>From the review below -
".... The philosophes of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, in their
search for a science of man, gave theoretical underpinning to an assumed black
inferiority. Theories regarding the "Chain of Being," although posited
according to the Church-imposed theory of the monogenism of human creation,
placed the black African on the bottom rung of the evolutionary ladder--or at
the extreme end of a postulated chain of progressive degeneration--just above
the orangutan, wrote Jacques Philibert Rousselot de Surgy around 1763 (p. 87).
For some Enlightenment era thinkers, Voltaire among others, the specific
physical characteristics of Blacks seemed to be a self-evident argument in
favor of polygenism, a theory postulating the separate creation of the races of
humankind, leading to the conclusion that Blacks were a separate, not fully
human, species. Polygenism had the added attraction, among the more
anticlerical French thinkers, of standing in opposition to the Church-backed
monogenism, according to which all humanity was descended from Adam and Eve.
.... "
So much for European "enlightenment", so much for Voltaire and the other
"greats" !!!
Please read this superb review even though it is a little long.
Shiva Shankar.
---------------------------
http://allafrica.com/stories/200511300742.html
A Review of Two Books Dealing with Slavery and Colonialism in West Africa
H-Net (East Lansing)
BOOK REVIEW
November 30, 2005
Posted to the web November 30, 2005
Leland Conley Barrows
----
Slavery and Reform in West Africa: Toward Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century
Senegal and the Gold Coast.
By Trevor R. Getz
Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. xx + 257 pp.
Maps, notes, bibliography, index. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN
0-8214-1520-4; $26.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8214-1521-2.
The French Encounter with Africans: White Responses to Blacks (1530-1880)
By William Cohen
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. xxx + 361
pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $24.95 (paper),
ISBN 0-2532-1650-8.
Reviewed by: Leland Conley Barrows, General Studies
Division, Voorhees College.
Published by: H-Africa (April, 2005)
The Chicken and the Egg or the Egg and the Omelette: Considerations on the
Image of Africa and the Realities of Slave Emancipation and Legitimate Trade
We have here two examples of very different kinds of historical writing, albeit
on related subjects. The first book, by Cohen, is the work of a mature scholar.
It is a broad synthesis derived mostly from intellectual history that analyzes
the French view of Blacks over a three-hundred-and-fifty year period. The
second book, by Getz, is his revised University of London, School of Oriental
and African Studies doctoral thesis. Titled "The Most Perfidious Institution:
The Slow Death of Slavery in Nineteenth century Senegal and the Gold Coast," it
earned him his doctorate in history in 2000. Like the original, the revised
version is a short, targeted monograph, an exercise in comparative history,
which presents and interprets the dynamics of the European-imposed suppression
of the Atlantic slave trade followed, some years later, by the European-imposed
emancipation of slaves in two distinct nineteenth-century protocolonial areas
in West Africa: French Senegal (excluding Casamance) and British Gold Coast.
Both books purport to be revisionist. The first one, however, is spectacularly
so. Its author challenges the reputation that France had gained for itself
(particularly among Anglo-Saxons and AfricanAmericans and Afro-West Indians) by
the first decades of the twentieth century for being a country virtually bereft
of race and color prejudice, a perception, indeed, that had come to form an
integral part of the French self-image. The second book, the revisionism of
which is more subtle, applies the broad sweep of such an author as Martin Klein
in his Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998) and the methodologies of those who contributed to
Suzanne Miers and Martin Klein, eds., Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa
(London: Frank Cass, 1999), to the complex socio-economic and political
realities of the Southern Gold Coast and Senegal north of the Gambia River. It
shows how slavery persisted and even thrived, thanks to the initiatives and
connivance of both masters and slaves as well as colonial officials in both
settings well beyond the conventional dates given for the ending of slavery in
the colonies of Great Britain and France, 1833 and 1848, respectively.
While Getz does not take direct aim at a national myth, he does add
considerable evidence of the unintended perverse results of the hopes for and
the realization of "legitimate trade" as defined by European abolitionists such
as Thomas Fowell Buxton, whose African Slave Trade and Its Remedy (1840; 2nd.
ed. London: Frank Cass, 1967) was influential in Great Britain as well as in
France. As an aside, Getz also suggests that the Gold Coast elites who
generated the Mankessim Constitution, the Fante Confederation (1868-1873), and
the Accra Native Confederation were, in large part, slave owners who wished to
conserve at least indigenous slavery (pp. 97, 113). This finding is a surprise
to those who view the Fante Confederation, in particular, as the first step
towards modern, liberal, constitutional, and independent government in Ghana
where slavery, of course, would not be tolerated, and as a precursor of the
Gold Coast Aborigines' Rights Protection Association, founded in 1897, that
would be known for its strong antislavery stance.
It would seem that the French authorities in Senegal, even more than the
British authorities in Gold Coast, allowed, indeed, collaborated in, the
continued existence if not the expansion of indigenous slavery in Senegal,
particularly in the protectorate areas--where most of the indigenous
populations lived--until as late as the 1905 decree abolishing slavery in
French West Africa.
Can the laxness (or "pragmatism") of French policy, as perceived by Getz, be at
least partially explained by the deeply ingrained negative view of Africans and
Afro-Caribbean peoples that Cohen identifies as a significant thread running
through French intellectual history from the sixteenth century onward? (Never
mind certain socio-economic realities characteristic of plantation slave
societies and the precariousness of the French presence in Senegal during most
of the period under study.) Or was the problem in the French case, like in that
of the British, simply one of maintaining the commercial profitability and the
political stability of the respective colonies by relying on the support of
local slave-owning elites?
Professor Cohen's study has been around for some time. First published in 1980,
it was intended to be a French-focused equivalent to Philip Curtin's The Image
of Africa: British Ideas in Action, 1780-1850 (Madison: The University of
Wisconsin Press, 1964). Cohen's inspiration germinated while he was preparing
his doctoral thesis at Stanford University on the French colonial service.[1]
The present paperback edition of The French Encounter with Africans, published
in 2003, is identical to the original of 1980 except for the addition of a
foreword by Professor James D. Le Sueur of the University of Nebraska. The
latter explains how groundbreaking the first edition was even if its central
thesis, which postulates a "consensus [existing] in French thought, which
relegated the black to a position of inferiority," was vigorously rejected by
such knowledgeable French critics as the historian Emmanuel Todd.[2] Given the
growing French preoccupation, since the initial publication of the book in
1980, with immigration from the former French colonies, Indiana University
Press found it appropriate to republish Cohen's book. (Never mind the fact that
this particular debate in France is mostly concerned with immigration from
North Africa even if it has been punctuated from time to time by widely
publicized mass expulsions of Malians and other Africans from the former French
colonies and their forced repatriation in chartered aircraft) and the general
hardening of attitudes, not only in France but in other European Union
countries, regarding immigration not only from the Third World but also, since
1990, from such Eastern European countries as Romania. Also, republication of
this book would serve as a suitable memorial to its author, given his untimely
death in November 2002 as the result of a freak accident. As Professor Le Sueur
claims, Cohen has taught the French as much about their long history of racism
as Robert O. Paxton has about their more recent collaboration with Nazi Germany
and their contributions to the holocaust during the period of the Vichy regime
(1940-1944).[3]
If we are to believe Professor Cohen, the "impulse to inequality" goes back a
long way in the history of French thought, having even been influenced by the
negative views about Sub-Saharan Africa and its inhabitants of the
third-century geographer, Solinus (p. 1) and by Christian traditions equating
blackness with sin, dirt, and the devil. This "impulse to inequality," once
established, was confirmed and reinforced by the first contacts of Frenchmen
with West Africa, particularly Senegal, in the development of slave-worked
plantation colonies in the Caribbean and elsewhere, and the corresponding
Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trade. Early French observers, it seems, were
shocked by the blackness of African skin and the general appearance of Africans
as well as by their social customs, apparent religious practices, and material
culture.
The philosophes of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, in their search for a
science of man, gave theoretical underpinning to an assumed black inferiority.
Theories regarding the "Chain of Being," although posited according to the
Church-imposed theory of the monogenism of human creation, placed the black
African on the bottom rung of the evolutionary ladder--or at the extreme end of
a postulated chain of progressive degeneration--just above the orangutan, wrote
Jacques Philibert Rousselot de Surgy around 1763 (p. 87). For some
Enlightenment era thinkers, Voltaire among others, the specific physical
characteristics of Blacks seemed to be a self-evident argument in favor of
polygenism, a theory postulating the separate creation of the races of
humankind, leading to the conclusion that Blacks were a separate, not fully
human, species. Polygenism had the added attraction, among the more
anticlerical French thinkers, of standing in opposition to the Church-backed
monogenism, according to which all humanity was descended from Adam and Eve.
Theory and practice intermingled in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth
centuries in three venues: the French West Indies, Senegal, and France. The
perceived exigencies of intensive sugar production by slave labor and the
presence of Whites in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue, as a very
small but dominant minority in a slave plantation society, led to stringent
racially exclusive laws (despite the relative humanity of the 1685 Black Code),
intended to guarantee the efficiency of the slave production system and the
dominance of the white planters. Even though the presence of Blacks in France
at the time was minuscule, a perceived growing fear of "disorders" and
miscegenation led to laws in 1738 and 1777 that vastly restricted the presence
of blacks in France. Only in the tiny French settlements in Senegal,
particularly the islands of Saint-Louis and Goree, where French survival
depended on the maintenance of good relations with the surrounding African
polities, did a strong but de facto degree of racial tolerance and a sentiment
of equality evolve along with an influential, politically dominant, and
culturally French mixed-race population.
The French situation in the West Indies also gave rise to a large mixed-race
population but with the opposite result of increasingly stringent regulations
intended to prevent White-Black unions, to exclude the children of such unions,
even when free, from the rights and privileges of French citizens and from
positions of authority in these colonies, and to keep the Blacks separate and
in bondage. The intent was to safeguard the operation of what was probably the
cruelest but most efficient slave system in the New World, based as it was on
the practical, if perverse, application of certain physiocratic theories
relating to efficiency in agriculture, particularly in the case of
Saint-Domingue (Haiti). It is not surprising that disgruntled mixed-race
persons like Vincent Oge and Andre Rigaud laid the groundwork for the slave
rebellion of 1791 that led, eventually, to Haitian independence in 1804.
Quoting J. Fouchard (1972), Cohen remarks that the white planters "had dug
their graves with their penises...."
Although the urge to colonial expansion in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth
centuries that Cohen describes in chapter 7 was mostly driven by mercantilist
and population theories, French theories of colonial expansion, he writes, also
reflected French ideas of Black inferiority, of persons who, because of their
"backwardness," would benefit from White French domination. Indeed, the first
French abolitionists, Abbe Henri Gregoire and Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours,
among others, became ardent expansionists. For such a philosophe as
Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, "European colonial expansion
[was] proof of human progress", a process that could not help but to raise the
cultural level of Africans (p. 177). The blueprint for French expansion into
the Western Sudan via the Senegal River was set during the Old Regime by Andre
Brue, Louis Moreau de Chambonneau, Demonique Harcourt Lamiral, and others. It
is not at all clear, however, that these persons were particularly motivated by
ideas of black inferiority.
Still, the heritage of assumed inferiority carried over into the nineteenth
century where it contributed to and reinforced French theories of scientific
racism that evolved from a preference among French anthropologists for physical
rather than for cultural anthropology (pp. 219-220). As Cohen writes, "In an
era worshipping scientism, the claims racism made of being supported by the
findings of science furthered its spread and rooted it firmly in French
culture" (p. 210). The unprecedented rate of technical progress in nineteenth
century Europe and the United States came to be viewed as proof of the racial
superiority of Whites. According to Cohen, one outcome was a less powerful
nineteenth century abolitionist movement in France than in Great Britain (where
it had strong religious endorsement) and a degree of doubt as to whether the
freeing of slaves would actually be of benefit to them--given their assumed
inferiority. Of course, as Cohen further points out, the loss of Saint
Domingue, particularly the perceived brutality towards Whites of the rebelling
former slaves, stimulated negrophobia in France (just as the Algerian War of
Independence is said to have brought in its wake increased anti-Arab prejudice
in France). Still, when final slave emancipation came to France in 1848, its
terms were ideologically determined by the discourse of a liberal bourgeois
revolution. It mandated the immediate transformation, by parliamentary fiat, of
all slaves on French territory to the status of free citizens of the French
Republic. The achievement was remarkable, however much Victor Schoelcher and
other French abolitionists might have condemned slavery more for negating the
idea of civic freedom than for being a serious violation of human rights.
When in the course of the nineteenth century France developed its second
colonial empire, "white domination was ... still regarded as a natural result
of the perceived inequality between Europeans and Africans," even if France
could marshal the same political, strategic, economic, religious, and
humanitarian justifications for empire as those formulated by Great Britain and
the other colonial powers of the era (p. 282).
But does Cohen's detailed examination of the racist thread in French history
reveal any striking differences between France and other European countries in
terms of racial intolerance? This reviewer thinks not, for a reading of Philip
Curtin's Image of Africa and of David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in
Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966) reveals that French
racial attitudes towards Africans, both negative and positive, were little
different from those of other Europeans. So far as the specific problems of
plantation societies are concerned, a reading of Winthrop Jordan's White over
Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1969) reveals that the racial attitudes of white
Frenchmen in the French sugar islands were not much different from those of
their North American counterparts. In both cases, it seems that the economics
of slave plantation systems destroyed most if not all chances for inter-racial
tolerance.
What Cohen has done is to challenge a central myth regarding French color
blindness, one that is, however, of relatively recent vintage. For the good
treatment that African-American GIs received in France during and after the
First and Second World Wars and the lionization in France of such black
American entertainers as Josephine Baker and Sydney Bechet were, after all,
twentieth century phenomena. The same is true of the 1950 quotation that Cohen
has taken from Henri Blet's France d'Outre-Mer: l'Oeuvre coloniale de la
troisieme republique (Grenoble: B. Arthaud, 3. vols., 1946-1950) to the effect
that "Frenchmen have never adopted the racial doctrines affirming the
superiority of Whites over men of color" (p. xvi). If, at the time that these
remarks were penned, the African-American novelist Richard Wright could state
that "There is more freedom in one square block of Paris than in all of the
United States" (Cohen, p. 285; quoted from Roi Ottley, No Green Pastures,
1951), his comment accurately reflected the reality of his experience of the
United States as compared to his experience of France. Of course, it is
necessary to add the caveat that Wright and other African-Americans who had
settled in Paris in the 1950s were warned by the French authorities that if
they made any utterances against French efforts to suppress the ongoing
Algerian rebellion they would be expelled from France.
And too, the French, at least from the era of the French Revolution onward,
permitted the emergence of a small but very visible number of blacks or mixed
race persons who played major roles in French culture, politics, and the
military. One immediately thinks of Alexandre Dumas, father and son, nineteenth
century novelists and playwrights, but there was also the grandfather,
Alexandre Davy Dumas, the Mulatto general from Saint-Domingue, who had a
successful career in the French army, distinguishing himself in Napoleon's
Egyptian campaign despite the fact that Napoleon "appears to have suffered from
a genuine racial phobia" and who, after Haiti had won its independence from
France, would order the Ecole polytechnique in Paris "to dismiss its black and
colored students" (pp. 119-120).
Moving ahead to the height of French colonial expansion in Africa, one can cite
the case of another Mulatto general, Alfred Dodds of Senegal, who led the
French conquest of Dahomey (1892-1894) and, before retirement, served as
military governor of Paris; and the case of the black governor of Chad, Felix
Eboue, from French Guiana, who was the first French colonial governor to give
the Free French of World War II some territory when, in August 1940, he rallied
Chad to General Charles de Gaulle who appointed him Governor General of French
Equatorial Africa.
The above-mentioned success stories were certainly not unknown to Professor
Cohen. Likewise, in his analysis of the thoughts on race of Georges-Louis
Leclerc Comte de Buffon, Abbe Antoine-Francois Prevost, Charles de Secondat
Baron de Montesquieu, Condorcet, and many others, Cohen shows that these
thinkers, even if they did, from time to time, draw certain negative
conclusions as to Black and African capabilities, more often than not wavered
between negative and positive, often, finally, coming down on the positive
side. When evoking Arthur de Gobineau, the central theoretician of French
racism in the mid-nineteenth century, Cohen points out that this personage "was
irritated that his work was used to support proslavery opinion in the United
States" and that despite his insistence on Black inferiority, Gobineau believed
"that race-mixing was necessary for the creation of civilization (p. 181); the
artistic abilities of the blacks [being] necessary to fertilize the European
imagination" (p. 218). What is upsetting (and what seems to have annoyed
reviewers of his book, like Professor Emmanual Todd), is that although Cohen
marshals evidence pro and con in terms of his thesis, he persists in
maintaining his verdict of guilty even though he could have derived the
opposite verdict from substantially the same body of evidence.
Cohen's thesis as to the relative racial tolerance and intermingling
characterizing relations between Frenchmen and Africans in Senegal, resulting
from the precariousness of the French presence, dependent for survival on
Africans, appears to underpin Getz's picture of a colonial administration that,
at the start of the nineteenth century, was less than keen about having to end
the Atlantic slave trade and then of slavery itself because of ties of blood
and of economic and political interest to local slave-owning Euro-African and
indigenous elites. Given the importance of slavery to both groups, its role in
the local economy, and the wish of the metropolitan government to ensure peace
and prosperity, and, once expansion got underway after 1854, the need to
placate newly acquired slave-holding indigenous allies, both the colonial
government and the Paris authorities contrived to delay the full application of
the Emancipation Decree of 1848.
That negative racial theories were not part of the French equation in Senegal
seems to be confirmed by the existence of a similar paradigm in the Gold Coast,
even after the 1874 application by the local British governor, George Strahan,
of the British Emancipation Act of 1833 to British colonial and protected
territories in this territory. Indeed, a rather passive form of emancipation
was adopted in Gold Coast, the so-called Indian model, which left indigenous
slavery in place in the so-called protectorate for many years, thus avoiding
problems with indigenous allies or any disruption of the local economy,
dependent to a greater or lesser extent on unfree labor.
Getz intends his study to be a contribution to the growing body of studies on
slavery and emancipation in Africa. Its "most important feature ... and
greatest innovation," he says, is that it is a comparative study of two regions
that "underwent comparable transformational processes resulting in both
divergent and similar results" (p. xvi).
Comparative studies in history, like interdisciplinary studies in all fields,
are in vogue even if both varieties are more easily talked about than actually
executed. Getz, this reviewer understands, was influenced by a comment made by
the historian Paul Lovejoy, to develop a comparative study on slavery and
emancipation in West Africa, rather than one strictly on the Gold Coast.
According to Lovejoy, in Transformations in Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983), the many local studies on slavery in Africa that had
recently appeared had suffered "from a failure to place the particular case in
the context of Africa as a whole, or even in specific regions in Africa" (p.
xiii). So Getz added a Senegalese component to a very competent study of
problems of slavery and emancipation in nineteenth century Gold Coast and thus
has derived valid comparative conclusions about the two situations in West
Africa.
Getz begins by introducing the reader to the particularities of the two regions
under study as well as to the institutions and the effects of the Atlantic
slave trade prior to its "criminalization," at the beginning of the nineteenth
century. He then turns to the immediate effects of criminalization and
suppression in both regions, phenomena that he labels as the "crisis of
abolition."
How did French and British officialdom and traders and the African elites
linked to them adapt to the new situation? In Senegal, French attempts to
develop plantation agriculture in Walo, next door to Saint-Louis, from 1822 to
1831, failed. In the Gold Coast, production of palm oil, albeit by slaves, as a
response to the call for "legitimate trade," was more successful. And a
contract labor scheme (regime des engages a temps) introduced by the French in
1823, evolved into a de facto slave system, including transportation to the
West Indies and to Reunion, that lasted until 1846.
Chapter 3 deals with the special situation of the Gold Coast following the 1833
Parliamentary Act abolishing slavery in much of the British Empire (the crown
colonies).[4] Given the situation here in which Britain could only claim
sovereign rights in the coastal forts that it occupied, the Act could not be
applied in Gold Coast until 1874. In the intervening period, the British
government, that, in 1828, had transferred responsibility for the
administration of the Gold Coast forts to a London Committee of Merchants
(similar to the situation before 1821), resumed direct control over them in
1843. The British, both formally and informally, extended their influence and
administration in the Southern Gold Coast, purchasing the Danish forts in 1850,
attempting to exchange forts with the Dutch in 1867 so that both powers could
hold unbroken stretches of the Atlantic coastline, and finally, because of
African opposition to this exchange, buying out and taking over the Dutch forts
in 1872. At the same time, the British had to operate in a complex
African-defined socio-political situation of interacting coastal African
polities and to contend with the power of Ashanti, the major African polity to
the North, that they defeated militarily in the so-called Serengeti War of
1873-1874. In this complex situation, the British authorities could do little
to end indigenous slavery in the Gold Coast, nor did they really wish to do so
until goaded into action by increasingly militant abolitionism at home.
Chapter 4 deals with the effects of the Decree of April 27, 1848, abolishing
slavery in all French territories everywhere and conferring French citizenship
on the former slaves. Embodied in the Decree, which was promulgated in Senegal
on August 23,1848, was the provision that merely setting foot on French
territory conferred immediate liberty. What then would happen if the thousands
of captives in the independent African polities within the French sphere in
Senegal were to escape to Saint-Louis, Goree, or to the few French posts in the
hinterland and claim their freedom? Obviously, without a revolution in the
French-African relationship, this aspect of the 1848 Decree could not be
applied in Senegal any more than could the British 1833 Act be applied in Gold
Coast. Thus, chapter 5 explains how the French authorities in Senegal during
the period of expansion associated with the administration of Governor Louis
Leon Cesar Faidherbe (1854-1861 and 1863-1865) managed to emasculate the Act
while extending their sway over slave-holding African populations.[5] The
British in the Gold Coast would employ similar "pragmatic" means to avoid
interfering with indigenous slavery and its role in the economy of the Gold
Coast.
Given the stepped up pressure coming from London to extend the Emancipation Act
into a strengthened British protectorate system, chapter 6 describes how the
so-called Indian model of emancipation was applied and assesses the results
that it yielded. According to this model, slaves would have to take the
initiative themselves to obtain freedom by going to a colonial magistrate to
have themselves declared free. Thus they themselves became responsible for
their own emancipation, a situation providing a "formidable roadblock against
wholesale emancipation..." one that allowed the colonial administration to have
its proverbial cake and eat it too. Examining this ambiguous situation, Getz
identifies the role of the slave owners themselves in "reevaluat[ing] their
relationships with their masters through individual solutions negotiated
largely outside the formal judicial system" (p. 112).
In the case of French Senegal, as we see in chapter 7, the retrenchment,
associated with the administration of Francois-Xavier Michel Valiere from 1869
to 1876 that followed the expansionist administrations of Governors Faidherbe
and Jean-Marie Emile Pinet-Laprade, gave way, in turn, to renewed French
expansion under the nascent Third Republic and an expansionist governor,
Louis-Alexandre Briere de Lisle, who took over in 1876. At the same time,
renewed abolitionist pressures came from Paris, spearheaded by a Protestant
Pastor, Villeger, and the old 1848 abolitionist, Victor Schoelcher.
Republican-sponsored expansion, the abolitionists felt, must also include
renewed efforts to stamp out slavery wherever it existed in the French empire.
Examining the spate of administrative slave freeing that followed in the 1880s,
Getz argues that they resulted much more from the actions of slaves and owners
themselves than from any deliberate efforts in favor of emancipation on the
part of the French administration. The latter continued, as in the past, to
avoid any frontal attacks on indigenous slavery, even to the point of
disannexing territories like Walo and Dimar, near Saint-Louis, giving them
protectorate status, so as to shield their slave-owning and peanut-cultivating
inhabitants from the full force of French antislavery legislation. Such
situations prevailed until the 1905 decrees abolished slavery in most of French
West Africa. Even then there would be exceptions, as in Mauritania, where the
French administration was still tolerating indigenous slavery in the 1950s
(Getz, p. 190).
A final chapter on the eradication of the mostly Dioula-operated overland slave
trade into Gold Coast and Senegal from the far interior of West Africa argues
that the British in the Gold Coast were more successful in suppressing this
trade than the French in Senegal. By the 1890s, so Getz's argument goes, the
British Gold Coast frontiers had been more-or-less set, thus permitting the
British to consolidate their rule and to make a concerted effort to end
slavery. The French, on the other hand, were still conquering the much larger
area of what became French West Africa, albeit now operating far beyond the
borders of Senegal. They still needed to mollify slave-owning African allies in
protectorate relationships with France by leaving indigenous slavery as
untouched as they could get away with doing.
The reader of this book is left with the clear understanding that the course of
emancipation in Senegal and Gold Coast was driven by a number of factors of
which "the impact of European metropolitan initiatives [was] just the beginning
of [the] story" and certainly had very little to do in the case of the French
experience in Senegal with any perceived notions of African inferiority (p.
180). For both France and Great Britain, "to please audiences at home, slavery
had to be abolished. But to keep colonies safe and profitable, slave owners
could not be alienated" (p. 183).[6]
Both books are fascinating and informative additions to the history of French
(and English) relations with Africa and Africans. Although Cohen's writing
style and anecdotal approach make for a pleasant reading experience, one must
not forget that he remains very selective regarding his elucidation of given
French authors and thinkers and their ideas, always hammering away at his basic
thesis that the French conception of the Black person has always been far more
negative than positive. Time and again, however, when he can demonstrate that
given thinkers were ambivalent about blacks or may have changed their views for
the better over time or as the result of personal contacts with blacks,
particularly in Senegal, Cohen still never fails to stress the negative rather
than the positive feelings about Blacks of these thinkers. Thus his basic
thesis appears, in part, to be forced, if not flawed.
On the other hand, Getz has developed a fully sustainable thesis, even though
his social science-influenced writing style lacks the polish of Cohen's style,
and his politically correct approach to the spelling of certain (but not all)
Senegalese personal and place names may annoy certain readers.[7] It is also
clear that Getz has a better mastery of colonial Gold Coast/Ghanaian history
than he has of colonial Senegalese history as proven both by the more ample
listing of British/Gold Coast archival materials in his bibliography than of
similar materials concerning France and Senegal and, unfortunately, by the
large number of errors appearing in his treatment of the French/Senegal
component of his study.[8]
Regarding the mechanics of publication, both books embody the annoying
characteristic that extensive sets of bibliographical and explanatory notes are
printed, in separate sections, at the ends of the respective texts rather than
at the bottom of the relevant pages. Such a presentation is hardly acceptable
given the page-formatting possibilities offered by computers and publication
software. Moreover, Cohen's book lacks a bibliography, and Getz's book,
although providing one, omits the dates of publication of the published
materials that he cites in his notes.
Still, this reviewer recommends both books to interested readers but with the
caveat that of the two, Cohen's book will appeal to the broadest readership and
will provide the most entertaining reading experience.
Notes
[1]. Cohen published this thesis in 1971 as Rulers of Empire: The French
Colonial Service in Africa and followed it up in 1977 with a volume on the
career and the writings of Robert Louis Delavignette (1897-1976), considered to
have been one of the most humane and enlightened of twentieth-century French
colonial administrators (Robert Delavignette on the French Empire. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1977).
[2]. Todd, in a review published in Le Monde (19 February 1982) wrote that
"L'ouvrage est construit comme un dinosaure. Le corps est gros, la tete
minuscule; les faits sont nombreux, la reflexion est mince", and that Cohen
"...est surpris en flagrant delire historique, souffrant simultanement de
simplicite conceptuelle et d'amnesie factuelle".
[3]. At the moment of his fatal accident, Professor Cohen was completing a book
on The Algerian War in French Memory and Politics, 1962-2002 that, if
posthumously published, will no doubt attempt once again to remind the French
that--like Monsieur Jourdain--they have been speaking in prose all their lives.
[4] We note that in his listing of those British Crown colonies to which the
1833 act was applicable, Getz has failed to include Jamaica that at the time
was the wealthiest of the British West Indian possessions. He has also omitted
Canada--surprising for an American scholar given the importance of Canada as
the terminus of the Underground Railroad, a role it acquired thanks, in great
part, to the act in question. [5]. The essence of Faidherbe's pragmatism is
captured in his 1855 instructions to Captain Jean Parent, the newly appointed
Commandant of Bakel: "Favorisez l'evasion et recueillez comme hommes libres,
dans nos etablissements, les esclaves des pays avec lesquels nous serons en
guerre. Rendez au contraire scrupuleusement ceux des pays avec lesquelles nous
sommes en paix," from ANS 3B77, piece 9, October 3, 1855, quoted in note 30, p.
129, of Andrew F. Clark,
> From Frontier to Backwater: Economy and Society in the
Upper Senegal Valley (West Africa), 1850-1920 (Lanham and Oxford: University
Press of America, 1999).
[6]. This simple statement of pragmatism reminds the reader of the case of Abbe
Henri Gregoire, a founder in 1788 of the Societe des Amis des Noirs, who, at
the start of the French Revolution, as Cohen reminds us (p. 14), argued that in
Saint-Domingue the sizeable free Mulatto population "should be given rights as
good loyal slave owners, on whom the whites could depend against slaves."
Likewise, as Cohen also indicates, Leger Felicite Sonthonax, the French Jacobin
Commissioner in Saint-Domingue, decreed the liberation of the slaves on August
29, 1793, five months before the National Assembly in Paris abolished slavery
in all the French colonies. Sonthonax hoped to rally the majority population of
the island to France given that the White slave owners, who had formerly been
supported by the Old Regime against all the other social categories in
Saint-Domingue, were resisting revolutionary France and were preparing to hand
over the colony to the British, as the planters had done in Martinique, hoping
that the British would help them retain slavery.
[7]. Like many Anglo-Saxon writers on Senegalese history, Getz has a problem
with the conventional French spelling of Senegalese place names and names of
historical personages, never mind the fact that the official language of
Senegal is French. Also, as he explains (pp. xix-xx), he supports the efforts
of post-independence Africans "to reclaim their own locales and histories," and
thus favors "the spellings preferred by African academics of note"--Professor
Boubacar Barry in the case of Senegalese history. True, in 1971 the Senegalese
government approved a set of rules for the phonetic spelling of Senegalese
names using the Latin alphabet (Journal Officiel de la Republique du Senegal
116 (1971): pp. 623-628), but it has not been widely used by Senegalese and
other francophone scholars who generally prefer the traditional French
spellings. Barry, it should be added, although francophone, is not Senegalese
but Guinean, originally from Fouta-Djalon. A better guide to Senegalese
spelling might have been the usage of the Senegalese archivist, Oumar Ba, as
demonstrated by his edited and published compilation of documents on the French
invasion of Cayor, La Penetration francaise au Cayor du regne de Birima N'Gone
Latyr a l'intronisation de Madiodio Deguene Codou (Dakar: Oumar Ba, 1976).
And Getz himself is very inconsistent. While he insists on spelling Cayor
"Kajoor," and its national hero, Lat Dior, "Lat Joor," he adopts the
traditional spelling for Gandiole, the Cayor village facing (from time to time)
the moving and hard-to-cross bar at the mouth of the Senegal River, rather than
"Ganjool," the revised spelling. Likewise, he accepts "Baol" rather than
"Bawol" as the correct spelling of the name of the Woloff polity in which the
founder of the Mourides, Ahmadou Bamba, was born. Yet he refers to the
traditional ruler of Baol as "teen" rather than as "teigne."
Even in dealing with the analogous problem of spelling in anglophone Gold
Coast/Ghana, Getz has found it necessary to spell Akwapim "Akuapem," but to
retain the traditional orthography for Akwamu. If it is really essential for
Professor Getz to decolonize the orthographies of Senegal and Ghana, despite
the official languages being French and English, respectively, why has he not
been consistent the way Philip Curtin was in preparing his Economic Change in
Precolonial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975)?
[8]. Although it would go beyond the scope of this study to list all the errors
that appear in Getz's, book, a few representative examples will be pointed out
in what follows.
We note, for instance, on p. 33, that in referring to Baron Mackau's inspection
mission to Senegal of 1819, here and everywhere else in his text, Getz
misspells Mackau's name, rendering it as "Mackam."
Colonel Julian Schmaltz, the first Restoration governor of Senegal (1817-1820),
never held the title of Baron, even though Getz attributes it to him. Contrary
to what Getz tells us on p. 36, Baron Jacques-Francois Roger was not the "first
French commander and administrator of Senegal." Counting as of the Restoration,
Roger was the third, Schmaltz being the first, and Jean-Baptiste Lecoupe
(1820-1821), the second. Roger was definitely the first civilian French
governor of Senegal in the post-1817 period, serving from 1821 to 1827, not
Rene Servatius, Governor from 1888 to 1899, as Getz claims (p. 144).
Given the dates of Roger's governorship of Senegal, 1821-1827, it is surprising
to see Getz refer to Roger's "official memoirs," dated 1821, in which he
purportedly "retrospectively noted" the important role of the gum trade (p.
37). Getz has misunderstood the meaning, in French, of "memoire," which in the
context in which Roger was writing refers, not to an elder statesman's
reflections on his life's achievements (which Roger, at any rate, would not
have written at the start of his mandate as governor), but to the sort of
"state of the colony" report that a governor might write for his minister on
taking over or on leaving. A few pages later, Getz again misspells the name of
a French governor, Jean-Guillaume Jubelin, who served in 1827 and 1828, writing
it as "Jean Quillaume Jubelu."
It is also surprising to learn, again on p. 42, that in 1828 a group of
merchants urged Governor Jubelin to set up a peanut oil press in Saint-Louis
even though it was not until the late 1830s and early 1840s that the French had
begun to be interested in the commercial possibilities of the peanut. (Worth
reading on the economic development of Senegal in the nineteenth century is
Roger Pasquier's gargantuan University of Paris 1987 doctorat d'etat thesis,
"Le Senegal au Milieu du XIXe Siecle: La Crise Economique et Sociale"). The
origins of the development of peanuts as an export crop are amply traced on
pages 222-238.
In general, Getz wants to attribute to Senegal an earlier commercial
development of peanuts as an export cash-crop than seems to have been the case.
He claims that "by 1840 the administration had begun to grant groundnut
concessions to habitants," citing an 1848 report by M. Herice on improvements
to be made in the Colony of Senegal (p. 42). Herice's report had been published
in 1847 as Memoire presente a M. le Ministre de la Marine et des Colonies sur
quelques ameliorations a apporter a la Colonie du Senegal (Paris: Plon Frères,
1847). In it, the author does plead for the granting of agricultural
concessions, but not necessarily for the cultivation of peanuts. Herice
particularly promotes the agricultural development of Sor Island, opposite
Saint-Louis to the East, so as to provide occupational outlets for the young
habitants who were being squeezed out of the gum trade. He envisioned truck
farming, as a means to supply Saint-Louis with vegetables, and cash cropping.
But in regard to the latter possibility, although Herice cites peanuts as a
possible cash crop, he stresses the need to produce indigo and cotton, still,
and for several years to come, official French priorities (Herice, pp. 13-20).
A final example of confusion leading to error is Getz's reference, on p. 163 to
Jaureguiberry, the commandant of Podor from 1866 to 1868, to whom he refers in
note 14 on page 230 as the "later Governor and Minister of the Navy." This
Jaureguiberry, however, was a different person. He was Pierre Jaureguiberry, a
nephew of Jean-Bernard Jaureguiberry, the governor of Senegal, who had served
from 1861 to 1863 and who would serve twice as Minister of the Navy and
Colonies in 1879 and 1880 and again in 1882 and 1883. Also, just as Rene
Servatius was not the first civilian governor of Senegal, the Direction of the
Interior that Servatius created was not the first attempt on the part of the
French authorities to set up such an organizational unit in Senegal. During his
governorship, Jaureguiberry had attempted to do the same thing with a result
that was equally short-lived. He had also hoped to staff the French posts in
Senegal with civilian commandants, but his nephew, Pierre Jaureguiberry, the
Commandant of Podor mentioned by Getz (and confused with his uncle), was the
only civilian administrator Governor Jaureguiberry could find who was willing
and able to assume such duties. (See Yves-Jean Saint-Martin, Le Senegal sous le
Second Empire: Naissance d'un empire colonial, 1850-1871 [Paris: Editions
Karthala, 1989], pp. 481-482, and Leland C. Barrows, "Trois Biographies
Senegalaises,", in Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies_ 19.1 [2001-2002]: pp.
79-85.)
Citation: Leland Conley Barrows. "Review of Trevor R. Getz, Slavery and Reform
in West Africa: Toward Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Senegal and the Gold
Coast," H-Africa, H-Net Reviews, April, 2005. URL:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=80011118420252.
Copyright © 2005 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the
redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes,
with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of
publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online.
For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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