France justified ethnic re-segregation as liberal respect for Africans’ rights

Evidence

The right of Africans to be governed by leaders drawn from their own people was consistent with Dakar’s previously declared commitment to respect African customs, and would provide the basis for Panty’s reform of the native legal system. Panty’s concern here was again driven by the specific conditions he had encountered in the Western Sudan, where there had been a great mixing and migration of peoples in the nineteenth century, thanks to the constant warfare of rival empire-builders. Such ethnic intermingling was not as typical in the other colonies. Panty was also manifestly inspired by French democratic principles celebrating the equality of all peoples and personal freedom, as was said by those who knew him well. “In these arbitrarily formed groups,” his collaborator Paul Marty wrote, “created by the tyranny of local chiefs or the bloody madness of conquerors and marabouts, in these artificial groupings that we sometimes were weak enough to preserve, Panty returned the upper hand to all the ethnic elements; he proclaimed the equal human value of all people, and their right to exist.” — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 393

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the politique des races by its stated rationale: returning each ethnic group to self-rule as homage to French democratic equality principles.
• SEED: Essay angle: how a ‘liberating’ ideology of ethnic self-determination in a colony functioned as a divide-and-rule instrument — parallel to modern debates over ethnic federalism.