Educated Muslim clerics defied the colonial categories of subject and citizen

Evidence

Different treatment of the originaires reveals that the evolues posed a dilemma for the Government General. With their special privileges acquired at birth rather than through individual effort, their religion, and their fluent yet recently acquired French, they failed to fit neatly into either of the legal categories that Dakar was in the process of establishing for West Africans: uncivilized native subjects or assimilated French citizens. What is more, in aspiring to citizenship, they were not acting like the model “useful men” that the administration was stipulating as the proper future for educated Africans. These hommes utiles were by definition apolitical and subservient to the French administration. The evolues, in contrast, spurned farming and the army and were extremely vocal in their demands for immediate equality. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 523

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘homme utile’ ideal against which evolues were judged, central to the mission civilisatrice’s internal contradictions.
• DEEPTHINKING: Captures the structural bind: the very citizenship France offered was defined to exclude those it educated, because inclusion required abandoning Islamic personal status.