The use of colonial census data on religious conversion in historical analysis is often fraught with methodological problems. What, at first glance, might appear to have been profound structural transformations of society may in part be illusions created by changes in the census apparatus, or data collection process, itself. In this paper I will discuss how a colonial census was conducted and how local rural peoples were active agents in enumerating their own (official) religious identities. Thus, how did changes in this central tool of bureaucratic knowledge and power distort history? As an overarching critique, I suggest that the problem of the census as an exercise of colonial bureaucratic power in Africa has hardly elicited comment. Thus I suggest that the census may be a potentially fruitful avenue of historical inquiry in examining in closer detail the primary “enumerative modality” of colonial forms of knowledge.

I will present examples from the history of French colonial southern Mali during the postwar period in arguing that the colonial census was a complex social and political process that must be ‘deconstructed’ if we are to make critical use of such state-generated numbers. Southern Mali occupied what was believed, in the French imagination, to be an active frontier of Islamization, separating the “Muslim” Sahel (and Sahara) from the “fetishist” forest regions to the south. This religious frontier status elicited mixed views. As Jean-Loup Amselle has argued, colonial officials in southern Mali adopted a highly ambiguous stance toward Islam, “going from one extreme to another, sometimes seeing Islam everywhere, sometimes nowhere.”