Comparing Colonial Education Discourses in the French and Portuguese African Empires: An Essay on Hybridization

For different reasons, the idealized discourses and the offi cial versions about colonial education in the African context clash with the local circumstances of government forcing the revision, sometimes the subversion, of principles and objectives defi ned by the metropolitan governments. Very often we realize that the same ‘author’ interprets the reality he observes according to the statute and the locale from where he speaks and acts, frequently making use of arguments of a total opposite signal.¹ Following what Michel Foucault called ‘the governmentalisation of the State’ to govern at a distance ² implies the invention and the construction of a vast set of technologies which link calculations and strategies developed in the political centres thousands of points distributed in the space.³ As such, the analysis of the discourse is linked to the superposition of discourses produced at the global level with the discourses produced at the local level, a process through which the relations of power–knowledge are developed in parallel to the technologies of government at a distance. These discontinuities in the scripts of educational governance (Meyer et al., 1997) permit us to understand the coexistence of cultural references and clear political positions, even opposite, in the lusophone (and francophone) space. They underline, on the other hand, the importance of the networks of global diffusion (Ramirez & Rubinson, 1979; Ramírez & Boli, 1987) and of a specifi c reception, of internationalization and of indigenization, of supranational integration and of intra-national diversifi cation (Schriewer, 1993). This sharing, as I did demonstrate elsewhere (Madeira, 2005 and 2006), results in totally different appropriations, sometimes even opposed, from presuppositions inscribed in the discourse about education, making clear how the discourse productions are used to legitimize the practices of inscription and domination destined to the populations and cultural contexts with characteristics very different among them.

This essay proposes to go beyond a ‘traditional’ vision of educational change, i.e. a concept based on the analysis of infl uences, forces or relations of cause—effect about the political aspect of education (Wolf, 1982; Murray & Postlethwaite, 1983; Wesseling, 1991). In contrast with the perspectives which consider the colonies as homogeneous cultural identities, as extensions of the metropolitan ideas and practices, I tend to emphasize the symbiotic relations which developed between the empires and the metropolis (Said, 1993; Cooper, 1994; Thomas, 1994). This position contradicts a representation of colonialism as a coherent and consistent process and defi nes the colonial scenario as a context of confl ict between colonizer and colonized, in which the ideas and practices about the processes associated with the civilization of Africans are open to negotiation and restructuring of a different kind (Kumar, 1991; Thomas, 1994; Bhabha, 1997; Cooper & Stoler, 1999). Therefore the approach that I will sketch here emphasizes the contradictory and confl icting aspects contained in the colonial discourse (Thomas, 1994; Stoler & Cooper, 1997). This implies in particular an understanding about the political and cultural relationship which was developed among the colonies and the metropolis and, within this perspective, exploits it from the confi gura-tion of the discourse fi eld about education considering that it limits a historical space in a set of other mechanisms that crossed the colonial space.