Hostname: page-component-6898cfcb55-th4rj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-11T18:03:01.050Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Histories of a Conspiracy, Zinder, 1906: Rethinking Colonial Occupation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2021

Camille Lefebvre
Camille Lefebvre*
Affiliation:
CNRS-IMAF
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

By tracing the history of what French colonizers considered a conspiracy against them, this paper seeks to reconstruct the complexity of the first phase of colonial occupation in Zinder (Niger) during the early twentieth century. It draws on three types of source, corresponding to three successive moments and to three different perspectives on the event: the archives of the colonial investigation, carried out by French officers to justify their action; the personal journals and notes of the interpreter Moïse Landeroin, who did not believe the accusations and opposed his superiors; and finally the letters written in Arabic by one of the defendants, Malam Yaro, to plead his innocence. These letters enable a new reading of what took place in 1906 by highlighting the social intricacies of Zinder society. Using more diverse sources thus makes it possible to reconstruct the different timelines of the occupation and to reveal the blind spots of a purely colonial interpretation of the event.

Information

Type
Temporalities of the Colonial Moment
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 72 , Issue 4 , December 2017, pp. 567 - 604
Copyright
© Éditions EHESS 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

This article was translated from the French by Monica Biberson and edited by Robin Emlein, Chloe Morgan, and Stephen Sawyer.

*

The research for this article was conducted during four trips to Niger: Niamey in February 2015, July 2015, and April 2016, and Zinder in February 2017. I would like to thank the sarki of Damagaram, Aboubakar Oumarou Sanda, for having made my research in Zinder possible, as well as the director of the National Archives of Niger (Archives nationales du Niger, hereafter “ANN”), Boukari Habou, and the director of the Departmental Archives of Zinder (Archives départementales de Zinder, hereafter “ADZ”), Mato Marafa. I would also like to thank André Salifou, Mahaman Tidjani Alou, Djibo Hamani, Zakari Maïkorema, and Roufai Ali for their invaluable help and clarifications on Niger’s history, as well as my friend Malah Abdou who accompanied me during my investigations in Zinder in 2010 and 2017, obtained copies of documents concerning the 1906 events from Zinder’s departmental archives in December 2015, and worked with me on the recordings in Hausa. However, the present author is solely responsible for the analyses presented in this article.