Africa Will Accept Us If We Remain Faithful to Her: Métis Boys, Schooling, and Masculinity in Late Colonial, Dakar Senegal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the population of metis reached between 3,000-7,000 across Francophone West and West-Central Africa in the 1940s, some African intellectuals forwarded the idea of a centralized African identity based on blackness. Concurrently, French colonial society debated the contradictions of the metis problem, the conundrum of if mixed-race persons not legally recognized by their French fathers could be legally and culturally recognized as French based on the brownness of their skin. This paper analyzes the building and management of a live-in school for mixed-race boys operated by a mixed-race Senegalese man in the colonial capital city of Dakar from the 1940s-1960s. Rejecting the French missionary model of placing metis children in orphanages, Nicolas Rigonaux sought to cultivate metis boys into literate future professionals who would be versed in mores of French civilization, language, and culture, as well as maintaining links with their black mothers and the varied ethno-language communities from which they came. In emphasizing affective ties with natal African societies and cultural and intellectual ties with the French society, Rigonaux educational experiment was to create African men who were intimate with both sets of cultures. This paper analyzes the meaning of belonging in late colonial Francophone Africa through the intersections of masculinity and race.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".