Title: Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940
Abstract: Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940. By Elizabeth. A. Foster. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. ix, 263, maps, photographs, bibliography, index, notes, $60.00 cloth, $60.00 E-Book.Faith in Empire is part of the slowly growing scholarship that calls attention to core but neglected dimensions of the role of missionary congregations in colonial Senegal. Father Joseph Roger de Benoit has recently published the most detailed study on the history of the Catholic Church in this country. Following de Benoit, Foster deepens our knowledge of the relations between the Fathers of the Holy Spirit (Spiritans) and colonial officials in Senegal under the French Third Republic by weaving together archival documents, ecclesiastical correspondences, and journal articles.For Foster, a central power represented by colonial officials and many counter-powers whose representatives came from various backgrounds coexisted in Senegal. She argues that the realities on the African ground played a more crucial role than metropolitan values, culture, and beliefs in influencing the decision-making processes in the colonial state in French West Africa. One of the best examples Foster uses is the invention of laicite (secularism), which was contested, negotiated, and subsequently applied or rejected depending on local colonial realities.Foster also uses many case studies to demonstrate how the clash of worldview between Spiritans missionaries and colonial officials led to their irreconcilable differences. The former caricatured African customs as inferior, backward, and worthy of no respect, and perceived the evangelization of Africans as the stepping-stone for the success of the so-called civilizing mission. But for colonial officials, the ultimate goal of the civilizing mission was not the conversion of Africans, but rather the accumulation of wealth through the economic exploitation of Africans. These contradictions are well summed up by Father Jacquin, for whom the colonial administration is the problem, not the solution when it comes to civilizing Africans.Missionaries, eager to be viewed not as adversaries but as partners for colonial officials, took advantage of the outbreak of the Great War and of the erection of the Cathedrale du Souvenir Africain in 1936 to ameliorate their public image in France and in Senegal, through a display of their patriotism and loyalty to their motherland. But Foster contends that these calculated efforts did not allow them to win the hearts and minds of colonial officials who still perceived missionaries more as a curse than as a blessing for French imperial ambitions.Central in hindering the Spiritans' ability to expand their faith in Senegal was the rise of anticlerical sentiment symbolized by laws of laicite (1900-1910), which prevented them from getting the financial and human resources they needed to carry out their mission. …
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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