The Right to My Daughter: African Women, French Men, and Custody of Métis Children in 20th-Century French Colonial Africa

This paper analyzes case studies of struggles between African women and European men for custody of multiracial children in 20th century colonial French Africa. Drawn from letters and colonial documents, the paper analyzes competing perceptions of African women’s motherhood, European men's fatherhood, and racial and gender tropes. This paper focuses on the little explored theme of emotion—the historical actors’ sentiments of vulnerability, intimacy, anger, betrayal, love— in scholarly analyses of sex and colonialism. The paper argues that analysis of the intersectional histories of race, sexuality, and colonialism, and the biological reproduction and parenting of children that such relationships produced, reveals the tenuousness of asymmetrical relations of power based on race and gender that were the very foundation of colonial rule.