French Fathers and Their “Indigenous Children”

Métissage and History

Senegal has a long history of interracial unions, which date to the earliest arrivals of Europeans in the fifteenth century and which helped to define French relationships with Africans after the Compagnie du Sénégal established a trading post there in 1659. For several centuries, many within the predominantly male and young French population formed unions with African women, which they sometimes formalized as mariages à la mode du pays. These “marriages in the fashion of the country” followed some local practices, including marriage negotiations and gifts, and received recognition in the wider community despite their unofficial status. In this era, French men relied on the local population, and especially on their African wives or consorts, for access to trading networks in Senegal’s interior. Furthermore, women provided domestic services, education about local culture and language, care when men fell sick, and sexual intimacy. In this early period, French men often supported their African wives and métis children financially, while they lived in Senegal, and they sometimes bequeathed wealth or business interests to their African families when they returned to France or when they died. In doing so, they and their African wives founded the prominent métis families of Saint-Louis and Gorée, which exercised significant economic and political power through the mid-nineteenth century and played an important roles in local politics into the twentieth century. ⁹

By the late nineteenth century, temporary unions had become common—so common that Dr. Barot devoted several pages to them in his 1902 guidebook written for European residents of and visitors to West Africa. ¹⁰ But conversely, officials’ tolerance of these relationships had begun to decline. Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, as French territorial interests expanded rapidly in West Africa and as ideas about race hardened in France and across the empire, officials began to condemn interracial unions and to view mixed-race children with concern and some suspicion. While decision makers never banned them, they sought to discourage those they supervised from entering into such relationships. As the French administration in West Africa worked to establish its authority in newly “pacified” territories, interracial intimacy seemed to threaten the stability of colonial rule precisely because it transgressed the boundaries on which colonialism depended. In this context, many officials felt a sense of responsibility to those métis children who carried French blood in their veins, even as they worried about whether métis would remain loyal to the colonial state and about where they fit in the civilizing mission.

Concerns about métissage emerged across the empire, especially in the recently acquired colonies in Africa and Asia. Indeed, in a 1912 circular, the minister of the colonies strongly urged Frenchmen to support the education and training of their métis children even after they returned to France. ¹¹ This circular had no enforcement mechanism and thus made little impact, but it does reflect the widespread preoccupation with the issue. In several French West African colonies, officials tackled the problem not by pressuring French fathers but by focusing on their métis offspring, creating special orphanages or employing personnel to serve the population. At the end of 1911, for example, twenty métis children lived in a newly opened orphanage in Côte d’Ivoire, seventy-five lived in two orphanages in Haut Sénégal-Niger, and Dahomey’s budget provided for an “inspectrice of abandoned métis children.” ¹² Significantly, many of these children were not truly orphaned or abandoned but rather, received care from their African mothers and their families. Yet regardless of the actual involvement of the family, officials often labeled as “morally abandoned” those métis children whose upbringing they found insufficiently French. In doing so, they revised metropolitan ideas about moral order and about the state’s responsibility to care for certain kinds of children to suit the colonial context. ¹³

While authorities in Senegal never created official métis orphanages, at least some of them considered the idea, and many thought that the state had a duty to these children. In a 1912 letter supporting a Frenchman seeking a scholarship for his mixed-race daughter, for example, an administrator in Louga, Senegal, wondered whether scholarships and social assistance payments were enough and contended that the state should consider supporting an orphanage for métis children. And the issue reemerged periodically in official correspondence, within humanitarian organizations, and in discussions among elected leaders. ¹⁴ Yet, instead of running separate institutions for métis, the colonial administration in Senegal relied on missionary orphanages to shelter some métis children and provided financial assistance and scholarships to some who remained with their families. Like their counterparts in other French West African colonies, then, authorities in Senegal felt that the state should intervene on behalf of métis children.

Officials likely felt this responsibility since, in French West Africa as a whole, most French fathers neither recognized their métis children nor registered them with the civil state, an act that would provide them with citizenship and legal status. Using statistics from 1938, Owen White estimates that less than 15 percent of métis children in Dahomey and perhaps only 1 percent of métis children in Soudan were recognized. I have not found comprehensive data for Senegal, and most censuses do not include métis as a distinct category. The 1914 census for Senegal does quantify métis, and though its data may not be complete, it suggests that métis children went unrecognized by their fathers much more frequently than white children. Of sixty-two live births to French mothers and French fathers recorded in that year, only one father declined to recognize his child. In contrast, of the twenty-one children born to a French father and a métisse or African mother, nine were unrecognized. ¹⁵ In the absence of more data, we cannot know whether this relatively high percentage (57 percent) of recognized métis children was typical or unusual for Senegal, or whether it resulted from underreporting (of births outside major population centers, e.g.). Yet clearly, if most French fathers had recognized and provided for their children, the “métis question” would not have seemed so urgent to officials. Indeed, several of the fathers discussed below made the case that they deserved help from the state precisely because they had taken the unusual step of recognizing their métis children.

Thus, the interracial families that are the focus of this article were uncommon in the sense that the French fathers continued to provide support and—at least sometimes—love and affection for their métis children. These fathers cared about their children’s education and future, and in some cases, they had already paid substantial sums for schooling. Yet, most of them belonged to the French working class or the petite bourgeoisie, having come to the colony in their youth to try to make a living in trade and having suffered various financial setbacks that prevented them from fully meeting the needs of their families. Although most were private citizens, they saw themselves as agents of French colonialism and civilization, and they sometimes seemed to insinuate that their families were a natural outgrowth of this role. As the impoverished French fathers discussed here called upon officials to recognize their contributions to colonialism by giving scholarships to their métis children, they engaged with issues of race and power both within their own families and in Senegal more broadly, and they revealed important details about intimacy, paternal duty, and affect in interracial families.

French Fathers, Métis Children, and Scholarships

French fathers of métis children, like other parents and guardians in the colony, often sought scholarships for their children because there were no schools near their homes or because they found the available schooling to be deficient or less prestigious in comparison with schools in the colonial capital or in France. Indeed, though formal French schooling had been available in Senegal since the early nineteenth century, its quality remained uneven and, in rural areas, schools were still few and far between. In Saint-Louis, Dakar, Rufisque, and Gorée, towns that had been designated as communes in recognition of their long history of involvement with the French, many schools offered academic programming that resembled metropolitan curricula, though with a more “practical” emphasis. Teachers in these schools, classified as “urban” schools by Governor General Roume’s 1903 reform of education in French West Africa, were predominantly European and had received at least some pedagogical training. Roume’s 1903 reform and subsequent decisions also closed the secondary school that had operated in Saint-Louis since 1884 and, reflecting the policies being pursued in France, required public schools to be entirely secular. This shift eventually led to the cessation of the decades-old official collaboration between Senegal’s administration and Catholic teaching orders, fueled anxieties about quality among some parents, and for a time created a shortage of European teachers. ¹⁶

A concentration of educational institutions and personnel in the communes—there were ten schools and forty-seven teachers in 1912, for example—contrasted sharply with the situation outside these towns, where many communities lacked schools entirely. In 1912, the towns, administrative posts, and rural areas that accounted for the vast majority of Senegal’s territory and population had only thirty-five schools, many staffed by a single, locally trained, African instructor and offering only one class. Furthermore, the 1903 reform designated the schools located in these areas as “regional” or “village” schools and limited the course of study they offered. Village schools were to provide two to three years of instruction, emphasizing spoken French and introducing basic writing, arithmetic, and a few other subjects. Regional schools were to offer a three-year course of study that included a slightly wider range of subject areas. And both types of schools were to devote considerable time to vocational or agricultural training. Whether their children were métis or white, European fathers frequently found these regional and village schools to be insufficient due to the “adapted” curriculum and instructors’ limited training and credentials. The provision of local scholarships, designed to subsidize the living expenses of children from other parts of Senegal who came to Saint-Louis for school, suggests that the administration was sympathetic to these concerns. ¹⁷

Across the colony, and especially in the communes, some parents and guardians had for decades dealt with their concerns about education quality by sending their children to the more rigorous and prestigious schools of France, either at their own expense or thanks to a government scholarship. Indeed, as Louis Guillabert maintained during the 1904 session of the General Council, parents lacked “faith” in their local schools and would continue sending their children to France until Senegal’s schools offered “sufficient instruction.” ¹⁸ Although the practice of awarding scholarships for metropolitan study frequently drew criticism and provoked heated debate among officials and General Council members about how best to use the colony’s education budget, the administration had provided scholarships at least since the 1840s. Even in the 1820s, Governor Roger had helped Anne-Marie Javouhey, Mother Superior of the Sisters of Saint-Joseph of Cluny religious order, carry out her plan to take young people from Senegal to France to train as teachers and priests. ¹⁹

Although the administration at first selected recipients and disbursed funds somewhat informally, it began inviting families to submit scholarship application packages for review in the 1870s. And in 1883, the governor of Senegal issued detailed guidelines regulating scholarship applications and the process by which they would be evaluated. Subsequent reforms made some changes to the program, particularly regarding the length of time recipients could hold scholarships and the types of institutions that they could attend. A 1901 decree, for example, barred recipients from using their awards in most private schools, effectively laicizing the scholarship program. This decree reflected secularization processes underway in France but predated by a few years the administration’s decision to remove Catholic teaching orders from Senegal’s schools. Despite this change and others, the application process and required documentation remained essentially the same. Indeed, into the twentieth century, applications had to include the applicant’s birth certificate, a “certificate of good conduct” from the head of the student’s current school (if applicable), an attestation from the mayor or a comparable authority as to the number of children and other dependents supported by the head of household, proof of parents’ tax payments, and “a detailed note on the grounds on which the request is based.” ²⁰ Throughout this period, though interested in academic promise and financial need, decision makers placed greater weight on the question of whether candidates and their families deserved to attract the state’s “interest.” As they made the case for financial assistance in their application materials, French fathers revealed important details about class position, family demographics, and their métis children’s civil status. Furthermore, their documents at least occasionally allow us to glimpse the emotional life of the family. In what follows, I provide two case studies based on the most richly documented files and then conclude with some discussion of overall trends and what they represent.

Case 1: The Latrilhe Family

In May 1903, André Isidore Latrilhe, a Frenchman and an employee of a merchant firm, wrote to the governor of Senegal to request a scholarship that would allow his son, Marcel Latrilhe, to attend school in France. ²¹ This 1903 letter was the first in a long chain of correspondence stretching nearly a decade in which Latrilhe doggedly pursued educational opportunities for his son. Although the initial application revealed only that Mr. Latrilhe had worked in Senegal for over twenty years, that he did not have the financial wherewithal to educate his son in France, and that he wanted the boy to have access to a better education than he could receive locally, subsequent correspondence and other documents show that Latrilhe had a long-term relationship with his African wife, Awa Sow, that he was a committed father to his three métis children, and that he was able to use his connections to colonial society for the benefit of his family.

André Latrilhe, son of a merchant (négociant) in Aire sur l’Adour, France, had come to Senegal in 1879 at age fifteen to seek his fortune in commerce. Over the ensuing decades, he worked in the region as an employee of several different trading firms and spent some time in the military. Although he sometimes received commercial postings to towns with a significant French presence, such as Gorée, Dakar, Saint-Louis, and Rufisque (where he lived for eight years in the 1890s), he spent the majority of his career in more remote locations, including parts of the French Soudan and M’Pal, Senegal. Sometime before 1900, he came to Mekhé, a small railroad town in the Kayoor region and part of Senegal’s protectorate, where he lived and worked at least through 1911. In 1902, he tried to go into business for himself in Mekhé, a failed effort that left him heavily indebted and precipitated his initial request for a scholarship for Marcel. Some months later, he returned to the Maison Chavanel trading company as an employee. As of 1930, he still worked in commerce in Senegal, having moved to Thiès. ²²

Throughout his career and despite his lowly status as a commercial employee, Latrilhe maintained strong ties to Senegal’s small French settler community and to the colonial administration. In 1899, for example, a French sporting publication mentioned Latrilhe as one of the several amateur equestrians who raced horses in Rufisque, where a track had opened in 1894 as an outlet for the boredom experienced by many European residents. During the yellow fever epidemic of 1900, Latrilhe, who had survived yellow fever in 1880, came to the aid of fellow Frenchmen in Mekhé and his heroics drew the attention of colonial authorities. For these efforts, he received a decoration in 1902, becoming a Chevalier in the Étoile Noire de Bénin, a colonial honor society that recognized those who helped promote French colonization in West Africa. And he seems to have remained on good terms with administrators, several of whom supported his efforts to win scholarships for Marcel or—much later—suggested that he receive additional decorations recognizing his work in commerce and economic development. ²³

Yet, at the same time, as he lived and worked among them, André Latrilhe sought connections with Africans as well. These connections would have been especially important when he lived in remote areas like Mekhé, where the European presence consisted of perhaps a dozen traders. ²⁴ Most significant was his long relationship with Awa Sow, the mother of Marcel and at least two younger siblings, Odette Rose Lucie Latrilhe and Pierre Bernard Latrilhe. Latrilhe seems to have married Awa Sow, if not in a civil ceremony, then according to local custom. The relationship lasted long enough to produce their three children, and perhaps longer; I have no record of it ending. Although he failed to declare Marcel’s 1895 birth with the state until a court ruling several months later required him to do so, Mr. Latrilhe not only recognized all three of his children but gave them his family name. ²⁵ In marrying an African woman, recognizing their children, and remaining present and involved with his family, Latrilhe was unusual, though, as I discuss below, not unique. Furthermore, Latrilhe’s own letters and those of his supporters suggest that his connection to his family went beyond paternal duty to true emotional attachment and even affection.

Indeed, in a 1904 letter of support for Marcel’s scholarship application, an official in the Secretary General’s office portrayed André Latrilhe as an honest man, guilty only of “poverty,” who was committed to properly raising his three métis children. Mr. Latrilhe had placed nine-year-old Marcel in the Catholic school in Gorée, but, the official argued, the state would need to help the family given that laicization would soon result in the closure of the colony’s religious schools. Similarly, in a 1908 letter of support, the Chef de Cercle of Bandiagara, who had befriended André Latrilhe in 1892, claimed that Latrilhe had “entirely sacrificed his life” to his métis children. In light of the family’s financial need and Marcel’s educational successes thus far, the official called on the Secretary General of Senegal to strongly consider Marcel’s application for a metropolitan scholarship. ²⁶

André Latrilhe’s actions also suggest commitment to and perhaps even love for his son. Beginning with that first attempt in 1903, Mr. Latrilhe determinedly pursued educational opportunities for his eldest child in an effort to provide quality schooling despite his limited means. This meant finding a way to educate Marcel in France or at least in a major colonial town like Saint-Louis, where the schooling was much more rigorous and highly regarded than the rudimentary instruction offered in Senegal’s rural schools. Although Mr. Latrilhe was initially unable to secure a metropolitan scholarship, the administration provided a local scholarship in 1904, and Marcel’s academic accomplishments allowed him to keep it for several years as he completed primary school, a secondary course, and a complementary course in Saint-Louis, Senegal. In May 1908, Mr. Latrilhe again submitted Marcel’s application for a metropolitan scholarship. ²⁷

When word came in September that Marcel had won one of the coveted awards, Mr. Latrilhe was already in France on leave. He made arrangements to meet his son in Bordeaux to help him settle in at school but mishandled paperwork and other red tape delayed the boy’s arrival. Required to report back to work in Senegal, Mr. Latrilhe expressed disappointment that he had to return to the colony without seeing his son. When, soon after his return, Mr. Latrilhe learned that Marcel had been sent to France without identity papers or proof of his scholarship, he scrambled to complete the paperwork required to correct the problem, and he worked to secure reimbursement for the boy’s guardian in Bordeaux, a Mr. C. Paret-Laterrade, who had paid the first two months’ tuition out of pocket. ²⁸ Significantly, André Latrilhe chose to send Marcel to a school in Aire sur l’Adour, where he had grown up and where friends and relatives perhaps still lived. Although by 1908, Mr. Latrilhe’s parents and one sister had died, a younger sister was still alive. This sister, Jeanne Marie-Claire Latrilhe, a singer and artist who went by the stage name of Odette Dulac, had ended her performance career in Paris a few years before, and though she does not appear to have moved back home, she certainly could have had interactions with Marcel during his time in France. Yet, regardless of whether Marcel was able to come to know extended family in Aire sur l’Adour, André Latrilhe’s choice of a school in his own hometown seems deeply sentimental and suggests another level of emotional connection to his son. ²⁹ Finally, in August 1911, Mr. Latrilhe requested a one-year extension of Marcel’s scholarship to allow him to complete additional specialized training, and in August of the following year, he wrote to the governor general seeking the repatriation to Senegal to which Marcel was entitled. ³⁰ Clearly, Mr. Latrilhe remained concerned about and involved in Marcel’s education for its duration.

And from the beginning, André Latrilhe had a vision for Marcel’s future. In a June 1904 letter, he noted that he wanted Marcel to become an electrical technician or engineer and that he had written to his family in France for advice on selecting a technical school (an école des arts et métiers). ³¹ When Marcel finally received a metropolitan scholarship, his Bordeaux guardian helped his father execute this plan, placing Marcel in the industrial division of the Ecole professionnelle d’Aire sur l’Adour, and the scholarship extension that Mr. Latrilhe secured in 1911 was intended to allow Marcel to deepen his understanding of electricity before beginning a career in the field. ³² At the time, electricity was still a new and exciting technology, and both private industry and the government sector needed highly trained specialists. As such, pursuing technical training in electrical work could allow Marcel to obtain a stable, salaried position with possibilities for promotion and to thereby improve his economic outlook and class position. Electricity was thus an appropriately ambitious and practical path for a petit bourgeois father to select for his eldest son. ³³

Latrilhe was clearly committed to ensuring a future for his son, and Marcel did his part by performing well in school. Although his initial scholarship award was based primarily on financial need since Marcel did not sit for the competitive examination in 1904, his consistently high marks allowed him to retain his funding. Furthermore, in support of his scholarship applications in both 1904 and 1908, Marcel’s teachers attested that he behaved well and worked hard. He placed fourth in the 1908 scholarship competition in Saint-Louis and then continued to earn good grades at school in France. ³⁴ Following his father’s plan for his future, Marcel studied electricity, and in all likelihood, he returned to Senegal in October 1912 as his father requested, perhaps to take up work as an electrician. ³⁵ In the absence of documentation produced by Marcel himself, we can only conjecture about his feelings and motivations. Yet, his consistently good behavior and academic performance would seem at the very least to suggest that he respected his father’s emphasis on education.

The story of André Latrilhe and his son Marcel is remarkable in several regards. First, it provides a clear example of an interracial family in which the French father remained committed to and involved with his recognized métis children. Second, it offers hints at the emotional content of a father–son relationship that straddled the lines of race and status that colonial officials worked so hard to maintain. And finally, it demonstrates how down-on-their-luck fathers could use the state’s concern about the future of métis children to their advantage, tapping into the state’s resources on behalf of their children. Despite the state’s official position discouraging interracial unions, there is no doubt that individual officials found this case compelling. They liked and seemed to respect André Latrilhe, who had worked to maintain ties with French colonists and officials, and they encouraged their superiors to extend the patronage of the colonial state to his family. In this way, this case highlights some of the tensions between race, class, and colonial policy, and it also shows how different kinds of personal relationships—including those between father and son—could challenge the ideologies of the colonial state even as they were shaped by them.

Case 2: The Vallier Family

The case of Louis Etienne Vallier, a French merchant, and his métisse daughter, Madjighen N’Daw, also shows how colonial racism and interracial family relationships intersected. Despite some obvious differences—most notably regarding naming choices and gender—this case has much in common with that of André and Marcel Latrilhe: both of these interracial families lived in remote locations, both fathers were merchants, both children were recognized, and both applied for and received scholarships. And significantly, evidence suggests that, like André Latrilhe, Louis Etienne Vallier involved himself in his children’s lives, worked to give them a better future, and leaned on sympathetic colonial officials in times of need, all the while viewing himself as a servant of colonialism.

Louis Etienne Vallier had come to Senegal in 1882, at the age of twenty-four, to work on the Dakar-Saint-Louis railroad. At the completion of construction a few years later, he tried and ultimately failed to develop an agricultural business in Dagana. In 1896, he settled in Mbeuleukhé, a village near Louga, in Senegal’s Jolof region, where he became, according to the lieutenant governor, “the only European who does commerce.” Alongside his trading activities, Vallier continued to promote agricultural development, working with the Africans among whom he lived to more efficiently harvest gum Arabic and to conserve the shrubs on which it grew. As Vallier wrote in a 1911 letter, he had spent nearly thirty years in Senegal living and working “in the bush” and had never earned enough to return to France. Yet, despite his poverty and his decision to live far from most other Europeans, Vallier seems to have maintained ties with colonial society. The lieutenant governor of Senegal knew about his work, recommending in 1908 that he become a Chevalier in the Étoile Noire de Bénin honor society. And when Vallier applied for a scholarship for his daughter in 1911, the administrator of the Louga cercle wrote a strong letter of support, making the case that the colonial state owed him a debt of gratitude for his willingness to be a colonist and for his work in agriculture and pointing out that he was in poor health and advanced in age. ³⁶

Yet, as significant as these connections to other Frenchmen might have been, Vallier also cultivated strong relationships with Africans, most notably with a woman named Maty Niang. Louis Etienne Vallier and Maty Niang were married “according to Muslim rites,” and on March 19, 1907, their first child, daughter Madjighen N’Daw, was born. Vallier seems to have recognized his daughter immediately—though incorrectly—by reporting the birth to the province chief of Jolof, Bouna N’Diaye, who then exceeded the scope of his power in recording it. Nearly three years later, the court in Saint-Louis intervened to correct the error and to properly record Madjighen N’Daw’s birth and recognition in the official register in Louga. At that time, the court reported that both parents acknowledged Madjighen as their daughter and that the public also knew and accepted this relationship. As witnesses, the parents brought two women from Mbeuleukhé, Ata Niang and Aram Niang, who had attended to Madjighen’s birth. The couple went on to have several more children, including a daughter, Marie Louis Vallier, in July 1909 and two others by March 1913. ³⁷

It is of course striking that, in contrast to most recognized métis children, Madjighen carried African names: Madjighen, which loosely translates from Wolof as “woman,” and N’Daw, a common Wolof and Sereer surname. Her younger sister, born a little more than two years later, on the other hand, received French given and family names: Marie Louis Vallier. Although the archival record does not explain the naming choices made by Mr. Vallier, perhaps in conjunction with his wife, several plausible explanations come to mind. Mr. Vallier may have been unsure upon her birth about how involved he wanted to be in Madjighen’s life and may have therefore decided not to give her his name. Maybe the second child received the father’s family name because the couple’s relationship seemed more permanent by that time or because Mr. Vallier’s family had come to accept it. Or the couple may have sought to recognize both of their families and heritages in naming their children, giving Wolof names to the first child born in Senegal and French ones to the second. If this was the case, they likely gave Madjighen the names of a turando, or namesake, as a way of honoring a treasured friend or relative as so many Wolof people still do today. ³⁸

Whatever this choice signified, it did not predict a lack of commitment on Mr. Vallier’s part over the long term. To the contrary, several sources suggest that, like André Latrilhe, he was a devoted father. He remained involved in the lives of his métis children and sought to ensure that at least his eldest received a quality education, applying for funding to allow Madjighen to go to school in Saint-Louis, and later asking for an increase in her scholarship. To bolster his case, Mr. Vallier sought support from the teacher in the local regional school and from the administrator in Louga. The letters from the administrator offer an outsider’s assessment of Louis Vallier, and they were quite positive. In 1911, the administrator noted that Mr. Vallier worried about his children’s education and in 1913, he commented that the father “never ceases working” to provide for his four children “despite his advanced age” and failing eyesight. ³⁹ These sources suggest that Mr. Vallier felt a strong sense of duty toward his métis children, and they allow us to imagine a relationship characterized by an emotional bond.

This case also illustrates how interracial families existed uneasily alongside the racism of the colonial state, even as they sometimes benefited from the state’s concern about the future of métis children. Despite his conclusion that Vallier was worthy of interest, the administrator of Louga also made the case that the state had a moral obligation to protect Madjighen N’Daw, her sister, and others like them from the influences of African family and community, using metropolitan rhetoric of moral abandonment to capture colonial anxieties about maintaining racial order. In his 1911 letter, this official maintained that, “it would be humane to remove these children [Vallier’s daughters] from the native milieu in which they are growing up.” And the following year, as noted above, he mused that the 1913 budget could perhaps fund “the creation of an orphanage for morally abandoned assimilés, or for those whose parents cannot effectively take care of their children.” This orphanage would provide the material “conditions” and “sentiments” demanded by the “origin” of such children. ⁴⁰

Concerns about the impact of a “native milieu” followed Madjighen to the girls’ school in Saint-Louis, which she entered in April 1912 at the age of five. In a report on the girl’s progress written a few months later, Mme. Gracianet, the school’s director, did not blame Madjighen’s initial difficulties in adjusting on the newness of the school, on her age, on her arrival in the middle of a term, or on the fact that she was living with a host family in Saint-Louis but rather pointed to her upbringing. At first, Mme. Gracianet wrote, “Madjighen was so uncivilized (sauvage) that she cried and seemed terrified when the schoolmistress came near her.” To mitigate this, she had spent two weeks in a different class in which she had a friend. Finally, “little by little, she became tame and now she plays with all of the children in the preschool class.” ⁴¹ For the Louga administrator, the school director, and other like-minded colonial officials and employees, children like Madjighen N’Daw were inherently problematic, especially if left in a native milieu, because they blurred lines of race, culture, and status. The state could save these children, these officials and functionaries believed, by removing them and educating them. The influence, presence, and attention of an impoverished French father were simply not enough.

French fathers surely were aware of these views about their métis children, and they may have shared some of them. Yet the cases discussed above and others like them show that at least some French fathers really were committed to their interracial families and mixed children, even if they did not ignore race and even if they continued to contribute to the colonial system of which they were a part. Despite their meager financial resources, these fathers did not simply turn their children over to missionaries or to the state, and they did not abandon them. Rather, they remained involved, working to ensure that their children received an education and a path to employment, even if this meant sending their children away, so that they could attend a good school.

Discussion

The families of Madjighen N’Daw and Marcel Latrilhe had much in common with those of other new métis scholarship applicants in the early twentieth century. Like Louis Etienne Vallier and André Latrilhe, several other fathers had lived and worked in Senegal for long stretches of time—ranging from thirteen to thirty years. Several of them lived in remote areas, though one was based in Saint-Louis, one in Dakar, and another in Thiès. All but one had fathered multiple children in Senegal, usually with the same African woman, and each had recognized one or more of those children. Many, though certainly not all, of the children also received their father’s last name. Significantly, six of the fathers were merchants and two of them had been colonial soldiers prior to entering that profession, meaning that they belonged to the colony’s lower class. Anatole Riquetty, an employee of the colonial postal and telegraph service, had been born in Senegal to European parents. And although the eighth father, Charles Soyez, served as an officer (brigadier maréchal) in the colonial army prior to his 1901 death, he came from a very modest background in France as the son of a farmer. Class distinctions mattered to the European community in Senegal, despite the fact that it accounted for only a tiny percentage of the overall population in the early twentieth century—in 1914, there were 4,348 Europeans in a total population of over 1.26 million—and fathers’ class position would have shaped their interactions with the state and with other Europeans. All of the families, of course, claimed to be financially stretched, often as a result of a bad commercial investment of one kind or another, though at least two of them owned real property. ⁴² Analysis of these families as a group provides context for the cases discussed above, offers additional insight into families’ affective ties and economic strategies, and further demonstrates how colonial ideologies intersected with interracial family life.

On the one hand, scholarship applications and related documents portray these French men as dutiful fathers trying to do right by their children who were born under somewhat unusual circumstances. In their requests for scholarships for their métis children, fathers often made much of the burden they had already accepted in raising their children as a way of illustrating their commitment and honorable intentions, before making the case that they needed financial assistance to continue educating the children properly. For example, when he applied for a scholarship for his eldest daughter, Joseph-Augustin Pourpe was already paying for the education of all four of his children in France. Recent financial setbacks made it impossible for him to continue providing his daughter with the sort of education he thought appropriate. Charles Soyez noted his attempts to provide for his son despite limited means, contending that increasing costs and his “modest situation” no longer “permit me to raise him as I desire.” And finally, the tremendous effort made by André Latrilhe to obtain various scholarships for Marcel is a testament to the value he placed on his son’s schooling. ⁴³ These fathers and others seem to have felt a duty to these children, manifested first in their decision to care for rather than to abandon them and later in the drive to provide them with adequate education.

In at least a couple of cases, duty called upon the extended family. After his father’s death, for example, Jean-Pierre Desplats, born in February 1893 to Dominique Desplats and Ankoufalol (Anna) Diata, became the ward of his aunt, Mme. Marie Desplats. Marie Desplats sought to obtain funding that would allow her nephew to complete a secondary course of study first in Dakar and then in Saint-Louis, since these opportunities were not available where she lived. ⁴⁴ Similarly, and perhaps more strikingly, when Charles Soyez died just a few months after applying for a local scholarship for his son, Louis Soyez, his own father sought the state’s financial and logistical assistance in arranging Louis’s “repatriation” to France. After months of correspondence, eight-year-old Louis finally boarded a ship bound for Le Havre in May 1901, on his way to join his grandfather, Mr. Carolus Soyez, an illiterate farmer in the northern village of Aubers. ⁴⁵ The acceptance of these children by other family members may indicate that the fathers had communicated—either by example or in writing—the paternal duty they felt to their métis children. It could also suggest that members of their extended families valued kinship more than hierarchies of race or national origin.

Yet, such a sense of duty often seems to have taken some time to develop. While all eight fathers had recognized the children for whom they requested scholarships, along with their younger siblings, at least six of them waited various but fairly substantial lengths of time after the children’s birth before doing so. A. Rivière, for example, recognized his eldest daughter, Marguerite Léontine, when she was six months old. Significantly, the Act of Recognition recorded Marguerite’s last name as “Diallo,” an African name that presumably belonged to her mother, but it suggests that upon recognizing her, Mr. Rivière also gave his daughter his family name. Marguerite’s six younger siblings likewise carried the Rivière name. At the other end of the spectrum, Joseph-Augustin Pourpe recognized daughter Émilie-Zoé, the eldest of four children he had had with Fatou Bâ, when she was five years old, shortly before he sent her to Marseille to attend school and a few months before the birth of the fourth child. He likely did so to facilitate her schooling and interactions with family and friends in France, but he may also have been motivated by the long-term nature of his relationship with Fatou Bâ or by his feelings for his daughter. ⁴⁶ Colonial racism likely affected fathers’ decisions regarding recognition and family names. Racism probably influenced these fathers as they hesitated in recognizing their children, but it is also possible that the state’s heightened concern about abandoned métis encouraged them to publicly claim their children in naming them.

Colonial ideology shaped these relationships in other ways too. Indeed, in their letters, some of the fathers distanced themselves from their children, suggesting that distinctions in status, national origin, and race mattered. In an effort to convince the lieutenant governor to grant his request for a scholarship, for example, André Latrilhe wrote that he hoped the official would want to help “an old colonist who strongly desires that my children become good subjects.” ⁴⁷ In using the phrase “become good subjects (bons sujets),” Latrilhe likely intended to say that he wanted his children to reach their potential. Yet, given the colonial world in which he lived, it is difficult not to read this as a commentary on political status and state power. Recognized children inherited their father’s civil status, which meant that Latrilhe’s children were French citizens. Their mother, on the other hand, likely was not, since, with the exception of those born in the four communes, Africans in Senegal were colonial subjects. Latrilhe’s use of the word “subjects” thus raises questions about the role of race and status within his family and makes one wonder whether he saw his métis children as inherently different from or lesser than himself.

Latrilhe’s letter suggests that he, and perhaps other French fathers, recognized the complications that colonialism inserted into the personal, intimate, and emotional aspects of interracial family life. Indeed, connected to the colonial authorities by nationality, language, and race if not by class position and outlook, these French fathers could “speak” for their children in ways that black fathers could not and could thereby reinforce the dependent status of these children. Furthermore, this letter and others raise the question of whether such fathers viewed the role of head of an interracial family itself as part of the process of colonization. Although this is a compelling question, I have not found evidence that would allow me to address it in any depth. My evidence does, however, show that fathers made the case that private-sector work in commerce constituted service to the colony, and Anatole Riquetty certainly described his more than two decades of work for the postal and telegraph service in that light. It is perhaps not a leap too far to suggest that they may have also categorized their personal relationships in this way, at least when it seemed useful to do so. ⁴⁸ Regardless, although these French fathers were remarkable in their decisions to remain involved with their interracial families and in the emotional attachment to their children that at least sometimes developed, they did not break with the colonial system. Indeed, these Frenchmen neither rejected colonialism nor explicitly criticized colonial racism but instead used these institutions to benefit their families when the opportunity arose.

Conclusion

Thus, the new métis families discussed here simultaneously challenged and contributed to French colonialism in Senegal in the early twentieth century. In this period, the colonial state had become less tolerant of temporary unions between French men and African women and more concerned about the offspring these unions produced. By exhibiting commitment and connection, the interracial families discussed here continually called into question the racial lines that were so crucial to colonial rule. In recognizing their métis children and in remaining involved with their lives, these French fathers did not try to hide their transgression. On the contrary, in several cases, administrators knew enough of these families to be able to describe the fathers as committed to their children, and in all of them, the fathers shared details about their family lives as they applied for scholarships.

Yet, at the same time, these fathers did not reject or openly criticize colonialism but rather characterized themselves as quintessential colonialists, who had promoted French interests by settling in Senegal, engaging in trade, and serving the state in other ways. Furthermore, these working-class and petit bourgeois fathers were able to turn the state’s concerns about race to their advantage by tapping into its financial resources on behalf of their métis children. The strategies of these interracial families thus highlight some of the tensions between race, class, and colonial power structures, and they suggest that these tensions affected both state policy and personal relationships in Senegal in the early twentieth century.