"The Right to my Daughter": African Women, French Men, and Custody of Métis Children in Twentieth-Century French Colonial Africa – Rachel Jean-Baptiste

This article analyzes a case study of a struggle between an African woman from the Ivory Coast and a French man to gain custody of the woman’s multiracial child in 1930s French Africa. Drawn from letters and other communications that the woman and man sent to each other and to colonial officials, the article emphasizes the African woman’s perceptions of motherhood and parental rights and French colonial personnel and private citizens’ reactions to these claims. This article focuses on the little-explored theme of emotion—the historical actors’ sentiments of vulnerability, intimacy, anger, betrayal, love, and indignation—in scholarly analyses of sex and colonialism. The article argues that analysis of the intersectional histories of race, sexuality, and colonialism, and the biological reproduction and parenting of children that such relationships produced, reveals the tenuousness of asymmetrical relations of power based on race and gender that were the very foundation of colonial rule.