‘To Save Eurafrican Children’: Métis Children, African Mothers, and the Reluctant French Colonial Welfare State in post-World War II Senegal

From Enjeux postcoloniaux de l'enfance et de la jeunesse. Espace francophone 1945-1980

While youth played an important role in the construction of colonial empires, they are also a key issue in decolonization and its aftermath. In the second half of the 20th century, the emancipation processes of colonized peoples forcefully raised the social and political question of childhood and youth in colonial and postcolonial contexts, in countries that had become independent as well as among former colonizers. The interest of this book is to highlight the biopolitics specific to children and young people that emerged in a complex set of political and diplomatic, economic and social, demographic and populationist, philosophical and religious questions. Like Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, it is a question of questioning postcolonial cultures and the connections between decolonization and colonization, in particular the extensions of the latter into the former. During the decolonization of the French and Belgian empires and the construction of new states, children and young people were the subjects of policies desired or supported by biopowers and implemented by various protagonists: armies, associations, humanitarians, colonialists, new elites, activists, and ordinary citizens. Public archives reflecting the various policies implemented, as well as written and oral sources from associations and other organizations, make it possible to identify the roles of non-state actors. The more or less critical words of those who are the first people concerned by this history—that is, children and young people themselves—are also, of course, mobilized.