Social Science Research Council

"Educating Nationality: Senegalese Children and France, 1870-1903"

From the mid-nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth, the French colonial government in Senegal devoted a portion of its budget to educational grants for local children. These grants allowed children to attend secondary school in France or North Africa, and sometimes, to pursue programs of study that were not available in Senegal. My dissertation project will use the life stories of students from Senegal who traveled abroad between 1870 and 1903 to test the hypothesis that their experiences away from home encouraged them to consider themselves “Senegalese.” I will pay special attention to expressions of sentiment and to affective ties, and I will question how experiences of marginality, racism and homesickness in diaspora, as well as the formation of new friendships with both Senegalese and French people, ultimately influenced former bursary recipients’ participation in struggles to define Senegalese national identity at home.

My research will also seek to demonstrate that these experiences, along with returned students’ familiarity with French Republican ideology, made Senegalese nationality attractive as a means to demand of France certain rights for Senegal’s people. Most importantly, I will examine the reintegration of travelers into their families and communities. I will study their links to community and kin and follow their later career paths, seeking to understand how these individuals ultimately shaped Senegalese society as a whole. In this way, my work will question the ways diaspora has shaped the homeland by locating the roots of Senegalese nationalism in a migration diaspora created by Senegalese children circulating between Senegal, France and North Africa. Indeed, because of the important political roles played by many of these individuals in adulthood, we cannot fully understand the notions of Senegalese identity developing in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries without considering the role of education in France and North Africa.