Highlight the factors that contributed to the failure of the policy of Assimilation in the French West African Colonies.

Answer Details

Assimilation was the French colonial policy which aimed to turn Africans in the colonies into black Frenchmen by making them adopt French language, culture, law and citizenship, and by integrating the colonies with metropolitan France. In practice the policy largely failed, especially outside the Four Communes of Senegal. The factors responsible for its failure include the following:

1. Wide cultural differences: African social systems, languages, religions and customs were deeply rooted and very different from French culture. Africans were unwilling to abandon their own way of life, and complete cultural conversion proved impossible.
2. Racial prejudice of the French: Despite the theory of equality, many French settlers and officials regarded Africans as inferior and were unwilling to accept them as true equals or fellow citizens, which contradicted the very idea of assimilation.
3. The huge population involved: The African population was too large to be assimilated. It was practically and financially impossible to turn millions of Africans into educated French citizens.
4. Inadequate educational facilities: Assimilation depended on French education, but the schools provided were far too few to educate the mass of the people, so only a tiny minority could ever qualify as citizens.
5. Cost of the policy: Providing the schools, welfare and institutions needed to assimilate Africans on a large scale was too expensive for France to sustain.
6. Opposition from French commercial and settler interests: Merchants and settlers feared that assimilated Africans would compete with them and demand equal rights, so they resisted the extension of citizenship.
7. Stiff conditions for citizenship: The requirements for becoming a French citizen (fluency in French, monogamy, evidence of French culture and loyalty, and so on) were so stringent that very few Africans could satisfy them.
8. African resistance and nationalism: Africans increasingly rejected the denial of their identity and resented being asked to renounce their heritage, giving rise to opposition that made the policy unworkable.

Because of these difficulties, France gradually abandoned pure assimilation in favour of the modified policy of association.