Locating colonial histories: Between France and West Africa

American Historical Review

Volumn 110, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 409-434

  Mann, Gregory ^a  

^a Howard Hughes Medical Institute   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33750001684     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/531320     Document Type: Review

References (242)

1. For an essay on the revival of colonial studies with particular reference to France and Africa, see Frederick Cooper, "Decolonizing Situations: The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Colonial Studies, 1951-2001," French Politics, Culture, and Society 20, no. 2 (2002): 47-76.
2. A recent historiographic survey with an emphasis on Indochina is Robert Aldrich, "Imperial Mise en valeur and Mise en scène: Recent Works on French Colonialism," Historical Journal 45, no. 4 (2002): 917-36.
3. See also "Writing French Colonial Histories," Alice Conklin and Julia Clancey-Smith, eds., special issue, French Historical Studies 27, no. 3 (2004);
4. Gary Wilder, "Unthinking French History: Colonial Studies beyond National Identity," in Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, (Durham, N.C., 2003);
5. Daniel J. Sherman, "The Arts and Sciences of Colonialism," French Historical Studies 23, no. 4 (2000): 707-29. Wilder and Conklin and Clancy-Smith suggest that historians of France have handled the curves in the "imperial turn" rather differently than have historians of other European nations, Great Britain in particular.
6. See the essays in Burton, After the Imperial Turn. The terms "colonialism" and "imperialism" are frequently used interchangeably. In this paper, I prefer colonialism, following a distinction laid out by Henri Brunschwig some years ago. For Brunschwig, colonialism, like imperialism, rested "on the assumption [of] political domination and economic supervision over the territories which had been conquered. But it excluded a third assumption, which was vital to imperialism: the possession of a clear conscience."
7. Brunschwig, French Colonialism, 1871-1914: Myths and Realities, William Glanville Brown, trans. (London, 1966), 180-81, emphasis added.
8. In my usage, locality, the identity of a place, is the product of histories that create particular social forms, types of community, and vectors of memory while generating possibilities for the future. Localities enable meaning. They are in this sense akin to Pierre Nora's lieux de mémoire; Nora, "General Introduction: Between Memory and History," in Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Arthur Goldhammer, trans., 3 vols. (New York, 1996-1998), see esp. 1: 15.
9. Note that my use of "locality" differs from that of Arjun Appadurai, who uses the term to refer to a phenomenological quality. My definition more closely resembles the meaning he lends to "neighborhood, " in that the latter characterizes a social form; Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996), 178-99.
10. See also Mamadou Diouf, "The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism," Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 679-702.
11. By "location," I mean something quite different than do most scholars of postcolonial studies. 1 use the term to refer to place and not to subject position; see Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani, "Crosscurrents, Crosstalk: Race, 'Postcoloniality,' and the Politics of Location," Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (1993): 292-310.
12. Avowedly postcolonial scholarship veers from the quite specifically localized - for example, "Under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817," Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994) - to place as mere metaphor;
13. see the caution expressed in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, 1999), esp. 209.
14. Mrinalini Sinha, "Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India," Journal of British Studies 40, no. 4 (2001): 489-521, see 491.
15. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, "Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda," in Cooper and Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), 4.
16. Two excellent recent books do just that, in different places; Eric T. Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain's National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940-1944 (Stanford, Calif., 2001);
17. Catherine T. Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago, 2002).
18. A sense of place is not new in French history, only rare in its colonial versions. For an overview of the significance in French historiography of the local and the regional, see Stéphane Gerson, "Une France locale: The Local Past in Recent French Scholarship," French Historical Studies 26, no. 3 (2003): 539-59;
19. Gerson, The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-century France (Ithaca, N. Y., 2003);
20. and Michel Denis, "L'Approche régionale," in François Bédarida, ed., L'Histoire et le métier d'historien en France, 1945-1995 (Paris, 1995).
21. See also Odile Georg, "The French Provinces and 'Greater France,'" in Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, eds., Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France (New York, 2002).
22. Janet MacGaffey and Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga, Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law (Bloomington, Ind., 2000);
23. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton, N.J., 1993);
24. Charles Piot, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Chicago, 1999);
25. Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, 1995).
26. A particularly intriguing essay with a focus on memory is Mary des Chene, "Locating the Past," in Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds., Anthropological Locations (Berkeley, Calif., 1997).
27. A recent look at mobility that leaves little room for coercion, capital, or the state is James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).
28. Previously historians of colonialism have looked to the work of anthropologists and literary critics in grappling with the problem of culture; see, for example, Nicholas Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992)
29. Catherine Hall, ed., Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York, 2000).
30. Appadurai, Modernity at Large.
31. In a celebrated 1951 article on the "colonial situation," Balandier argued that the "situation" was created and recreated in particular times and places, and could not be adequately understood without reference to the dynamism of local contexts. Georges Balandier, "La situation coloniale, approche théorique," Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie 11 (1951): 44-79.
32. See the special issue of French Politics, Culture, and Society 20, no. 2 (2002), edited by Emmanuelle Saada.
33. See Francois Manchuelle, Willing Migrants: Soninke Labor Diasporas, 1848-1960 (Athens, Ohio, 1997),
34. or, on the Belgian Congo, Nancy Rose Hunt. A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, N.C., 1999).
35. Rooted in place, these works emphasize mobility. See also David Robinson, Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880-1920 (Athens, Ohio, 2000);
36. Julia Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800-1904) (Berkeley, Calif., 1994).
37. Like most contemporary African histories, these are neither "nationalist" nor "national" histories; see Alice Conklin, "Boundaries Unbound: Teaching French History as Colonial History and Colonial History as French History," French Historical Studies 23, no. 2 (2000): 215-36, see 219.
38. See Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895-1960 (New York, 1999);
39. and James E. Genova, Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in French-Ruled West Africa, 1914-1956 (New York, 2004). The federation of French West Africa (AOF) included the colonies of Mauritania, Senegal, Soudan (Mali), Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), Guinea, CÔte d'Ivoire, Dahomey (Benin), and Niger. The mandated territory of Togo was appended after World War I. It is worth noting that none of these were settler colonies. The European population of each was quite small, a point to which I return below.
40. Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, Calif., 1997);
41. and Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (New York, 1996). These are very different books, each with its own contribution to make. Cooper in particular is interested in the comparative dimensions of empire.
42. In addition to Cooper, Decolonization and African Society,
43. two studies that take on multiple and distinct colonies (as opposed to a colonial federation) are Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics;
44. and Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago, 1991).
45. An excellent recent metropolitan example of incorporating what I term scale and locality is Mary Dewhurst Lewis, "The Strangeness of Foreigners: Policing Migration and Nation in Interwar Marseille," French Politics, Culture, and Society 20, no. 3 (2002): 65-96.
46. See also Clifford Rosenberg, "The Colonial Politics of Healthcare Provision in Interwar Paris," French Historical Studies 27, no. 3 (2004): 637-68.
47. In this sense, the centralizing tendencies of the French empire and its bureaucracy threaten to become normalized in research strategies, as the colonial bureaucracy becomes the frame of the analysis of which it is partly the object. Moreover, the CAOM represents the top rung of an archival ladder that ascends from local administrators, whose reports were often synthesized and sanitized before being passed upward to the Ministry of Colonies. Put simply, the view is different from the top. Documents that reached Paris, or even Dakar, are often notably silent on violence, corruption, and everyday abuse. Regarding Aix itself, it should be noted that a school for the training of teachers did attract a small number of students from the colonies.
48. Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, 3 vols. (Paris, 1984-1992);
49. translated as Realms of Memory (New York, 1996-1998).
50. For two seminal essays from Nora's project, see Antoine Prost, Republican Identities in War and Peace, Jay Winter and Helen McPhail, trans. (New York, 2002), chaps. 1 and 2.
51. Jay Winter has been among the most extreme in his rejection of Nora's national framework, which he reframes as European; see Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (New York, 1995).
52. Local and regional processes are highlighted in Daniel J. Sherman's The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago, 1999).
53. See also Hue-Tam Ho Tai, "Remembered Realms: Pierre Nora and French National Memory," AHR 106, no. 3 (2001): 906-23.
54. The sole exception is Charles-Robert Ageron, "L'Exposition Coloniale de 1931: Mythe républicain ou mythe impérial?" in Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 1 (Paris, 1984).
55. This omission has been commented on in Sherman, "Arts and Sciences," 708;
56. and in Eric Jennings, "Remembering 'Other' Losses: The Temple du Souvenir Indochinois of Nogent-sur-Marne," History and Memory 15, no. 1 (2003): 5-48, see 7.
57. See Tai, "Remembered Realms";
58. Eric Jennings, "Monuments to Frenchness? The Memory of the Great War and the Politics of Guadeloupe's Identity, 1914-1945," French Historical Studies 21, no. 4 (1998): 561-92;
59. and Zeynep Çelik, "Colonial/Postcolonial Intersections: Lieux de mémoire in Algiers," Historical Reflections. Réflexions historiques 28, no. 2 (2002): 143-62. Other Africanist works
60. that build on Nora include Marc Michel, "Mémoire Officielle: Discours et pratique coloniale le 14 Juillet et le 11 Novembre au Sénégal entre les deux guerres," Revue Française d'Histoire d'Outre-Mer 77, no. 287 (1990): 145-58;
61. Jean-Pierre Chrétien and Jean-Louis Triaud, eds., Histoire d'Afrique: Les enjeux de mémoire (Paris, 1999);
62. and Pier M. Larson, History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement: Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770-1822 (Portsmouth, N.H., 2000).
63. On the tensions between the local and the national in the building of memorials, as well as the meaning of "local" in the administrative context, see Sherman, Construction, chap. 5, esp. 218-19.
64. Eric Jennings has studied one metropolitan site that was designed to commemorate the French presence in Southeast Asia, and, just as significantly, its inverse; see Jennings, "Remembering 'Other' Losses."
65. Much recent work on French colonialism is devoted to the explication of these and other categories. See Emmanuelle Saada, "The Empire of Law: Dignity, Prestige, and the 'Colonial Situation," French Politics, Culture, and Society 20, no. 2 (2002): 98-120;
66. Saada, "La République des indigènes," in Vincent Duclert and Christophe Prochasson, eds., Dictionnaire Critique de la République (Paris, 2002), 364-70.
67. Some of the best of this scholarship recognizes that even categories emerge from places with their own histories. See Laure Blevis, "La citoyenneté française au miroir de la colonisation: Étude des demandes de naturalisation des 'sujets français' en Algérie coloniale," Genèses 53 (2003): 25-47;
68. and the seminal work of Ann Laura Stoler, collected in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, Calif., 2002).
69. On colonial workers, see Tyler Stovall, "The Color Line behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France during the Great War" AHR 103, no. 3 (1998): 737-69;
70. on soldiers from across the empire, see Claude Carlier and Guy Pedroncini, eds., Les Troupes Coloniales dans la Grande Guerre (Paris, 1997);
71. and Richard Fogarty, "Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918" (PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2002).
72. On soldiers from North and sub-Saharan Africa, see Anthony Clayton, France, Soldiers, and Africa (London, 1988).
73. e siècle (Geneva, 1981);
74. and Driss Maghraoui, "The Moroccan Colonial Soldiers: Between Selective Memory and Collective Memory," in Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, ed., Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib: History, Culture, and Politics (New York, 2000). Note that North Africans were not part of la Coloniale; they composed l'Armée d'Afrique.
75. On the French West African war effort, the key work is Marc Michel, L'Appel à l'Afrique: Contributions et Réactions à l'effort de guerre en A.O.F., 1914-1919 (Paris, 1982),
76. recently republished in a modestly revised version as Les Africains et la grande guerre: L'appel à l'Afrique, 1914-1918 (Paris, 2003).
77. See also Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857-1960 (Portsmouth, N.H., 1991), 25-46 and below;
78. Joe Harris Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War (Portsmouth, N.H., 1999);
79. and Bakari Kamian, Des tranchées de Verdun à l'église Saint-Bernard: 80,000 combattants maliens au secours de la France (1914-1918 et 1939-1945) (Paris, 2001), chaps. 3 and 4.
80. Figures are drawn from Michel, Appel, 404-408.
81. See also Conklin, Mission, chap. 5.
82. Michel, Appel, 404.
83. Not all of these men would serve in Europe. Note that Michel's figures are cited incorrectly in Echenberg Colonial Conscripts, 46.
84. This argument has most recently been made by Mahir Saul and Patrick Royer, West African Challenge to Empire: Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anti-Colonial War (Athens, Ohio, 2001).
85. Interview with the author, Commandant L. Baron, Aix-en-Provence, October 9, 1998.
86. Two recent studies of the place of the colonies in the popular imagination in France are Chafer and Sackur, eds., Promoting the Colonial Idea;
87. and Elizabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000).
88. See also Jean de La Guérivière, Les Fous d'Afrique: Histoire d'une passion française (Paris, 2001);
89. and William H. Schneider, An Empire for the Masses: The French Popular Image of Africa, 1870-1900 (Westport, Conn., 1982).
90. René Massip, "Le Musée des Troupes de Marine," Revue Historique des Armées 151 (1983): 116-19, see 116.
91. There were 7,742 people identified as "French" in the AOF in 1921; Raymond Leslie Buell, The Native Problem in Africa, 2 vols. (New York, 1928), 1: 925.
92. Michel, Appel, chaps. 17, 18.
93. As the number of tirailleurs in France increased in 1917 and 1918, camps opened to accommodate them in towns other than Fréjus; Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom, 104-106.
94. In contemporary African French, the term hivernage refers to the rainy season, which in the Sahel extends from June to September.
95. Alphonse Séché, Les Noirs: D'après des documents officielles (Paris, 1919), 236-47.
96. Lucie Cousturier, Des inconnus chez moi (Paris, 1920), 215. All translations are those of the author.
97. Cousturier, Des inconnus chez moi, 143-44;
98. see also Cousturier, Mes inconnus chez eux, 2 vols. (Paris, 1925), 1: 66.
99. Reports, Contrôleur des troupes Sénégalaises Logeay, sur les Batallions Sénégalais stationés dans les Camps de Saint-Raphaël, Fréjus, et Formations sanitaires, March and September 1918; see also Report of February 14, 1918. All in sub-series 4D, dossier 8g (hearafter, 4D89), Archives Nationales du Senegal (hereafter, ANS).
100. Joe Lunn, " 'Les races guerrières': Racial Preconceptions in the French Military about West African Soldiers during the First World War," Journal of Contemporary History 34, no. 4 (1999): 517-36.
101. Kamian, Des tranchées de Verdun, 122.
102. Michel, Appel, 326-30.
103. Georges Labouré, "Un monument aux troupes noires," La Revue indigène 17, nos. 165-66 (1922): 249-54.
104. This was the most significant monument to African troops in interwar France. See Serge Barcellini, "Les Monuments en hommage aux combattants de la 'Grande France' (Armée d'Afrique et Armée Coloniale)," in Carlier and Pedroncini, Les Troupes Coloniales.
105. "A la mémoire des tirailleurs noirs," Bulletin du Comité de l'Afrique Française, August 1924,
106. and "Pour les héros de l'armée noire," Annales Coloniales, July 15, 1924, Agence de la France d'outre-mer (hereafter AgeFOM), carton 389, dossier 13 bis (hereafter 389/13b), CAOM.
107. Jennings, "Monuments to Frenchness?," 588.
108. Note, "Souscriptions diverses en vue d'ériger des monuments aux morts de la Guerre en AOF" (n.d., 1921?), laffpol 543, CAOM.
109. See, for example, Labouré, "Un monument aux troupes noires."
110. On the revolts, see Saul and Royer, West African Challenge;
111. and on recruitment, see Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts, chaps. 3 and 4;
112. Michel, Appel, chaps. 3, 4, and 6;
113. Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom, chap. 2.
114. Note, "Souscriptions diverses," CAOM.
115. At the time, Dakar was capital of AOF, while Saint-Louis was the capital of the colonies of Senegal and Mauritania. Two monuments were installed in Dakar, one in 1924 and another, sponsored by Diagne, in 1929; Michel Africains et la grande guerre, 241-42.
116. The memorial in Saint-Louis was not inaugurated until 1939. Armée généralités, no. 303, "Sénégal, la fête du 14 juillet à St-Louis," July 27, 1939, AgeFOM 389/13b, CAOM. Such monuments would gradually become common sights in colonial capitals and in some African towns.
117. On some of Paul Moreau-Vauthier's metropolitan activities, see Sherman, Construction, 185.
118. Inauguration du Monument élevé à Dakar À la gloire des Troupes noires ... Monument élevé à Bamako Aux Héros de l'Armée noire ..., Pamphlet, (Dakar, n.d., 1924?).
119. Inauguration du Monument.
120. The governor's comments support Sherman's point that such ceremonies function as "idealizing representations of the communities they seek to shape." Sherman, Construction, 264, emphasis added.
121. Michel Larchain, "L'Hommage aux Morts: Deux manières de le rendre, une bonne et une mauvaise," La dépêche coloniale et maritime, July 16, 1921;
122. and "Statuomanie africaine,"La dépêche coloniale et maritime, January 26, 1921.
123. The colonial administration consistently opposed recently demobilized tirailleurs who sought to remain in the capital cities rather than return to their villages of origin. However, whether or not the former tirailleurs should be expelled from urban areas by force was a matter of some dispute, beginning in 1917; see the exchange between Governor-General François-Joseph Clozel and Lieutenant
124. Governor of Haut Sénégal-Niger Raphael Antonetti in sub-series 3n, dossier 243 (hereafter, 3N243), Fonds Ancien, (hereafter, FA), Archives Nationales du Mali, Bamako (hereafter, ANM). Into the 1920s, veterans and soldiers' wives or widows were sometimes given money to leave Bamako for their communities of origin, which in most cases were rural villages; see files of the Comité d'Assistance aux Troupes Noires in 2N85FA, ANM. As former slaves, many were reluctant to return to their masters and wound up in towns instead. On tirailleurs as former slaves, see Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts, chap. 2;
125. Martin Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (New York, 1998), 80-83, chap. 13.
126. In 1898, the French captured Samori and exiled him to Gabon, where he died. On Samori, see Yves Person, Samori: Une révolution Dyula, 3 vols. (Nîmes, 1968-1975);
127. D. T. Niane, "The Origins of Samori's State," Mande Studies 3 (2001): 7-14;
128. Lanisiné Kaba, "Almami Samouri Touré within the West African Imperial Tradition," Mande Studies 3 (2001): 15-34.
129. A recent wave of monument building in Bamako may offer some additional insight. In the 1990s, Bamakois sometimes referred to the new statues as the then-president's boliw, or ritual power objects, implying with more than a hint of sarcasm that they were intended to secure his rule through occult practices. The term Samorikélékédenw is in current usage in Bamako.
130. My description of the dedication of the memorial is drawn from Edouard de Martonne, "Le Mémorial" du tirailleur Séné galais, Kati, le 13 Mai 1934 (Dakar, 1934).
131. De Martonne, Mémorial, 8.
132. Edouard de Martone, La fête du 2me[sic] Régiment de Tirailleurs Svnégalais, Kati, le 7 mai 1933 (Dakar, 1933), 15.
133. De Martonne, Mémorial, 5-6.
134. The text in full reads: "To the unknown tirailleur, to the dead of the Second R.T.S., to every Bandiougou, ever Samba-Taraoré [sic], every Mamadou-Fofana [sic], and [to all the] other brave men fallen for the conquest of the Soudan, as well as during the great war of 1914-1918 and in the theaters of foreign operations in Morocco, the Levant, and Madagascar, etc ... [sic] homage from their sons, their nephews, their successors." The opposite side bears the date of dedication, noting that it is the thirty-fourth anniversary of the creation of the regiment.
135. The previous year, de Martonne had, for example, described the unit's flag as the "fetish of the regiment," suggesting that it bore particular power; de Martonne, Fête, 4.
136. On the importance of naming in metropolitan France, see Daniel J. Sherman, "Bodies and Names: The Emergence of Commemoration in Interwar France," AHR 103, no. 2 (1998): 443-66.
137. In the African context, the colonial administration could not have named with any accuracy those who had been lost, nor would its agents have wanted to present a public accounting of the losses. Naming the African soldiers and auxiliaries killed in the Volta-Bani war, an anticolonial revolt sparked by conscription, would have been a more feasible undertaking, but colonial administrators advocating the erection of such a memorial in the town of San apparently never considered the option. Nevertheless, the names of European officers figured on their tombs; President, Oeuvre des Tombes (Soudan Français) to Commandant de Cercle (CdC), San, November 1927; response of CdC, San, December 23, 1927, B352-3FR, ANM. On the Volta-Bani war, see Saul and Royer, West African Challenge.
138. By way of contrast with the anonymity of colonial memory, Malian historian Bakari Kamian's recent book names 2,588 "Native soldiers from Haut-Séngal Niger who died for France and whose remains are not yet identified." Kamian intends to underscore the "blood debt" owed by France; Kamian, Des Tranchées de Verdun, 377-434.
139. As Kamian acknowledges, many of those names are likely to be pseudonyms or aliases; see also Gregory Mann, "What's in an Alias? Family Names, Individual Histories, and Historical Method in the Western Sudan," History in Africa 29 (2002): 309-20.
140. For instance, the original Mamadou Fofana was a legendary tirailleur from the time of the colonial conquest, but the name Mamadou (or Mahmadou) Fofana came to stand for a type of tirailleur; in 1928, the well-known French art critic Raymond Escholier published a novel bearing that name. The novel contains a brief discussion of a brothel in Fréjus, where the tirailleurs had encounters with European women; Raymond Escholier, Mahmadou Fofana 12th edn. (Paris, 1928), 235-38.
141. See, for example, Haut-Commissaire/ Gouverneur Général AOF (GGAOF) to Gov. Soudan (Cabinet), October 16, 1953, Fonds NuméNI sub-series ID dossier, 1484, ANM. In a similar vein, contemporary activists have staged demonstrations in defense of African immigrants at memorials to colonial troops in France; Gregory Mann, "Immigrants and Arguments in France and West Africa," Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 2 (2003): 362-85, see 365.
142. Colonel Peltier, "Historique du Drapeau, D.M.A. No. 3," Kati, March 21, 1957, sub-series 16H, dossier 327, Centre d'histoire et d'études des troupes d'outre-mer, Fréjus (hereafter, CHETOM).
143. Interview by Radio Mali with Chief of Staff Abdoulaye Soumaré, printed in L'Essor (Hebdo.), October 22, 1962 .
144. See also Vincent Joly, "La fin de la présence militaire française au Mali," Revue Historique des Armées 218 (2000): 39-54.
145. Halla Linker, Three Tickets to Timbuktu (New York, 1966), 258-59.
146. Bulletin de renseignements du conseiller militaire près de l'ambassade de France au Mali, November 5, 1961, no. 2053/SC, sub-series 10T, dossier 701, Service Historique de l'Armée de Terre, France (hereafter, SHAT).
147. Barcellini, "Monuments," 132-33 and 151-52;
148. M. Rives and R. Dietrich, Héros méconnus (1914-1918, 1939-1945): Mémorial des combattants d'Afrique Noire et de Madagascar (Paris, 1990), 115.
149. Dakar's 1923 monument, known as "Demba and Dupont" for its two figures, one African and one French, has been removed to a less prominent place and is now in the cemetery where President Léopold Sédar Senghor was buried in 2001; Annie Thomas, "Senghor reposera au côté des tirailleurs sénégalais," Agence France Presse, December 24, 2001.
150. Although later in the war the German army destroyed other memorials for scrap metal, the 1996 plaque states that "the occupier destroyed the 'Monument to the Blacks' out of racial hatred"; Barcellini, "Monuments," 132 and 151-52.
151. In the immediate wake of independence, other monuments to colonial troops were dedicated in Amiens, Châteauneuf-sur-Loire, and elsewhere in France; see Barcellini, "Monuments" and 1K354, SHAT.
152. My reading of this statue's visual cues differs substantially from that of William Kidd in "Representation or Recuperation? The French Colonies and 1914-1918 War Memorials," in Chafer and Sackur, Promoting the Colonial Idea, see 192-93.
153. Chef du service de contrôle et d'assistance aux indigènes à M. le GG de l'Indochine, Hanoi (Tonkin), December 26, 1923, Minute, Service de liaison avec les originaires des territoires français d'outre-mer (hereafter, SLOTFOM) carton 11, folio 1 (hereafter, 11/1), CAOM.
154. See also René Massip, "Le Rôle de l'E.F.O.R.T.D.M. dans la formation des cadres africains," Revue Historique des Armées 151 (1983): 96-101, see 98.
155. Ministère des Colonies, Direction des Services militaires, "Renseignements sur les effectifs militaires indigènes en service en AOF, en France ou en dehors de leur pays d'origine, en 1913 et 1926," January 8, 1928, AgeFOM 389/13b, CAOM. West African civilians, as well as those from other colonies, were the subjects of surveillance by the Ministry of Colonies' SLOTFOM from 1916 to 1954;
156. SLOTFOM recognized that its own figures were unreliable, but they can be found in "Indigènes de l'AOF en résidence en France au 8 Avril 1924." "Note pour le Secrétariat Général du Conseil Supérieur des Colonies," SLOTFOM 6/9, November 29, 1926;
157. and "Nombre approximatif des indigènes travaillant en France et classement par colonie d'origine," June 6, 1932, all in SLOTFOM 6/9, CAOM.
158. Edouard de Martonne, "La Verité sur les tirailleurs Sënëgalais," Outre-Mer 7, no. 1 (March 1935): 27-45, see 28.
159. "Les tirailleurs coloniaux aux inondations," Revue des troupes coloniales (1930): 90-92
160. (reprinted from La Petite Gironde, March 20, 1930).
161. See also de Martonne, "Verité," 39,
162. and Colonel Jean Charbonneau, Balimatoua et Compagnie: Zigzags à travers le vaste Empire Français (Paris, 1934), 247.
163. De Martonne, "Vérité," 39.
164. Séché, Noirs, 79.
165. Paul Catrice, "L'emploi des troupes indigènes et leur séjour en France," Etudes: Revue Catholique d'Intérêt Général 20 (1931): 387-409, see 402.
166. Rapport d'Inspection de M. Dupuy au Resident Supérieur, Chef du Service de Contrôle et d'Assistance en France des Indigènes des Colonies, "Centres militaires de Grasse et de Fréjus," 1924;
167. SLOTFOM 1/10, CAOM.
168. It is not clear that the mosque was used for prayer, but such was the governor-general's intention. GGAOF, Direction du Cabinet Militaire to Lieutenant Governor's, May 11, 1928, no. 269 CM, 2N53FR, ANM.
169. GGAOF, Direction du Cabinet Militaire to Lieutenant Governors, May 11, 1928, no. 269 CM, 2N53FR, ANM.
170. See also Catrice, "L'emploi."
171. "Manifestation au cimitière du camp Gallieni, à Fréjus," La Voix des Nègres 1 (January 1927).
172. On the activities of Senghor and his fellow African radicals, see Philippe Dewitte, Les mouvements nègres en France, 1919-1939 (Paris, 1985);
173. J. S. Spiegler, "Aspects of Nationalist Thought among French-Speaking West Africans" (PhD dissertation, Nuffield College, Oxford University, 1968).
174. The Dahomeyan radical Louis Hunkanrin had also worried his commanders when he was stationed in the Fréjus-St. Raphaël area immediately after the war; Guy-Landry Hazoume, Jean Suret-Canale, et al., La Vie et l'Oeuvre de Louis Hunkanrin: Suivi de deux écrits de Louis Hunkanrin (Cotonou, 1977), 154.
175. Agent Désiré, report of March 30, 1926, SLOTFOM 2/4, CAOM.
176. See reports of agent Désiré in SLOTFOM 2/4, CAOM
177. and Désiré, report of March 26, 1926, SLOTFOM 3/112, CAOM.
178. Désiré, report of November 2, 1926, SLOTFOM 2/4, CAOM.
179. GGAOF Carde to Ministre des Colonies, Direction des Affaires Politiques, First Bureau, October 27, 1927, no. 367apa, SLOTFOM 3/134, CAOM.
180. Désiré, report of November 13, 1926, SLOTFOM 2/4, CAOM. Lucie Cousturier died in 1925.
181. Senghor died on November 25, 1927;
182. La Race Nègre 1, no. 5 (May 1928).
183. According to Nancy Lawler, this complaint eventually made its way to the minister of war; Lawler, Soldiers of Misfortune: Ivoirien Tirailleurs of World War II (Athens, Ohio, 1992), 90, n. 24.
184. Rapport du Lt. Sekou Koné ... au Gén. Commandant le GOC [sic] à Montpellier, May 20, 1946;
185. Rapport Confidentiel, no author (Lt. Aho?), September 10, 1945, SLOTFOM 14/2, CAOM.
186. On the photographer, see also Note of Renseignements Géné raux, Draguinan, March 7, 1955, Centre des Archives Contemporains (CAC, Fontainebleau) 0019850087, article 9.
187. Rapport du Lt. Sekou Koné, May 24, 1946, no number, SLOTFOM 14/2, CAOM.
188. Rapport confidentiel, no author (Lt. Aho?), September 10, 1945;
189. also, Rapport du Lt. Koné, May 20, 1946, SLOTFOM 14/2, CAOM.
190. "Copie de la lettre adressée le 21-9-45 par les Sénégalais de quelques centres de rapatriement à Monsieur le Chef du Gouvernement Français," appendix to Fernand Poujoulat, "Evolution de la mentalité des tirailleurs Sénégalais au cours de la guerre 1939-1945," Mémoire, Ecole Nationale de la France d'Outre-Mer (ENFOM), 1945-1946, CAOM.
191. Poujoulat, "Evolution."
192. See also Georges Pujol, "Nos soldats noirs d'aujourd'hui," Mémoire, ENFOM, 1945-1946;
193. and Echenberg Colonial Conscripts, 99-104.
194. Jacques Prévert, "Etranges Etrangers," in La Pluie et le beau temps (1955; Paris, 1981), 30.
195. éme République (Paris, 1982), 157.
196. See Massip, "Rôle," 100.1 have altered Massip's transcription. A soldier who trained there in the 1950s recalled that he and his comrades were free to go into town on the weekends but were prevented from doing so by the amount of homework their officers deliberately assigned on Fridays, due the following Monday morning; interview with the author, el-hajj Nianson Coulibaly, Koutiala (Mali), February 11, 1998.
197. "Catalogue des Films du SCA (Service Cinématographique des Armées)," 17G520v143, ANS.
198. L'Ancien Combattant Soudanais, issues of December 1959, January and February 1960.
199. Such charitable giving by colonial subjects for metropolitan causes was not new; see Jennings, "Monuments to Frenchness?"
200. Other exceptions included a small number of beneficiaries of individual ministerial decisions who had maintained French citizenship, and a scattering of trainees at other military schools. Le Ministre des Armées to G.G. Militaire de Paris, Metz, Lyon, Gén. Commandant les 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10 Région Militaire, etc., August 11, 1964, no. 10.443/EMAT/1.ES, 14H127, SHAT.
201. Général-adjoint OM au chef d'état-major général des armées, Note à M. le Ministre des Armées (CM), December 5, 1960, no. 5478/BOM/3/SC, 14H216, SHAT.
202. Massip, "Musée."
203. On the evolution of that relationship since 1994, see Tony Chafer, "Franco-African Relations: No Longer so Exceptional?" African Affairs 101 (2002): 343-63.
204. Mann, "Immigrants and Arguments"; interview with the author, Col. Maurice Rives, Paris, April 29, 2004.
205. These networks were in turn distinct from those of Paris-based radical or communist African intellectuals of the interwar period. Ousmane Sembène, interview with Samba Gadjigo, Contributions in Black Studies 11 (1992-1993): 75-94, see 76.
206. Catherine Hodeir, Stratégies d'Empire: Le grand patronat colonial face à la décolonisation (Paris, 2003);
207. Chafer, "Franco-African Relations";
208. Alexis Spire, Sociologie historique des pratiques administratives à l'égard des étrangers en France (1945-1975) (doctoral thesis, Université de Nantes: 2003).
209. Jennings analyzes a similar circumstance around Nogent-sur-Marne in "Remembering 'Other' Losses."
210. The memorial commemorates both World War II and the anticolonial war of 1946-1954.
211. Michel Bodin, Les Africains dans la guerre d'Indochine, 1947-1954 (Paris, 2000), 6, 18, and 172.
212. Revue trimestrielle (hereafter, RT), 3' trim. 1951, GSF to HCGG, November 20, 1951, no. 642/APAS;
213. RT, 4' trim., 1951, GSF to HC, Februrary 4, 1952, no. 61/APAS;
214. and RT, draft (n.d.), IE3FR, ANM.
215. See also Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts, (1991), chap. 5.
216. Message du Conseiller d'Arboussier aux Prisonniers de Guerre Africains aux Vietnam. Bulletin des écoutes Radio Viet Minch [sic], October 15, 1952, no. 1749, laffpol 2111/11, CAOM;
217. and Renseignement, February 12, 1948, no. 167/C SU. Soudan no. 503, 2N44FR, ANM.
218. See, among other documents, Note: Chef de Bataillon, chef de poste, SSDNFA/G/AOF/Togo, July 25, 1955, no. 3190, secret; 17G594v152/1, ANS.
219. B. H., "Le Mémoire encerclée: Nécropole nationale, Fréjus," Technique et Architecture, 405 (December 1992): 110-11.
220. See also "La Nécropole de Fréjus," Le Moniteur-Architecture-AMC, 42-43 (June-July 1993): 24-5;
221. Gilles Davoine, "Lieu de culte oecuménique," Le Moniteur-Architecture-AMC, 77 (February 1996): 46-7;
222. and B. H., "D'Or et de Silence," Technique et Architecture, 428 (November 1996): 60-1.
223. The remains of civilians have been included "on an exceptional basis" (à titre exceptionnel). Ministère des Anciens combattants et victimes de guerre, Le mémorial des guerres en Indochine, pamphlet (Paris, n.d., 1998?).
224. The civilians do not bear the administrative status, "died for France" (morts pour la France), and their cemetery was funded by the Ministry of the Interior; "La Nécropole de Fréjus." See also David L. Schalk, "Of Memories and Monuments: Paris and Algeria, Fréjus and Indochina," Historical Reflections. Réflexions historiques 28, no. 2 (2002): 241-53, 251-53, discuss the memorial.
225. The memorial would be inaugurated on February 16, 1993. Philippe Rochelte, "Fréjus, capitale de 'l'Indo,' " Libération, February 16, 1993, 6.
226. See also, "Fréjus: La mémoire des soldats d'Indochine," Le Provencal, February 16, 1993, 24.
227. Ministère des Anciens combattants, Mémorial des guerres en Indochine. The pamphlet puns, as the anchor is the symbol of la Coloniale.
228. Barcellini, "Les Monuments," 121.
229. Jean-Claude Pomonti, "Les restes de vingt-cinq mille soldats français morts en Indochine vont être rapatriés," Le Monde, September 27, 1986, 5.
230. In 1986, the position of "secrétariat d'état à la francophonie" was created and a "francophone summit" was held. Since 1987, such summits have met biennially.
231. Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature (Durham, N.C., 1996), 151-52.
232. Sherman, "Arts and Sciences," 726. The internal quotes contain Norindr's words.
233. Despite the claims of Nicola Cooper in France in Indochina: Colonial Encounters (New York, 2001).
234. Sherman, "Arts and Sciences," 726.
235. See Florence Bernault, "The Political Shaping of Sacred Locality in Brazzaville, 1959-1997," in David M. Anderson and Richard Rathbone, eds., Africa's Urban Past (Portsmouth, N.H., 2000);
236. Janet Roitman, "The Garrison-Entrepôt," Cahiers d'études africaines 150-152 (1998): 297-329;
237. AbdouMaliq Simone, "On the Worlding of African Cities," African Studies Review 44, no. 2 (2001): 15-42;
238. Diouf, "Murid Trade Diaspora";
239. and MacGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga, Congo-Paris.
240. Stoler and Cooper, "Between Metropole and Colony";
241. Burton, After the Imperial Turn;
242. Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York, 2000).