Kelly M. Duke Bryant, "Negotiating Childhood: French Colonialism and African Children in Senegal, 1848-1940" (U Mass Press, 2026)

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Inezia Prosperity

Welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm Inezia Prosperity, the host of the channel. Today, we'll be talking with Kelly M. Duke Bryant about her new book, Negotiating French Colonialism and African children in Senegal, 1848-1940. It was just recently published by the University of Massachusetts Press. Kelly Duke Bryant is an associate professor student, soon to be full professor. Congratulations, Kelly. And chair of the history department at Rowan University. She also just began her term as the president of the French Colonial Historical Society. Kelly, welcome to the podcast.

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Thanks so much for having me. It's really great to be here.

Inezia Prosperity

Yeah, it's great to talk to you. We've known each other a very long time. We work in kind of similar and adjacent field, history of education. So I'm excited about this conversation. Why don't you start by having. By introducing yourself to us?

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Yeah. So I am an Africanist historian specializing in the history of Senegal during the colonial period. I focus mostly in my research on the mid 19th century to 1920s, 1930s, and this book, I took it all the way to 1940 and can talk a little bit about why I stopped there. Later on, I did my PhD at Johns Hopkins University, and before that I did a master's degree in African history at the University of Wisconsin. And I'm really excited to talk with the audience about my new book.

Inezia Prosperity

So this book, which is about childhood, the title, negotiating Childhood, it seems to me to emerge pretty organically from your first monograph, which was Education as Politics. So can you talk to me a little bit about the move from that first project to thinking through the topic for this one?

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Yeah, absolutely. In the first book, I was really interested in the history of colonial schooling and also, frankly, in the history of Koran schools and to a certain extent, traditional approaches to education in Senegal. But the book was, while education was a major focus, the book was about its relationship to political questions, political sort of contests, to social hierarchies, to gerontocracy and to challenges to gerontocracy, really, that were able to emerge out of the fact that young people were obtaining colonial educations that had currency that their elders didn't necessarily have. And so that that book traced colonial schooling and its development in Senegal and was really focused on the interactions of African people, both children and adults, with that institution. It ends with the election of Blaisdian in 1914, which I see as being linked to education in several different ways. He was, of course, himself a highly educated person. Increasing access to education was part of his political platform. And many of the young people who supported him were themselves kind of literate elites who worked for the colonial administration in one way or another. But what that book didn't really do is to unpack the history of childhood itself. So, of course, as I was doing the research for that, I was reading a lot of sources where children were present. But in the book itself, I didn't really engage with what their experiences were outside the classroom. I didn't really engage with how their experiences in the classroom changed the understanding of childhood in Senegal in that period. And I certainly didn't look at children who were not in schools at all. The book was really about those people who passed through the colonial schools or who were in Quran schools, but not children and childhood as a whole. And so I started to think about those questions, the questions of what it meant to be a child more generally, when I was doing the research for the first book. But it wasn't something that I really started to pursue at length until after that book was finished. And, you know, I became really interested in trying to understand what children who were not already elite or who were not going to become elite by virtue of the fact that they had attended French schools, I became really interested in their experiences as well, which I hadn't been able to capture in the first project.

Inezia Prosperity

It seems to me that there is such a kind of clear through line here in terms of thinking about. As you said, your first book was a lot about gerontocracy, but also this idea of generation and who's young and who's mature or who's young and who's adult. And it seems to me a very kind of natural way to move from those questions to the questions of who's a child. Right. This book is about historicizing that concept, that idea, and that it's obviously a historically contingent idea what the child means. And I think one of the main ideas or theses of the book or one of the things that I really took away is that the history of colonial schooling is also a history of the documentation of children, of the production of a documented child in a colonial regime.

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Yeah. And that is one of the major. One of the major arguments of the book, that not just colonial schooling, but also the. The kind of other sites of colonial intervention, or we could think of this as even sites of colonial surveillance and discipline. That is how when I first started thinking through the different chapters, the thematic chapters that I wanted to include in the book, I initially came from a place of thinking about this as a kind of A project on discipline and surveillance. In a way, it sort of still does that. But I also tried to broaden the scope a bit so that it's not just all kind of colonial repression and limitation and discipline all the time throughout the book, but all of the sites that. That the book examines, which include schools and includes courts, it includes public spaces, it includes medical. Medical encounters which are not exactly. Not necessarily happening in a clinical space, but often out in the open or even at schools themselves. And as the book moves through those spaces, it tries to show how children's experiences were shaped by the encounters that they had with various representatives at the colonial state in those spaces and at the same time, how those experiences were being documented by a colonial administration that was really concerned with recording everything that happened, everything that they. That they were involved in, and creating what I ultimately think of as. As the documented child that you referred to in your question.

New Books Network Host/Announcer

Right.

Inezia Prosperity

It's kind of shocking sometimes when you realize how little historians of education tend to have to say about the history of children. It's kind of one of those things that it's like these absurd, let's say, subfield distinctions. So you've kind of started as a historian of education, and then one chapter of this book is about the school. But as you mentioned, and as we'll discuss, you have this kind of broader sense of the site in which the child becomes part of this documentation practice. So I wanted to ask you about the chronology of the book. It's in the title. Starts in 1848, ends in 1940. 1848. You'll tell us the significance of that date. But I just want to say, before you start talking about it, how much I admire that your work really takes the 19th century seriously. And I think that not that many historians of Africa really do anymore. I think there's just a real tendency to focus on the 20th century. And the 19th century is a time where the kind of colonialism that we know of the 20th century isn't being practiced and is very tentative and is kind of, you know, that hasn't happened yet. Right. And I kind of think sometimes we understand the 19th century only as a function of prelude to the 20th. And your work, really, it doesn't fall into this trap. So I really appreciate reading

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

your earlier

Inezia Prosperity

focus for that reason. So tell us about 1848.

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Yeah. So in some ways, the dates are. Come out of the experience of colonialism. You know, I could make some arguments that the dates reflect African political changes, but that would be a bit of a stretch. I mean, really These are colonial dates. 1848, of course, was the date that France abolished slavery in its empire, which at that time included Gore and Saint, Saint Louis and Senegal, as well as a few other kind of places where they kind of had footholds along the river and along the coastline. But really it's limited to Goree and St. Louis in 1848, where this abolition decree or abolition law actually applies. 1848 is also a few years before the sort of infamous governorship of Louis V' Herbe begins. So he becomes governor of Senegal in 1854, and he was in many ways the architect of some of the initial periods of significant territorial expansion in Senegal. And then, as you say, I follow through throughout the 19th century, when as the territory the French controlled in Senegal grew, the administration also began to set up the infrastructures that would become the basis for the much more full fledged bureaucracy that existed by the later 1910s, 1920s, 1930s. So they're doing things like expanding schools. The first schools in Senegal date actually to before the period of this book, 1816 and 1826, but they're by the late 19th century, as the territory France controlled grew, trying to put schools in key locations, right. As a way of kind of, in many ways consolidating French influence in the area. They're also establishing other kinds of institutions that are aimed at children. So, for example, the guardianship system, called toutel in French, dates to 1849. And it was established precisely because the French were very concerned about what would become of children who had just been liberated from slavery by the 1848 law, but who didn't have parents, didn't have relatives to care for them, and were now no longer required to remain with their former enslavers. There was a concern that they would create instability, that they would refuse to work as they had before. And the guardianship system was established, you know, less than a year later as an effort to address and control that problem, that perceived problem. You know, also the other institutions, like the first reform institution for juvenile offenders were established in this late 19th century period. And a number of health interventions, including mass, early, early versions of mass campaigns for smallpox vaccinations. When I began the project, I was initially thinking I would stop around the same time that I stopped in my first book, so 1914, 1920, something like that. But as I continued to do my research, I found so much fascinating material related to child welfare reform, to school discipline, to the increasing success of smallpox vaccination, lots of things happening in the 20s and 30s as well. As an increasing kind of international focus after World War I on child welfare. So institutions like Save the Children date to that period. And there were a number of really important child welfare conventions, international conventions that were held in the 1930s, where representatives from the French. From the various French colonies, including Senegal, came to discuss what was happening in their respective zones of influence with regard to child protection and child welfare. So I felt that I really needed to carry it through those decades to be able to engage with some of that material. And then, you know, 1940 as the end point makes sense to me because it's the very early stages of World War II. And the war and of course, its aftermath brought a lot of really important changes that related to things like veterans and veterans benefits, social welfare and education investments following the war under the fetus program, as France tried to kind of reinvest in the colonies in an effort to hang on to them for as long as possible after World War II. And I didn't want these changes to become the focus of the book. And so for me, it just. It made sense to stop at 19:40 before they became a factor. And also acknowledging the fact that a lot of other people, as you. As you alluded to earlier, have studied that period pretty thoroughly. And there are a couple of really great young scholars working on the history of childhood in the 1930s to the 1960s right now. So we'll also be very excited to see what they're able to come up with to focus on that period.

Inezia Prosperity

So I want to take us back to the 19th century, because I find it really fascinating what you just shared about the tutel system, which we will talk about in a second from 1849, that children are there at the heart of the colonial enterprise from the beginning. They are not an afterthought that gets tacked on in the 20s and the 30s because of league of nations pressure. And you show us in this book that colonialism relies on children to some extent. I'm interested in kind of unpacking this idea because it's counterintuitive. Right. Children are supposed to be the most vulnerable, lack of agency, least aware of the changes around them, because they don't really have any historical memory. And yet they're kind of a linchpin of this. Of this system, you're arguing.

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Yeah, I am. And I think that was something that started actually to become clear to me doing the research for the first book, because even looking primarily at archival documents related to the history of education, as I did at that time, there is this sort of Subtext in the argument that certain officials were making for increasing the budget for education or for expanding access to education, or for offering a certain kind of curriculum, right? The subtext is that these children are key to the future stability of a colony. They're not only in some cases the future workers, but they're also the future loyal colonial servant. Right? If we can get it right, if we can convince them through the kind of, through a particular approach to education, they'll be loyal to the colonial state forever. Like that's the kind of mentality that a lot of these officials who were involved with education in the 19th century kind of kept coming back to. And you see this very similar rhetoric being used in other domains as well. And I think it's key not only to this idea that the children were the future of the colony, that, I mean, that makes sense, right? I mean, most societies, when they, when it comes down to it, they're investing in children because children carry that society forward in one way or another. So that is sort of seems logical and not all that surprising. But what I think is actually more surprising about that is that that gives children a certain amount of power. Right? If the state's stability is dependent upon a child and their future adult self behaving in a certain way, believing in a certain way, well, then by simply not doing the anticipated or hoped for thing, a child is placing, knowingly or not, some kind of limit on what the colonial state is able to achieve. And so for that, for me, that realization was really an important one. I think I came to that realization partly on my own, partly by virtue of, of being a mother myself and realizing how much power my own children sometimes have over me. Anybody who has had a child and has had a, a crying baby knows that, you know, that baby is getting attention as soon as possible. You don't leave a baby to cry forever. You don't leave a, a hungry child alone to fend for themselves. They are someone who needs attention. And even though as you, as you start, started as you mentioned in your question, Elisa, even though we think of children as incredibly vulnerable and dependent, and they are right in many ways, they are. They also hold a really important power over those who are closest to them, their immediate family, their immediate community. But then also as on a symbolic level, they hold power with this over the state, because a state, a modern state, that is a humane and forward thinking state, which is precisely what the French empire wanted, what French officials wanted their empire to be perceived as at the turn of the 20th century, late 19th early 20th century. There's a lot of discourse around that time about being an empire that emphasizes humanity. Right. In order to be perceived in that way, you have to provide for the children and you have to show the world, show the public in France that that is of paramount importance to the colonial enterprise, which again, kind of feeds back into the notion that children had a certain amount of. Of power within that by complying or not, right. They're indexing the success or limitations of the state.

Inezia Prosperity

So this idea that the state has to show how humanitarian it is or how enlightened it is leads to the fact that they have to document what they do and document the children. But I wanted to ask you, before we start thinking about how this changes over the course of the more or less century that you look at, you give us a sense of what or of how African communities in diverse ways, might have understood children and childhood. And from there, we can understand how that changes throughout this period. But how would you characterize some of the notions of the child and of childhood that are present in Senegal in the 19th century or the middle of the 19th century?

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Well, I want to begin by saying that those notions that I'll describe in just a moment are present in the 19th century, but that they don't go away even as things begin to change as a result of various kinds of colonial interventions and this process of documentation that we'll talk a bit more about in a few minutes. So I think one of the things that's important to keep in mind is that existing, as far as I can tell from the sources, existing notions and understandings of childhood continue to exist alongside newer understandings of childhood that were defined by various kinds of. Well, that were defined in conversation with the various kinds of French interventions. So that being said, the understandings of childhood, of course, varied in different societies, but at a kind of. To paint a broad brush. To paint with a broad brush. Here, children were people who were defined by their capabilities, in many cases by their physical growth and development, sure, but also by their social relationships with other people, by their ability to carry out specific kinds of tasks within the society. And once they were able to carry out kind of basic level tasks like maybe helping around the house or running short distance errands for the family, then they would be given more complicated tasks. And so there's a way in which the progression through a child's, through the various stages of life that a young child would would need to progress through is defined partly by, as I said, by their physical size, but more importantly by what they're able to do. In addition to that, childhood was defined by very important rituals. So I don't really discuss very young childhood in the book. I'm not. This book is, is not really concerned with babies and you know, the categories that in that we would refer to in English as babies and toddlers. Right. It's more concerned with children who are a little more able to act on their own behalf in somewhat more complicated ways. But there are really important rituals around birth, naming ceremonies in, in many of the societies that I'm interested in here. And then of course, circumcision and other rites of passage that mark a transition from young childhood to older childhood or the sort of in between status of where you're sort of a man, but you're not a full man because you're not yet married. Right. So then marriage becomes another key endpoint. And then for girls and women, bearing a child of your own is a key endpoint. So there are these sort of important social markers that index a person's change in status in that way.

Inezia Prosperity

Right. And just to state the obvious, that's of course very different from a vision of childhood that's defined by age. Right. Because of course children walk, speak, process the world at different paces in different ways. Puberty arrives in different moments. And so that's a much more socially constructed or socially reliant and fluid understanding of the progression of life, rather than one that says a 6 year old needs to be at school or a 12 year old needs to be able to read this passage or these kinds of very other understandings of childhood that now are so mundane for us. So before we kind of dive into some of the chapters here, I wanted to ask you another few questions. One about how looking at the French Empire and this history of Senegal over this longer period is giving us a different perspective on the history of childhood, since so much of the literature on the history of childhood is focused on the British Empire and in societies that engaged with the British colonial regime.

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Yeah. So I think there are a few important contributions that come out of this focus on a case study that was part of the French Empire as opposed to the British Empire, and that is that in addition to that geographic difference, most of the studies on the British Empire also focus on the 20th century. Right. So there's also a difference in my longer time frame, which I think allows you to see more of the changes that occur over this longer period of time. In particular, with regard to those changes in chronological age, measuring childhood vis a vis chronological age that you were Just alluding to Elisa, because Those by the 1920s and 30s, it's easier to assume that chronological age already exists in people's minds. I think that's a mistaken assumption, at least to assume that everyone has accepted chronological age by that time. But I do think it's easier to. To just kind of think of it as something that's there and that is natural. Right. As opposed to really historicizing the emergence of chronological age as a central aspect to defining what childhood means and in particular, when childhood ends. So there's that difference. I think also the literature on childhood in the British colonies in Africa tend to focus fairly. They tend to focus on juvenile delinquency, on scouts, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Girl Guides, those kinds of questions, and on schools. And I sit in kind of to a lesser extent on schools, because also, as you already mentioned, those of us who focus on the history of education tend not often not to really unpack the history of childhood as well. And so I think the Senegal case study is important because it brings

New Books Network Host/Announcer

a

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

longer focus, a wider range of topics and kind of spaces where childhood is being thought through and renegotiated and redefined, but also a different set of metropolitan interests and priorities, including things like France's emphasis on the civilizing mission, which, you know, of course, in the British colonial context, there were efforts to kind of inculcate certain aspects of British culture within African societies. But there's a whole sort of doctrine of the civilizing mission in the French case that is, I think, was much more central to what colonial officials and colonialists more generally believe to be their purpose. The humanitarian rhetoric that I alluded to earlier was really central here as well, from a pretty early date in a way that I don't know that it was. In the British case, of course, the civilizing mission led to a different kind of emphasis in schools where French education, French language, certain kinds of cultural values became really crucial. And I also think that some of the literature on British colonial Africa suggests that there was very early on this notion of a universal concept of a child that came into play in British sort of social welfare or in social work circles in the colonies and that sort of thing. And. And I actually think in the French, the case of Senegal at least, but probably in. In French, The French colonies in Africa more generally, this idea doesn't really make sense. I think that there was enough of an effort in French discourse to really actually draw a strong distinction between what a European child was like versus a Metis child versus children who belong to different African ethnolinguistic groups, or what the French would have called African races. Right. They weren't seen as all the same. They weren't seen as reaching milestones at anywhere close to the same time, for example. And so I think this notion of kind of universal childhood concept being applied in the British colonies, it may work for those places, but I don't think it works for Senegal or for French colonies more generally.

Inezia Prosperity

This is an unexpected thing to say because as we know, the French love universalism, but they also have hierarchy. So, yes, that does make sense. Yeah.

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

I'm just going to interject one quick example to kind of illustrate this. So there's a document that I remember. I think it's from. I actually don't remember the date, maybe the 1930s, where they're discussing reforms to children's to. To a home to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents. And in the document where they're discussing what to do, they say something like, well, we should have a separate place for Metis children to go to because they can handle the African climate, but they shouldn't be in the same institution as black children. We should have another institution for. For black. Black juvenile offenders. And then all of the metropolitan French juvenile offenders should be sent to reform homes in France because they should not. They can't handle the climate. They're so different. They're. Even their biology is so different. They believe that they had to be sent back to the Metropole. So it's. It's that kind of stuff. And you encounter that again and again and again in different ways.

Inezia Prosperity

Oh, the knots that these racist ideas twist people into.

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Exactly.

Inezia Prosperity

So then I wanted to also invite you to talk to us a little bit about your sources, because, of course, trying to find sources for African children in the 19th and early 20th century is a very difficult proposition, I think. So how did you try to approach creating a primary source base for this work?

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

I looked for children any place I thought I might possibly have the smallest chance of finding them. So that meant that I looked in all kinds of archival records in series that had labels that didn't seem on the surface to necessarily have anything to do with children at all. For example, I looked at some documents in the series in the archive in Dakar on agriculture. And the reason I did that is because I knew that some of the reform homes that children were sent to were actually agricultural research stations. And I thought, well, maybe there will be some report somewhere that'll have something about these kids. Right. And I didn't find a lot, but I did find A few things in the agriculture series. Similarly, I started to look and, you know, obviously looked at the archive archival record on education, anything that. That said anything about children or minors or apprentice apprenticeship or anything like that, but I also started to. To delve into records on police and policing because I figured that that would be an interesting way. I had already read some of the court cases that were the reason that children ended up in juvenile penitentiaries or juvenile reform homes. But I thought that looking at the police records might give me a better sense on what they actually were perceived to have done in public space or in a private home or wherever they were found having supposedly done something illegal. And so I began looking at the police records and was. I was blown away with the kinds of material, the richness of the material that I was able to find. Not only did the police records give me a sense of how children were being surveilled and sort of almost controlled or attempt. The police were attempting to control them in public spaces, but it also shed light on a lot of practices around hygiene. And I was able to draw on this material around hygiene regulations, sanitation, hygiene, dealing with household waste, which of course, was often a task that fell to young people in a household. I was able to kind of delve into that in a way that I completely did not expect. I had. No, I did not anticipate that a good portion of my chapter. I'm forgetting the chapter now, chapter on public space, which I think is chapter four. I had no idea that I would be able to write that piece of that chapter on sanitation because I wouldn't have dreamed of those sources. So that's one approach. I just read almost anything that I could imagine might possibly have something to say about children and was often surprised by what I found. I also, of course, looked in published sources as well, so things like missionary accounts, travel accounts, traditional places that we look. I think the main way that I branched out, the main kind of type of documents, published sources that I. That I branched out into for this book was medical reports, medical reports of. Related to smallpox in particular, but also other things as well.

Inezia Prosperity

Well, then let's. Let's talk about smallpox. This is chapter five of the book. And I think this is a great example of showing how your sense of the history of childhood is capacious. So you have this chapter about inoculations and vaccination campaigns, and smallpox, for reasons which you'll explain to us, is particularly linked to the vaccination of children rather than adults.

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Yeah. So smallpox was so important, I think in understanding early French interventions into children's health, because it was a disease that primarily affected children, and this was the case in Europe. And by the time that this book begins, 1848, the smallpox vaccine had been around for several decades and had been pretty widely and effectively used to control the disease in France, although there was still vaccine hesitancy and resistance in France that overlapped with the vaccination campaigns in Senegal as well. But it was known to be a disease that affected children more intensively than everyone else, largely because smallpox is epidemic. So it emerges and then it goes away for a period of time and then comes back. And when it would come back, anybody who had had the disease previously, who had survived it was immune. So it really would only affect the people who had been born since the last smallpox epidemic. And smallpox is also a really interesting case because it had been present in West Africa for a very long time, and Africans were used to dealing with it. And they had their own techniques in many societies, including some of the societies in Senegal, for protecting people against future infection. They used a process called virilization, where they would take smallpox matter from a pustule of someone who was currently infected with the disease, and they would put it into an incision in another person to provoke a sm, like an immune response. And if it worked, which it would pro, it would provide long term immunity to the disease. It could, of course, also seed an outbreak of smallpox and could help to kind of accelerate an epidemic that was already in the works. So French colonialists were very against viralization. But it's an interesting case because there is an existing practice where children and young people underwent what was in many ways a sort of surgical procedure of a sort in their own society. And then French, French medical doctors came in with a different approach that was similar in some ways, but different enough that people didn't quite know what to make of it. And they tried to replace the existing approach with their own and were targeting children as they did. So I want to add one thing, one more thing about this, which is that this chapter was particularly important to me because to include in the book and to be able to say something about children's bodies and the way in which French colonial initiatives affected children's bodies and then ultimately the understanding of childhood, because this was a way to say something about children who were not elites, right? These were not students. They were not. And they also were not children who had caught the attention of the colonial state because they had rebelled or broken a law or gotten into trouble. And those tend to be the two categories of children who are easiest to find in the archive, the ones who are in trouble with, with the state for whatever reason, or the ones who end up in the official schools. And the Smallpox chapter, while it doesn't deal with young children by name, I don't have. I'm not able to get that granular in, in telling their experiences. So it's more of a sort of traditional social history approach. It does allow me to say some things about ordinary children's experiences and encounters with the state, which I think are really important.

Inezia Prosperity

So connect then the Smallpox case to the state's ideas about childhood and how they were related to or communicated to children, who, as you say, are kind of exceptional archival, because they don't show up either in the troublemaker category or the proto elite category.

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Yeah, so I think that there were. That this was important to understanding changing ideas about children for a couple of reasons. First, I think it's the first large scale way in which French colonial doctors were involved in a process that we might think of as medicalizing childhood. Right. There had not yet been a sustained effort to, for example, train midwives and birth attendants in biomedical approaches to childbirth. So even babies wouldn't have yet encountered very much in the way of French medical interventions or protocols. If you happen to be in a city and have parents who were interested in seeking care at a colonial hospital, that was possible to do in this period, but very few Africans did. And the hospitals were really mostly meant for French, for the military and then also for French residents. And so this, I think, is again crucial because it's this first moment where there's mass. There's an approach. Sorry, there's an effort at a mass medical intervention and that intervention targets children. So it sends the message that people's bodies should be subjected to French medical interventions and that children are key to that process in a way that hadn't been done or said before. It also leads to a really interesting process of documentation where children are getting medical certificates or vaccination certificates or their families are receiving those to serve as proof that they have undergone the vaccination procedure. I don't know that the record is not clear on how many of these were actually distributed, but they're, they're discussed in multiple different points in time. And in some cases around the turn of the 20th century, at least, children who were trying to gain access to certain French schools actually had to show the document that, that had proof that they had been vaccinated against smallpox. So there were, there's references to Them being given out and then also references to them being used, which I think also suggests that people would have had reason over time to accept not only the vaccination experience itself, but also the idea that that should be documented and that that document was important to a child's existence and ability to access resources later on.

Inezia Prosperity

Yeah, that's one of the most powerful arguments of the book, which I think really comes through in the final chapter especially, which is that there's all these incentives really for Africans in the colonial system to adopt colonial ideas of childhood, or certainly maybe not to adopt fully, but to engage with. So to have a document, to have some certification of your age opens and closes doors related to, as you say, like scholarships, whether they're too old or too young. From the perspective of the French or if, or for courts, whether they're tried as minors or as adults is a huge, a huge distinction. And so there's really a kind of incentive structure to play the rules of the game of chronological age.

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Yeah. Or at least, yes. To understand them and then to either play by them in a way that's advantageous to you or to knowingly break those rules. And I, in that last chapter that you referenced, which is focused on chronological age and documentation of it, I have examples of children and their families engaging in both practices. Right. I think one of my favorite kind of short, short case studies in the whole book is an example of a 20 year old young person who wanted to get a scholarship to go to a particular French school, but he was told that he was too old. So he and his father went to, he had, he actually had a birth certificate. He had been recorded in the, the birth registry at the time of his birth. And that was the reason that he was known to be too old to receive the scholarship. So he and his father went before the Muslim court and got the cuddy to sign off on a, an earlier, well, an early, younger age. Right. A later birth date, younger age to say, to attest that he was actually only 16. They called witnesses. The witnesses attested to having seen the birth at a different date than what the attested said. And then they present this alternative birth certificate issued by an Islamic court to say, no, actually this child is actually, is really a child, is really only 16. Meets the definition for, meets the standards for the scholarship and therefore should be considered. The French didn't buy it, but the fact that they tried I think is really indicative of just how aware people had become of the importance of chronological age within the French system and their understanding of how they could potentially use that in their favor.

Inezia Prosperity

It really made me think of. So, you know, my work is later. But when I asked people about going to school universally in the 40s and 50s, this would have been universally, everyone took their hand and put it around their head to touch their ear, because that was the motion that if you weren't able to complete that you were too young to go to school. And we talked about it. There's also this story about counting teeth to establish the age of children to go to school. So these are, I think, just things that don't show up maybe in the historical record, but are so essential and important to how people experience and understand their life story. In these years in this period.

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

It's also important though, because those examples that you cited, right, they were used, I'm sure, to then go and record a numerical age and document somewhere, right? This child's old enough to go to school, therefore he must be six or she must be seven or whatever the age the appropriate age was. And the reason they're having to. To test age in that way is because, of course, in my period, and I'm assuming at least for some of the period that you. That you look at, most people's ages were not. Most people's births were not recorded. And so they did not have a known and precise chronological age associated with themselves and their identity. And so it raises a lot of questions, I think, methodologically, that for all of us about when we look at records in this, in any period when birth registration or any kind of civil status registration is not white spread, it should raise questions for us about how accurate those numerical, little numerical entries on a ledger actually are. Right? And then we should start to think about the process by which those numbers came to be created and recorded. And that's exactly what I try to do in that last chapter of the book in.

Inezia Prosperity

In this World cup season. It also made me think a lot about all these polemics about the ages of different players and all that kind of stuff. So very far away from your work, but I think also still a relevant question in popular culture. So here as we come to a close, I wanted to ask you what future projects you are working on, which is of course, the question that one asks right after one has finished a book. But how are you thinking about your work as it develops from this book onwards?

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Well, I am really excited, actually, to share that I'm continuing to do some small projects that relate to the history of childhood. And there are really kind of two main small projects that I'm Working on. I say small and yet actually the first one is quite massive. It's just that a lot of the work has been done by my absolutely amazing undergraduate research assistant who is going through all of the records that I used in chapter one of this book that was just published that related to liberated minors. So children who had previously been enslaved were liberated and then placed in this two tail system. There are many lists and ledgers and registers, including their names and a lot of demographic information about them. And I read that material and I took notes on it myself and created a kind of database that likely makes sense to few people except for me. And so what we are doing now is transcribing, word for word, every single entry and the entire set of records on these children.

Inezia Prosperity

And this is about 1600. Like, this is a big more than just to.

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Yeah, more than 1600. And we are going to be creating a searchable and publicly available data set that will hopefully be published online and accompanied by some explanatory material and articles and article form so that other people can potentially use this set of records to ask different kinds of questions. So that's a really exciting and ongoing project. I'm also working on a short piece that has to do with the history of children and play in French West Africa in the 1930s. And then potential next book, maybe, I don't know, a longer project that looks at policing in everyday life in Senegal. Likely focused on the interwar period, but possibly a longer period of time. I haven't decided yet. It's early days.

Inezia Prosperity

Well, the way you lit up when you talked about your excitement at the police records makes me think that that's probably going to be a pretty exciting. Pretty exciting work.

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

So it's an exciting set of sources?

Inezia Prosperity

No, it really is. I've dabbled a little bit in some colonial intelligence stuff and they have their own crazy ideas, but it is really exciting what comes out, especially, I think, for people who work a lot with education files, where there's a lot less spice and a lot more regimentation in the archives. But Kelly, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me to talk about your new book, Negotiating Childhood. And I hope that you will return to the New Books Network when we have another book to talk about.

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it.

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