describe African methods of education that existed before colonialism began
and that continued to function during the colonial period, albeit in increasingly
altered form. It explores how African educational practices intersected and
often competed with French schools, and it seeks to understand why a majority
of Africans rejected these colonial institutions. African education, which was
situated within the community and in the Qur’anic school, played a central
role as a force of social reproduction and as a basis for adult authority both
before and during colonialism. Convinced that their own methods of education
best served the communities’ priorities and needs, I argue, many parents decided
against sending their children to the French school. Children sometimes dis-
agreed, however, and attended school against their parents’ wishes, and the
chapter explores how colonial schools facilitated this youthful disobedience.
Chapter 2 explores the limitations of French educational capacity in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making the case that a lack of
adequate financial and human resources contributed to the failure of colonial
schools to compete successfully with Qur’anic schools. It argues further that
French attempts to address these problems by regulating Qur’anic schools
had the unintended consequence of politicizing Muslims, who rallied around
their religious schools and teachers. In chapter 3 I focus on chiefs, arguing that
although they lost many of their old privileges under colonial rule, they used
their influence over colonial schools in a bid to retain some authority. Relying
in particular on the experiences and correspondence of the formerly inde-
pendent kings of Siin and of Bawol and of members of aristocratic families in
Kayoor, I find that schooling invited chiefs to engage with and contribute to
emerging concepts of colonial chieftaincy. Taken together, these case studies
demonstrate that French schooling figured into various negotiations over
power and authority in colonial Senegal—some of them within African commu-
nities, others between Africans and French officials.
Part II addresses some of the political effects of school attendance, focusing
in particular on how schooling provided people—many of them children or
24 Introduction

youth—with access to powerful new social networks, vocabularies, financial

resources, and skills. These chapters emphasize the roles of children and youth
as historical actors and explore how schooling shaped African experiences and
discussions of racism, making an important contribution to the scholarship of
youth and of race in African history. Chapter 4 focuses on students at the School
for Sons of Chiefs and Interpreters in Saint-Louis and their rather extensive
correspondence with colonial officials. In their letters, young relatives of chiefs
sought to create patronage ties by, for example, portraying themselves as the
“sons” of one or another official. In doing so, they sought not only to incorpo-
rate the colonial apparatus into their existing worldviews but also to use institu-
tions such as schools to their own advantage. Chapter 5 focuses on a 1909 school
reform in the Communes, the accusations of racism that it engendered, and the
use of racial language by students, parents, and teachers in correspondence
and debate about schooling. It argues that such language and the issues it ad-
dressed contributed to the politicization of race in the colony. The book’s sixth
and final chapter investigates the 1914 electoral campaign, which allowed Blaise
Diagne to become the colony’s first black representative to the French National
Assembly. It explores how politically active young men used their French edu-
cations to challenge the power of the elder generation and to criticize the French
administration for the race-based limitations it placed on their employment.
In all three cases, I demonstrate how Africans drew strategically on French
schooling to gain power within their own communities and to highlight problems
with colonial rule.
In exploring how parents, chiefs, marabouts, students, politicians, and
school leavers incorporated colonial schooling into their personal and political
strategies, the book contends that French schooling was much more than a tool
of colonial policy—though it certainly facilitated the entrenchment of colonial
rule. Rather, viewed from a variety of individual African perspectives, it seems
clear that education stood at the center of numerous debates of critical impor-
tance to both colonial and local African politics. In the chapters that follow, I
address these perspectives and this politics, arguing that as they engaged cre-
atively with colonial schooling, Africans reconfigured politics and power within
the family, local community, and colony. Chiefs, for example, contributed to
this reconfiguration by seeking to control access to colonial schooling as a means
of asserting authority within a colonial system. Young people did so by develop-
ing alternative networks of patronage or sources of prestige or money that they
could use to challenge the authority of their elders. And some elected leaders
participated in the process by criticizing the development of segregated schools.
The election of 1914 represents a culmination of this process of political change
that grew out of colonial schooling.
 Introduction 25

A Word on Sources
This book is based on a wide variety of documentary sources, most of which
are held in archives in Senegal and France. In addition to the typical adminis-
trative correspondence and reports, my source base includes more than 250
letters written between 1885 and 1915 by Africans—chiefs, marabouts, parents,
teachers, and young people—on the subject of schooling. Though they form
part of a colonial archive, these letters allow me some insight into African re-
actions to French schools and their efforts to use such institutions for their own
ends. Such sources do not negate the problems of bias and perspective inherent
in colonial archives, but they, especially when combined with oral evidence,
allow some access to African voices.41
Indeed, the documentary evidence is complemented by material from
nearly forty interviews conducted in Gorée, Saint-Louis, Louga, and Mouit in
2007 and 2010. I spoke with several descendants of people who passed through
the School for Sons of Chiefs around the turn of the twentieth century about
their relatives’ experiences in this school. I also interviewed numerous retired
teachers about their own experiences in education and their knowledge of edu-
cation in the past. I came to teachers unintentionally; when I explained my
project to community members, they almost always directed me to retired
teachers as the most knowledgeable interlocutors on the subject of the history
of education in Senegal.42 Since the period predates the lived experiences of
the oldest elders in contemporary Senegal, I cannot use this material as the
main set of sources for a history of education in Senegal from the 1850s to 1914.
But it is useful in that it provides insight into the cultural context and into
Senegalese memories and interpretations of their past.
French colonial schools entered an already complex social and political
milieu in Senegal. Parents and Islamic teachers had claims on children’s time,
and these adults had much at stake in the process of turning children into pro-
ductive adults and good Muslims. At the same time, children had to acquire an
appropriate education in order to gain respect as adults in their communities.
The French administration introduced an outside element into this mix in the
form of colonial schools, and, while many people shunned them, others sought
to capitalize on the new institution. If some Africans used the French school to
help them react productively to the new colonial context, others attempted to
use it as a new resource in old contests of power and authority. These reactions
had important implications for African families and communities, they encour-
aged African engagement in colonial politics, and they were the precondition
for the development of the Young Senegalese and the success of Blaise Diagne
in 1914.
Part I
 1
Education and Authority

Avo idance of C olonial Sch oo ling

in Senega l

A t the turn of the twentieth century, teachers, their supervisors, adminis-

trators, and local allies struggled to attract students to Senegal’s colonial schools.
In the protectorate, where the French had just completed the conquest and
were still establishing control, the very new schools suffered from a lack of re-
sources and questions about their utility. Even in the Communes, where French
schools had operated since the early nineteenth century, attendance remained
low. Indeed, in 1898, when the primary schools of the Communes enrolled just
over 2,100 students, Senegal’s official annual report suggests that attendance
was still “well below normal; it is approximately 1/18 of the population of the
towns, instead of 1/6.” Average attendance in the thirty-five schools of the pro-
tectorate was 30 per school, for perhaps another 1,050 students.1 Around a
decade later, attendance had grown, but only by a few hundred students. In
1907, for example, the primary schools of the Communes and protectorate
enrolled only 3,196 boys and 415 girls combined, according to the annual report.
And in 1912, the colony counted 3,677 boys and 502 girls in the public primary
schools.2 These numbers—which admittedly only hint at the size of the total
school-age population—suggest that a large majority of families simply opted
out of schooling at this time. This chapter attempts to understand why. It asks
what was at stake for those who prevented their children from attending colo-
nial schools in the early years and how family strategies could change, it considers
the reluctance of Islamic teachers to support French schools, and it explores

29
30 Education and Authority

how at least some children decided to attend school against the wishes of their
parents or guardians.
In recent years, historians have offered nuanced studies of African efforts to
shape the experience of colonial schooling to suit their needs, of the importance
of schooling to elite identities, and of the uses to which political actors put the
literacy and status they gained from attending school. Implicit in these studies
and explicit in older ones, which tended to focus on the development of colo-
nial schooling as an institution, is the notion that only a minority of Africans
attended these schools, especially in the first decades of their operation. While
historians sometimes mention this fact, they do not typically provide evidence-
based explorations of why so many Africans initially turned away from colonial
schools.3 Furthermore, as Jean-Hervé Jézéquel notes, very few scholars con-
sider the decision-making processes and trajectories of particular families. For
that reason, we perhaps gain the best insights into these issues by reading novels
like Ambiguous Adventure or Weep Not, Child, which invite the reader to consider
the strategies and calculations that figured into an individual or family decision
to send a child to school.4 Although much of the rest of the present book focuses
on Africans who engaged with colonial schooling in one way or another—
though not necessarily by sending a child there—I thought it would be instruc-
tive to consider why others made a very different choice. Furthermore, serious
consideration of the rejection of the colonial school by so many and the only
partial acceptance of these schools by many more allows us to better under-
stand the political impact of colonial schooling on African communities, families,
and individuals, issues that I address in subsequent chapters. This chapter
attempts to explain why Africans initially stayed away from the French school
by focusing on what they had to lose: control over children and education and
the authority derived from that control.
Relying primarily on letters and reports from teachers who worked in
colonial schools from the 1890s to the 1910s, on other administrative corre-
spondence, and on a series of short ethnographic essays written by young men
from across Senegal who studied at the colony’s William Ponty Normal School
during the 1930s and 1940s, this chapter makes the case that Africans did not
simply reject French schools out of hand. Instead, they reacted in logical ways
that reflected an ongoing commitment to existing methods of education. These
methods focused on instilling appropriate values and manners; on teaching
children agriculture, fishing, or a skilled trade; and—often—on learning the
Qur’an and Muslim prayers and rituals. They had helped reproduce social
hierarchy, culture, economy, and religion for generations by socializing chil-
dren and by giving adults control over children’s conduct and labor during the
education process. Adults thus tended to keep children away from colonial
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Spirit of
Chambers's Journal
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
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eBook.

Title: Spirit of Chambers's Journal

Original tales, essays, and sketches, selected from that
work

Author: William Chambers

Robert Chambers

Release date: January 12, 2024 [eBook #72693]

Language: English

Original publication: Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1834

Credits: Bob Taylor, Susan Skinner and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book
was produced from images made available by the
HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPIRIT OF

CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL ***
 SPIRIT
OF
CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL.
 SPIRIT

OF

CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL:

ORIGINAL TALES, ESSAYS, AND SKETCHES,

SELECTED FROM THAT WORK.

BY

WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS.

EDINBURGH:
W. & R. CHAMBERS, WATERLOO PLACE; AND
ORR & SMITH, LONDON.
1834.
PRINTED BY W. & R. CHAMBERS, 19, WATERLOO PLACE, EDINBURGH.
 NOTICE.

By the recommendation of a number of their friends and agents,

Messrs Chambers have been induced to reprint a selection of the
principal original articles of their Journal; in order that such
individuals as might desire to possess those articles in a portable
shape, distinct from the mass of compilations and extracts with
which they were accompanied in the numbers, might be gratified in
their wish; and in order that this new series of Essays, in which an
attempt has been made, almost for the first time, to delineate the
maxims and manners of the middle ranks of society, might have an
opportunity, in the shape of a book, of attracting the attention of
those by whom it might be overlooked in its original form and
progressive mode of publication.
The articles embodied in the present volume are chiefly selected
from the forty earliest numbers of the Journal. Should it be
favourably received, the authors will probably, from time to time,
throw further selections into the same form.

Edinburgh, February 12, 1834.

 CONTENTS.

Page
Lady Jean, a Tale, 1
Fallacies of the Young.—“Fathers have Flinty Hearts,” 27
Bruntfield, a Tale of the Sixteenth Century, 32
The Passing Crowd, 41
A Tale of the Forty-Five, 44
Removals, 61
Victims, 71
Fallacies of the Young.—“Acquaintances,” 83
Subjects of Conversation, 86
Secure Ones, 89
To Scotland, 98
Story of Mrs Macfarlane, 100
The Downdraught, 118
Tale of the Silver Heart, 134
Cultivations, 152
Fits of Thrift, 157
Susan Hamilton, a Tale of Village Life, 163
Flitting Day, 182
Fallacies of the Young.—“Debtors and Creditors,” 193
General Invitations, 197
Confessors, 205
A Chapter of Political Economy, 209
The Drama, 214
Recognitions, 218
The Ladye that I Love, 226
Pay your Debt! 227
Children, 238
Tea-Drinking, 246
Husbands and Wives, 249
They, 255
Relations, 258
The Strangers’ Nook, 261
Nobody to be Despised, 265
Trust to Yourself, 270
Leisure, 275
My Native Bay, 278
Advancement in Life, 279
Controllers-General, 286
A Turn for Business, 291
Setting up, 296
Consuls, 303
Country and Town Acquaintances, 309
Where is my Trunk? 314
 SPIRIT
OF

CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL.

LADY JEAN.—A Tale.

The Yerl o’ Wigton had three dauchters,

Oh, braw walie! they were bonnie!
The youngest o’ them, and the bonniest too,
Has fallen in love wi’ Richie Storie.
Old Ballad.

The Earl of Wigton, whose name figures in Scottish annals of the

reign of Charles the Second, had three daughters, named Lady
Frances, Lady Grizel, and Lady Jean—the last being by several
years the youngest, and by many degrees the most beautiful. All the
three usually resided with their mother at the chief seat of the family,
Cumbernauld House, in Stirlingshire; but the two eldest were
occasionally permitted to attend their father at Edinburgh, in order
that they might have some chance of obtaining lovers at the court
held there by the Duke of Lauderdale, while Lady Jean was kept
constantly at home, and debarred from the society of the capital, lest
her superior beauty might interfere with, and foil, the attractions of
her sisters, who, according to the notion of that age, had a sort of
right of primogeniture in matrimony, as well as in what was called
heirship.
It may be easily imagined that while the two marriageable ladies
were enjoying all the delights of a third flat in one of the closes of the
Canongate, spending their days in seeing beaux, and their nights in
dreaming of them, Lady Jean led no pleasant life amidst the remote
and solitary splendours of Cumbernauld, where her chief
employment was the disagreeable one of attending her mother, a
very infirm and querulous old dame, much given (it was said) to
strong waters. At the period when our tale opens, Lady Jean’s
charms, though never seen in the capital, had begun to make some
noise there; and the curiosity excited respecting them amongst the
juvenile party of the vice-regal court, had induced Lord Wigton to
confine her ladyship even more strictly than heretofore, lest,
perchance, some gallant might make a pilgrimage to his country-seat
in order to behold her, and, from less to more, induce her to quit her
retirement, in such a way as would effectually discomfit his schemes
for the pre-advancement of his elder daughters. He had been at
pains to send an express to Cumbernauld, ordering Lady Jean to be
confined to the precincts of the house and the terrace-garden, and to
be closely attended in all her movements by a trusty domestic. The
consequence was, that the young lady complained most piteously to
her deaf old lady-mother of the tedium and listlessness of her life,
and wished with all her heart that she were as ugly, old, and happy
as her sisters.
Lord Wigton was not insensible to the cruelty of his policy,
however well he might be convinced of its advantage and necessity;
he loved his youngest daughter more than the rest; and it was only in
obedience to what he conceived to be the commands of duty, that he
subjected her to this restraint. His lordship, therefore, felt anxious to
alleviate in some measure the desagremens of her solitary
confinement; and knowing her to be fond of music, he had sent to
her by the last messenger a theorbo lute, with which he thought she
would be able to amuse herself in a way very much to her mind—not
considering that, as she could not play upon the instrument, it would
be little better to her than an unmeaning toy. By the return of his
messenger, he received a letter from Lady Jean, thanking him for the
theorbo, but making him aware of his oversight, and begging him to
send some person who could teach her to play.
The earl, whose acquirements in the philosophy of politics had
never been questioned, felt ashamed of having committed such a
solecism in so trivial a matter; and, like all men anxious to repair or
conceal an error in judgment, immediately ran into another of ten
times greater consequence and magnitude: he gratified his daughter
in her wish.
The gentry of Scotland were at that time in the custom of
occasionally employing a species of servants, whose
accomplishments and duties would now appear of a very anomalous
character, though at that time naturally arising from the peculiar
situation of this country, in respect to its southern neighbour. They
were, in general, humble men who had travelled a good deal, and
acquired many foreign accomplishments; who, returning to their
native country after an absence of a few years, usually entered into
the service of the higher class of families, partly as ordinary livery-
men, and partly with the purpose of instructing the youth of both
sexes, as they grew up and required such exercises, in dancing,
music, writing, &c., besides a vast variety of other arts,
comprehended in the general phrase of breeding. Though these men
received much higher wages, and were a thousand times more
unmanageable than common serving-men, they served a good
purpose in those days, when young people had scarcely any other
opportunities of acquiring the ornamental branches of education,
except by going abroad. It so happened, that not many days after
Lord Wigton received his daughter’s letter, he was applied to for
employment by one of these useful personages, a tall and
handsome youth, apparently five-and-twenty, with dark Italian-
looking features, a slight moustache, and as much foreign peculiarity
in his dress as indicated that he was just returned from his travels.
After putting a few questions, his lordship discovered that the youth
was possessed of many agreeable accomplishments; was, in
particular, perfectly well qualified to teach the theorbo, and had no
objection to entering the service of a young lady of quality—only,
with the proviso that he was to be spared the disgrace of a livery.
Lord Wigton then made no scruple in engaging him for a certain
period; and next day saw the youth on the way to Cumbernauld, with
a letter from his lordship to Lady Jean, setting forth all his good
qualities, and containing among other endearing expressions, a
hope that she would both benefit by his instructions, and be in the
meantime content on their account with her present residence.
 Any occurrence at Cumbernauld, of higher import than the
breaking of a needle in embroidering, or the miscarriage of a brewing
of currant wine, would have been quite an incident in the eyes of
Lady Jean; and even to have given alms at the castle-gate to an
extraordinary beggar, or to see so much as a stranger in the candle,
might have supplied her with amusement infinite, and speculation
boundless. What, then, must have been her delight, when the goodly
and youthful figure of Richard Storie alighted one dull summer
afternoon at the gate, and when the credentials he presented
disclosed to her the agreeable purpose of his mission! Her joy knew
no bounds; nor did she know in what terms to welcome the stranger:
she ran from one end of the house to the other, up stairs and down
stairs, in search of she knew not what; and finally, in her transports,
she shook her mother out of a drunken slumber, which the old lady
was enjoying as usual in her large chair in the parlour.
Master Richard, as he was commonly designated, soon found
himself comfortably established in the good graces of the whole
household of Cumbernauld, and not less so in the particular favour
of his young mistress. Even the sour old lady of the large chair was
pleased with his handsome appearance, and was occasionally seen
to give a preternatural nod and smile at some of his musical
exhibitions, as much as to say she knew when he performed well,
and was willing to encourage humble merit. As for Lady Jean, whose
disposition was equally lively and generous, she could not express in
sufficiently warm terms her admiration of his performances, or the
delight she experienced from them. Nor was she ever content
without having Master Richard in her presence, either to play
himself, or to teach her the enchanting art. She was a most apt
scholar—so apt, that in a few days she was able to accompany him
with the theorbo and voice, while he played upon an ancient
harpsichord belonging to the old lady, which he had rescued from a
lumber room, and been at some pains to repair. The exclusive
preference thus given to music, for the time, threw his other
accomplishments into the shade, while it, moreover, occasioned his
more constant presence in the apartments of the ladies than he
would have been otherwise entitled to. The consequence was, that
in a short time he almost ceased to be looked upon as a servant,
and began gradually to assume the more interesting character of a
friend and equal.
It was Lady Jean’s practice to take a walk prescribed by her father,
every day in the garden, on which occasions the countess conceived
herself as acting up to the letter of her husband’s commands, when
she ordered Master Richard to attend his pupil. This arrangement
was exceedingly agreeable to Lady Jean, as they sometimes took
out the theorbo, and added music to the other pleasures of the walk.
Another out-of-doors amusement, in which music formed a chief
part, was suggested to them by the appropriate frontispiece of a
book of instruction for the theorbo, which Master Richard had
brought with him from Edinburgh. This engraving represented a
beautiful young shepherdess, dressed in the fashionable costume of
that period—a stupendous tower of hair hung round with diamonds,
and a voluminous silk gown with a jewel-adorned stomacher, a
theorbo in her arms and a crook by her side—sitting on a flowery
bank under a tree, with sheep planted at regular distances around
her. At a little distance appeared a shepherd with dressed hair, long-
skirted coat, and silk stockings, who seemed to survey his mistress
with a languishing air of admiration, that appeared singularly
ridiculous, as contrasted with the coquettish and contemptuous
aspect of the lady. The plate referred to a particular song in a book,
entitled “A Dialogue betwixt Strephon and Lydia, or the Proud
Shepherdess’s Courtship,” the music of which was exceedingly
beautiful, while the verses were the tamest and most affected trash
imaginable. It occurred to Lady Jean’s lively fancy, that if she and her
teacher were to personify the shepherdess and shepherd, and thus,
as it were, to transform the song to a sort of opera, making the
terrace-garden the scene, not a little amusement might be added to
the pleasure she experienced from the mere music alone. This fancy
was easily reduced to execution; for, by seating herself under a tree,
in her ordinary dress, with the horticultural implement called a rake
by her side, she looked the very Lydia of the copper-plate; while
Richard, standing at his customary respectful distance, with his
handsome person, and somewhat foreign apparel, was a sufficiently
good representation of Strephon. After arranging themselves thus,
Master Richard opened the drama by addressing Lady Jean in the
first verse of the song, which contained, besides some description of
sunrise, a comparison between the beauties of nature at that
delightful period, and the charms of Lydia, the superiority being of
course awarded to the latter. Lady Jean, with the help of the theorbo,
replied to this in a very disdainful style, affecting to hold the
compliments of lovers very cheap, and asseverating that she had no
regard for any being on earth besides her father and mother, and no
care but for these dear innocent sheep (here she looked kindly aside
upon a neighbouring bed of cabbages), which they had entrusted to
her charge. Other verses of similar nonsense succeeded, during
which the representative of the fair Lydia could not help feeling
rather more emotion at hearing the ardent addresses of Strephon
than was strictly consistent with her part. At the last it was her duty to
rise and walk softly away from her swain, declaring herself utterly
insensible to both his praises and his passion, and her resolution
never again to see or speak to him. This she did in admirable style,
though, perhaps, rather with the dignified gait and sweeping majesty
of tragedy-queen, than with any thing like the pettish or sullen strut of
a disdainful rustic; meanwhile Strephon was supposed to be left
inconsolable. Her ladyship continued to support her assumed
character for a few yards, till a turn of the walk concealed her from
Master Richard; when, resuming her natural manner, she turned
back, with sparkling eyes, in order to ask his opinion of her
performances; and it was with some confusion, and no little surprise,
that on bursting again into his sight, she discovered that Richard had
not yet thrown off his character. He was standing still, as she had left
him, fixed immovably upon the spot, in an attitude expressive of
sorrow for her departure, and bending forwards as if imploring her
return. It was the expression of his face that astonished her most; for
it was not at all an expression appropriate to either his own character
or to that which he had assumed. It was an expression of earnest
and impassioned admiration; his whole soul seemed thrown into his
face, which was directed towards her, or rather the place where she
had disappeared; and his eyes were projected in the same direction,
with such a look as that perhaps of an enraptured saint of old at the
moment when a divinity parted from his presence. This lasted,
however, but for a moment; for scarcely had that minute space of
time elapsed, before Richard, startled from his reverie by Lady
Jean’s sudden return, dismissed from his face all trace of any
extraordinary expression, and stood before her (endeavouring to
appear) just what he was, her ladyship’s respectful servant and
teacher. Nevertheless, this transformation did not take place so
quickly as to prevent her ladyship from observing the present
expression, nor was it accomplished with such address as to leave
her room for passing it over as unobserved. She was surprised—she
hesitated—she seemed, in spite of herself, conscious of something
awkward—and finally she blushed slightly. Richard caught the
contagion of her confusion in a double degree; and Lady Jean,
again, became more confused on observing that he was aware of
her confusion. Richard was the first to recover himself and speak. He
made some remarks upon her singing and her acting—not, however,
upon her admirable performance of the latter part of the drama; this
encouraged her also to speak, and both soon became somewhat
composed. Shortly afterwards they returned to the house; but from
that moment a chain of the most delicate yet indissoluble sympathies
began to connect the hearts of these youthful beings, so alike in all
natural qualities, and so dissimilar in every extraneous thing which
the world is accustomed to value.
After this interview there took place a slight estrangement between
Master Richard and Lady Jean, that lasted a few days, during which
they had much less of both conversation and music than for some
time before. Both observed this circumstance; but each ascribed it to
accident, while it was in reality occasioned by mutual reserve.
Master Richard was afraid that Lady Jean might be offended were
he to propose any thing like a repetition of the garden drama; and
Lady Jean, on her part, could not, consistently with the rules of
maidenly modesty, utter even a hint at such a thing, however she
might secretly wish or long for it. The very consciousness,
reciprocally felt, of having something on their minds, of which neither
durst speak, was sufficient to produce the said reserve, though the
emotions of “the tender passion” had not come in, as they did, for a
large share of the cause.
 At length, however, this reserve was so far softened down, that
they began to resume their former practice of walking together in the
garden; but though the theorbo continued to make one of the party,
no more operatic performances took place. Nevertheless, the mutual
affection which had taken root in their hearts experienced on this
account no abatement, but, on the contrary, continued to increase.
As for Master Richard, it was no wonder that he should be deeply
smitten with the charms of his mistress; for ever as he stole a long,
furtive glance at her graceful form, he thought he had never seen, in
Spain or in Italy, any such specimens of female loveliness; and (if we
may let the reader as far into the secret) he had indeed come to
Cumbernauld with the very purpose of falling in love. Different
causes had operated upon Lady Jean. Richard being the first love-
worthy object she had seen since the period when the female heart
becomes most susceptible—the admiration with which she knew he
beheld her—his musical accomplishments, which had tended so
much to her gratification—all conspired to render him precious in her
sight. In the words of a beautiful modern ballad, “all impulses of soul
and sense had thrilled” her gentle and guileless heart—

——hopes, and fears that kindled hope,

An undistinguishable throng,
And gentle wishes, long subdued,
Subdued and cherished long,

had exercised their tender and delightful influence over her; like a
flower thrown upon one of the streams of her own native land, whose
course was through the beauties, the splendours, and the terrors of
nature, she was borne away in a dream, the magic scenery of which
was alternately pleasing, fearful, and glorious, and from which she
could no more wake than could the flower restrain its course on the
gliding waters. The habit of contemplating her lover every day, and
that in the dignified character of an instructor, gradually blinded her
in a great measure to his humbler quality, and to the probable
sentiments of her father and the world upon the subject of her
passion. If by any chance such a consideration was forced upon her
notice, and she found occasion to tremble lest the sentiments in
which she was so luxuriously indulging should end in disgrace and
disaster, she soon quieted her fears, by reverting to an idea which
had lately occurred to her—namely, that Richard was not what he
seemed. She had heard and read of love assuming strange
disguises. A Lord Belhaven, in the immediately preceding period of
the civil war, had taken refuge from the fury of Cromwell in the
service of an English nobleman, whose daughter’s heart he won
under the humble disguise of a gardener, and whom, on the
recurrence of better times, he carried home to Scotland as his lady.
This story was then quite popular, and at least one of the parties still
survived to attest its truth. But even in nursery tales Lady Jean could
find examples which justified her own passion. The vilest animals,
she knew, on finding some beautiful dame, who was so disinterested
as to fall in love with them, usually turned out to be the most
beautiful princes that ever were seen, and invariably married and
made happy the ladies whose affection had restored them to their
natural form and just inheritance. Who knows, she thought, but
Richard may some day, in a transport of passion, throw open his
coat, exhibit the star of nobility glittering on his breast, and ask me to
become a countess?
Such are the excuses which love suggests to reason, and which
the reason of lovers easily accepts; while those who are neither
youthful nor in love wonder at the hallucination of their impassioned
juniors. Experience soon teaches us that this world is not one of
romance, and that few incidents in life ever occur out of the ordinary
way. But before we acquire this experience by actual observation,
we all of us regard things in a very different light. The truth seems to
be, that, in the eyes of youth, “the days of chivalry” do not appear to
be “gone;” our ideas are then contemporary, or upon a par with the
early romantic ages of the world; and it is only by mingling with
mature men, and looking at things as they are, that we at length
advance towards, and ultimately settle down in, the real era of our
existence. Was there ever yet youth who did not feel some
chivalrous impulses—some thirst for more glorious scenes than
those around him—some aspirations after lofty passion and supreme
excellence—or who did not cherish some pure first-love, that could
not prudentially be gratified?
 The greater part of the rest of the summer passed away before the
lovers came to an eclaircissement; and such, indeed, was their
mutual reserve upon the subject, that, had it not been for the
occurrence of a singular and deciding circumstance, there appeared
little probability of this ever otherwise taking place. The Earl of
Home, a gay and somewhat foolish young nobleman, one morning
after attending a convivial party where the charms of Lady Jean
Fleming formed the principal topic of discourse, left Edinburgh and
took the way to Cumbernauld, on the very pilgrimage, and with the
very purpose which Lord Wigton had before anticipated. Resolved
first to see, then to love, and lastly to run away with the young lady,
his lordship skulked about for a few days, and at last had the
pleasure of seeing the hidden beauty over the garden wall, as she
was walking with Master Richard. He thought he had never seen any
lady who could be at all compared to Lady Jean, and, as a matter of
course, resolved to make her his own, and surprise all his
companions at Edinburgh with his success and her beauty. He
watched again next day, and happening to meet Master Richard out
of the bounds of Cumbernauld policy, accosted him, with the
intention of securing his services in making his way towards Lady
Jean. After a few words of course, he proposed the subject to
Richard, and offered a considerable bribe, to induce him to work for
his interest. Richard at first rejected the offer, but immediately after,
on bethinking himself, saw fit to accept it. He was to mention his
lordship’s purpose to Lady Jean, and to prepare the way for a private
interview with her. On the afternoon of the succeeding day, he was to
meet Lord Home at the same place, and tell him how Lady Jean had
received his proposals. With this they parted—Richard to muse on
this unexpected circumstance, which he saw might blast all his
hopes unless he should resolve upon prompt and active measures,
and the Earl of Home to enjoy himself at the humble inn of the village
of Cumbernauld, where he had for the last few days enacted the
character of “the daft lad frae Edinburch, that seemed to ha’e mair
siller than sense.”
On the morning of the tenth day after Master Richard’s first
interview with Lord Home, that faithful serving-man found himself
jogging swiftly along the road to Edinburgh, mounted on a stout nag,