Colonial decree-making reclassified educated Africans as natives outside their home communes

Evidence

Dakar could not but feel threatened by these actions, and its first response was to deny the evolues many of their earlier privileges, on the grounds that these rights belonged only to authentic citizens. Whatever their aspirations, the Government General implied, the evolues were legally no different from France’s other subjects and should be treated as such. Dakar did not go so far as to rescind their electoral privileges-a move that would have been politically unacceptable in France. But it did begin to penalize this group in other ways. … His decree distinguished between citizens and “natives” and insisted that the latter had to be judged by their own magistrates whenever they left coastal Senegal. The term “native” included all individuals born in West Africa, Equatorial Africa, and foreign possessions located in those territories, who did not have “in their country of origin the status of European nationals.” Since the evolues had just been denied the status of nationals, this definition now presumably applied to them. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 524

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the legal category ‘native’ as applying to all non- European-national Africans, which became the tool to strip evolues of privileges.
• XREF: connects to: Who counts as Native varies with shifting settler-colonial standards — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 84