Archival Utopias

In the early 2000s, I decided to try and recover the ways in which Africans and colonialists struggled about the realm of the “sacred,” negotiating the interpretation, location and boundaries of various forms of agency they believed in. The topic seemed elusive and ill-fitted for conventional archives, and since a lot of my questions had been prompted by the present, I needed to rely on field research. If nothing else, the quest helped me understand that no radical solution of continuity affect our research strategies after 1960.

Somewhat frightened by the task at hand, and loyal to my cannibal instinct for papered information, I again sought refuge in whatever written archives I could get in, roaming through piles of missionary records, administrative and economic reports, pamphlets, and novels. Rather than a fleshed-out historical script, however, the stacks yielded a somewhat predictable groundwork that mapped out broad intellectual and political trends but hinted very little on the fluid imaginaries of power and agency I was after. For instance, scattered in the national archives of Gabon, the judicial records of local tribunals were neither complete nor ordered in any logical way. After months of research, I had a laughingly thin dossier of perhaps forty cases over eighty years of French rule, a paltry slice of judicial conflicts in the colony where most had never come to the attention of colonialists to begin with. These were piecemeal affairs, some existing only as a brief mention in a report, others as a single, isolated questioning of a witness transcribed in French. The main thing that this meager harvest could help me draw was a thin map of “witchcraft” incidents that attested to the composite nature of the criminal category in French legal imagination, including “tiger-men” murders, profanation of corpses and cannibal repasts. It showed that the incidents had occurred fairly evenly across the colony. But only a few could help me glimpse into moments of crisis and confrontation, when the French and Gabonese systems of moral values came together around a concrete case of transgressive acts.

Covered in the dust of brittle paper and smelly documents, I had nothing more than a thin chain of clues to back my narrative. The past I wanted to recover or, rather, to understand, was missing enormous sequences. Pressing questions could not be answered. Entire layers of information and atmosphere were absent. I knew that the field would not complete these. On the contrary, it would make what I already had seem pointless or confusing. In the end, the structural sloppiness of the colonial archives, rich as they seemed to be, dictated the composite nature of the materials backing the book. One chapter, for instance, ended up being almost entirely based on published sources. Another used only field research conducted in southern Gabon.

But aren’t historians better served by inadequate and deficient archives? Never once did a repository fully answer our quest.^{Footnote 6} “If only I had such information, I could finally understand this,” is not a real researcher’s complaint. Our talent is to be able, from piecemeal traces, to narrate a fleshed-out, elucidatory story. Our paradox is to use incomplete and fragmentary traces to understand broad patterns and timelines in a past that remains, by definition, unreachable. More to the point, the goal is to give it some meaning, and by the same token, highlight its significant relation with the present. If this interpretative art needs to be fueled by evidence, it hardly depends on the comprehensiveness of the record.

Only Umberto Eco or Jorge Borges would have the talent to write this nightmare. Yet imagine a perfect archive.^{Footnote 7} All the records of a nation, significant or less significant, are preserved in this utopian library. Sources are flawlessly catalogued and easily accessible thanks to efficient and powerful computers. Both the search engines and the documents are available, free of charge, to the public. On demand, one can quickly obtain boxes of carefully triaged documents and copy them for free. Thanks to their enormous capacity, the computers can triangulate written records with other sources, oral testimonies, published and unpublished fictions, cartoons, music, teleserials, everything. Their precision and flexibility guide the search into relevant sources with minimal waste and redundancy. According to the curiosity of the moment, one can follow the productivity of a specific industrial sector, or delve in the turbulent history of labor riots, complete with debates and confidences from leaders and patrons, police reports and intimate glimpses in the life of workers and families. Detailed medical records of mental patients have also been preserved for every facility of the kingdom. They contain the questionnaires and the successive diagnoses of the medical personnel, as well as the reactions, testimonies and intimate aspirations of the inmates. All is there, well-ordained, for eternity. In a nutshell: the world is at your feet, itemized, sorted, and compiled.

In such an archival utopia, could one really write histories that matter? The sheer comprehensiveness of the sources presses on the creative mind as a straightjacket. The tyranny of pre-ordained categories of meaning stifles the perspectives and suffocates irreverent questions. By contrast, academic history is a labor of incomplete archives and partial interpretation. What we end up writing is rarely what we anticipated discovering.^{Footnote 8} It is, ultimately, what we can articulate, with all our personal limitations, from the little we have gathered. If we found everything we were looking for, our histories might not be worth crafting.

The Poetics of Fragments

To start the final labor of writing, I rely on unpredictable, bizarre nuggets of information that often seem isolated and hard to pin with a particular meaning. By contrast with the nebulous timeline painstakingly patched up from conventional archives, these oddities appear only from time to time and in various settings. They are few in number. Some abruptly disturb my obsessive-compulsive archival retreats. I encounter an odd or misplaced document that does not make any sense. I relegate it on the pile, but somehow, an afterthought makes me look back and record it. Others come from the field, when I work, relax, listen to friends or do errands. It can be a conversation in a taxi, the sight of a ruined building where a famous politician was executed, something banal yet strange I cannot explain. These oddities should not be confused with the many signs a seasoned researcher keeps noticing in the field and sometimes actively seeks in the lives and landscapes she or he has been working for a long time. These familiar signs bear the trace of a recognizable past. Oddities, instead, never seem to fit.

One day for instance, I found a couple of letters pleading for the liberation of a Gabonese man (March 1931). One was addressed by a member of the Ligue pour la Défense des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, the other had been sent by the brother of the accused.^{Footnote 9} The defendant had been arrested and arbitrarily confined in the prison of Libreville after angry parents had complained to the chief of the neighborhood. They blamed the young man for making surreptitious cuts on their baby’s knees during his daily visit to their house. He wanted, they claimed, to collect the baby’s blood to compose a charm that would enhance his activity as a trader. The typed letters were short. They did not fit in the files I was consulting that day, and hardly aligned with the main patterns of witchcraft crimes and accusations I had found so far. I searched a bit to see if I could find any complementary information on an investigation, a court hearing or the result of the request. Nothing came up.

Yet, on its own, the fragment was pregnant with rich patterns and meanings. Besides showing Gabonese intellectuals working at the head of transnational humanitarian associations, it informed on the recomposing of kinship and corporate units in urban settings, and the fact that families could open their houses to casual acquaintances who, in the end, they did not trust. Another possibility pointed instead to internal family tensions, maybe projected on an outsider and used as an attempt to take advantage of French courts for reparation. A third layer of significance concerned the agency of blood. The cutting of the child’s knee may have been an early trace of contemporary ritual murders in Gabon, during which, today, the assassins are reputed to cut the victim’s organs when s/he is still alive. The crimes serve to harvest organs so they can be composed into a powerful, agentive charm for augmenting a rich patron’s prosperity. They stand in contrast with ancient techniques of the body in Gabon where ritual experts collected the dried bones of remarkable relatives to compose genealogical relics, crucial to the social survival of a clan or lineage.^{Footnote 10} In 1932, sixty or seventy years before ritual crimes started to be at the center stage of Gabon’s public debates, the fresh blood of a baby seemed to reverse older, socially sanctioned practices to construct bones into therapeutic social devices, replacing their magical protection by the threat of witchcraft attacks on social wealth (the child). Yet, the accusation also testified to the enduring popular investment in the efficacy of carnal substances.

Whatever strands I privilege, I try to look at each of these odd elements as a macrocosm rather than a microcosm.^{Footnote 11} A microcosm is bounded and has some sort of internally logical and cohesion. A macrocosm is full of holes, incoherence and surplus of information. When I elaborate from curious fragments and findings, my strategy is to link the particular to the general by seeking the densest and most complex connection possible.^{Footnote 12} I also need to leave the story incomplete. Whether found in well-ordered archives or in the field, the power of incongruous oddities comes precisely from their intrusive, irritating lack of wholesomeness.

My second example concerns post-1960, contemporary “archives.” But it does not differ, in essence, from the one picked in seemingly richer and more rationalized settings. In 2007, I returned to the city of Mouila, in southern Gabon, to complete research on a water deity. I spent most of my days rekindling old friendships, seeking new informants, and walking on and about in the streets taking pictures and sketching some urban features. Back in my hotel, I often spent evenings alone. That summer, local TV channels were airing the final days of the annual Miss Gabon Pageant, a drama followed by hundreds of thousands of Gabonese eager to see which young woman would be chosen as the country’s Beauty Queen. The show was staged in a modern theater venue in Libreville, attended by several dozens of VIP guests gathered around dining tables.

After a few days, taken up by the suspense and the story, I made sure to turn on the TV every evening. For an obscure reason, perhaps out of professional guilt, I started to take notes. The final night arrived. A presenter brought on stage a shiny metal suitcase that, the spectators were told, contained the crown under lock. Like a magician, he silently lifted the case in front of the public. Everybody held their breath, waiting for the crown to be revealed and fitted on the new Queen’s head. But the metal case evoked additional meanings for the Gabonese. I need here to make a short detour in the history the cult of ancestors performed by many societies in the region. Starting in the 1890s, French administrators and Christian missionaries destroyed family shrines where the heads of families preserved the bones and relics of their ancestors (in Fang: byeri). They criminalized the making of relics as “desecration of graves,” “profanation of cadavers,” and “anthropophagy.”^{Footnote 13} The offence carried a death sentence, effectively bringing the practice to its knees. By the 1960s, it had been suffering an almost complete collapse. Still, some families continued in secret to own and to compose relics. To counter colonial scrutiny, elders started to put their byeri in a suitcase (in French: valise) that they could conceal under a bed.^{Footnote 14} Around the 1920s, a euphemism, “la valise de l’entente” (“the suitcase of alliance”) emerged among the Gabonese to talk of the newfangled reliquary box where a clan or a family kept ancestral relics.^{Footnote 15}

The shiny metal case brandished to the public at the end of the 2007 Miss Gabon Pageant could not but evoke the new container for a family’s most sacred instruments of genealogical endurance. The trophy it held, however, was a cheap custom jewel. Although it had the power of changing the life of the young beauty queen, its function, like a cataract of time, refracted several layers of historical shifts.^{Footnote 16} It suggested, for instance, how patriarchal clan politics had now swelled to the size of the nation: because the crown and the pageant were sponsored by the Gabonese government, the latter stood as the protector of family politics. Meanwhile, displaying the nation’s jewels under stage lights was dramatically breaking away from older regimes of genealogical knowledge and spiritual expertise. In the nineteenth century, only higher initiates could take care of relics. Only they could “see” ancestors and pierce the secrets of the invisible realm in order to mobilize extraordinary forces. The pageant, instead, was unveiling the contents of the valise under bright stage lights and in front of millions. Through the transparency of TV screen, the performance violently pulled apart the system of nocturnal secrecy and esoteric knowledge.^{Footnote 17}

Writing, Wandering

These ideas did not come to me right away. It was only months later that I could articulate, with difficulty, some of them. The encounter with oddities and fragments had occurred first, literally, as a distraction. Yet they played a disproportionate role in the crafting of the book’s argument. The narrative I ended up writing was, more than anything else, an (im)probable wandering between these isolated incidents/hearsays/fantasies. True, the foundation of the story has been fed by the time-line I obtained from richer, more conventional archives, at least until the 1960s. Beyond that date, and often before it, I meandered between heterogeneous finds, whose evidence is often transnational and multi-sited, scattered in various deposits across the world.^{Footnote 18}

The clusters of meaning that support my story started their paper life as composite oddities. Invariably, I was tempted to discard them. Yet they proved most potent in orienting my argument. The final text they helped me to birth reads as a contingent strolling between the linkages and gaps they suggested. In the end, whether in pre- or post-1960 deposits, only those sources that force you to rethink your empirical archive and bend your narrative are worth writing about. Oddities make you confused and lost, so they make you think. The rest is history as usual, a meeker labor of recognition and anticipation.

This poetic, I realize, bears the mark of trivial choices, chance encounters and sometimes unconscious fantasies. I don’t mind so much, as I have been trained to see academic history as the conceiving of debatable hypotheses, and to approach sources as potent and unpredictable muses, feeding our improbable dreams of truth.