The French Colonial Policy of Assimilation.........

This article talks about the four "communes" ( Dakar, St Louis, Rufisque and Goree). These Four Communes are the result of the French presence on the western coast of Africa. 

On 1 August 1872, a decree was signed granting Goree and St Louis the same municipal prerogatives and rights as French communes and became fully empowered communes(" communes de plein exercice"). Rufisque benefited from being a locality where the exploitation of the peanut crops intensified the commercial activities, but also from being a coastal region. It had space for warehouses, offices and depots that could not be built in the small island of Goree. So it joined St Louis and Goree and became a fully empowered commune in 1880. And Dakar would have been included within the circle of fully empowered communes in 1887. The natives of these regions(communes) had the status of French subjects, and were subject to the Native Code( "le code de l'indigenat"). 

Ther were quit different sharply situations and different religions fellowed by people in those communes. In Goree and St Louis, the population was composed of metropolitans, habitants(mullatos,gournets, signares), freed slaves or captives(depending on the period), and Muslims. Dakar and Rufisque were much more homogenous ethnically: they were Lebu and Wolof, and the population proclaimed allegiance to an Islam very heavily modified by local beliefs. Mosques and churchs started being built. Christians' churches were based on Sudanese architecture, and Muslims Mosques' signs of Islam were taken from the Arab world.

Father Boilat started stating Christian dogma in Wolof, for helping people understood the reasons why people must adopt Chatolic religion. He helped also and encouraged people opening new school for seminarians to be educated, and fought against the expansion of Islam. But muslims like El Hadj Malick Sy or El hajj Umar Tall, added an intellectual impetus to Muslim religious practices.

The Decree of 20 November 1932 recognized the exclusive competence of muslim courts in the civil affairs of Muslim natives and their descendants, such as marriage, inheritance, gifts, wills, and so on.

There are many signs of a memory required to become African by thr philosophy of Negritude and the wolof ideology of Diggel.