COLONIALISTS IMPOSED THEIR LANGUAGE TO OBTAIN SUBORDINATES WITH WHOM THEY COULD COMMUNICATE
The French invented a pidgin to exchange with their force of local soldiers.
Voyage to the French Sudan (Upper-Niger and the Ségou country) by Commander Joseph Galliéni, 1881.
Tirailleurs sénégalais, or "Senegalese riflemen" were African and Vietnamese colonial troops. The first were in Senegal, the oldest French colony. More here.
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"It's good"
"We must not spare Black blood to save some of that of the whites," wrote Commander-in-Chief Robert Nivelle in his diary. One-fourth of the Black troops were killed in the battle of Chemin des Dames in 2017
Survivors learned that whites were not invulnerable supermen, but suffered and were afraid as they were.
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Colonialists also needed white-collar workers which meant literacy in their conventional language. The French insisted with particular force, believing in the the universality of their culture and ignoring the weapon that a common language would bring.
- "Our ancestors the Gauls," Indochinese and African schoolchildren learned, in contrast to the British* who took distinct identities for granted.
*That did not keep them from also destroying local societies, as Nigeria's Chinua Achebe shows in Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease. (Published in 1958 and 1960, these novels are the beginning of African literature in English).
- The first presidents of Senegal and Ghana, Léopold Senghor and Kwame Nkrumah: Senghor, one of France's great poets, wears the uniform of the prestigious Académie française. Nkrumah, champion of Ghana's independence from Britain, wears the traditional draped cloth:
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Takam Tikou BnF (books for children)
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Personal recollection (of 1973)
On the Ivory Coast-Ghana border Ivoirian officials wore European suits adapted to the climate (trousers and jackets made of light, no-wrinkle fabric) and on the Ghanaian side, draped traditional cloths. The difference reveals the colonial past: The French had ruled the Ivory Coast and the British had ruled Ghana.
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Another aspect of French insistence on its culture: the Sorbonne
- By combining a prestigious diploma with free, excellent education, it attracted students from the colonies, the protectorates, Latin America and China, whom the police monitored:
A police record of politically active Asian and Latin-American students (in 1927), from the study of immigrant politicization in Paris before World War II by Michael Goebel: Anti-Imperialist Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third-World Nationalism, 2015, readable on the web. It inspired some of the ideas presented here.
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Those youths discovered a stratified, racist France, not "the country of the rights of Man" that they expected.
Almost always poor, they came together through mutual aid societies based on national or ethnic origin. Informal gatherings happened in the same way:
- North Africans met in cafés for their music, Asians in restaurants for their cuisine. The Vietnamese independence movement began in a restaurant that continued a few steps from the Sorbonne until 2018. It is known through Michael Goebels's study alone: There is not even a plaque.
Rue Cujas, with the Sorbonne's dome in the background.
- African students also met according to ethnicity, until a weekly appeared in the language that all could read (in 1935):
The Black Student, first issue, with articles by Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Félix Éboué, 1935
"The goal of 'The Black Student' was to end the tribalism and clannishness of the Latin Quarter. One stopped being a student from Martinique, Guyana, Africa or Madagascar and became a Black student, plain and simple."
- That journal led to the Negritude movement, which by resisting assimilation and emphasizing Blackness unified intellectuals of diverse origins. This evocation of the sugar fields by the Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam is an example of its reach.
The Jungle by Wilfredo Lam, 1943 / zoom
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The students, who were often menial workers, joined the French left to discuss, demonstrate, organize and strike,* activities impossible without a common language. *Author Michael Goebel devotes a full chapter to the connection between the foreigners and the left. 
Founders of the League against Imperialism and Oppression (in Brussels in 1927). Though under Moscow control its language was French.
The future Ho Chi Minh at the founding of the French Communist Party, 1920 / zoom |
- An example of that language's familiarity: As a young man in Paris Ho Chi Minh criticized the use of English in boxing (le round, le knock-out, le manager), and wrote a poem and a play in French.
-- Wikipedia
- How could, say, a Wolof-speaker from Senegal read Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism except in French?
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In the Middle Ages Latin let the Sorbonne form the clergy of a large part of Christendom, giving Europe a common philosophy and elites the means to communicate. In the 20th century French made the Latin Quarter cradle of Third World independence.
Familiarity with France's language and culture now helps immigrants adapt and reduces xenophobia.
Useful colonialism
And encourages the dynamism
they bring to the heartland.
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