Assimilation (French colonial)

Assimilation was one ideological basis of French colonial policy in the 19th and 20th centuries. In contrast with British imperial policy, the French taught their subjects that, by adopting French language and culture, they could eventually become French. The famous 'Four Communes' in Senegal were seen as proof of this. Here Africans were afforded all the rights of French citizens.

The French Assimilation concept was based on the idea of expanding French culture to the colonies outside France in the 19th and 20th century. Natives of these colonies were considered French citizens as long as the culture and customs were adopted. This also meant they would have the rights and duties of French citizens.

The meaning of assimilation has been greatly debated. One possible definition stated that French laws apply to all colonies outside France regardless of the distance from France, the size of the colony, the organization of society, the economic development, race or religious beliefs. A cultural definition for assimilation can be the expansion of the French culture outside Europe.

Arthur Girault published "Principes de colonisation et de Legislation coloniale" in 1885 which defined assimilation as "eclectic". Its ideal he considers "the constantly more intimate union between the colonial territory and the metropolitan territory". Arthur Girault also wrote that all military responsibilities of a French citizen also apply to the natives of the colonies.

People in West Africa devised a variety of strategies to resist the establishment of a colonial system and to oppose specific institutions of the system. For example, labourers engaged in strike action in the late 19th and early 20th Century in Lagos, the Cameroons, Dahomey, and Guinea.

Ideological protests included the banding together of the Lobi and the Bambara of French Sudan against the spread of French culture. Shaykh Ahmadu Bamba founded a movement, called Mouridiyya, to protest against the French presence. British West African colonies rebelled by forming their own messianic or millernarian or Ethiopian churches with distinctively African liturgies and doctrines, such as the Native Baptist Church, founded in Nigeria in 1888.

During this same time period, a variety of groups formed to protest specific colonialist laws or measures imposed on indigenous populations, such as the Young Senegalese Club and the Aborigines' Rights Protection Society, which used newspapers, pamphlets, and plays to protect themselves from assimilation.

Despite widespread protest, Colonialism was firmly entrenched in the whole of West Africa by the time of World War I. Till the abolishing of the colonial rule, Africa had endured many oppressions in relation to religion, tradition, customs and culture.

...
Wikipedia