Foe or Friend? Catholics and the Specter of Islam at the End of French Empire in West Africa

This paper examines the great anxieties of French Catholic missionaries as well as French and African lay Catholics about Islam as they contemplated the independence of the French West African colonies in the 1950s. Some worried that the end of French rule would result in a rapid spread of Islam, or the establishment of Islamic theocracies in some regions of West Africa, or that Islam would be a handmaiden to Communism in the newly emerging states. The place of Islam in Africa’s future, and what attitudes Catholics should adopt vis-à-vis Muslims were the subjects of heated dialogue that crossed the boundaries between metropole and colony within the French Empire in the 1950s. This debate built on older, competing strands of missionary thought from the colonial period that alternatively saw African Muslims as dreaded foes in a battle for souls, or as fellow people of faith who were more comprehensible than militantly secular French officials. In the course of the 1950s, Marcel Lefebvre, the French missionary Archbishop of Dakar and the Pope’s delegate to all of francophone Africa, frequently articulated a very negative view of Islam in the press, and also suggested that Islam would lead to the establishment of communism in Africa. Yet leftist Catholics in France and Africa, not to mention prominent Muslims, decried Lefebvre’s attitude and called for respectful dialogue between the faiths.