Colonial officials argued Africans could only become fully human through French tutelage

Evidence

Gi-gla and Moussa were repeatedly told that their destiny was to be made into hommes utiles. “It is necessary [for the African] to rise to the dignite d’homme,” Hardy wrote in his book Une conquete morale. Only “whites know themselves as men [se connaissent en hommes].” Schools, he reiterated to the Council of the Government General, were to make of the African child “a man and a Frenchman, in order to prepare him to become useful, and to want to become useful.” Georges Deherme, who wrote the federation’s slavery report in 1908, used the same formula in discussing the need to eradicate human bondage. France wished to elevate Africans to a higher “humanity,” to evoke in them “more human ambitions … We know that in thus increasing the capacity of Africans to live, we will also increase their capacity to suffer. But it is in this way that they will truly be men.” — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 471

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The colonial claim that elevating Africans increased their capacity to suffer yet made them ‘truly men’ is a dense, morally tangled articulation of the civilizing mission’s inner logic — worth sitting with.