Putting the history back into ethnicity: Enslavement, religion, and cultural brokerage in the construction of Mandinka/Jola and Ewe/Agotime identities in West Africa, c. 1650-1930

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Volumn 50, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 920-948

  Nugent, Paul ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL HISTORY; CULTURAL IDENTITY; ETHNIC GROUP; ETHNICITY; HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE; IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION; SOCIAL STATUS;

AFRICA;

EID: 53149128409     PISSN: 00104175     EISSN: 14752999     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S001041750800039X     Document Type: Article

References (120)

1. There is a parallel here with the debate about caste in India. For a revisionist take on caste in India, which focuses on the colonial crucible, see Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
2. The position adopted by Dirks in previous articles, and more extreme versions of colonial constructivism, are questioned by Susan Bayly who notes, "Caste has been for many centuries a real and active part of social life, and not just a self-serving orientalist fiction." She sees the colonial caste system as neither fabricated nor "a single static system... [that] has dominated Indian life since ancient times," a position broadly akin to the argument advanced here. See her The New Cambridge History of India IV.3: Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), quote p. 4.
3. Similarly, for an attempt to historicize communalism in India, rather than portraying it as a purely colonial product, see C. A. Bayly, "The Pre-History of Communalism," Modern Asian Studies 19, 2 (1985): 177-203.
4. John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 318.
5. Terence Ranger, "The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa," in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 211-62.
6. The literature on this subject is now vast, but some of the most important case studies are Terence Ranger, "Missionaries, Migrants and the Manyika: The Invention of Ethnicity in Zimbabwe," in Leroy Vail, ed., The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (London: James Currey, 1989)
7. J.D.Y. Peel, "The Cultural Work of Yoruba Ethnogenesis," in E. Tonkin, Maryon Macdonald, and Malcolm Chapman, eds., History and Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 1989)
8. H. Chimhundu, "Early Missionaries and the Ethnolinguistic Factor during the 'Invention of Tribalism' in Zimbabwe," Journal of African History 33, 1 (1992): 87-109
9. John Lonsdale, "The Moral Economy of Mau Mau: The Problem"
10. and "The Moral Economy of Mau Mau:WEalth, Poverty and Civic Virtue in Kikuyu Political Thought," both in Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, eds., Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (London: James Currey 1992), 265-314, 315-504
11. Justin Willis, "The Makings of a Tribe: Bondei Identities and History," Journal of African History 33, 1992: 191-208
12. David Killingray, "Imagined Martial Communities: Recruiting for the Military and the Police in Colonial Ghana, 1860-1960," in Carola Lentz and Paul Nugent, eds., Ethnicity in Ghana: The Limits of Invention (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 119-36
13. Paul Nugent, Smugglers, Secessionists and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier: The Lie of the Borderlands Since 1914 (Athens and Oxford: Ohio University Press and James Currey, 2002)
14. Dmitri van den Bersselaar, "Imagining Home: Migration and the Igbo Village in Colonial Nigeria," Journal of African History 46, 1 (2005): 51-73
15. Axel Harneit-Sievers, Constructions of Belonging: Igbo Communities and the Nigerian State in the Twentieth Century (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2006)
16. and Carola Lentz, Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press/International Africa Institute, 2006).
17. Terence Ranger, "The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of Colonial Africa," in Terence Ranger and Olufemi Vaughan, eds., Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-Century Africa (London: Macmillan, 1993), 62-111
18. and Thomas Spear, "Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa," Journal of African History 44, 1 (2003): 3-27.
19. This argument is presented in more detail in Carola Lentz and Paul Nugent, "Ethnicity in Ghana: A Comparative Perspective," in C. Lentz and P. Nugent, eds., Ethnicity in Ghana: The Limits of Invention (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 1-28.
20. The contribution of Sandra Greene to this same volume makes the point clearly. It is developed at greater length in Sandra Greene, Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe (Portsmouth and London: Heinemann and James Currey, 1996).
21. Anthony Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (London: Routledge, 1989), 102-4.
22. For an insightful account of the ways in which memory works over time, see the introduction to Rosalind Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
23. See also, Judy Rosenthal, Possession, Ecstacy and Law in Voodoo (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998).
24. On the ideological underpinnings of the Asante monarchy, see T. C. McCaskie, State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
25. Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade, 10, see also 4-5.
26. See, for example, Allen E. Howard and David E. Skinner, "Network Building and Political Power in Northwestern Sierra Leone, 1800-65," Africa 54, 2 (1984): 2-28.
27. Donald Wright, "What Do You Mean There Were No Tribes in Africa? Thoughts on Boundaries - and Related Matters - in Pre-Colonial Africa," History in Africa 26 (1999): 409-26.
28. In the words of Iliffe, "Early nineteenth-century Tanganyika was not inhabited by discrete, compact and identifiable tribes, each with a distinct territory, language, culture and political system... Normally one group merged imperceptibly into another" (Modern History, 8-9). For a very similar statement with respect to West Africa, see Carola Lentz, "Contested Identities: The History of Ethnicity in Northwestern Ghana," in C. Lentz and Paul Nugent, eds., Ethnicity in Ghana: The Limits of Invention (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 137-38.
29. Richard Jobson, The Golden Trade or a Discovery of the River Gambra and the Golden Trade of the Aethiopians (1st. ed. 1623; rev. ed. by Walter Rodney) (London: Dawsons, 1968).
30. Howard and Skinner, "Network Building."
31. It is also anachronistic for the reason that not all of those Europeans who visited and wrote about Africa can be said to have belonged to nation-states.
32. For an extended discussion of the problems with European labels, see Peter Mark, A Cultural, Economic, and Religious History of the Basse Casamance since 1500 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985), ch. 2.
33. Bakary Sidibé of the Oral History Division in Banjul has coordinated the collection of this important oral documentation.
34. In their run-down of the peoples of the Gambia, Arnold Hughes and David Perfect do not mention the Bainuks. See their book, A Political History of the Gambia, 1816-1994 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 12-24.
35. Christian Roche, Histoire de la Casamance: Conqueête et résistance, 1850-1920 (Paris: Karthala, 1985), 23.
36. He also referred to "Usol," which appears to indicate the village of Thionk-Essil. This would have been a Bainuk settlement before becoming Jola. Mark, A Cultural, Economic, and Religious History, 26-27. The term "Floup" is a source of some confusion because at times it has been taken to refer to a particular subgroup, while at others it has been used for all those we today call Jola.
37. Mark, A Cultural Economic and Religious History, 19
38. Roche, Histoire, 26.
39. Donald Wright, "Beyond Migration and Conquest: Oral Traditions and Mandinka Ethnicity in Senegambia," History in Africa 12 (1985): 335-48.
40. The full description is missing from De la Courbe's published account, but it is available through the plagiarized text of J. B. Labat in 1728. Olga F. Linares, "Deferring to Trade in Slaves: The Jola of Casamance, Senegal in Historical Perspective," History in Africa 14 (1987): 113-39, cite p. 20.
41. Roche, Histoire, 22-23.
42. Wright, "Beyond Migration," 336, refers to Mandinka traditions that claim a direct origin from Mali and others which refer to the settlers having come through Gabou.
43. Interview with Jerreh Demba et al., Kabadio, 19 Feb. 2004.
44. Jobson, The Golden Trade, 42-47.
45. Ibid., 47-48.
46. Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (London: E. Cave, 1738), 24.
47. Ibid., 52.
48. The trading networks of the Bainuk have been examined by George Brooks, Eurafricans in West Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford and Athens: James Currey and Ohio University Press, 2003), 44-49.
49. Alvares d'Almada referred to the Bainuk trade at Geregia in his account, dating from around 1570. Mark, A Cultural Economic and Religious History, 14-15.
50. Moore, Travels, 29.
51. Ibid., 30.
52. Ibid., 35-36.
53. On the strategies used to defend against enslavement in the sub-region, which included retreating into swampy areas and the building of fortifications, see Peter Mark, "Portuguese" Style and Luso-African Identity: Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002)
54. and Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003).
55. By way of an anecdote, Moore himself refers to the hostile reception accorded to a vessel that ran aground in the Casamance, a theme echoed in a number of Portuguese sources.
56. A detailed account of the deep-rooted impact of slave trading on one Jola society, based on shrine histories, is provided in Robert Baum, Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). The changing involvement of the Jola, traced through European sources, is provided by Linares, "Deferring to Trade," 113-39.
57. Olga Linares, Power, Prayer and Production: The Jola of Casamance, Senegal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
58. Moore, Travels, 36.
59. There is a lack of consensus on the etymological origins of the name "Jola." The anthropologist Louis-Vincent Thomas took "Di-ola" in the language of the Jola themselves to mean "all the visible living." Louis-Vincent Thomas, Les Diola; essai d'analyse fonctionnelle sur une population de Basse-Casamance, Mémoires de l'Institut Français d'Afrique Noire (Dakar: IFAN, 1958).
60. Mark suggests the name is rather of Wolof origin, but without providing any further explanation, in A Cultural, Economic and Religious History, 7.
61. But it is also widely believed that the name comes from Mandinka, where it means "someone who pays back." Jonathan Vaughan Smith, "The Jolas of Senegambia, West Africa: Ethnolinguistic Identity and Change across an International Border," Ph.D. thesis, University of Oregon, 1993, 157. This is the version I have repeatedly encountered in the field.
62. According to Lovejoy's estimates, 201,400 slaves were exported across the Atlantic from the Senegambia in the eighteenth century, as compared with 677,400 from the Gold Coast and 1,278,600 from the Bight of Benin (largely synonymous with the Slave Coast). Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), table 3.4, 50.
63. On the Volta River trade, see Marion Johnson, "Asante East of the Volta," Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana VIII, 1965
64. and D.J.E. Maier, Priests and Power: The Case of the Dente Shrine in Nineteenth-Century Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
65. Per Hernaes, Slaves, Danes and African Coast Society (Trondheim: University of Trondheim, Department of History, 1995), 33.
66. Père Labat, Voyage du Chevalier des Marchais en Guinée, isles voisines et Cayenne fait en 1725, 1726 et 1727 (4 vols.) (Paris, 1730).
67. For a measured assessment of the utility of such maps, see René Baesjou, "The Historical Evidence in Old Maps and Charts of Africa with Special Reference to West Africa," History in Africa 15 (1988): 1-83.
68. I am grateful for the advice of Ole Justesen on this specific point of detail. See also Daniel Hopkins, "Peter Thonning's Map of Danish Guinea and Its Use in Colonial Administration and Atlantic Diplomacy 1801-1890," Cartographica 35, 3-4 (1998): 99-122.
69. The British collected some data, which is preserved in the District Record Books, Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD), ADM 39/4/4, "District Record Book (Ho)."
70. Paul Nugent, Myths of Origin and the Origin of Myth: Local Politics and the Uses of History in Ghana's Volta Region, Working Papers on African Societies, no. 22 (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1997).
71. I adopt the time-scale of D.E.K. Amenumey, The Ewe in Pre-Colonial Times (Accra: Sedco, 1986), 11-12.
72. Sandra Greene, Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), 20.
73. For a survey, see Paul Nugent, "A Regional Melting Pot: The Ewe and Their Neighbours in the Ghana-Togo Borderlands," in Benjamin Lawrence, ed., A Handbook of Eweland: The Ewe of Togo and Benin (Accra: Woeli, 2005), 29-43.
74. Cornevin's timing of the movement of the main body of Agotimes to the period after 1776 does not correspond with the Danish records. Robert Cornevin, Histoire du Togo (Paris: Editions Berger-Levrault), 108.
75. Entry XI 84 for 5 May 1749, in Ole Justesen, ed., Danish Sources for the History of Ghana, 1657-1754 (Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, 2005), 766.
76. Sandra Greene, Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change, 37.
77. Entry XL 108, dated Nov. 1750, in Justesen, Danish Sources, 798.
78. Entry XI 116, dated 3 Feb. 1751, in ibid., 815.
79. Ray Kea, "Akwamu-Anlo Relations c. 1750-1813," Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana X (1969): 59.
80. It is claimed that before they began their inward migration the Agotime were involved in the salt trade from the Songhaw lagoon. Nene Noe Keteku, "Short History of the Agotimes" (unpub. MS in author's possession), 1-2.
81. Entry in "Introductory Remarks," listed under "Adampe" within "Dahomean or Slave Coast Languages," in Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle's Polyglotta Africana, Paul Hair and David Dalby, eds. (Graz: Akademische Druk, 1963), 4. "Panyarring" was a recognized procedure for recovering debts by seizing a debtor or his kinsmen. If the debt was not settled, the person might be sold as a slave.
82. I am grateful to Robin Law for confirmation on this point.
83. Greene, Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change, 75.
84. Keteku, "Short History."
85. It resurfaced in the run-up to the 2004 elections in Ghana when the creation of a new district, separate from Ho, led to a dispute over the site of its capital. The Adaklus insisted that because they were the landowners they should be granted the district capital. This was supposed to happen, but the decision was overturned and Kpetoe was selected instead. This produced a tremendous amount of ill feeling in which deep history came to the fore.
86. Cornevin, Histoire du Togo, 61. The author notes that the Adames came from the borders of Lake Aheme, having fled from Dahomean attacks. He also asserts that the Zukpe and Nyitoe people came from Lekpo on the Volta, but these villages deny that they are of the same origin. Nene Keteku refers to the Nyitoe people speaking a variant of Adaklu-Ewe, which may indicate that they were there when the Agotime arrived. Interview, Kpetoe, 26 Mar. 2001.
87. Keteku, "Short History," 7.
88. Ranger suggests the term "imagination" is not much of an improvement. See his "Invention of Tradition Revisited."
89. Symptomatic of this problem is the position outlined in Nicholas Dirks, "Introduction: Colonialism and Culture," in Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: Comparative Studies in Society and History Book Series, University of Michigan Press, 1992), 1-25.
90. Birgit Meyer brings this out particularly well in Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh and London: Edinburgh University Press for International Africa Institute, 1999).
91. On Sylla, see David Skinner, "Islam in Kombo: The Spiritual and Militant Jihad of Fode Ibrahim Ture," paper delivered at the African Studies Association conference, 1990.
92. See also Paul Nugent, "Cyclical History in the Gambia/Casamance Borderlands: Refuge, Settlement and Islam from 1880 to the Present," Journal of African History 48, 2 (2007): 221-43.
93. This is documented at length in Roche, Histoire, chs. 6-7.
94. National Archives of the Gambia, ARP 33/1, "Reports on Kombo, Foni and Kiang (1894-99)," Report on Kombo, Fogni and Kiang for 1898-1899 by Sitwell, Travelling Commissioner, 29 June 1899.
95. NAG ARP 33/2 "Reports on Kombo, Foni and Kiang (1900-01 and 1906-07)," Report from the Travelling Commissioner, Sangster, 26 Sept. 1901.
96. On Jola conversion, see Fay Leary, "Islam, Politics and Colonialism: A Political History of Islam in the Casamance Region of Senegal (1850-1914)," Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University, 1970
97. Olga Linares, "Islamic 'Conversion' Reconsidered," Cambridge Anthropology 11 (1986): 4-19
98. Mark, A Cultural, Economic and Religious History, ch. 6.
99. On the history of Christianity in the Gambia, see Martha Frederiks, We Have Toiled All Night: Christianity in the Gambia, 1456-2000 (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 2003).
100. Important biographical details on Mahfoudz are contained in the intelligence files that kept track of the movement and activities of marabouts across French West Africa: Archives Nationals du Senegal [ANS] 13G/384 "Casamance Affaires Politiques." On the surveillance of marabouts, see Christopher Harrison, France and Islam in West Africa, 1860-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
101. For further details, see Nugent, "Cyclical History."
102. ANS 13G/384, "Casamance Affaires Politiques," Rapport sur la situation politique de la Casamance et programme de desarmement et de mise en main de la population (19 Aug. 1918).
103. For a study that examines the impact of Islam on the division of labor, see Linares, Power, Prayer and Production. Her calculations of yields in more recent times suggested that they compared favorably with much of East and Southeast Asia prior to the Green Revolution (p. 23).
104. In his attempt to isolate specifically Jola characteristics in the 1950s, Thomas noted: "The Diola knows nothing about commerce in the strict sense, that it is to say the business of exchange. It is an occupation which, in his natural pride, he believes to be disgraceful, precisely because it exempts the one who lives from it (ayasa, alanora) from working in the fields." ("Le Diola ignore le commerce au sens strict, c'est- à-dire l'exploitation des échanges. C'est une occupation que, dans sa fierté naturelle, il croit indigne de lui, précisément parce qu'elle dispense celui qui en vit (ayasa, alanora) du travail des champs.") Thomas, Les Diola, 283.
105. The centrality of migration to Igbo identity formation has been noted by Harneit-Sievers, Constructions of Belonging, ch. 5
106. and by Dmitri van den Bersselaar, "Imagining Home."
107. A heightened sense of Jola sub-nationalism in the Casamance only surfaced in the period after Senegalese independence. But what is perhaps worth underlining about the Mouvement des Forces Démocratiques de la Casamance (MFDC) is that its target was never the Mandinka, who it endeavored to recruit into its guerrilla army, but the Wolof of the northern half of Senegal. In that sense, the positive interaction between Jola and Mandinka at the start of the century has had enduring consequences.
108. Nugent, Smugglers, 21-23.
109. For a detailed treatment, see William Hudson Bryars, "The Evolution of British Imperial Policy on the Volta, 1857-1897: From Informal Opportunism to Formal Occupation," Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1994.
110. Claude Welch, Dream of Unity: Pan-Africanism and Political Unification in West Africa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 42.
111. Welch, Dream of Unity, 47-51. Most of the business of the church was conducted in Ewe, and the Bible was translated in 1912.
112. Meyer, Translating the Devil, 57-60.
113. For a more general history of the Bremen mission, see Werner Ustorf, Bremen Missionaries in Togo and Ghana, 1847-1900 (Legon: Christian Council of Ghana, 2002).
114. Greene, Sacred Sites, 29.
115. Welch, Dream of Unity, 61
116. Benjamin Lawrance, Locality, Mobility and "Nation": Peri-Urban Colonialism in Togo's Eweland, 1900-1960 (Rochester, N.Y.: Rochester University Press, 2007), ch. 1.
117. Ibid., ch. 5
118. Nugent, Smugglers, ch. 5.
119. Ibid., 166-68.
120. Even in those minority communities that played an important role in the history of the Bremen mission, notably Avatime and Akpafu, Ewe took precedence.