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The year is January 2002.
These happy women are meeting at Annette Mbaye d'Erneville's,
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
a former great reporter for the Senegalese radio and TV
that we can glimpse on the phone, in the back.
The woman dancing is Jeanne Turpin,
former headteacher.
Are they filming us?
And this is Nafi Sen, teacher.
It's the first time I'm meeting them
and it's a bit of a special day.
In this taxi, three former students from the first year group
of École normale de Rufisque,
created in 1938, 6 miles from Dakar.
When we decide to come through
The Golden Bees are coming
Make way for them
Is this the school?
That morning, we met history.
Their history.
RUFISQUE MEMORIAL
These women aren't just visiting their old school.
They're walking in the footsteps of their former headteacher:
a Breton teacher who came to teach in Africa
in 1923.
How are you?
I'm great.
The first female headteacher.
- Mrs. Germaine Le Goff. - Mrs. Germaine Le Goff.
Yes.
There she is.
Mrs. Germaine Le Goff.
Germaine Le Goff. They keep pronouncing her name
in this small office.
Life is beautiful.
That's true.
Beautiful thinking.
That's true.
And I remained a universal African.
Authentic.
THE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSAL
GERMAINE LE GOFF THE STORY OF A PIONEER
A DOCUMENTARY FILM BY
The story I will tell you begins here
at the turn of the 20th century.
Germaine was born in Douarnenez in 1891.
It was one of the most dynamic sardine harbors in Brittany.
Her father, Nicolas Le Bihan, was a deep-sea fisherman.
He went offshore for a long time.
Her mother, Philomène, was a housewife
and worked as a seamstress to make ends meet.
GOD PROTECTS US
That's when the first women's strikes occurred in France.
The Penn Sardin, workers
who canned the fish,
demanded a wage increase.
The climate was quite hostile
despite the beauty of the landscapes.
Germaine, born Le Bihan, was
a fisherman's daughter,
the fourth among ten siblings.
She goes to the secular school, or "the school of the devil."
At night, she prays for God to bring her father back.
Pamela, my cousin, is her great-granddaughter.
She's discovering the family house for the first time.
The house is bigger than I thought.
The window is open. Someone must live here.
- Hello, sir. - Hello, ma'am.
My name is Pamela Caillens.
I'm here because my great-grandmother
lived in this house.
Come in, take shelter inside.
Thank you.
My great-grandmother lived here.
Thank you. I was curious.
It's nice to be here and discover this space
because I can put images to the stories I heard
and my memories.
I didn't have a place to connect them to
and now, I can see this street leading to the old harbor
and I can put an image on the stories.
She told me a story about these stairs
and when I saw them, I remembered it.
Of course, education was primordial to her.
As a child, she struggled to go to school.
They were ten siblings,
of which eight survived.
So they were many and she was one of the oldest.
Maybe some of them left
so she had to take care of the young ones,
and especially the babies.
She could only go to school
when the baby was sleeping.
She told me she went down the stairs quietly
when he was asleep.
She always took 3-4 steps
and there would be a crack, the baby would start crying
and she'd go back up.
So she'd have to stay home.
At my age,
I found it very surprising that she couldn't go to school.
Germaine was a pious and studious little girl
who went to the only school in the area.
And she already was an adventurer
who liked to wander
far from the old Pouldavid area, where she lived.
She took long walks with her brothers and sisters
to get some wood,
sometimes all the way to the beach in Tréboul
and looked at the ships sailing offshore.
When she was 12,
her uncle who was a teacher took care of her
and made her pass her graduation certificate.
In 1909, she brilliantly passed the entrance exam
for École normale d'institutrices de Vannes.
Then she married François Auffret.
As he also was a teacher,
they both taught in a primary school in Morbihan.
She got pregnant with Raymonde, also called Monette.
But WWI broke out
and François died from pleurisy when he came back from the front.
A monument to the dead. World War I.
That was her youth.
Her first marriage.
A sailor, of course.
Just like her father.
Overwhelmed with sorrow,
Germaine comes back to Douarnenez,
in Pouldavid, for a while,
where her family cared for her.
At 20 years old, Germaine was a free girl from the Republic.
She married Joseph Le Goff.
He was a teacher too,
a miracle survivor from Verdun, covered in medals.
Together, they managed a small school in Guiscriff,
then in Réguiny, in Morbihan.
But the local vicar gave them a hard time.
She had a very secular speech
and positions that rather defied
the religious institution.
But when people asked her,
she always said:
"I'm not an atheist, I'm agnostic.
"I will believe in God when I see him."
After the war, life went back to normal
and during a nice spring day,
the Le Goff couple was having lunch with cousin Arthur and his wife Mina
who had just come back from Brazzaville in Congo.
They praised the advantages of life in the colonies.
Germaine didn't like privileges and injustice,
but she wanted to see the palm trees,
wear the same outfits,
and above all, to leave this miserable life behind
and make it so that this sunny day lasted forever.
They asked for their transfer. The letter came:
a post was available in French West Africa.
Germaine answered:
"Being a teacher is the nicest of professions.
"We are on our way. We love,
"we commit and we are coming."
In 1923, in Bordeaux, Germaine Le Goff boarded
the ship Belle-Isle heading to Africa.
The fisherman's daughter who never left Brittany
discovered the heat of the south
as the boat sailed on the ocean.
They reached Dakar, a dynamic harbor.
They saw people with a different skin color for the first time.
They took the train for their first mission in Djenné,
in the heart of what we used to call French Sudan,
which is now Mali.
The trip lasted a few days
but Germaine never got bored of observing this new life.
Countryside landscapes, the first villages with huts...
In the heat of this never-ending summer,
Africa's beauty naturally prevailed.
In Bamako, they got in a car and boarded another boat.
And at the end of this long journey, they finally glimpsed
Djenné.
She was assigned to a post
in Djenné, a town 310 miles northeast of Bamako.
Remember that this was in the early 1920s.
There were very few French people in Djenné at that time
and very few white people.
So this couple of teachers ended up working there.
She was in charge
of opening the first girls' school in Djenné.
It was a challenge.
We could say it was almost doomed at first
because the families were very reluctant.
It was a trading city.
The children, and especially girls,
stayed with their families
and didn't get in touch with Europeans.
So opening a girls school in Djenné was a challenge.
In 2002,
almost 100 years after Germaine Le Goff's first steps in Djenné,
I went back to the city of the 313 saints.
Djenné, a clay city founded in the 3rd century
and located at the core of the Trans-Saharan gold trade,
was Islamized in the 10th century by an Arab caliph.
Since then, the city has experienced strain
between the protectors of an animist tradition
composed of healers and marabouts
and the protectors of a rigoristic Muslim faith many times.
Here is proof: the French rebuilt its mosque
destroyed many times in 1906.
And this is Germaine Le Goff's school in 2002, in a Mali
that is still peaceful
and far from terrorist attacks and insidious Islamism.
This is where she started teaching, with Joseph, two young
African girls
whose marabouts, imams, and parents above all,
they had to convince about the benefits of education.
This is where we see Germaine Le Goff's personality
because she took up this challenge
and noticed a phenomenal and quick success:
in two or three years,
she managed to gather over 100 young girls
in her primary school.
That was more than Bamako's primary school.
She managed to convince people that
this western education wouldn't affect the culture
of these young African girls.
And yet, Germaine had doubts about her mission.
"Can I talk about roses and oaks in a land of hibiscuses and baobabs?"
She wondered.
Learning to read, but what for?
They had no books in Djenné,
not even newspapers, she regretted.
So the method was simple:
to arouse the desire to learn instead of forcing it
and to teach the country's realities
instead of France's, so far away. It was a success.
In the statements of her superiors
and hierarchy, we can see that they acknowledged her
as someone who managed to convince the families,
especially the mothers,
to have girls go to school
and keep going. The colonial administration's biggest challenge
wasn't to enroll girls in school
but for them to complete their education.
In Germaine Le Goff's school,
these little girls passed their graduation certificates.
It was her first post
in Africa and her first success as a teacher.
And this area of French West Africa was
very remote.
Far from Brittany,
when they weren't teaching,
the Le Goff couple enjoyed this brand new landscape
almost out of the Tales of 1,001 Nights.
For them, it was culture shock and a real heart-stopper.
Outside of class, they loved observing
this peaceful world following its own pace.
In 1927, Germaine Le Goff was transferred to Saint-Louis.
She flew Mermoz's airline like Saint-Exupéry,
which had stops between Paris and Rio de Janeiro.
Saint Louis, a capital swarming with life
on the banks of Senegal,
where the past and present mix...
The capital of Senegal was very modern,
if not civilized.
She was assigned to the prestigious Faidherbe high school.
She found her bearings,
But she already missed the natural beauty,
softness and truth of the people in Djenné.
As a French teacher,
she started writing reports about girls' education.
But she had to be patient.
It all took shape when she was transferred to Dakar
in the early 1930s.
In 1936, the Popular Front took power.
They entered a new phase of colonial policy
that some called colonial humanism.
They wanted to implement
reforms, especially in Senegal.
The Popular Front launched many commissions of inquiry
to get a state of play of the social situation in the colonies.
They also wanted to create a feminine elite
to have a feminine version
of the masculine ENS students,
called "pontins,"
students from École Normale William Ponty dating back to 1903.
The speech that we found in the archives stated
that they didn't have wives at the same level.
Then, there was Germaine Le Goff.
She also was a theoretician about girls' education
in a colonial context.
She wrote articles,
became known in the colonial environment
and intervened in 1937 in the intercolonial congress
in Paris to talk about the education
of the colonial populations.
She started to be famous among the governing authorities
and spread ideas that were very clear to her:
both men and women need education.
When she heard about this project of opening a school to train
female teachers in French West Africa,
she volunteered
and was acknowledged as the most qualified to do it.
She was entrusted with this school,
but she had very limited means.
As she recorded it in her texts, she was given
an old building in a very dirty city:
Rufisque, a few miles away from Dakar.
The school opened in an old peanut factory.
Joseph and Germaine rolled up their sleeves to clean and paint it
and turned this dirty and sinister place into a real family house.
On September 15th 1938,
the first students from Senegal, Dahomey,
former Benin and Togo
finally arrived in the first African feminine teachers school
in the entire continent.
Some young girls, a few days late, went
on a long trip to come here.
In the middle of the yard, at the bottom
of the stairs, stood the headteacher, smiling.
To her left in this photo, is her sister-in-law,
Miss Auffret,
who also was a teacher.
Joseph, her husband, assisted her
when he wasn't sculpting
or painting Africa's beauty.
And quickly, Claude appeared,
Monette's child and the school's mascot.
In her bedroom in Dakar,
Marie-Anne Sohaï, 95, from the Abeilles D'Or year group,
recalls her memories with her daughters.
There you are. See?
That's you, right here.
Here.
I recognize Mrs. Le Goff.
Yes, and to the left...
There is Jeanne.
Yes, this is Jeanne.
Mrs. Le Goff was a simple woman,
pretty,
who dressed nicely.
We always waited for her
to come down the stairs.
She reached the next floor,
and when she came down,
we recognized her very specific pace
down the stairs
and said: "Here comes mother Le Goff."
She said that we were
real wealth
and above all,
she gave us the possibility to be ourselves.
To form a bond,
the headteacher quickly established singing
as one of the school's main activities, as it was unifying.
African, Breton and French songs
that forged friendships, work, solidarity
and feminism too.
The Golden Bees are coming
Make way for them
Here come the young girls
We all walk in unison
One, two, one, two
Etc.
We were all sisters
and called each other
"companions."
There was a lot of solidarity.
"Hello, companion.
"How can I help you?"
Things like that.
That's how we lived.
Whether we followed
this or that religion,
it didn't matter.
Germaine Le Goff bet on excellence.
As a visionary, she wanted to form a feminine elite
able to lead the future of Africa.
In the school in Rufisque,
they had lessons about general subjects
such as math, sciences, literature and history
along with morality lessons
and domestic activities,
but above all, sport activities.
Germaine Le Goff didn't want her students
to be lazy at school.
They had
to walk fast.
The Bees never stopped.
They were Golden Bees, they shone bright.
This also was part of the training
of these young girls.
There were
more songs about gazelles and such,
but Golden Bees is emblematic of that school.
It's even the symbol of their memorial association
called FAC-MR,
Fondation Femmes d'Afrique et Culture, Mémorial de Rufisque,
which they created in Senegal in 1992.
Twenty years later, I met Bathilde Loambé Gaye once again.
Back then, she welcomed me in a beautiful purplish red outfit
before her villa in Dakar,
with her daughter on her right,
Germaine Anta Gaye,
literature professor and artist.
Bathilde is still as lively, delicate and refined today.
She is now 99 years old
and was also part of the Abeilles D'Or year group.
She is even a close friend of Marie-Anne Souhaï.
It's not very interesting to work with old people, right?
This was the invitation to a whole day
I organized
and there's a picture in which I'm standing... There it is.
I'm standing behind Mrs. Le Goff.
The headteacher was a council member
who selected us,
and we were proud and happy to belong to this school.
She made us notice
all the qualities in our mothers and grandmothers,
everything our grandmothers did for us in our homes
and that we didn't notice because we thought it was normal.
She always told us:
"My children, no matter what happens,
"don't forget that you are African
"and that Africa will be what you make of it.
"Feed on what's beautiful.
"No matter where you are
"or what you're doing, do it for everyone's best interest."
These are the morals she taught us.
She didn't need to be strict to teach us this.
She taught us gently.
She participated along with us
and that's why we accepted her reflections.
The different families came to see her peacefully.
She helped out Senegal a lot.
Remember the taxi I took to go to the school in Rufisque in 2002?
I wanted to do the same trip with Bathilde's daughter,
whom she called Germaine
as a tribute to the old headteacher of École Normale d'Institutrices.
It later became the mixed Abdoulaye Sadji high school,
named after an anti-colonial teacher.
The commemorative plaque is now gone.
I feel moved.
I wonder where my mother's dorm was...
TEACHER, ARTIST
...and where Mrs. Le Goff's house was.
I heard she had a grandson called Claude,
with whom the girls played.
Right.
I picture these young girls as corollas
from all over Africa
with varied hairstyles,
dyes, skin tones
and silhouettes,
but all wearing pink.
Mom told me they wore pink aprons.
Exactly.
Here are the dormitories.
- It was very nice. - Of course.
So why should we change it?
It's splendid.
In this happy, bright, flowery and tropical school
among the palm trees she dreamed to see,
the bougainvillea and Madagascar periwinkles
that she planted herself with the other teachers,
Germaine Le Goff imposed a quirky exercise,
annual and graded, truly African,
in the classrooms or in the yard: the hut,
inspired from the first traditional houses
she glimpsed from her train to Djenné.
Huts are built in rural environments.
It's a circular room with a conical roof made of straw.
Mrs. Le Goff told her students:
"When you will be assigned, my girls,
"in the most remote regions,
"you will have to get your own hut built
"or maybe they'll grant you one
"and you will have to organize it
"to make it pleasant, friendly and habitable.
"This hut will reflect what you learned
"when it comes to skills, hygiene and practicality,
"but it will also reflect your culture."
Then, the students went back home for the holiday.
When they came back to school, they brought items
from their different countries like mats,
calabashes and such,
water jugs...
Anything that reflected their craftsmanship
and their own civilization.
Le Goff was a free spirit
but her anti-conventional temper ended up
annoying the administration,
especially during World War II.
In Dakar, French West Africa's governor, Pierre Boisson,
joined Marshal Pétain's collaborationist regime
and thwarted the first landing attempts
of De Gaulle's troops
in September 1940.
This is Rufisque, the capital of peanuts,
considered the Champs-Élysées of French West Africa.
We can clearly see the three wooden piers
where the assailants planned on landing.
Germaine Le Goff stayed at the head of École Normale in Rufisque
but her students said that she was a Gaullist
and that she forbade them from singing "Maréchal, nous voilà."
She was under house arrest for a time
but she kept managing her institution.
She refused any establishment of new religious ceremonies.
They wanted the pupils to celebrate Joan of Arc's holiday,
but she refused. She said they had too much work.
She practiced what we could call micro-resistance.
And above all, she tried to preserve her school
in trying circumstances.
She succeeded.
In this native school,
these Black children kept learning French.
Protected by people who knew how to defend them,
they learned about the new France and the person
in charge every day.
LONG LIVE MARSHAL PÉTAIN
Bathilde hasn't forgotten this period of the war
and certainly not some songs whispered near the establishment.
Hymns that she wrote down much later
from memory.
Let's erase the past
Slaves, stand up
The Republics are men
And the slaves are children
This is the final fight
Let's group and tomorrow
The new human race
Will be international
Where have you heard L'Internationale?
Right, L'Internationale
and songs about De Gaulle,
all these songs...
There was a time in my life during which I remembered the lyrics.
It's science. I don't know how it happened.
But not "Maréchal, nous voilà."
Not at all.
We never learned that song. It was forbidden.
THE FREE WORLD
The government in Bordeaux chose to surrender.
France chose
to keep resisting in the colonial empire.
Dakar first.
In January 1944, De Gaulle came back as a victor.
The leader of Free France walked in a jubilant city.
...by France, towards their allies
and the populations that depend on them.
Germaine Le Goff and young Claude stood in that crowd.
Claude gave him a young pupil's bust that Joseph,
Germaine's husband, sculpted.
Behind them stood a young pupil from the school in her uniform.
She might have been a model for the sculpture.
After the war, a wind of change blew on the colonies.
The administration wanted new people.
Germaine Le Goff wanted to stay longer
but she was already old enough to retire.
In January 1946,
she left with Joseph and her grandson Claude
for her villa in Sucé-sur-Erdre near Nantes,
bought from a catalog.
She dreamed of this house
to be able to welcome her Breton, but also African, clan
with dignity.
Do you remember Pamela? My cousin.
It's in this house in Sucé-sur-Erdre
that we got to know each other with her brother Nicolas
during school holidays.
It was right after the accidental death of their father, young Claude.
Here, like in Rufisque,
mother Le Goff carried out her teacher role once again
by watching over her progeny.
Today,
this family villa has become a tea house.
They kept the same handles.
This used to be the living room,
with access to the big lounge
and its 1930s decorations.
They preserved the stained-glass windows.
She loved to host people here.
She loved to host her family
but she was also proud of receiving her old pupils.
They called themselves the Legoffiennes
and that always made her laugh.
She planned for these moments.
She hosted them like a head of state.
She prepared for their arrival.
She always prepared her nicest outfits with an African touch
in her jewelry.
Because she knew it was a long trip
to come and visit her.
She welcomed them like a head of state
but she was also the one cooking for them.
She had this double aspect.
She would be someone with a very statutory behavior
ready to welcome a diplomatic delegation
and then, she behaved like a great-grandmother
cooking a generous meal.
The railing wasn't white.
I'm curious about the landing.
Everything has changed so much.
We had a nice view over the Erdre from here.
We still do.
After 23 years in Africa,
in this new exile, throughout the window,
between the stained glass and Joseph's sculptures,
far from this land she loved,
Germaine Le Goff watched the world change without her.
Her old pupils are now women,
teachers, headteachers
and role models in Africa.
After school, 3/4 of them became teachers.
They were trained for that.
Some of them lived in difficult conditions
as they were transferred
and assigned in a different colony.
Some were from Dahomey.
There were many girls from Dahomey in Rufisque
and they were assigned to a post in Niger, French Sudan,
or even Equatorial Africa.
These first African teachers
wrote letters.
They were the first generation
to write to Germaine Le Goff to tell her about their daily lives
and it wasn't easy.
They ended up in the same position as Germaine in Djenné.
Sometimes, they were foreigners
since they couldn't speak the language of that area.
"I am very busy lately. I neglected my mom.
"But she is so quick to forgive!
"I wonder if that's why I overstep so often."
"The mark you left in them is one of the best universal virtues.
"That's why it persisted.
"This mark helped out all of Africa."
"You can't imagine how happy I was
"when I got your letter.
"During such times, a few encouraging words are talismans."
Then, there were the generations that worked in the 1950s.
Some of them were politically involved
in movements demanding reforms
that were anti-colonialist and demanded independence.
And some of them became activists.
It's interesting.
They were young girls
who fought the colonization
but stayed very loyal and close to their former
headteacher.
They kept writing to her and visiting her in France.
In some countries, they created clubs
about Germaine Le Goff.
They created groups to gather former pupils.
Starting from 1966, in Senegal, there was
a Germaine Le Goff club.
There was one in Guinea,
one in Benin...
And these structures helped
preserve the spirit of the school in Rufisque
and their bond with Germaine Le Goff.
FOR GOOD TEACHING AND EDUCATION
In 2002, I met the late Marie-Louise Sow.
This happy, soft yet firm woman
from the 4th year group
in Rufisque, a brilliant teacher,
created École Nolivé in Dakar,
named after a figure of the anti-colonial fight.
In the yard, in the middle of the school,
she wanted to recreate the spirit of Rufisque.
This is the hut.
They sing, play and dance here,
they exercise together...
It's the hut.
She also mentioned the hostility
she experienced from those who didn't get any education.
We were very modern.
The other girls called us fops.
They said: "Those girls are fops."
When a young man
proposed to one of us,
they said:
"Are you really going to marry this fop?
"They are so frigid."
They said that because fridges
just arrived in Africa. They called us freezers.
To them, we were ridiculous fops.
In the end of the 1950s, independence finally came.
Everybody rejoiced.
Léopold Sédar Senghor gave beautiful speeches.
Before her TV,
Germaine Le Goff was happy about her pupils' role
around the continent,
because some of her old pupils were more than just teachers.
They didn't just parade.
They were involved politically and wanted to serve their countries.
Among the most militant ones,
there was Jeanne Martin Cissé, of course.
This former pupil
quickly joined the battle of Guinea's revolutionary communist president,
close to the Soviets.
Long live the revolution!
1965 - SOCIALIST GUINEA
Sékou Touré,
the first to obtain his country's independence in 1958,
chose a woman as his prime minister.
In 1975,
Germaine Le Goff was invited to visit her former pupil
in a country with which, as the perfect Gaullist,
she shared neither the cult of personality
nor the dictatorial tendencies.
Pamela kept her photo album.
This one is called Memories from Guinea.
She made it when I was a child.
That's when she went down
the plane. She looked very elegant.
As usual, she wore a nice outfit
but she knew she would meet a head of state.
There we are.
Incredible.
Sitting next to Sékou Touré.
They both sat on that sofa.
She was welcomed
like an important person, clearly.
Sékou Touré, splendid,
smiling, standing up in his car before the crowd.
Amazing. This might have been
a national event. I guess it was.
And here, along the avenue,
a huge banner said: "Down with imperialism".
It must have been surprising
for her to come back to this country and see that.
For the first time, a woman was elected president
of the UN Security Council.
Her name was Jeanne Martin Cissé.
Guinean, 46 years old, a mother
and former teacher.
Mrs. Cissé's intelligence is only matched
by her pleasant and refined elegance.
It was impressive
because she was from a small village in Upper Guinea.
She was of modest origins
and her mother was a midwife.
She was one of the first female teachers in Guinea.
She was close to Sékou Touré,
but her career began internationally.
She was a Guinea ambassador in the United Nations
and as we know, she became
the first African woman to be president of the UN Security Council
in 1972.
She was Conférence des Femmes Africaines' secretary general.
So she was quite an exceptional woman but she wasn't
the only one.
At the same time, in Ivory Coast,
the Legoffienne Jeanne Gervais became
President Houphouët-Boigny's first female prime minister.
She was in charge of the women's condition.
In Niamey, Fatou Djibo founded
and presided over the association Union des Femmes du Niger.
In Senegal, Annette Mbaye d'Erneville, poet,
became the first female reporter for Senegalese radio and TV.
She founded a feminine periodical called Femmes de Soleil
and Awa later on.
The writer Mariama Bâ
was among the pioneers of the Senegalese literature
thanks to her novel Une si longue lettre
in which she paid tribute to Germaine Le Goff
and denounced the disparity between men and women.
Her friend, Caroline Faye Diop,
became the first female PM of her country in 1978.
She led Léopold Sédar Senghor's feminine movement
and was very active in Organisation Panafricaine des Femmes.
As for Marie-Anne Souhaï,
she was one of the first female deputies
from Casamance, in Senegal.
We didn't only work with politics
to win or to be all this or that.
We, women, wanted
to enhance women's life conditions
and for them to be able to gather in associations,
so they could build a program
for themselves instead of just being wives.
At the foot of her bed, her great-granddaughter, Djamila,
a brilliant medicine student
who studies human genetics.
Transmission is a value that this matriarchal family holds dear.
Her journey was extremely rich and when it comes
to teaching,
especially in an era during which women were limited,
I think the Legoffiennes represented
a real challenge during that period.
It was the colonial era.
But I think it was thanks to the context
and the fact that they recruited Africans
like my grandmother, Marie-Anne Souhaï,
and surely many others.
I think it was just the beginning of change.
It showed that it was the beginning of a revolution
since they started to include young Africans
and African women who were there.
It was all for the succession.
In December 1976, at 85 years old,
Germaine Le Goff went on her last trip to Africa.
Once more, she was welcomed by her former pupils.
She came to inaugurate the new École Normale d'Institutrices,
now established in Thiès.
She discovered a colorful and happy building,
which reminded her of her school in Rufisque.
Her former pupils asked President Senghor
to name it after her.
Very moved, Germaine, the fisherman's daughter from Douarnenez
who became the first female headteacher in Africa,
read a speech that was broadcast live
on the Senegalese radio and TV.
And now,
I would like to say a few words about what I think.
I am proud of my girls.
They aren't my pupils or young girls anymore,
but women, mothers
and citizens from sovereign countries.
Wherever destiny led them,
I know that
they are fulfilling, with expertise and awareness,
the task that was given to them.
I know that their children are evolving too,
but may they never forget
that in 1938,
my goal
wasn't to create scholar women within four years,
but to make women evolve
so that they could spread it
thanks to their personal influence
and education.
May they never forget, my girls' children,
that when I saw them leave
our family home in Rufisque,
I was aware they would dive
into a sometimes hostile environment
that wouldn't accept African women's evolution.
And I'm not only talking about white people,
but also of native people who should have,
instead of being wary of these new women,
on the contrary,
guided their first steps with benevolence.
In the crowd, among the Legoffiennes,
there was a very young dancer: Germaine Acogny.
She came to Dakar
and saw my small dance school.
DANCER
She encouraged me a lot.
We were two artists and the goddaughters
of Anta Germaine Gaye,
who also was an artist and painter.
She met President Senghor
and told him:
"I hope you will help artists like Germaine Acogny."
President Senghor was like a little boy
before Mrs. Le Goff
and said: "Yes, of course."
It was a wonderful encounter.
Having this woman as a godmother was
also a form of transmission and a source of strength.
You wrote something really nice
on a photo when you met her.
Yes, it's a poem by Senghor: Femme nue, femme noire.
That was the first solo I danced
when I started dancing in Senegal,
where solos didn't exist yet. It inspired me.
Naked woman Black woman
Wearing your color That is the essence of life
Your shape is beauty
I grew in your shade
The softness of your hands Covered my eyes
And now, in the middle Of summer and midday
I discover the Promised Land
From the top Of a burned out high pass
And your beauty struck me Right in my heart
Like thunder
Germaine Acogny is now Africa's most famous dancer
and choreographer of all times.
Here, in her École des Sables near Dakar,
founded in 1998 with her husband Helmut Vogt,
she trains dancers from all around the world.
She wanted to reproduce something universal
that her mother, Marthe Redenou, might have passed on to her.
She was from Benin, a former pupil in Rufisque
who died very young and that she knew very little.
She was called Marthe Redenou.
Marthe. She was a smart woman.
She was one of the best in her year group.
She already fought for women's independence
against my grandfather, who had a strong character.
She was brave enough to tell him she wanted to be a teacher
and she managed to go to Rufisque.
I'm convinced this legacy is real.
I believe in Africa's distinctiveness.
In any case, anything that is specific
to Africa becomes universal.
Germaine Le Goff left Africa, Brittany,
and this world in 1986.
Many Legoffiennes were there
to accompany her from the church in Sucé-sur-Erdre
to her final resting place.
What's left
of these pioneers of the universal in French West Africa?
Values, a mark and memories.
Musée de la Femme Henriette-Bathily,
created by her partner
Annette Mbaye d'Erneville and her children,
in Place du Souvenir Africain et de la Diaspora.
Despite the erosion of time, the brevity of life
reminds us that human progress is a long-term undertaking.
The message of Germaine Le Goff
and her pupils endures
because thoughts never die.
My only merit was
to bring them real education
and not sub-tier education
for underdeveloped countries.
I understood that my African girls
carried deep qualities within them,
possibilities I had to make them aware of
so that they could fulfill them as best they could.
They did, and I am grateful to them for that.
Now, their children and pupils will keep going
because thoughts never die.
She's a person who made us love Africa
because she loved her own nation.
You have a homeland. Love it.
Love Africa. My dear,
don't let people fool you. You have a civilization
and you must help Africa
to get more teachers
to spread this rectitude
and clarity.
That's all.
She is avant-garde.
She is avant-garde about many things.
It's too bad we don't have...
Another one, later?
INAUGURATION OF PLACE GERMAINE LE GOFF
IN DOUARNENEZ BY ASSOCIATION RHIZOMES
Subtitling: TransPerfect Media