Abstract
In the regions of sub-Saharan Africa conquered by France during the second half of the nineteenth century and later become part of French West and Equatorial Africa, the development of anthropology can be linked to colonial expansion. In addition to colonial officials and missionaries, teachers—trained at the École Normale William Ponty—contributed to expand ethnological and historical research on local cultures and societies. After the achievement of independence, the colonial legacy of anthropology hampered the growth of the discipline in the national contexts born out of the disintegration of French West and Equatorial Africa. History and sociology became instead popular, the former considered able to return to the new nations the agentivity lost with colonisation, the latter for its application to the understanding and planning of change. Relations with France remained crucial to the development of higher education and scientific research in French-speaking West African and equatorial contexts. The discussions of this new century focus on the importance of re-localising African studies within Africa itself without forgetting that the time is over when a country, a centre and a unique perspective could claim the monopoly over the knowledge of African cultures and societies.
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Notes
- 1.
The term “anthropology” is used differently in French than in English. By the end of the nineteenth century, “ethnology” and “ethnography” corresponded to the emerging discipline of British and American cultural and social anthropology, while “anthropology” was a generic term used to indicate the entire field of studies centred on the human sphere as much as a synonym of physical anthropology. After World War II, led by Claude Lévi-Strauss, French scholars began to speak of themselves as cultural and social anthropologists (Sibeud, 2012, pp. S83–S84).
- 2.
See, for example, Delafosse (1912), Monteil (1915, 1924), Gaden (1931), Labouret (1929, 1935), Viellard (1939), Delavignette (1939); more specifically on the work of Delafosse, see Amselle and Sibeud (1998) and on that of Gaden, Dilley (2014). Sibeud (2002) reconstructs the beginnings of French Africanist thought, while Coquery-Vidrovitch (2006) offers a critical assessment of developments following decolonisation, underlining how Africanists lost their central role in the French context.
- 3.
For Mudimbe (1988), the expression “colonial library” refers to body of texts and representations, and to the epistemology, that have “invented” the otherness and inferiority of Africa as an antithesis to Western civilisation.
- 4.
Founded in 1703, from 1732 the Holy Ghost Fathers (Congregatio Sancti Spiritus sub tutela Immaculati Cordis Beatissimae Virginis Mariae) were actively engaged in evangelising work in the Caribbean and North American French colonies and in other parts of the world with trade links to France, such as China and Siam. In 1766, the Holy See assigned them the Apostolic Prefecture of Iles Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, off the coast of Canada, followed by those of French Guiana and Saint-Louis du Sénégal. Suppressed during the French Revolution and restored under Napoleon Bonaparte, only to be immediately again suppressed, the congregation continued to operate during the 1800s, settling from the end of the century in the parts of Africa conquered by France. Holy Ghost Fathers who made important contributions to advancing African ethnology included Alexandre Leroy, with his impressive work on Bantu religions (Leroy, 1911) and numerous articles published in the journal Anthropos, founded in 1906 by Wilhelm Schmidt (1968–1954), a Verbite (Society of the Divine Word, SVD) missionary. The Missionaries of Africa (known as the White Fathers) are a more recent order, founded in 1868 by Cardinal Charles Martial Allemand Lavigerie, Archbishop of Algiers. Lavigerie, aware that members of the congregation were destined to live in little-known areas of Africa, made the study of local languages and cultures one of the missionaries’ daily tasks. The White Fathers also published numerous articles in Anthropos.
- 5.
Senegalese ethnologists and historians of note from this period include Jean-Pierre Sarr, a seminarist who gathered the first information on Serer history and customs, and Cheikh Moussa Kamara, a scholar from Futa Toro who wrote in Arabic—also a friend of Delafosse, Gaden and other French Africanists—author of Zuhuir al-Basatin ft Ta’rikh al-Sawadin (translated as Florilège au jardin de l’histoire des Noirs), consisting of over 1700 pages of genealogies, chronicles and comments written in the early 1920s (Boulègue, 1988, p. 396; Robinson, 1988, p. 100).
- 6.
As a federal school, the École normale William-Ponty was attended by students from all over French West Africa. Initially it had a teacher-training function, but from the 1920s on it also prepared administrative and financial officials, as well as students from Dakar’s Jules Carde School of medicine. At the time of decolonisation. The majority of political leaders in French-speaking West Africa had a William-Ponty background. Further details of the school, its educational polices, as well as the professional and political careers of its students are available in Jézéquel (2002).
- 7.
Profiles of Adandé and other William-Ponty graduates are available on the website: https://bibcolaf.hypotheses.org (last accessed: 20 February 2022).
- 8.
Diallo graduated from the École des Langues orientales in Paris and went on to obtain a degree in humanities. On returning to Africa in 1956, he had difficulty in obtaining a post as an IFAN assistant. After the independence of Guinea (1958), he was appointed as an assistant to the Institut National de la Recherche et de la Documentation de Guinée (INRDG) and head of the ethnology-sociology department (https://bibcolaf.hypotheses.org/notices-biographiques/ousmane-poreko-diallo-1922-1961, last accessed: 31 March 2022).
- 9.
The Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), set up in 1946, played a crucial role in the decolonisation of French West and Equatorial Africa. It comprised a range of parties present in the various colonial territories and was dissolved in 1958 after the vote for independence. The RDA did not support secession from France, but nonetheless made anti-colonial and pan-Africanist demands.
- 10.
Paul Mercier, who had been a friend of Balandier since their schooldays, established the Dahomey branch of IFAN. When he was recalled to Dakar in 1951 to study urbanisation processes, Monod recruited Jacques Lombard to replace him. Lombard too devoted himself to the study of urban anthropology (Galliard, 2017, p. 10).
- 11.
With courses on the family, marriage and kinship, anthropology was one of the first disciplines taught at the Université fédérale de Yaoundé, set up on French initiative in 1962 and supported by France for a decade thereafter. The discipline took on greater importance with the reforms of the 1990s, which strengthened recruitment of students and academic staff alike (Nkwi & Sopca, 2007, p. 73 and ff.).
- 12.
In 1998, the ORSTOM was converted into the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD), under the aegis of the French ministries dealing with research and cooperation. It was given the mandate of working in cooperation and partnership with the countries of the Global South and engaging in research in human and social, health and environmental fields. By 2018 the institute had branches in 40 countries worldwide as well as in the French overseas territories, in addition to four regional delegations in metropolitan France.
- 13.
- 14.
Founded in 1973, with its headquarters in Dakar, the CODESRIA aimed to “promote multi-disciplinary social research deriving from the experience of the continent and its inhabitants and relevant to such experience” (Olukoshi & Nymanjoh, 2006, p. 18). In addition to supporting the education of young scholars, the institution offered African researchers an important showcase for their work, which might otherwise have been condemned to submit to the scientific interests and publishing market of the Global North. Its first executive secretary was Samir Amin.
- 15.
For example, Mudimbe, who settled permanently in the United States in the 1980s and Achille Mbembe, who spent almost the entire next decade working in US research institutions and universities.
- 16.
When it was set up in 1970, the National University of Gabon (soon renamed Omar Bongo University in honour of the president of the country) had departments of history and sociology, from which a separate department of anthropology was set up in 1997 under the directorship of a French-educated Gabonese anthropologist, Jean-Émile Mbot, and of a French oceanographer living in the country. The department organised a full programme, offering bachelor, master and doctoral degrees, quickly establishing itself as an important centre for the development of the discipline (Bonhomme, 2007, p. 2). After heading the department of sociology at Marien Ngouabi University in Brazzaville, Tonda took up his post at Omar Bongo in the early 2000s.
- 17.
- 18.
http://www.crash-td.net/about/1 (last accessed: 22 February 2022).
- 19.
An example would be the critique by Charles Didier Gondola (2007) of how the history of Africa is practised in French-speaking as compared to North American contexts. For Gondola, who began to put forward his argument during the 1990s, French scholars dealing with colonialism cultivated a Eurocentric perspective, remaining deaf to constructive comments from both Africans and historians of the continent trained in other scholarly traditions. Mbembe (2010, p. 160), for his part, sees the lack of French interest in English-speaking post-colonial studies as the expression of an intellectual provincialism that would continue to celebrate the glories of a France with a central role in world balances of power.
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The research and reflections underlying this chapter were developed within the framework of the Research Project of National Interest (PRIN-2017) “Genealogies of African Freedoms” (2020–2023), which the author has coordinated together with Pierluigi Valsecchi (University of Pavia), Alessandro Gusman (University of Turin) and Bruno Riccio (University of Bologna). Special thanks to Gabriella D’Agostino and Vincenzo Matera, editors of this volume, for the encouragement to consider an aspect of the history of anthropology that has proven particularly fruitful.
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Bellagamba, A. (2023). Indigenous Ethnologists, National Anthropologists, Post-colonial Intellectuals: The Trajectory of Anthropology in French-Speaking West and Equatorial Africa. In: D'Agostino, G., Matera, V. (eds) Histories of Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21258-1_9
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