Care-Taking as Civilizing: Catholic Orphanages and the Mission Civilisatrice in Saint-Louis, Senegal, 1936-1949
[Thesis]
Warchol, Abigail R.
Burrill, Emily S.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2020
57 p.
M.A.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2020
For nearly a century, the Catholic Sœurs de Saint Joseph de Cluny operated the Ndar Toute orphanage for mixed-race (métis) and African girls in the city of Saint-Louis, Senegal. By the 1940s, Popular Front reforms, citizenship laws, and even changes in the social and political culture of Saint-Louis itself, sparked questions about the responsibility of Catholic missions and colonial authorities to care for orphaned girls. After tracing a history of orphans in Saint-Louis, this paper examines subsidy requests, inspection reports, and mission documents to reveal that colonial administrators and Catholic missions held shifting and sometimes conflictual understandings of which children needed care, what form that care took, and for what purpose orphaned children were raised. Through considering both rhetoric and actions concerning orphaned children, this paper argues that, despite an increasingly welfarist colonial discourse, the civilizing mission on lived on past its expiration date in the bodies of orphaned children.