Social Change
French rule brought important changes in the structure of society through the dismantling of the indigenous political and administrative hierarchies. From the early 1900s efforts to suppress serfdom and the slave trade struck at the economic power of a leisured aristocracy. Many former slaves and serfs, however, had no claim, or only tenuous ones, to land or had to pay high rent and remained economically and psychologically dependent on their former masters; this was particularly true in the Fouta Djallon.
Trade, a principal purpose of the colony, created opportunities for new employment for individuals apart from the traditional traveling merchant. The poorly financed African was generally relegated, however, to a secondary role, providing domestic goods to European and Levantine companies and selling consumer items imported by such firms. The introduction of plantation production for export also created new occupations in the late 1930s. Urbanization, although very slow, brought the development of new service requirements and new jobs, as did the expansion of the colonial government. Before World War lithe wage economy grew only slowly, however, and the vast majority of the population, which had been recorded at somewhat over 2 million in a census made in the latter 1930s. continued to engage mainly in subsistence agriculture.
The French, in the field of culture even more than in that of the economy, brought changes—some deliberately, some indirectly. The French language, culture, and ideas and particularly the introduction of a Western educational system resulted in the emergence of a new elite group, the so-called évolués (individuals who had become as much French as they were African). By the 1920s and 1930s this group was largely self-sustaining and self-perpetuating. Children of the members were sent to schools operated for the French and emerged with an outlook vastly different from that of the great mass of Guineans.
The first school in Guinea was opened by the Holy Ghost Fathers at Boffa in 1878. In 1890 the school was moved to Conakry, where three years later the first girls' school was opened by the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny. The Holy Ghost Fathers opened five more schools during this period. By 1900 the missionary schools had a total enrollment of about 360 children.
Anticlerical pressures in France for the secularization of schools in the colonies resulted in the introduction of a state school system in French West Africa in 1903 and led in 1906 to a withdrawal of government subsidies to mission schools that halted their progress. The new system called for separate primary schools for Africans and for French and certain assimilated Africans and children of mixed parentage. The African system was to include rural village schools and regional schools, the latter located at district administrative centers.
In Guinea the development of African schools proceeded slowly; three village and twelve regional schools, plus two schools in Conakry, had been established by 1906. The total enrollment was fewer than 1,400. In 1918, after the end of World War I, the French government announced that education was the basis of its policy for Africans and essential to economic progress in the colonies. A broad development plan was laid out, but the cost of implementation was to be met by the colonies; and in Guinea, largely for reasons of expense, educational expansion continued at a slow pace. The worldwide depression of the 1930s also seriously affected expansion, and by 1938 only fifty-five primary schools for Africans (forty-three of them village schools) having an enrollment of under 7,700 students were operating. In addition one government higher primary school and one vocational school accommodated about 200 other African students. There were also three private mission schools having an enrollment of over 900.
The chief task of the village schools, which provided three to four years of education, was to spread a knowledge of spoken French and of personal hygiene practices. Reading and writing in French and some arithmetic were also taught. The regional schools offered five to eight years of more formal French, and introduction to practical agriculture, and some vocational training using facilities, if available, at nearby civil or military installations. A primary certificate could be acquired at the regional schools, although scholastically it was well below that offered by the French schools.
The academic content of the instruction, which was entirely in French, was of French origin and largely irrelevant to African life. In 1932 a Paris intercolonial conference pointed out that teachers recruited from France had no knowledge of Africa or Africans and that African teachers were trained exactly as those in France were. Moreover, African teachers often taught in rote manner metropolitan subject matter they had learned in order to pass teacher training examinations. Almost all textbooks used in African schools were from France or French Algeria.
Guinea's single African higher primary school and an African vocational school, the Georges Poiret School (Ecole Georges Poiret), opened in Conakry in the early 1930s offering two to four-year courses to those who had earned primary certificates. The former turned out junior administrators, the latter foremen or artisans. Both schools accepted only as many pupils as would be required to fill the administration's needs, as they existed solely for this purpose and the French avoided giving instruction to those who would not be able to use it. In 1933 a small agricultural school was opened at Tolo, near Namou, and offered adult classes in the vernacular in agriculture, crafts, and hygiene. This completed the French educational system in Guinea for the African population until after World War II.
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