French administration destroyed West African institutions without adequate replacement.

Evidence

More often than not, Delafosse continued, Dakar had destroyed existing institutions without putting anything better in their place. The situation was worse than in the first years of French occupation. “Our native policy has regressed, not progressed.” He attributed this situation to a lack of interest in, and respect for, the cultures France had undertaken to change. Ponty, he pointed out, had held in contempt all scientific inquiry. The African people had a history of their own, which, he concluded, “we do not have the right to ignore nor disdain, on the grounds that it is not written and does not appear on university curricula. It is the history of a human race and, for this reason alone, cannot remain unknown to men, whomever they might be, and particularly not to men who have received the mission to continue [this history].” — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 638

Categorization

• XREF: Quotes an internal French colonial official who saw Africans as having a history worth respecting — complicates the standard civilizing-mission narrative and connects to critiques of erasure of precolonial societies elsewhere.
• QUESTION: Delafosse was himself an ethnographer/official; worth investigating his own position relative to the assimilation ideal this book tracks.