Interior Motives: Spiritan Missionaries, Plantations, and Salvation in Senegal, 1845–72

A turning point in the history of the colony of Senegal occurred in the 1840s when the Spiritans, or Congregation of the Holy Spirit, began sending missionaries to areas beyond the French colonial centers. Up to this point, the French missionary presence had been restricted to staffing schools and hospitals in the coastal posts of Saint-Louis and Gorée. The Spiritan missions inaugurated a new form of relationship between missionaries and inhabitants who, while connected to the French by the regional economy, did not necessarily have the same daily contacts with them as did Africans living in the main French posts. In this paper, I look at the way Spiritan missionaries conceived of “civilization” over the first quarter century of their presence in Senegal. In French imperial historiography, the civilizing mission is often described as a secular ideology having its roots in the French Revolution of 1789 and as coming to maturity under the anticlerical Third Republic. However, during much of the nineteenth century, the task of “civilizing” in Senegal was given to missionaries.  Missionaries debated  whether contact with the French was a positive civilizing force or a corrupting one. Ultimately,  they settled on a program of agricultural settlements in uncolonized areas such as Dakar and Ngazobil. While the plantation experiment echoed projects the French had attempted a quarter century earlier, a new notion of a moral civilizing mission developed as missionaries attempted to reshape the interior of Africa through plantations and the interior of Africans through salvation. French military expansion in the following decades justified itself through the perceived failure of this “civilizing” attempt.