A Sentimental Education

Many scholars have assessed the missionary curricula that strategically deployed the sentimental language of love and family, but this scholarship frequently lacks an assessment of how such ideologies and fantasies were received by local populations or how they influenced everyday behaviors. The Sacred Heart Fathers in western Cameroon encouraged their students to “become godfathers and godmothers of the African race,” and Spiritan missionaries demanded that catechists “assume the character of a family counselor.” These exhortations built around kin-centered language do not simply illustrate how foreign missionaries sought to instill Christian conceptions of familial love and unity, they also point to a specific form of persuasion that empowered male catechists, priests, pastors, and church elders to emerge as authorities who took responsibility for cultivating dutiful and moral behaviors among their coreligionists and intervened on their behalf when their souls were at risk. The development of a hegemonic masculine status, then, certainly emerged from religiously based gender ideologies, but also found enthusiastic supporters in secular, governmental colonial institutions and, most importantly, increasingly networked and organized African men, many of whom felt compelled to act shrewdly in the marital domain to counter the new forces constraining their advancement and autonomy.

Philip Nord and Judith Surkis persuasively argue that during the Third Republic, married love and family life moved the French social and political imagination, resulting in a social policy that anchored the conjugal family as the bedrock of the socio-economic order. This ideology complemented and reinforced foreign missionaries’ convictions regarding the necessity of a nuclear matrimonial regime in French Cameroon, and bolstered their initiatives in the face of the local colonial government's resistance. Missionary leaders in Cameroon termed their campaign to form individualized African households “le plan individuel,” which intended to demarcate the monogamous African family cell and encourage individualist self-determination by discouraging bridewealth exchange, distancing young women from their fathers’ and elders’ authority, and guarding young men from indebtedness and the labor demands of senior men. However, Africans who became familiarized with le plan individuel negotiated it to suit a collective (often lineage-based) purpose, while incorporating the belief that marriage was a freely chosen, sexually exclusive relationship, as well as a contract with God that guaranteed a man's right to govern his wife and children.