In 1905, Mohandas Gandhi paid homage to Joseph Chailley, the founding father of the International Colonial Institute. Gandhi’s appreciation for Chailley exposed the complex interconnectedness of the colonial world around 1900. The Indian Opinion, a journal Gandhi published in South Africa, bestowed honor upon the Frenchman Chailley, who had recently spent several months in the Dutch Indies and was about to coauthor a book with British colonial administrators. To give the imperial interconnectedness an institution, Chailley had established the International Colonial Institute (ICI) in Brussels, as early as 1893. By 1905, this institute had grown to become the most important think tank for colonial rule, continuing with 136 (white) members. As it styled itself as reformist, this institute raised hopes among colonial subjects around the world. Gandhi’s Indian Opinion saw in Chailley’s writings on India “an unbiased testimony of a stranger,” and an adequate description of British colonial mismanagement: “He finds himself in a vast agricultural country, where there is great poverty and where commerce and trade are entirely local and therefore without real importance. He notices an absence of industrial activity, he discovers some people, perhaps owning fortunes, but – there is no capital.”1 Fighting against the underdevelopment of colonies was the declared aim of the ICI. Its members claimed to develop colonies through cooperation among international experts who would get the most out of the colonized population and the colonial economy. Gandhi was not alone in falling for this delusion, which actually served to legitimize and perpetuate colonial domination.2

This chapter looks at both language and racial thinking and the ways one affected the other. Race was an important category of colonial modernity that was used to conceive of other people in relation to Europe and in relation to themselves. Introducing racial thinking was thus a significant way to reconfigure the population not only of Morocco or even of the entire region of northern Africa, but also the populations surrounding them, in what became known as Black Africa on the west side and the Arab Middle East on the east side. Because of the fluidity of colonial conceptions of race, language became an important marker of race in the region. Hence, the constructed opposition of Berbers versus Arabs was also perceived as a linguistic relation that was imposed as antagonistic and hegemonic.