Assimilation (colonialism)
The attempt by France and Portugal to develop and privilege an elite willing to cooperate in their African colonial territories by dissolving traditional social ties and by Europeanization was described as the politics of assimilation . This special colonialist form of assimilation policy failed after the struggle for democratization as a result of the Second World War also gripped the African colonies.
France's colonial assimilation policy
detail of a racist caricature of the French policy of assimilation in Simplicissimus 1904
The idea of at least winning minorities for cooperation by integrating them into the colonial administrative apparatus corresponded to the self-image of large parts of the French nation that on the one hand France was capable of assimilating foreign peoples (as happened with Franks, Normans, Corsicans or Caribbean mulattos) , on the other hand, from the democratic-republican tradition, it is also obliged not only to "civilize", but also to integrate subjugated peoples under administrative law. It was first formulated after the Congo Conference by the lawyer Arthur Girault in his work Principes de Colonization et de Legislation Coloniale (1895). This included not only granting subjugated Africans certain civil rights, but also B. to oblige to military service. In connection with the recruitment of African soldiers, the residents of four Senegalese cities ( quatre communes ) were declared full citizens in 1916 . From these cities z. B. Blaise Diagne sent to the French National Assembly in Paris. The 1924 law on the indigénat (native statute ) distinguished between assimilated ( Assimilées ) and natives ( Indigènes ). Assimilated people could, for example, acquire real estate and were no longer subject to the duty of "public work" ordered by the authorities.
Residents who did not come from Senegal had to do military service and service in the colonial authorities in order to acquire civil rights, as well as a French school education, a fortune and a French (Christian) way of life, but even then did not become full citizens. But some even made careers in the colonial authorities, Félix Éboué, for example, became governor of Guadeloupe, Chad and all of French Equatorial Africa.
Since the assimilation policy depended on French schooling, which in turn was often based on Christian mission schools, it was less successful in predominantly Muslim North and West Africa than in equatorial and central Africa. After the Second World War, however, the previous colonial policy could no longer be maintained. With the citizenship rights granted to all inhabitants of the colonies by the French Union , the indigenous culture was abolished in 1946 and the concept of assimilation became obsolete.
Colonial Assimilation Policy of Portugal
The Portuguese assimilation policy was initially borrowed from the French model. As early as 1921 Portugal had enacted an indigenous statute (Estatuto do indígena). Only those who spoke and written the Portuguese language, adopted the Christian religion, had performed military service and could prove property or income, were exempt from forced labor as an assimilado and could be integrated into the lowest colonial authorities. The proportion of the Assimilados in the population remained minimal. In Angola, which had been under Portuguese colonial rule for the longest (in fact since the Christianization of the Kingdom of the Congo around 1500), the proportion was highest in 1950 at 0.77%.
After the failure of the French policy of assimilation, Portugal also abolished assimilado status in 1954, forced labor and in 1961 the indigenous statute, only to distinguish between "civilized" and "uncivilized". Only the Goa Catholics , Macanese and the descendants of Portuguese immigrants in Cape Verde received full civil rights. Instead of the principle of assimilation, Portugal now saw itself chosen to civilize Africans through the ideology of lusotropicalism .
While the French policy of assimilation was at least partially successful (some of the African elites remained pro-French even after the independence of the colonies), it even turned into the opposite in the Portuguese colonies. The few Assimilados in particular took the lead in the independence movements.
See also
literature
- Arthur Girault: Principes de colonization et de législation coloniale . Recueil Sirey. Paris 1895
- Heinrich Loth : History of Africa - From the Beginnings to the Present , Part 2 (Africa under imperialist colonial rule and the formation of the anti-colonial forces 1884–1945). Akademie-Verlag Berlin 1976
- Christian Mährdel: History of Africa - From the Beginnings to the Present , Part 3 (Africa from World War II to the collapse of the imperialist colonial system). Akademie-Verlag Berlin 1983
- Golo Mann (ed.): The Fischer-Lexikon foreign policy , pages 137-142 (colonial policy). Frankfurt / Main 1957/58
- Raymond F. Betts: Assimilation and association in French colonial theory, 1890-1914 . New York 1961
- Robert O. Collins: Historical problems of imperial Africa . Princeton 2007
- Françoise Vergès: Monsters and revolutionaries - colonial family romance and métissage . Durham 1999
Web links
- Trapped in the forecourt of hell . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 1971 ( online - 25 October 1971 ). (on the continuing ties of French-educated elites in Africa to France)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Mährdel, pages 150–154
- ^ Hermann Kinder, Werner Hilgemann : dtv-Atlas zur Weltgeschichte , Volume 2, Page 457. Munich 1996
- ↑ Märdel, page 130ff
- ↑ Loth, page 166f
- ↑ Mährdel, 253ff