Colonial unity imagined at a shared school evaporates when administrative practice fails to match

Evidence

In its heyday, the École Normale William Ponty in Dakar, though only a secondary school, was still the apex of the colonial educational pyramid in French West Africa. To William Ponty came intelligent students from what we know today as Guinea, Mali, the Ivory Coast, Senegal, and so on. We should not be surprised therefore if the pilgrimages of these boys, terminating in Dakar, were initially read in French [West] African terms, of which the paradoxical concept négritude – essence of African-ness expressible only in French, language of the William Ponty classrooms – is an unforgettable symbol. Yet the apicality of William Ponty was accidental and evanescent. As more secondary schools were constructed in French West Africa, it was no longer necessary for bright boys to make so distant a pilgrimage. And in any case the educational centrality of William Ponty was never matched by a comparable administrative centrality of Dakar. The interchangeability of French West African boys on the benches of William Ponty was not paralleled by their later bureaucratic substitutability in the French West African colonial administration. Hence, the school’s Old Boys went home to become, eventually, Guinean or Malian nationalist leaders, while retaining a ‘West African’ camaraderie and solidary intimacy lost to succeeding generations. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 464

Categorization

• XREF: Fits directly into the reader’s Module 2 toolkit: pilgrimage-as-imagined-community mechanism applied to colonial education, the same mechanism Anderson uses for Indonesia and the ‘interchangeability’ theme used for both this and the Indochina passages. — connects to: An imagined community only solidifies when educational and administrative pilgrimages coincide — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 472; External education makes the colonial subject an outsider to both races — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 232; Partial colonial education created a literate unemployed class who felt abandoned — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 181
• DEFINE: Introduces-negritude concept linked to colonial education structure.

Related

• Colonial schooling directed elite pilgrims outward while administrative careers confined them to demarcated homelands (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• External education makes the colonial subject an outsider to both races #complicates (0.75) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 232
• Partial colonial education created a literate unemployed class who felt abandoned #qualifies (0.70) — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 181