French-educated African clerks became colonial critics, not loyal servants

Evidence

Even the auxiliaries that were formed did not behave as the French had expected. The majority of the new students did not become model farmers or model soldiers; instead, they went to work for the administration or for commerce, where the jobs were both more lucrative and more prestigious. … These clerks, moreover, would increasingly be perceived as a threat to the colonial regime; far from using their new language and knowledge of French culture to understand the French and accept their high-minded motives in colonizing West Africa, at least some members of this first generation of educated Africans would begin to challenge the exclusion of Africans from power. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 478

Categorization

• XREF: This is the seed of the educated elite who later become nationalist leaders in West Africa — connects to the larger arc of decolonization.
• SEED: Angle: the educated colonial clerk as the inadvertent revolutionary — France trained its own future critics.