Education Through Labor: From the deuxième portion du contingent to the Youth Civic Service in West Africa (Senegal/Mali, 1920s-1960s)

International audienceUnder the French colonial regime, the “second portion” of the military was used as labour brigades, compelled to serve for two years in works of public nature. They were encamped in labor camp and were taught the value of work as well as discipline and basic rules of hygiene. After the independence of the francophone West African countries in 1960, postcolonial leaders in Senegal and Mali try to implement a civil service for the youth in order to offer them basic education. In reality, the civil service appears as a way to control and use the recruits for economic purposes echoing in some extent the former colonial “second portion du contingent.” More broadly, through the analysis of the legacies and continuities, I argue that the postcolonial elites perpetuate the “civilizing mission,” no more for the so-called mise en valeur of the colonies but for the development of the territory

The British attitude towards the Congo Question with particular reference to the work of E. D. Morel and the Congo Reform Association 1903-1913.

While still in Africa, and nearing the end of an epic expedition that had brought him across the heart of the African continent from Zanzibar to the Congo estuary on the Atlantic coast, Henry M. Stanley wrote the following letter to his co-sponsor, the Daily Telegraph, the letter appearing in that paper on 12 November, 1877. Stanley was indeed showing foresight, both commercial and political, for he was anticipating by only a few years the tremendous 'scramble' for Africa that was to engage the European Powers in the last two decades of the nineteenth century