In Des Pays au Crépuscule: le moment de l'occupation coloniale (Sahara-Sahel) Camille Lefebvre asks an important question: how did colonial domination begin? Pursuing this question with rigorous method and engaging prose, Lefebvre demonstrates that it is possible to write an African-centered history of colonial conquest (she prefers the term ‘occupation’) at a human scale that encompasses the history of emotions and private life.
Although its title — Countries at Dusk — is expansive, in many ways the book is a tale of two cities, Zinder and Agadez. They make an interesting pair. A mostly Hausa-speaking island in a Tamasheq sea, Agadez sits some 450 kilometers almost due north of Zinder in the Nigerien Sahara. Its sultanate dates from the fifteenth century, but it was a deliberately decentralized and disempowered one, making the city a commercial center more than a political capital. The Sahelian town of Zinder, by contrast, changed dramatically beginning in the 1850s as the value of its primary exports — leather and ostrich feathers — rose. Within a few decades, it had disentangled itself from a fading Bornou to become an independent political actor, the sultanate of Damagaram. Within Zinder, a classic duality of power existed between the birni, the fortifications representing political and military power (where one spoke Hausa and wrote in Arabic), and the zango, where the caravans and the commercial establishments clustered (and where many spoke Tamasheq, while writing in Arabic or ajami). Hausa was the lingua franca in this polyglot, socially stratified community. Across the Sahel, slavery had become endemic, and the sultanate raided peasant and pastoralist communities, capturing non-Muslims. Those unfortunates who were not sent into or across the Sahara were often integrated into the urban community from below, via domestic and, in many cases, reproductive labor. The Zinder-Agadez axis was a single segment of a commercial thoroughfare that ran north to Ghadames and on to Mediterranean markets and beyond, but Lefebvre sees the two towns as much more than points on a line. They were cosmopolitan centers in a heterogeneous, multilingual, and tumultuous world that was about to be upended. Lefebvre lays all this out beautifully in the first chapters of her book. The text then takes a dramatic and remarkable turn.
Lefebvre's story unfolds in a brief moment — 1898 to 1906 — when the colonial ‘night’ fell as rapidly as evening does in lower latitudes. In previous years French military officers, like other European travelers, had met a hostile reception while crossing through the country. Yet by adopting the language and rhetorical gestures — and in at least one case, the practice — of Islam, they began to represent themselves in diplomatic terms as potential allies. Rival factions within the city-states began to associate with these heavily armed foreigners in order to gain the upper hand in complex regional struggles that the French could not fully grasp. Fixated on Chad, the French officers were thought to be temporary visitors passing through on their way east. However, their presence enabled them to exploit, or sometimes merely to exacerbate, already acute tensions internal to a society based on slavery. The camp they established on the outskirts of Zinder, peopled by tirailleurs, their wives, and their dependents, became a third pole of power in the town, with all the intimacy that emerges amongst small groups of people in close quarters. Then in 1905, everything accelerated.
Although a decree from Dakar abolished slavery, or at least refused to recognize it, what happened locally mattered more. In 1905–6, an influential set of Muslim scholars began to suggest that colonial rule could be recognized as legitimate, while the sultan of Agadez solicited French forces as allies against the Kel Fadei and other Tuareg groups. In Zinder, a eunuch, bellama Ousman, used the influence he had gained amongst French officers to accuse the sultan and his allies of a plot to murder the foreigners. In response, the French officers deposed their former hosts and sent them south into exile. Ousman appropriated the sarki's title, claimed ownership over many of the people he had enslaved, and made other royal slaves village chiefs. Lefebvre argues that French actions upended an intricate, polyvalent, and hierarchical social world. Such social upheaval was the most profound effect of occupation.
Lefebvre's goal is to understand this moment for what it was, rather than as either the end of African autonomy or the beginning of colonial rule. Taken on its own terms, this moment is neither a ‘before’ nor an ‘after’. Its richness and complexity emerge from the author's methodological finesse in weighing her evidence, her skills in Arabic and Hausa, and her remarkably wide and intimate body of sources: bundles of correspondence in both their French and Arabic versions (allowing comparison); the personal papers of various French officers, including many intimate confessions between them; texts collected by a long-serving interpreter, Moïse Landeroin; oral histories collected over the decades by Nigerien and foreign scholars; an astonishing number of photographs and drawings; and — as a jewel in the archival crown — a pair of letters between two lovers, Captain Henri Gouraud and Ouma (sic) Dicko. Their story alone is worth the price of admission. One can only hope to see work this rich in English and in paperback.
