Ideas - Négritude: The Birth of Black Humanism

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

Négritude was a Francophone movement to rethink what it meant to be Black and African. Scholar Merve Fejzula explores the dynamic debates happening in the early-to mid-20th century among Négritude thinkers, how they disseminated their ideas, and how all this changed what it meant to be part of a public. *This episode originally aired on March 8, 2023.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. In the early 20th century, Black intellectuals were imagining a post-colonial world.

Students from Africa and the Caribbean studying in European cities were thinking about what an African future could look like and giving shape to a political movement known as Negritude. You know, it's best to think about it as a kind of Black humanism, really. An incursion into that Black people have something distinctive to offer to humanist philosophy. This humanist philosophy fueled debates about education in French West Africa. What types of knowledge and learning would best serve African children in the future? Was it possible to prepare Africans for a time beyond colonialism, but also hold fast onto tradition and history? Transformations have been occurring since

enslavement, which fundamentally sort of changed the way that the continent looked. But the real sort of investments in developing and changing what intellectual and public culture looked like on the continent itself, is a sort of late 19th century development. And education is really central to this. Educators and politicians hashed out their opinions, helped by a growing number of magazines and newspapers. These newer forms of literacy were creating new kinds of audiences or publics built around the printed word.

Newspaper contributors from Sierra Leone to Cameroon obsessed over the problem of illiteracy and the challenge of education, revealing continuous anxieties about class, political status, and the future of West African publics. Merve Fezula is a historian of modern Africa at the University of Missouri. Along with our conversation, you'll hear excerpts of a lecture she gave recently at the University of Toronto.

We're calling this episode Negritude, the Birth of Black Humanism. Can you tell me what negritude is? The term came about initially among students in Paris in the 20s and 30s. They were encountering themselves from all different parts of the French imperial world. And for students from Africa and the Caribbean, they were publishing in early student magazines. So they were attending these kind of, they were one of the few that received these scholarships to not only get educations in their home territories, but to

travel to France to kind of get university training. And so they were really, this is really a cohort of maybe a dozen. It's an incredibly small group of people that are allowed to sort of travel to France in order to pursue these educations. And when they get there, you know, they're encountering people from across the French Empire for the first time. And it's this, they've written about it as this enormously sort of instructive experience in both empire and in race. think about their own understandings of race and self in different ways. And the term itself comes from a student periodical, The Black Student, it was called, in which it was a one issue periodical. So these were very, you know, they're scrapped for money. So they would sort of cyclostyle these, you know, staple them together, whatever it was, and then put them out. But that one issue became this sort of legendary issue for coining this term negritude, which was coined

by Aimé Césaire, the Martiniquan, the great Martiniquan intellectual and politician, and then later taken up. It was sort of, it wasn't something that was just immediately taken up by people. He used it. And then later on, it's when he publishes his great poem, he publishes his great poem, Cahiers d'un retour au pays natal, that it becomes sort of something that lots more, that exposes many more people to the terminology. But that's sort of where the origins of the word come from. But the philosophy itself was really, you know, it's best to think about it as a kind of black humanism, really, an incursion into that black people have something distinctive to offer to humanist philosophy. And as you say, it was a very small group, but obviously, it becomes a very influential

idea. Why is it that this philosophy caught people's imagination? I think sometimes intellectual historians have a tendency to assume that, you know, the important ideas that we've come to live with and know, just sort of, oh, they must have been important to begin with, right? And that actually doesn't really happen until after the Second World War. And one of the sort of central institutions, you know, to that transmission and that dissemination is Présence Africaine, which is a publishing house that still operates today. It was founded in 1947, simultaneously in both Paris and Dakar. And that became the sort of hub, it collected a lot of Black intellectuals in Paris and in Dakar and organized a lot of these seminars. So it was through the work of that publishing house, and then lots of anthologies begin to be published after the Second World War,

consecrating negritude, gathering all of these intellectuals in a single volume, for instance, of poetry and writing. So it's really through that work, and then eventually through the work of other academics and intellectuals based both outside of France, in the US, in Nigeria, which is what I write about especially, but across the Black world, that that's the reason this takes on the resonance that it does, because people that are invested in disseminating it really take up the task of doing that. Let's begin in the 19th century or early 20th century. There's a lot of churn and tension in West Africa in terms of power and intellectual development and education. Can you talk broadly about what's happening there, about the milieu? What were people talking about? And it's important really to remember too that we tend to think of colonialism as just this sort of endless process that stretches into time. But in previous centuries, this had looked different on the continent. And actual contact with Europeans was often limited to coastal areas. Of course, transformations had been occurring since enslavement, which were fundamentally sort of changed the way that the continent looked. But the real sort of investments in developing and changing what intellectual and public culture looked like on the continent itself is a sort of late 19th

century development. And education is really central to this. So very early on, mission schools are a key piece of it, who provide, you know, Western style educations, they're trying to impose these, like, if you're in a British contents, for instance, Victorian ideals of what that might look like. But on the continent itself, there had already been, obviously, these vibrant intellectual cultures, you know, manuscript cultures, even when it came to Islamic cultures, who had long had these traditions of manuscript exchange. And even outside of that, you had these really long held oral cultures that had pre-existed and continued alongside these more printed forms of publics that were key to kind of a real flourishing intellectual life that predated,

you know, European arrival and continued alongside it. What was the conversation like? Who was participating and what were they saying? So it depends on sort of the level that you're looking at thinking about publics, you know, if you think about them, because even today, they're quite segmented, right? So you have at the graduates of these mission schools, for instance, who are invested in developing sort of print publics and expanding European language literacy. You have that operating at one level. And newspapers, mission periodicals are some of the earliest places

where lots of these African intellectuals begin to write and publish. You have, outside of this though, those oral publics don't just disappear right they continue and those also start are serving multiple different functions depending on where you're situated kind of within a given society and this will obviously be enormously variable across the continent but if you take for instance the example of um you know yoruba court culture, which is a really vibrant oral culture. A lot of that is surrounded around the court. So it's a very courtly, you know, praise poems and things like this that are around a ruling class of some kind. But then you also have these popular forms of oral life that are super vibrant as well.

So it's just kind of interestingly dense and layered. And I think that's always true of publics, but that's what makes them such interesting things to look at and analyze. So what were the concerns of African intellectuals in that moment in time? Between the mid to late 19th century, for the people who are invested, right, who are being trained in these mission schools, and increasingly, sometimes in these colonial state schools, they are determined to expand literacy, right, because they see these Western style educations as key to an African future. So for instance, like lots of these early, so I do, I study both Anglophone and Francophone West Africa. And in both cases, you can find people who call themselves black Frenchmen

and black Englishmen, like on the continent who are convinced that education grants them full and complete access, right, to Western culture. And they are trying to combat these very racist stereotypes that there is no possibility of African or black, you know, or diasporic intellectuals to ever accede to like Western forms of knowledge. So they really aggressively pursue some of these forms of educational expansion, because they see it as key to disproving like a lot of these racist myths. Whereas and then you get sort of interesting segments though even amongst that kind of elite class too i'm thinking again about a nigerian example with herbert macaulay who's a great sort of nationalist pan-africanist figure in

both nigerian history and in african history but he is a lot more ambivalent about Western-style educations. He is much more in favor of what he, this is the terminology that he uses, but it's important to remember that it's a kind of Western imposition, a traditional education. And he thought that there was something being lost, right, in this pursuit of Western education. How did the work of public thinking at the time fall to people like school teachers and Francophone students specifically? So for instance, in one of the more elite institutions, the elite institution really of education in French West Africa at the time, that was the name of the entire sort of territorial scope, was the William Ponty School. And they wrote these plays, they were asked to write all sorts of essays. So they got this early training, and then immediately had, at the time, these forums were expanding in which they could, after graduation, write in. So this one very famous kind of Senegalese politician, Mama Dudia, he writes about graduating from the Ponti school, going, he's a trainee teacher, he's posted in Saint-Rémy, which is in a northern bit of Senegal. And he starts first a newsletter for his other

teachers. He's attempting to sort of organize them too, because at the time, African trained school teachers were receiving far less pay than European ones. And so he was attempting to raise the status of their degree so that they could have equivalent both training and equivalent access to pay and pensions from the French state. But he's doing this through newsletters, right? So he's doing this through forms of writing. newsletters, right? So he's doing this through forms of writing. And that becomes a jumping off point for him to start publishing editorials in newspapers at the time in Dakar and elsewhere. And he talks about it as his political formation, right? Like jumping from teaching, and then sort of gradually getting more and more invested in public writing. By the turn of the 20th century, education in French West Africa

was under intense pressure. African intellectuals like poet and cultural theorist Leopold Senghor were deep in conversation with each other about what kind of learning would be best for African children and youth. Colonial administrators were pushing for their own ideas about what was good for Africans. This came to a head beginning in the 20s as colonial administrators across West Africa, so in Portuguese colonies and British ones and in French colonies, began taking education away from mission schools and establishing state-run departments of education.

And in these secular institutions, there arose these debates over the indigenization, as they were calling it, of the curriculum. And so much of what was going on had to do with whether Africans could be taught in a classical manner along the lines of what was going on in imperial institutions, or whether you needed to introduce, and they often drew on interwar anthropology to do this, an adapted education. And what they meant by that was often manual labor, forms of craft making for women or domestic instruction for girls, and for boys, an integration of kind of farming labor, which they presumed all of them would resume labor on farms. And so they had to be trained in the proper techniques of farming.

And the debates that kind of ensued in that are really become so central that they're often, but they're interestingly overlooked when we tell these histories of negritude, basically. But what happened as the basically West African administrators were changing educational policies in order to close down some of those educational avenues, for instance, that had brought Leopold Senghor to study in Paris, where he got the highest degree that you could possibly get. He was the first African to do so, the agréation. But there's a debate that goes on about this that ends up being called cultural development

and the future of cultural development in West Africa. And this gets played out in the Dakar Chamber of Commerce in 1937, when both Leopold Senghor and Ousmane Saussure-Diop give lectures to an audience that was packed out. There were over a thousand people in attendance and their speeches were then reprinted in the West African press. And they were debated for decades, honestly decades. It's incredible to watch how long that debate endures. But Saussure, which was the surname that he went by, and Senghor, they've both been recipients of very rare scholarships to study in France, where they were both part of the interwar black Parisian circles that fostered

kind of negritude and other really interesting currents of black internationalism. Both took part in the foundation of a literary magazine where the word negritude was first coined by Aimé Césaire, l'étudiant noir, the black student. They had excelled academically and they were already published writers by 1937.

So their invitation from the Dakarois Cultural Association, the Foyer France-Sénégal, further verified their status as public intellectuals. Negritude wasn't limited to academic discussions. Black thinkers were working to understand the Black experience under colonialism. From the story of when Negritude first arises, it's in conjunction with a lot of different, you know, black internationalist, as they're called, philosophies, print cultures that were really arise at a moment where there is this need that black intellectuals feel for kind of global connection with each other, right, because of the way that global

empire and capital work, that coordinating their efforts in some way becomes really central to and finding, you know, a common way to articulate a diasporic experience, right? It becomes a central sort of project for in the 20th century. It was an ongoing project, obviously, to begin with, but the possibilities of coordination just intensify in the 20th century. Was there kind of an immediate critique of Negritude or did it take time? There was, yeah. And this is, I think sometimes people tend to attribute the critiques to some later period, but from the moment of its inception, people really accused Negritude of being sort of essentializing what we would use this term today, that's not necessarily the language that people would have used, but essentializing blackness, right? So Senghor had a very famous formulation that he delivered at a lecture hall

in Dakar in the 30s that was then reprinted endlessly, like in local newspapers and then circulated but this sort of infamous line became one of the central points of critique and he said emotion is African as reason is Hellenic so you can imagine how that would have generated like lots of outcry even at the time and later on but that continued to be a really strong point of contention for people, you know, for black intellectuals decades after that, and continually now, right? You still have groups of people who advocate for its revival, and then others who claim it's just, you know, it's sort of irredeemably essentialist. Going back to the beginning of this conversation, what's the line that you would draw between Negritude and the debates around education?

of people who became really iconic negritude writers. So Senghor, whose kind of infamous formulation I just mentioned a moment ago, he was trained as a teacher. You know, when he gave that speech in which he met, he sort of delivered that infamous line. He was giving it as having achieved one of the highest degrees ever awarded to a black person in France at the time,

the agréation. And so he was doing it sort of from a position of the summit of classical education, right? It was why it was so contested, in fact, that he could deliver such a statement because he was supposed to be in possession precisely of the knowledge, right, that enabled him to have a better overview of both, you know, supposed European and African cultures. But the way for so for him, for Alun Diop, who's the presence of the publisher, a co publisher with his wife, Christiane Andé Diop of Présence Africaine, they really get their starts as school teachers. So, so many, I mean, there's, there's actually an interesting anthology where Songo writes that

the earliest emergence, really the foundations of a francophone public is, quote, the literature of school teachers. So I kept noticing this and I was like, wow, this isn't, you know, although it's noted in a lot of contexts, I think really engaging by some scholars, like really engaging with what that meant, that so much of this was informed by experiences of education and then experience as teachers and as instructors is so central to thinking about for them. And then, you know, for us then in analyzing it, what it means to imagine the future of publics and try to organize something like a Negritude public, you know, where you see that happening. For them, it was crucial to expand education in order to accomplish this. Whether or not that's accurate, we can think about it.

In colonial settings, authenticity is obviously an important tool for power. Can you talk a bit about how Negritude upended authenticity? Yeah, yeah. So it's important, right, to think about the many valences that negritude is, the way it's kind of trying to do multiple things at once, right? So on the one hand, it's claiming for communities of Black people, right, that there is something that is recoverable about Blackness. There is something that Blackness is, right? And it's a kind of ontological experience of the world, right? It's a worldview of ontological experience of the world, right? It's a world

view of some kind. So they're offering this, right, in a kind of global black public sphere, so to speak, right? And a Pan-African one. And at the same time, it has this kind of metropolitan imperial valence where they want to lay claim to access to things, you know, from the state, right, to citizenship, to claim that it is possible to be both, you know, African and French, for instance, at the same time, right? Because at the time, in order to exceed to French citizenship, what you had to do was just demonstrate complete and full assimilation. So adapted educations, as many of Negritude intellectuals argued, was just actually ways of disenfranchising, you know, basically French

colonial subjects from accessing citizenship, because they still perceive this sort of fundamental incompatibility of Africanness, for instance, with Frenchness. So they're trying to do all of that simultaneously, right? And then at the level of a kind of cosmopolitan humanism, they're also arguing that a humanist project really ought to be a global one. And in order for that to be the case, we have to recognize how everyone situated from their specific context has something to contribute to this, you know, global concert of humanity. So for them, where they're relying, you know, occasionally on these more centralized versions, they still are attempting to sort of articulate a common human embeddedness, right? Which was honestly, I mean, for many Black intellectuals, up until the mid 20th century, one of the dominant ways of articulating, you know, humanist philosophy attracted Martin Luther King just like it did other people.

So it was the dominant paradigm for intellectuals globally. So it's no accident that Black intellectuals, too, would articulate ways to make their claim on it as well. Thank you. in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic.

I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app.

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas defined the word publics as arenas distinct from both the market and the state, where people gathered to exchange ideas or debate over shared concerns. At the beginning of the 20th century in French West Africa, a new kind of public took shape, one built around print. Instead of organizing through kinship or age, publics could now be made up of strangers, and newspapers began to radically change how people gathered. Merve Feizula is a historian of modern Africa at the University of Missouri.

Along with our conversation, you'll hear excerpts of a lecture she gave at the University of Toronto. Along with our conversation, you'll hear excerpts of a lecture she gave at the University of Toronto. We're calling this episode, Negritude, the Birth of Black Humanism. Without a continual and expanding stream of imperial language literate children, West Africans worried about their own reproduction and survival. Newspaper contributors from Sierra Leone to Cameroon, obsessed over the problem of illiteracy and the challenge of education, revealing continuous anxieties about class, political status, and the future of West African publics. In 1937, a Nigerian teacher in Lokoja expressed his anxieties in an article that was alarmingly titled now, Does a Nigerian Schoolboy

Think? While Francophone West African authors wrote in to voice their concerns and suggestions in three separate surveys of, quote, the black child in French West Africa between 1920 and 1950. It's really notable, in fact, that the origins of specialist periodicals for intellectuals in West Africa, in which these contributions appeared, were intended for instructors, the Boutin de l'enseignement de l'Afrique occidentale française, and the Nigerian teacher, which later was renamed Nigerian. In fact, you know indeed, if many African leaders at the time of independence had gotten their start as newspapermen, another significant subset had been trained as school teachers. Some of the founders of the iconic black publishing house and journal Présence Africaine that I write about quite a lot in the book even attended the same

school to learn how to be school teachers, the École William Ponty in Dakar. As part of efforts to standardize education and keep it out of the hands of mission schools like Ouzou Ak, the subsequent generation of state-educated West African school teachers in the early 20th century got their start in public spaces via debates over education. From Senegal to Nigeria, self-proclaimed black Englishmen or black Frenchmen, made use of print to attract readers and grow their numbers. Circulation numbers could then be displayed to colonial authorities as proof that one's ethnic community, political party, or social group enjoyed the widespread support of the public. The availability of newspapers, not just for reading, but as a disposable medium in art instruction,

is indicative of just how much the intellectual landscape changed in such a short time at the turn of the century. There were only four newspapers circulating in Nigeria at the start of the 20th century. By the 1920s, there were ten in the Lagos area alone. By 1959, there were almost as many newspapers as there is in the decade 60. Can you talk about the role of print, you know, newspapers and journals in the debates about education? Mamandou Dia and Songar actually team up and they start a newspaper that's called The Human Condition, which also says everything about wrapping up all of those three valences in one. Um, but so it's a, a paper based in, um, Dakar and it's meant to, it's, it's, they've formed a new political party. So it's partly a party organ.

But if you read kind of the issues of that, especially the early, the earliest issues of this newspaper, when it comes out in 1949, they are obsessed with pursuing an expansion of education. You know, this kind of adapted education style continues after the Second World War. And they are arguing really forcefully for this to be abolished. And that education just needs to be a kind of radically reimagined, its provision needs to be completely expanded. There's just editorial after editorial about this. And they'll reprint debates in French Parliament, right, in the French Senate of debates concerning this, you know, them on the floor making these interventions. So it is so crucial to the way that they imagine it. And newspapers are the forums in which they do it. But why print? Why was there, yeah, especially at a time when print literacy wasn't the norm?

Why was there, yeah, especially at a time when print literacy wasn't the norm? Well, first of all, I think it's important to expand our notions of what literacy means, especially when you go into contexts where European language literacy was not the norm, right? So for many people, even if they couldn't read newspapers, newspapers were performed and the news was communicated, right? So whatever print circulation and the and they did have enormous levels of print circulation i mean especially when you ramp up into the mid-20th century but um those circulation figures as much as they might be in the impressive thousands are not the full limit right of what literacy meant in west african contexts so these that news was being circulated and delivered in public forums.

Beyond the pages of a newspaper. Beyond the pages of newspapers, right? And it's still true today. I mean, there's this kind of wonderful book called Oxford Street Accra, where it speaks about the continued public performance of newspapers on public transportation, for instance, in Ghana, like of how news still gets read out. So it's a very different way of thinking about literacy and what print means, right? That

being able to read is still not a barrier to, you know, participating in a public. But even so, you know, even with that said, I do want to sort of strike a cautionary note that often, right, these elites who were fully, you know, European language literate and trained, they were deeply invested in print and its expansion in ways that we don't necessarily have to subscribe to, right, that this was the way to conduct intellectual life. And that it was the primary means of kind of transmitting knowledge, because concurrent with them concurrent with newspapers all forms of these oral cultures continued to thrive and other kinds

of manuscript cultures so it's just important to remember not always to take them at their word that newspapers were the only place right yeah and and that does bring us to the idea of publics at which you've mentioned a few times you, people were reading about these ideas and becoming publics or audiences for all of these ideas that were contained within. Was that a new phenomenon? Yeah, so publics themselves are thinking about groups of people kind of organized by some common, you know, sort of collectivity. Those had, again, had existed prior to the arrival of print publics and then continued concurrent with them. So you had village associations, right, town associations. There were things called age grades in West Africa and many parts of West Africa, not uniformly, but in many societies had them where cohorts of people who were born within the same period would come up through various rituals to achieve title in certain time. So you had these kinds of associations that existed

that collected people in some sort of way. Also, obviously, religious institutions did this too, churches, mosques, and other forms of indigenous religious traditions. But those were different from what came with print, because what print does is it kind of organizes collectivities very differently, right? In those examples that I've given, people know one another, right? In a village, you come from the same place, you're rooted in a similar context. But when you're addressing someone in print, you're sort of writing for an ether. I'm speaking to you now and just presuming that someone is listening, right?

So it's an audience of strangers. And that's a very radically different way of organizing what it means to be part of a public that you presume not to know personally the people that you're addressing. How does that change the conversation at that time? Yeah, yeah. So that becomes one of the, it's really when exactly that becomes apparent that things begin to change, right? So when, for instance, to return to the Yoruba example, you had this kind of courtly life, right, that organized itself around these kind of oral performances. And this is true in Europe as well, where you had these kind of courtly performances that were restricted to audiences

of people of the nobility. Once praise singers in this kind of new context realized that, well, you can actually earn a pretty good living by doing public performances and charging people to witness them, that changes the landscape of kind of what is possible in that given context, right? So now it becomes a much more popular genre. So an outside of this sort of really restricted group of people, and it becomes accessible to new groups of people, right? The restricted elite groups of people right exactly exactly so uh it not only though that kind of liberates these older genres from restricted circles but it generates a search for well what can we find we have a market now right that um what can we find to sort of fill this gap and to draw audiences in draw in these audiences of strangers and really that's where newspapers

come in and that's the kind of global story that it's really experimentation with the form that leads people to realize that it's possible to create new kinds of collectivities. And when you take people like Songho, for instance, you and Mamandudjian, who start their human condition newspaper, you begin to see how you what a useful tool this can be politically as well where you rally people around your party or you rally people around a cause um using this forum which can uh really draw together kind of audiences of people who you can't even imagine yet yeah so in southeastern nigeria from the 1920s to 40s in a region that was predominantly eboland the 1920s to 40s in a region that was predominantly Iboland, school boys at Uzuaquili Methodist College regularly defaced newspapers. That is, they painted on them with the encouragement of their teacher, Miriam Williams. Since the kind of foreign art supplies were in short supply

for Miriam Williams, she made these makeshift paintbrushes out of animal hair or bird feathers for these lessons. And though she admitted that her instructional resolve was to, quote, get them to copy Western art, she reported that all the children instead preferred to use sticks and always their pictures were line work, end quote. Unbeknownst to Williams, pictures were line work, end quote. Unbeknownst to Williams, her students were ignoring these lessons in favor of recreating both the tools and the motifs of Ibo Uli painting, which is an aesthetic repertoire of stylized linear motifs, typically practiced by women. The motifs can adorn homes, shrines, as well as bodies. The word uli refers to the berries of specific plants in Igbo land from which the dye is rendered, which is then painted onto

people or places using a stick whose end has been crushed to produce a fibrous effect. The motifs themselves are a mix of abstract and representational forms and as you can see from these images of Uli designs I'm pretty sure we can be fairly confident that the students were totally ignoring Miriam Williams's lesson to draw Uli on their newspapers. I have been so fascinated by this kind of snapshot this description that I found this summer in the archive a few months ago and unfortunately there aren't examples of their drawings that I can share with you. But even without knowing what these classroom sketches

might have looked like, this report offers us so much to think about. How do we interpret students' choices to execute Uli painting? What are we to make of the scene of young boys reproducing the designs of an art whose practitioners were predominantly women? What does it mean that before these students could even read newspapers, they were remixing them? Given the iconic nature of newspapers in Africa, which scholars have called, quote, infrastructures for public culture,

were these schoolchildren members of West African publics, even if they painted on newspapers instead of reading them. Conceptions of childhood had long existed in Africa before missionaries came along and introduced their own understandings of it. In that context, you know, rather than chronological age or physical development as a determinant of youth, in Africa, quote, coming of age was a process of navigating complex systems of obligations and privileges between elders and youth. Age was earned, it wasn't something that was biologically given. Beginning with the mid-19th century arrival of the printing press in Africa, however, a technology that accompanied the evangelizing side of the civilizing mission,

education and print were indelibly linked to children and publics. So as these broader conversations were happening in the early 20th century about colonial power and relationships and a possible post-colonial future, how was the place of children changing? that age really functioned in African societies is sort of important context here where age wasn't something that was kind of a demographic given as we tend to presume it is now it was something that was earned right you went through various rituals across your life various kind of forms of coming of age so those age grades for instance you would cohort, a kind of male cohort age grade, would take a specific title when they had passed a specific coming of age ritual. So it's a very different way of conceptualizing what it means to be educated too, right? Where education is organized really differently. right, where education is organized really differently. And then how this kind of gets transformed, as you can imagine, in an imperial context is that age is both much more closely

tied to a demographic age, but then also much more closely tied to this institution of the classroom that between certain ages, you ought not to be doing working on a farm or doing other things that you may have been doing, you should be in a classroom where you should be learning a specific set of, you know, reading, like, so, again, European language literacy, or other forms of instruction. And those can include, you know, those were gender divided in European context. So often, girls schools, right, the, there was a, the most elite girls training school in French West Africa in comparison to William Ponte, they did very little arithmetic. So a lot of it was focused on kind of housekeeping and sewing training. So they're also imposing

these specific, right. Understandings of, um, labor, right. What, what women's work looks like, labor, right? What women's work looks like, what they should aspire to, you know, what boys should do and what they should aspire to, etc. Yeah. You tell a story close to the beginning of the lecture about young schoolboys in a part of the early 20th century Nigeria in Iboland, I think I'm saying that correctly, painting traditional art on newspapers. Why is that image important? I've been so fascinated by this ever since I came across it in an archive, because it just kind of gathers everything in a single image. So first of all, I mean, to think about what they're doing on a newspaper, right?

The fact that this is available to them as a kind of disposable medium of art instruction is new. Newspapers are still very new, you know, up at the, by the point that they're drawing on them, there had been kind of earlier at the start of the 20th century, right at the turn of the century, maybe two or three newspapers. By the time they're just painting on them, there's 30 just in the Lagos area alone. So people perceive the possibilities of them immediately, right? And they begin to mushroom and expand. And so these young boys in Ibolan, they're encountering, they know what newspapers are before they can ever read them. And they're drawing on them, right? And they're being taught

to, I mean mean i also am fascinated by art training especially because we tend to think of it even today as a sort of disposable right piece of education that it's something that's nice but what can you really you know um it's never on the top of lists of people attempting to preserve right um certain kinds of subjects so it is interesting to even think about this being introduced into this adapted education context where education has been really limited to certain kinds of really rudimentary vocational training. And by sort of practicing drawing, they're being invited to do a skill that clashes with other lessons that are being reinforced in other courses. But at the same time, it's important to remember that the reason

that they're being taught to draw, many of those schoolboys in that same classroom in Uzwa Koli, they illustrate the first primers in indigenous languages. So their illustrations get employed, right? They're also being taught to draw because their drawing can be useful for expanding literacy. So it's this kind of interesting circle to think about. And they're doing it on newspapers that they can't read. Exactly. They're doing it on newspapers that they can't read. Yeah. For me, I think it's really important to take seriously the creative activity

of children like that. Is there any sense in which you think of this as an act of resistance? Yeah. So I think it can be, right? I don't want to be too definitive on it because I think the simplistic readings can go in both directions, right? Where we just celebrate every instance of this as some kind of demonstration of agency, right? Or you just reject it. Well, children are children and they just do these inexplicable things and it would be silly to make too much of them. So I think it's much more useful really to think about, just open up the possibilities that they open up, you know, that without being too definitive, that it still asks us to grapple with things we might not have considered, right? When it comes to histories of education, of African history, of global history,

of histories of publics. You talk about agency. We tend to think of children as passive, you know, in public life. How were children asserting their power at the time? Yeah, this is something that I've really learned from historians of childhood. And I think, especially from lots of the more recent literature on, you know, histories of African childhoods that are just amazing scholars. But that who have sort of recovered a sense of really children as actors, like as historical subjects who we need to understand in their own right

and not to presume that they're sort of these totally impressionable beings that just merely do kind of what they're told. And that instance in that classroom is certainly an act of some kind of agency, right? They're totally refusing the instruction of their teacher and are choosing to instead draw what they know, Igbo, these kind of linear motifs with which they're probably familiar. And you also have other instances of this, right, where children were running away from or running away to mission schools, right? You have instances, I mean, what we would probably consider children today, because some of this, and that's another reason why thinking about this in African context is delicate, right? issues of marriageable age, which become fiercely contentious for imperial administrators, are, you know, attempted to be policed quite heavily, especially, you know, at the start of the 20th century. And yet you find young people kind of trying to escape these strictures and

lying about their age in order to either escape a marriage or to marry. So, you know, you have lots of interesting evidence, you know, across the archive of the things that children, the choices that children have undertaken at great risk, right? Especially in imperial contexts. And we should take them, you know, in their own right and try and understand them. Why? I think that, so I'm an intellectual historian and thinking about children is new to me. And they're incredibly humbling to sort of study because they get you to really question a lot of the assumptions that you have elsewhere. Right. So or to think about the assumptions that you make and why the things that you might expect in certain circumstances as opposed to others, right? So we are so readily capable of thinking about the possibilities of agency when it comes to adults, but we don't think about the limitations on them as well, or as often, right? That we just imagine ourselves

as kind of moving through the world as these kind of perfectly agential beings and don't think about the kind of structural sociological limitations on our own decision-making all the time. But children confront you with that. And I think not, I don't think any more so than is true for adults, right? But they just make it more apparent to us the ways that we make assumptions about adult subjects. So that's just one, I think, among many reasons that they're so productive to think about and think with. The concept of childhood, lots of historians of childhood have shown this, that the kind of received notions that we have of it today are really the product of a long historical development,

but especially in the 19th century, where Victorian ideas about protecting children, having these places where they play and they don't work, lots of the labor regulations take a long time to come, come even in this country you know there's lots of histories of this that it's really not until very late in the 20th century that it becomes normative that children need to develop that they have to be cordoned off in these special institutions of social reproduction called classrooms in order to ensure that they don't advance to adulthood too quickly that they're gradually introduced to adulthood too quickly, that they're

gradually introduced to all sorts of things. Immersion in life is just not considered acceptable anymore. And that is something too that's being appropriated and adapted by West Africans in this context in different ways. You know, the letter that I quote from where Miriam Williams is describing that education, you know, what are they doing? What do they see when they're looking at a newspaper and they're drawing Uli on it? Why did they ignore her lesson? It, of course, generates these certain sets of absence and frustration. You know, I wish I had those drawings of those children to see what they looked like. But moments like that also just remind us of the way, I mean, again, for my wheelhouse intellectual history, children are so useful because they also upset your ideas about what it means to produce something to be an author of it

to me it's a kind of interesting crisis of imperial education right the fact that across portuguese french and british west africa everyone is moving to wrest control of mission schools and create these colonial departments of education because there is a fear about what education produces. And so they imagine that if they can shape the future generations of West Africans, then they can better control the direction of what West African public life will be like. Just as a final question, there's some universal resonance in the anxiety that Black intellectuals had about children's education back then. Maybe it's a fear about the future, you know, driven by change. Do you see that today? I mean, is that playing out today still? I mean, I think it's fascinating to think about the recent movements to decolonize education,

which people, I think, sometimes forget the most recent flourishing of it originated in Africa, right, on the continent. And that it's like, especially, you know, important to think through how those imperial legacies remain, right? Because that's what many of the demands of those students, whether they were based at the University of Cape Town, or, you know, the University of Ghana made, right, that so many of the curricula still continue to be shaped by these imperial metropoles, right? And just because colonial sort of holdings have diminished, that doesn't mean that this kind of presumption that imperial language doesn't circulate has diminished. So it's really an

ongoing struggle to think through what African educations can be like and what a truly decolonized education can be like. I think for Black intellectuals especially, you can see in the public arena how that continues to shape public debate and investments because you can still see disparities in educational outcomes for Black students and for students of color just globally. So, I mean, in canada right the indigenous experience which is also so particular and so ongoing and the way those debates continue

today are enormously instructive for really chastening us right and thinking about education simply as like a liberatory democratic project right so and that's and that's true um to you know zooming out just in education generally that The stakes are high for a reason. You're listening to Negritude, the birth of Black Humanism. Thanks to Merve Feizula, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Missouri. Ideas is a broadcast and a podcast. If you liked the episode you just heard, check out our podcast feed's vast archive,

where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. vast archive, where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. This episode was produced by Nahid Mustafa and Pauline Holdsworth. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Austin Pomeroy. Web producer, Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the Executive Producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.