A groundbreaking study of the meaning of childhood in French colonial Senegal Negotiating Childhood explores how colonial child protection policies and African children's responses to them produced new ways of defining, measuring, documenting, and experiencing childhood in the French colony of Senegal from 1848 to 1940. In this groundbreaking book, Kelly M. Duke Bryant takes the scholarship in new directions, offering to a literature dominated by studies of British colonies in the twentieth century a study of childhood in a French colony from the immediate post-emancipation period through the 1930s. This focus allows her to complicate the generally accepted timeline of child protection in colonial Africa and question other assumptions about children's history on the continent. This deeply researched work uses a wide range of sources to examine children's experiences in spaces where they encountered French discipline and surveillance, such as wardship courts, public streets, schools, juvenile reformatories, and vaccine clinics. The book shows not only how these spaces re-ordered African childhood, but also how children themselves shaped and limited French efforts to impose order, especially when the state depended on African children's cooperation to make good on rhetoric about child "protection." It also charts the rise of documentation in children's lives, as colonial representatives recorded names, ages, and other details about the African children with whom they interacted. Tracing the "documented" child back to the early colonial period, Negotiating Childhood historicizes the emergence of identity documentation-so crucial to our contemporary world-and questions the naturalness of the very idea of the "child."
Kelly M. Duke Bryant is associate professor of history at Rowan University. She is author of Education as Politics: Colonial Schooling and Political Debate in Senegal, 1850s-1914, and her articles have appeared in such publications as Journal of African History, International Journal of African Historical Studies, and French Colonial History.
"Beautifully written, Negotiating Childhood draws upon thorough and creative archival research, and manages the difficult achievement of appealing equally to a range of scholarly audiences: historians of Africa, of French colonialism, and of childhood and youth."-Sarah Duff, author of Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhood, 1860-1895 and Childhood and Youth in African History "Negotiating Childhood makes a very significant contribution to the history of childhood and youth in Africa, as well as the history of colonialism and gender in Africa. Kelly Duke Bryant does a great job of connecting lived experience with documentation and policy by showing how children's actions and experiences shaped and reshaped documentation of their lives and representations of them as children and youth."-Corrie Decker, author of Mobilizing Zanzibari Women: The Struggle for Respectability and Self-Reliance in Colonial East Africa and The Idea of Development in Africa: A History
