Félix Éboué

Félix Éboué was the Black governor of a French colony who declared for de Gaulle in August 1940, three days after the armistice government had told him not to, and gave Free France the first territory it governed. He was born in Cayenne, French Guiana, in 1884, the grandson of slaves, won a scholarship to a lycée in Bordeaux, and passed into the colonial service in 1908, which sent him to Ubangi-Shari for twenty years as an administrator of districts nobody else wanted. He learned the languages, wrote an ethnography of the Sara peoples that is still read, and married a woman from Guiana whose brother-in-law would be Toussaint Louverture's biographer. The Popular Front made him governor of Guadeloupe in 1936, the first Black man to govern a French colony, and then, in 1938, of Chad, the poorest and largest of the four territories of French Equatorial Africa. When France fell he made a decision the men in Brazzaville and Dakar did not. On 26 August 1940 Chad declared for Free France, Cameroon followed the next day under Leclerc, Brazzaville the day after, and de Gaulle had a landmass, an air route to Egypt, and the base from which Leclerc's column would march north across the Sahara to Kufra and Tripoli. De Gaulle made him governor-general of the whole federation in November 1940, and it was from Brazzaville that Free France broadcast and, in January 1944, held the conference at which de Gaulle promised the empire reform and not independence. Éboué's own politics were those of a republican assimilationist who had read the ethnographers. A circular of 1941 on native policy argued for governing through chiefs and customs rather than against them, for an educated African elite with French rights, and for towns built for Africans. He died of a stroke in Cairo in May 1944, on his way to rest, at fifty-nine. He was buried in the Panthéon in 1949, the first Black man there, and his portrait was on the stamps of every colony in the federation.

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