‘For good, God, and the Empire’: French Franciscan sisters in Ethiopia 1896−1937

Abstract

In 1897, four French Franciscan sisters arrived in Ethiopia, having been summoned there by the Capuchin missionaries. In 1925, they ran an orphanage, a dispensary, a leper colony and 10 schools with 350 girl students. The students were freed slaves, orphans and upper-class Ethiopian and European girls. After providing a brief background to the relations between the Ethiopian government and the missionaries, this article describes the general activities of the Sisters, the importance they dedicated to education, and their religious and political motives. In the second part, it analyses the sociological backgrounds of the female students and the way in which education intersected with gender, class and race. Third, it reconstructs the multiple power relations within which the Sisters’ educational work was embedded. Finally, it demonstrates how schooling girls in a class-based manner – in conformity with the Franciscan Sisters’ perceptions about what lower-class and upper-class women should be – enabled them to secure relations with Ethiopian political elites. These relations both benefited the Ethiopian elites and furthered the cause of French imperialism.