The Story of French (27 page)

Algeria was France’s first colony, and the first African territory officially declared a colony by a European country. While many historians consider this the event that sparked the second colonial push, the French hadn’t really set out to create a colony. For centuries, Algerian pirates had been in the habit of capturing European boats along the Mediterranean coast and selling their Christian crews as slaves. Between 1815 and 1824, British, American and Dutch fleets tried to put a stop to this practice by attacking Algerian fleets and bombarding Algiers, but it was the French who finally succeeded. Under King Charles X, France landed and seized Algiers in July 1830. The King’s successor, Louis Philippe, then decided to turn Algeria into a colony, partly as an attempt to boost the legitimacy of the French monarchy and partly to spite England, which had taken the hotly disputed Egypt out of French hands in the first years of the century. The moment he took power, Louis Philippe began laying siege to Oran and the rest of the Mediterranean coast. In 1833 France set up a colonial government in Algeria, the Gouvernement général des possessions françaises dans le nord de l’Afrique (General Government of the French Possessions in North Africa).

Then, for the first time in its colonial history, France got serious about sending settlers to a colony, partly because there were settlers anxious to go. France was late to enter the Industrial Revolution and was still largely a peasant country in the 1840s, but the population was expanding and land was becoming scarce. Landless farmers were seduced by promises of freely available rich farmland in North Africa, the legendary breadbasket of the Roman Empire. By 1850 there were twenty-five thousand European colonists in Algeria, mostly fishermen and peasants; half were French and the rest were Spanish, Italian, Maltese and Corsican. In the following decades unemployed Parisians and Alsatians poured into Algeria. By 1876 there were three hundred thousand Europeans in Algeria, half of them French. French winegrowers whose vines had been wiped out by the phylloxera epidemic in 1878 fled there looking for new land; Algeria was famous for its wines.

This contact between French soldiers and colonists and the Algerian
indigènes
brought a second wave of Arabicisms into French; the first dated back to the time of the Crusades (see chapter 1). But whereas then the French had borrowed scientific and technical terms from Arabic, the Arabicisms that slipped into the language in the nineteenth century were all popular expressions. Soldiers were the first to borrow from Arabic, using the word
barda
(from
bard’a,
packsaddle in the Algerian dialect) for their military kit.
Bled
(the country’s interior) took on a pejorative sense in French, referring to an insignificant place. And the Algerian
tabib
(healer) became the soldier’s
toubib
(still used in France for doctor). Other borrowings included
chouya
(a little bit),
maboul
(crackpot),
kif-kif
(the same) and
nouba
(party); all are used commonly in French even today, while others, including
casbah
and
raï,
spilled over into English. Dozens of other borrowings come from this period, many related to food, including the most famous,
couscous,
which is well on its way to becoming a national dish in France.

Almost from the beginning of the colony in Algeria, the French dreamed of replacing Arabic with French. French administrators declared French the colony’s official language and set about looking for ways to get Algerians to learn it. One of the early plans was to pay children two francs a day plus a meal to attend French school. The scheme failed. In 1850 the government created a school for sons of tribal chiefs in Paris, but this also produced few results. The main obstacle was the fact that Algerians already had a tradition of education. Before the conquest, up to forty percent of Algerians learned to read and write by studying the Koran in Muslim schools, so few North Africans bought the argument that the French were bringing them “civilization.” Meanwhile, the French settlers, who relied on exploiting undereducated
indigènes
as labour, were not too enthusiastic about applying the Paris education policies, which they considered too generous.

Nevertheless, the French persisted in their education objectives. In the 1850s the colonial government created “mixed” schools where students learned Arabic in the morning and French in the afternoon. By 1863 only a few thousand students were enrolled in them. From 1879 on, the French government began to create French
lycées, collèges
and schools of law and medicine in Algiers, and a full French school system was created in 1901. But the Muslim Algerians strongly resisted sending their children to the schools, and by 1914 only five percent of children attended French schools. The native inhabitants strongly opposed intermarriage as well, the other main means of assimilation.

Meanwhile, however, the French were assimilating almost all the other European settlers in Algeria. All the children of Europeans went to French schools, as did the Jewish population, both immigrant and indigenous. The overall result was that, by 1914, roughly a million inhabitants in a total population of 4.5 million spoke French as a mother tongue; three-quarters were Europeans, Algerian Jews and other assimilated foreigners, and one-quarter were Muslim
évolués.

In spite of the failure of the school program, French made rapid progress, though for the least noble of reasons. With the help of the colonial government, European settlers had been able to take over the best of Algeria’s agricultural lands, and they quickly transformed Algerian peasants into employees who had to speak the boss’s language. The French government had declared Algeria part of France in 1848, with each French ministry responsible for its own affairs there, so French became the language of administration. It was also the language of military service. Many Muslims performed military duties because the French government made oblique promises to grant them citizenship in exchange for these “special duties.” The overall result was that, by 1930, it was possible to go anywhere in Algeria without an interpreter.

The number of French settlers was considerably smaller in the rest of Africa, but there were so many colonies that it would be futile to try to give the details of how French progressed in each. The case of Senegal, however, is a good example.

What has gone down in history as the first French lesson in Africa took place in the town of Saint Louis, Senegal, in 1817. It was given by an equally legendary French instructor, Jean Dard, who was a visionary. When he arrived and opened a school that year, only a few thousand French people were living in Senegal. He began studying Senegal’s most important local language, Wolof, and even went on to publish the first French-Wolof dictionary in 1826, which described the structure of the language.

Jean Dard developed a new approach for teaching French outside of France, called the “mutual method” or
méthode de traduction
(translation method). The approach was to teach children to read and write in their native language, Wolof, then to learn French by translating. It was a very modern and very effective method, and Dard was said to have achieved remarkable results with it. Unfortunately he had to return to France in 1820 for health reasons. He came back to Senegal in 1832, but died a year later.

Had Dard’s methods taken root, the future of French in Africa might have been different. But his colleagues and successors favoured the “direct method,” which consisted of teaching French from scratch to people who didn’t even know how to read and write in their own language. Dard’s method required teachers to learn Wolof, and that was too much work, so the French in Africa just used the same teaching methods they used on schoolchildren in France. In Senegal this meant banning Wolof from the schools. To do this, the French went as far as taking children away from their families and sending them to French schools in distant villages. The children were mystified, upset and alienated by the whole process.

Until the 1850s, when Britain stopped disputing France’s dominion over the colony, there was no education policy to speak of in Senegal. That was when Senegal’s first governor, General Louis de Faidherbe, put one in place. If Senegal is today the cultural capital of francophone Africa, it is no doubt as a result of his actions. Faidherbe was a modernizer. When he arrived in 1854 there were between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand French people living in the colony, but little economic activity. He transformed the economy of the colony by introducing peanut plantations (albeit based on forced labour). He developed the ports of Saint-Louis, Rufisque and Dakar, and trade tripled between 1854 and 1869. Faidherbe defined and put into practice a system to train an African colonial elite by creating the first school for sons of chiefs in 1857. Its mandate was to “train functionaries who would collaborate with France,” including administrators, teachers and merchants. The schools later spread to Gorée, Dakar and Rufisque. Faidherbe also created a local infantry force, the famous
tirailleurs sénégalais
(though many of them came from Upper Volta, Guinea and Mali), who numbered 180,000 by 1914. It was an important means of Frenchification, as they had to speak to their officers in French.

Faidherbe’s plan worked quite well, and the burgeoning Senegalese elite got the message that French was the key to social promotion. France tried to build on this momentum by using different measures. As Amadou Ly, professor of literature at Cheikh Anta Diop University, told us, “The Senegalese helped the French colonize other African countries. We were the auxiliaries of colonialism.” In 1916 France extended citizenship to the residents of four colonial bases: Dakar, Rufisque, Saint Louis and Gorée. The people in these four towns were referred to as
les originaires
(natives), a status higher than
indigènes,
since they were French citizens. Starting in 1946, these four cities elected representatives to the National Assembly in Paris. During the colonial era, Dakar was the capital of French West Africa, and well into the first half of the twentieth century, colonial administrators came from all over western Africa to study at the École William Ponty, which trained colonial auxiliaries, administrators and even veterinarians. After the Second World War, France established scholarships to enable young Africans to pursue higher education in France. The first university in western Africa, the University of Dakar (now Université Cheikh Anta Diop), opened in 1950.

The results were less impressive among the rest of the Senegalese, few of whom learned French. In 1903 the French government passed a decree to put in place a system of secular primary education in its African colonies. The education system had three goals: to educate the masses, to establish French culture in Africa, and to train indigenous staff and assure the rise of an elite in the colonies. In 1912 there were 13,500 boys and 1,700 girls in French-language schools in West Africa. But the results in terms of language acquisition were weak. In 1925, across French West Africa, children still left school barely able to read or write. They learned only a few French words, often without understanding their meaning. After 1925 the French introduced village schools. The idea was to single out the children who had more aptitude for learning French, and send them on to regional schools. By 1945 the number enrolled had jumped to 94,400, but the numbers in French Equatorial Africa remained negligible.

The teaching of French never overcame some basic problems in Africa. First, the French simply never spent enough money on schools—a mere six percent of the colony’s budget, at the most, was devoted to education. According to French colonial doctrine, colonies were supposed to be financially self-sufficient. In addition, there wasn’t a lot of popular support for colonialism in France, so budgets were tight. Because of this mixture of colonial doctrine and financial considerations, the French didn’t invest heavily in infrastructure, and that worked against education. France also continued to rely heavily on missionaries to teach French. The overall result was that, even at the peak of France colonial teaching efforts—just before the 1960s independence movement—no more than fifteen percent of African children went to a French school, and this was a threefold improvement over the rate from fifteen years earlier. Education rates were slightly higher in Algeria—up to twenty percent at the peak—and a bit higher in Tunisia and Indochina. And, as Professor Pascale Barthélémy of the University of Paris VII argues in an article on the question, “although France tripled the rate of schooling in French West Africa between 1945 and the end of the 1950s, only four in a hundred could continue in a secondary school.”

Teaching methods were a major stumbling block. The French lacked qualified teachers throughout the colonial period. At one point they tried to put a teacher training school in place, but they never managed to develop a satisfactory method for teaching French as a second language. Not surprisingly, they never found a way to motivate Africans either. The objective was a steep one, considering that after 1791 it had taken the French ninety years to establish universal education in their own country. It is easy to imagine how disinclined young Africans were to learn a European language when their teachers insisted on using foreign references. In Senegal we met people old enough to remember textbooks that began with the famous phrase “
Nos ancêtres les Gaulois
” (“Our ancestors, the Gauls”)!

Mass education in the colonies might have been more efficient had the French better understood, or at least better defined, their purpose. In France schools served to educate citizens by instilling the values of the Republic and teaching them skills to make them employable, and then singling out the best and brightest for elite education. But in the colonies, aside from training an elite of auxiliaries, it wasn’t clear what the French were trying to achieve, or why they applied the same education scheme as in republican France to a population who had no rights or citizenship. As in Algeria, many French settlers in Africa objected to the idea of educating the
indigénat
—mass education is a dangerous thing to a dominant class that needs to keep natives in their place. The problem was that the settlers were the ones who were supposed to manage the program. So, in a way, the whole scheme was destined to fail.