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Challenging Colonial Forced Labor? Resistance, Resilience, and Power in Senegal (1920s–1940s)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2018

Romain Tiquet
Romain Tiquet*
Affiliation:
Geneva University
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Abstract

Based on the combination of colonial archives and the analysis of several complaints published in Senegalese newspapers, this article sheds light on the daily compulsory reality experienced by local populations with regards to forced labor in colonial Senegal (1920s–1940s). In contrast to analyses approaching forced labor systems through the study of colonial bureaucratic routines, this article studies the reactions of local populations and the consequences for colonial labor policies. I introduce the notion of resilience in order to overcome the pitfalls of the resistance paradigm and bring new insight into attitudes of distance, refusal, and adaptation used by local populations as methods to “absorb the shock” of everyday colonial coercion. More broadly, this analysis leads us to interrogate the limits and fragility of the colonial enterprise, recalling that the colonial state was not an almighty administration and that it was, above all, based on abiding adaptations and empirical decisions.

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Articles
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International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 93: Workers and Right-Wing Politics , Spring 2018 , pp. 135 - 150
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Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2018 

In 1927, the annual policy report of the Senegalese colony described the difficulties encountered by the colonial power on matters of road labor—carried out by forcibly recruited workers—in these terms:

We have to admit that the natives do not seem to show any enthusiasm to carry out their prestation, but also try to evade it by fair means or foul. The problems of the recruitment of laborers lead to the despair of local chiefs. They do not face an open and active resistance but rather a situation of complete inertia and a widespread apathy. […] Under these circumstances, it is obvious that this idle labor force, under-equipped and poorly overseen, cannot give satisfaction and show effectiveness.Footnote 2

In 1929, the Forced Labor Convention, organized by the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva, adopted certain proposals with regard to compulsory labor. The conference of the ILO introduced the notion of forced labor into international debates as “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily.”Footnote 3 In French West Africa (Afrique Occidentale Française, hereafter AOF), the recourse to an involuntary labor force was used, on a daily basis, as a principal driving force of colonial mise en valeur.Footnote 4 Thus, the French government refused to ratify the convention, claiming that it constituted an infringement on its sovereignty. Under the left-wing Popular Front government, French officials ended up adopting the text in 1937, mainly to deal tactfully with international public opinion.Footnote 5 The predominance of coercive mobilization of workers continued, nevertheless, until the official abolition of forced labor, enacted by the Felix Houphouët-Boigny law in April 1946.Footnote 6

In Senegal, as in most of the French colonies in West Africa, the historiography of forced labor is mainly focused on the nature of colonial intervention into the mobilization of the local labor force. Babacar Fall, in his pioneering work on forced labor in AOF,Footnote 7 outlines an institutional perspective of these types of labor but leaves aside the reactions of the coerced workers themselves. Few studies have examined the strategies of local populations and the incidence of local resistance against these practices.Footnote 8 This is particularly the case in the field of studies on Senegal where much attention has been devoted to the rise of the elite and large-scale protest movements that appeared to pose a threat to the colonial state.Footnote 9

The labor question was a major issue for the colonial enterprise, which had erected coercive and repressive forms of labor regulations as the keystone of the colonial political economy.Footnote 10 Colonial labor, as a mode of existence that was imposed on local societies by external actors, had many implications in multiple spheres (including economic, political, cultural, religious, and technological conditions), and it shaped the daily lives of individuals. In view of that, it becomes necessary to ask what short and long-term forms of struggle the population resorted to in order to strike back against repressive methods of labor. How did their actions and reactions shape their daily routines and modify colonial aspirations?

Through the use of representative cases, the main goal of this article is to go beyond the analytical ambiguity created by the dichotomy of domination and resistance and to think further in terms of intentionality and identity at the level of the individual. The question of self-consciousness appears as a central factor since it brings more complexity to the use of the paradigm of resistance and demonstrates that the reactions varied in their forms over space and time. Thus, instead of conceptualizing only in the sense of resistance against conditions, this article tries to interrogate the notion of resilience as a type of behavior that reflects attitudes of distance, refusal, adaptation, or negotiation, used by local populations as a way to “absorb the shock” of everyday colonial coercion. More broadly, I attempt to rethink in this article the relationship between colonial authorities and their domination exerted over local populations in order to highlight the presence and the practical expressions of power in most forms of relationships and activities under colonial rule.Footnote 11

In order to nuance the one-sided view of colonial archives that leads us to a certain methodological limitation, the analysis is based on a number of complaints brought forward by local populations and published in two newspapers in the colony (“Le périscope africain” and “L'action sénégalaise”). These sources are particularly innovative as they have enabled me to approach the local perception of colonial constraints within the specific political context of the Senegalese territory.

All Roads Lead to Work: The System of Colonial Forced Labor

The current historiography on colonial forced labor seeks to analyze these practices as a particular expression of the persistent problems that colonial powers were experiencing with regard to the mobilization of labor in colonial territories.Footnote 12 More than practices tending to overcome the shortage of workers, colonial forced labor has to be understood, above all, as the essence of colonial rule:

The labor problem must be the mainstay of our colonial policy. It is not only at the heart of our political economy, it is also a crucial issue on which the efficiency of our Empire might be evaluated.Footnote 13

From this perspective, colonial forced labor must be considered as representative of a specific type of governmentality.Footnote 14 Under these conditions, colonial forced labor must be analyzed as a system of rule, established through independent processes, which interact amongst themselves. The first of these describes a process of legitimization of coercive forms of labor. The combination of a Eurocentric representation of work (which includes the dogma of capitalism and the value of a free labor marketFootnote 15) and the constant outcry against the so-called laziness or “inertia of natives” both illustrate what can be described as a civilization of work. As a consequence, this “economically fruitful”Footnote 16 rhetoric had deeply transformed, within the colonial context, the representation of labor of the local population.Footnote 17 As Pierre Bourdieu has argued in his book on economic structures of Algeria under colonial rule, colonial domination tore the local population away from their relations to the economy and obliged them to face a new type of relation to labor, constructed around the value of work.Footnote 18

Second, we can observe an institutionalization of constraints, translating arbitrary methods into a system of rule. The introduction of taxes—an effective way to encourage people to work—and the application of the indigénat Footnote 19—a regime of administrative sanctions—together with a feeble level of labor regulation,Footnote 20 led progressively to a structural shift from the civilization of work to the law of work. Third, the system of colonial forced labor was reinforced and legitimized by the conclusions of the ILO Convention. By defining forced labor, the ILO assumed that “there was such a thing as free labor.”Footnote 21 In fact, the ILO Convention was the result of negotiations between European empires and it left enough space for the French colonial power to adapt itself.Footnote 22

Contrary to a uniform definition of mandatory labor, work regulations and colonial practices fragmented the meaning of forced labor into five forms, overshadowing abuses and excesses. The réquisition was the first coercive form of recruitment used at an early stage of colonization in order to face the shortage of workers. After the First World War, pressure from the ILO obliged the colonial powers to control this form of unfree labor. Consequently, two other forms of forced labor were used as the base of the work system in AOF. On the one hand, labor obligations were created through the “prestation system” or “corvée labor,” a tax to be paid in labor in addition to taxes paid in cash.Footnote 23 On the other hand, the “second portion” (recruits who were not used for strictly military activities) of the military was used as a reserve organized in labor brigades, and they had to carry out works of a public nature.Footnote 24 A fourth form was constituted by mandatory penal labor, a French tradition imported into the colonies.Footnote 25 Even if the number of these workers was very small, they strongly contributed to the development of public infrastructure (roads, administrative buildings).Footnote 26 Finally, compulsory cultivation, often called champs du commandant, obliged the population to cultivate certain industrial crops intended to be exported.

This article focuses mainly on corvée-type forced labor, better known as prestation in the French empire. This “sweat tax”Footnote 27 appears as the most significant form of colonial forced labor under French colonial rule since it led, in a very substantial manner, to the development of infrastructure (roads and airstrips), which was essential for the spread of colonial authority.

Prestation in AOF was introduced by a decree on November 25, 1912 and modified by the general circular of September 12, 1930. The circular specified that “this made the native contribution exacted hitherto a direct tax required from all men aged between eighteen and sixty years irrespective of status and payable in kind […].”Footnote 28 Even if the colonial administration was supposed to provide rations in cash or food and the sites of work were not to be too far from the home villages of laborers, multiple abuses were noticed throughout the period.Footnote 29 An in-depth analysis of colonial archives reveals a significant gap between the bureaucratic realm of labor regulations elaborated by technocrats from the Colonial Ministry and its practical application in the field by local administrators:

When prestation laborers work five kilometers from their village, we must feed them. Indeed, the rule is never applied, and whenever the natives protest, […] we locked them up in jail.Footnote 30

Furthermore, an analysis of prestation labor stresses the role of one of the most direct agents of the colonial administration: the “native” chief (chef de canton). Local chiefs played a primordial role within the colonial administration as they were in charge of the extraction of taxes, conscription, and the recruitment of laborers. From the perspective of local populations, the figure of the “native” chief was seen as the main instrument of colonial domination. Based on the use of pre-existing social structures,Footnote 31 the colonial administration employed the institution of chieftaincy to maintain the colonial order in every part of its colonies, and it left chiefs ample room for maneuver by giving them the power to abuse local populations. “Native administration” was part of the organization of corvée labor, and each local authority was in charge of the recruitment of laborers in every village of the region. “Native” chiefs were called to sit on the “council of notables” to approve the planning of the campaign for prestations in each new year. In the “colonial council,” they were in charge of the fixation of the number of days of corvée labor, and they sometimes endorsed administrative measures in this sphere. They were also the overseers of labor projects, inspecting the work process, and, paradoxically, they were in charge of controlling abuse and mistreatment. Thus, chieftaincy enjoyed an almighty power over the population leading to what Maurice Meker has called “internal colonialism,”Footnote 32 referring to the violence committed by chiefs and the lack of any control from the part of the colonial administration.

Everyday Forms of Struggle in Casamance: Varieties of Practices, Unity of Purpose?

This section mainly focuses on the region of Casamance, as the specific geographical, political, and cultural context of this area offers a better understanding of the several forms of reactions against unfree labor. On the one hand, the geographical situation of Casamance caused some difficulties for the colonial administration in imposing its power. This region was a forest area, sparsely populated and difficult to penetrate. Additionally, the borders of the region could easily be crossed by populations since Casamance was tucked between British Gambia in the north and Portuguese Guinea in the south.Footnote 33 On the other hand, unlike the societies in the North of Senegal which were more stratified and had a history of strong kingdoms,Footnote 34 societies in Casamance were often described as being egalitarian with political units built on small groups of villages.Footnote 35 As a consequence, the “fragmented and individualistic”Footnote 36 nature of the area slowed the French conquest.

Séverine Awenengo Dalberto has summed up the difficulties encountered by the colonial power in the region during the period of pacification (late nineteenth century). First, the political fragmentation of the area obliged the colonial forces to subjugate villages one by one. Second, the surrender was often “situational and, in this regard, temporary.”Footnote 37 Third, when a villager came to French officials to inform them of the surrender of a village, nothing assured the colonial power that the promise was to be kept by the entire community.Footnote 38

Regarding the mise en valeur, the road network in Casamance was almost nonexistent. The population of Casamance had to carry out a greater number of days of prestations to build, in a short period of time and under hard work conditions, more than 1,300 km of roads.Footnote 39 For instance, it was not unusual to make intense use of women and children in road labor in spite of the existing legislation.Footnote 40 This particular context created an ideally fertile ground for resistance against the colonial order and specifically against forced labor.

Since the end of the 1980s, a vast body of literature on resistance in Africa has emerged,Footnote 41 using the concept of everyday resistanceFootnote 42 and revealing the diversity of the daily struggle of subordinates. In the context of our analysis, the usefulness of colonial archives seems to be limited in its view of shedding light on everyday reactions against forced labor in colonies. Indeed, working on colonial documentation brings us a one-sided view of the forced labor system, which is mainly focused on the organization and sequences of work but rarely on the weapons of the weak.Footnote 43 Within the realm of colonial policy, local populations appear not so much as historical actors but more as statistics, anonymous contributors to conscription, taxes, and forced labor. In terms of labor, this method also reveals the implicit categorization maintained by colonial sources and based on a narrow definition of work, which was often regarded as a synonym of urban wage labor.Footnote 44 As colonial archives were resolutely centered on the colonial state, local populations became historical actors only when they posed a threat to the colonial administration and the colonial order.

Nevertheless, colonial archives do provide details that describe the less visible ways in which men and women struggled against colonial domination. In Casamance, the most prevalent reaction was desertion and the migration of massive groups of local inhabitants into the Gambia or Portuguese Guinea:Footnote 45

Tour on Kaléane road (new road between Ziguinchor and Oussouye). The worker units are skeletal, most of the villages are empty, people fled to Ziguinchor or the Gambia.Footnote 46

The importance of these flights should not be underestimatedFootnote 47 and can be interpreted as a direct reaction against forced recruitment and the fear of mistreatment on the labor site.

A second type of reaction appears through different acts of “foot dragging.” Many diary reports written by administrators stressed different cases of “bad intentions” or slowness at work:

As always, you will send children and peasants, forced and compelled, pretending to work, moving stones here and there, giving an illusion of road improvements but in fact doing nothing really useful. [They are] doing nothing with a real efficiency.Footnote 48

This denunciation has a direct link with the colonial rhetoric of the laziness of populations. However, far from constituting the “natural indolence” that many administrators pointed out, the multiple cases of slowdown were often a strategy of self-preservation and a continuous and low-profile struggle.

Finally, at some points this resistance became violent. Different cases of arson were noted by colonial officials.Footnote 49 Some reports of violence directed against local chiefs could also be observed. For instance, the poisoning of Afouya Sagna was considered by the colonial administration as an act of revenge against an autocratic chief engaged in organizing forced labor:

Afouya Sagna died today at 6 pm. […] The local population had a negative image of this chief because he was too authoritarian. He was shaking the villagers’ laziness. [It is] very likely that he has been poisoned.”Footnote 50

These different instances of daily struggle should not lead us to forget that the nature of resistance is influenced by the labor controls and organization of work. An open strike could constitute a disaster provoking violent repression, mistreatment, prison sentences, and so on, whereas in cases of a slowdown or shoddy work it was particularly difficult for the controlling authorities to put the blame on individuals.

One of the main possible pitfalls of this analysis would be to interpret out of every act a form of resistance against colonial domination, especially since many of them were “evading the written record.”Footnote 51 In this context, the thorny question of intention needs to be posed. How can scholars assess whether a particular event was an act of resistance or a strategy of self-help? On the basis of reactions occurring in the framework of forced labor, we can notice that most individuals were, after all, far less interested in changing the larger structures of the colonial state than what Hobsbawm called “working the system […] to its minimum disadvantage.”Footnote 52 The central issue of intention has many times been explored, and the goal of this article is not to offer a bibliographical essay based on analyses that are far more detailed.Footnote 53 However, the problematic nature of intention stresses the limits of the monolithic binary between domination and resistanceFootnote 54 and should lead scholars to rethink the notion of resistance itself.Footnote 55

For instance, we can refer to the important emigration of villagers from Casamance into the Gambia. In April 1934, the administrator of the district of Sédhiou expressed his concern about “the flight”Footnote 56 of the inhabitants of more than twelve villages from the area of Guimara:

The exodus of population from the area of Guimara into British Gambia is considerable. […] During my tour, I could see many abandoned villages. Inhabitants of twelve villages have deserted.Footnote 57

This quotation gives us a first dimension of the incident. However, it only constitutes a report of the event in itself, a raw event without explanation of the intention of the actors. The second dimension consists of giving opinions about such an event. The colonial administrator tried indeed to assign a special meaning to this episode, saying,

“Most of [the populations that remained in the area] complained about the number of days of prestation they had to carry out in the previous years.”Footnote 58

In this case, the colonial official elaborates an interpretation of the event, in other terms, he formulates an alleged intention (the migration is due to forced labor on the roads). In a further report, the local chief Abdoul Diallo gave a different explanation. He insisted that a vast majority of the population in the district were Fulbe people and that “Fulbe People are nomadic. They travel for no apparent reason, going back and forth.”Footnote 59

At the end of the report, the administrator concludes that “it is particularly complicated to find out the real reasons of this flight.”Footnote 60 This assertion adds to the third dimension of this event: to come closer to the genuine intention of the local actors. There is no proper answer to that question since it is extremely hard to determine the intentions of the actors, even if scholars can document an act or listen critically to the voices of the populations. Intentions clearly appear as polyvalent and they create a certain analytical ambiguity when using the domination/resistance category.

How can we deal with this ambiguity? How could it be possible to carve out strategies of opposition, sometimes acceptance, or accommodation, which do not all fall within the category of resistance? Besides, which term or concept could highlight the individual and collective consequences of these attitudes? As we have seen, one of the main pitfalls of the concept of everyday resistance is that it captures neither the diversity of intentions nor the consequences of these actions.Footnote 61 In order to add a layer of complexity, this article suggests the term “resilience” as an additional concept. My aim is to enlarge the scope of the analysis and to try to overcome the analytical ambiguity created by the dichotomy of domination and resistance.

In material science, resilience is the ability of a material to absorb energy when it is deformed, and to return to its initial shape. Under colonial rule, local populations were confronted with coercion and repression but they found diverse strategies in order to “absorb the shock” of the colonial situation and to cope with the repressive conditions. Consequently, not only resistance but also all the behaviors that reflect a certain accommodation of the population with existing power relations can be understood as forms of resilience.Footnote 62

A case of “laziness” commented upon by a colonial report gives us a concrete example of what I mean by resilience. In February 1939, a commandant de cercle (the French colonial term for a district commissioner) complained once again about the so-called idleness of Senegalese corvée laborers:

I went around the M'Pack road […], the unit in charge of the road has not done anything during the last week, taking advantage of the administrator's absence.Footnote 63

In this concrete case, but also for all petty acts of insubordination (slowdown, false compliance, desertion), the attitude of laborers can be understood as a form of resilience since this behavior appears as a strategy to resist against the difficulty of the work, but also and above all as a technique to survive, to overcome the constraints inherent in the situation of forced labor and to offer the workers a brief respite. This attitude can thus be considered as a subversive act (workers refuse to follow the pace) but the goal is not purposely to challenge the colonial state. From that perspective, the term “resilience” appears more relevant to describe the plurality of reactions of the population.

More broadly, the term “resilience” allows us to shed new light on colonial rule. The seemingly simple binary of domination versus resistance suggests an incorrect picture of power distributed within the colonial realm: from such a perspective, we would find the colonial power—as an almighty and omnipotent structure—on one side and on the other side the resistance of those who are forced to comply with the rule. Yet, as Foucault eloquently demonstrated,Footnote 64 power is not a monolithic apparatus of domination and discipline, but is above all the result of power-based relationships:

[Power] is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.Footnote 65

Thus, the concept of resilience enlarges the scope of the analysis of colonial power by integrating into this analysis the plurality of attitudes and intentions as well as the multiplicity of individual or collective interests that led the agency of actors within the colonial period.

Everyday Forms of Power: Public Exposure and Politics in Senegal

An obvious methodological limitation would be posed by an exclusive use of colonial sources. The colonial archives offer the greatest amount of evidence on the colonial mindset and, doubtlessly, they more strongly reflect European perceptions and interests than African experiences. The colonial ideology has created a “colonial gaze” (écran colonial), leading to some difficulties for colonial authorities to comprehend internal issues of populations under their colonial domination.

Therefore, the introduction of an alternative source—Senegalese newspapers—offers a way to counterbalance the one-sided view of colonial sources and to approach more precisely the local experience of individuals as shaped by a coercive pressure that was imposed by the colonial administration. Besides, this new approach allows us to leave aside the restrictive colonial framework of interpretation and put the Senegalese population in a role that no longer regards them as objects but as subjects of history.

The corpus of newspaper articles cannot be understood without taking into account the specific political context of the territory. The Senegalese context was characterized by a long-standing presence of the French at the coast and the specific political dynamics of the Four Communes (Gorée, Dakar, Saint-Louis, and Rufisque). Presses were developed at an early stage of the existence of the colonial territory,Footnote 66 and they profited from a certain degree of credibility in Senegal.Footnote 67 Since the election of Blaise Diagne in 1914 as the first black deputy entering into the French parliament, the relationship between the press and politics became stronger,Footnote 68 and the press landscape was composed of pro-Diagne and anti-Diagne newspapers.

For the period chosen, the corpus of press publications used is composed of two newspapers: Le périscope africain and L'action sénégalaise. They belonged to the political opposition and were engaged in a general criticism of colonial forced labor and the excesses of the colonial administration. This was especially the case in the early 1930s when the ILO Convention and the discussions related to colonial forced labor were at the core of the Senegalese political agenda. In Le périscope africain, the official newspaper of the opposition deputy Galandou Diouf, the journalist Henri Bellamy wrote, a few months after the 1929 ILO Convention, that forced labor was an “abomination” and even argued that “if the colonial mise en valeur means the continuation of the system [of forced labor], it is better to leave [the colony].”Footnote 69 More specifically, these newspapers took a clear disliking to the Senegalese deputy and official representative of the French empire in Geneva Blaise Diagne.Footnote 70 Le périscope africain went even so far as to name him “the negro coward [who] asked for forced labor for his race.”Footnote 71

The originality of these sources consists in the fact that the newspapers were mainly focused on widespread criticism of “native” chiefs who appeared for this press as the most important local agents of colonial rule. Chieftaincy thus became the principal target of the newspapers, which denounced, almost everyday, the exactions, mistreatment, and violence that the local populations suffered. It is interesting to note that a recurrent comparison with tyranny and oppression was made through the vocabulary of the Ancien Régime and the monarchy:Footnote 72

If there is a scourge in French West Africa that the population does not want, it is the “native” chief. […] The “native” chief is a kinglet in his territory. He extracts taxes, maintains order, ensures justice and he exercises his authority in every aspect of the daily life of his population.Footnote 73

In each article accusing the chiefs of abuses, the authors followed the same structure. The articles start with a public exposure of a specific chief's behavior or the mistreatment he had allegedly exerted. In most of the cases, the complaint denounces the violence of recruitment or the autocratic way of administration practiced by the local ruler (and this included abusive fines, requisition of cattle). The complaints also reveal how chiefs abused the use of workers for their benefits, namely for the cultivation of their own fields.Footnote 74 The case of Massene Sene became famous in the 1930s since this chief owned more than seventy-five lougans (fields) in different villages. A long article in Le périscope africain in September 1930 published the locations of each of these fields and the names of abused local inhabitants.Footnote 75 In the following pages, the accusation was directly addressed to the colonial administration, whose responsibility for the abuses was evoked as being complicit with such excesses:

We kindly ask the administrator to tell us what he thinks of Massene Sene. He abuses day after day his population, you cannot ignore it.Footnote 76

Abuses and complaints became so frequent that the colonial administration conducted an inquiry in 1934 in order to determine the veracity of the facts.Footnote 77 In 1938, the Directorate of political and administrative affairs even requested the removal of an honorary award given to Chief Massene Sene.Footnote 78

In this context, one would need to qualify the role played by these newspapers. As a consequence of their activity, on the basis of an accumulation of complaints, this press claimed for themselves the function of a real sentinel, chiefly against abuses and violence. It therefore echoed the enormous amount of repression felt by populations and clearly encouraged individuals to protest against abuses. At the bottom of the first page of every issue of L'action sénégalaise, the reader could find the following call:

To all friends living in the country, we highly recommend you to report to us any case of abuses that happened in your territory.Footnote 79

A glance at the numbers of complaints received throughout the period chosen illustrates the relative efficiency of this weapon:

A number of our correspondents asked us whether we have abandoned to denounce abuses from the chief Salif Fall. We tell you that this campaign is temporarily suspended until the publication of the last petition we have received.Footnote 80

We do not have the possibility to publish every letter you have sent but we wanted to let you know than we have received every day an important number of complaints about exaction.Footnote 81

In July 1933, an opinion column signed by thirty notables was published to thank L'action Sénégalaise for its intensive campaign against chiefly exactions. A French communist deputy even used an article of Le périscope africain at the national assembly to call for the minister of colonies to give explanations for such abuses. After the death of several persons in the region of Podor resulting from the violence of a local chief, the deputy Arthur Ramette asked for an investigation and brought the minister of colonies to take a public stand on this episode.Footnote 82

Once more, it is necessary to bring a new layer of complexity into this analysis. Who was able to buy and read the newspapers in the 1930s in Senegal? Certainly, they were not read by the vast majority of rural populations but rather by the Evolués and the French citizens of the Four Communes who could vote in French parliament elections. This fact suggests that the constant denunciation of exactions in the opposition newspapers was used more as a partisan strategy to attack a political rival than as a way to alert the public opinion of colonial coercion. The press supported the political ambitions of Senegalese elites rather than reflecting the concerns of local populations.Footnote 83

Nevertheless, in the same manner in which daily attitudes of the people posed a threat to colonial authority, these articles, by denouncing forced recruitment and the abuses inflicted by chiefs, participated in the diffusion of discontented voices and challenged, to a certain extent, the colonial power.

Conclusion

From 1936, under the leadership of Marcel De Coppet, governor-general of AOF, the colonial state attempted to modify the corvée labor system, taking into account the inefficiency of the labor processes in place, but also the generalized complaints coming from the local populations. The colonial administration established a new system of taxes, encouraging the population to pay in cash their prestation (in the form of the so-called rachat) in order to use the public income thereby generated to hire specialized and volunteer workers. Thus, this fact illustrates that reactions were not trivial, and narrowed, or at least reconfigured, colonial aspirations.

By focusing on particular reactions of local populations against the system of colonial forced labor and its actors, this article has centered on questions that have often been occluded by the dominance of the colonial and bureaucratic processes and eclipsed in the main trend of the historiography.

I have analyzed different strategies used by the local population to deal with the coercive system of forced labor and demonstrated that the colonial experience was, above all, a field of negotiation between colonizers and the colonized in which the latter adopted certain strategies to make the system more bearable. This fact leads to the widening of the framework of interpretation of the behavior of populations. In order to overcome the limits of the paradigm of resistance, the article has introduced the notion of resilience to recognize nuances, ambiguity, and contradictions in the daily attitudes of African populations. On a more general level, this analysis pointed out the limits and the fragility of the colonial enterprise, recalling that the colonial power was not an almighty administration and that it was, above all, based on abiding adaptations and empirical decisions.Footnote 84

Finally, the main point of this discussion was to interrogate the reactions of local Senegalese populations in order to analyze how they experienced the system of forced labor. I am fully aware that the exclusive reliance upon colonial archives and newspapers addressed to a certain elite—who were certainly not compelled to take part in forced labor—poses a certain limit to the analysis of the local perception of constraint. This article has to be understood as a call for further research that could make an extensive use of peoples’ narratives and interviews in order to interrogate the memory of labor and thereby to approach more precisely the “vision of the vanquished.”Footnote 85

Footnotes

Many thanks to Alexander Keese and the anonymous reviewers for their supportive criticism of the first draft. Research for this article was supported by ERC Starting Grant no. 240898, under the Framework Programme 7 (FP7) of the European Commission.

References

NOTES

2. Sénégal, Rapports politiques mensuels, May 1927, 2 G 27/18, Archives nationales du Sénégal, Fonds du Gouvernement général d'Afrique occidentale française (hereafter cited as ANS GGAOF).

3. Art. 2, paragraph 1, ILO Convention no. 29.

4. The “mise en valeur des colonies” was a political and economic plan launched in 1923 by Albert Sarrault, French minister of colonies. It was the basis of economic colonization, suggesting the use of a local workforce to “develop” the colonial territories. Sarrault, Albert, La Mise en valeur des colonies françaises (Paris, 1923), 675Google Scholar. See also Andrew, Christopher Maurice and Kanya-Forstner, Alexander Sydney, “France, Africa, and the First World War,” The Journal of African History 19 (1978): 11–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Decree of August 12, 1937, Journal officiel de l'AOF, October 23, 1937.

6. Fall, Babacar, “Manifestations of Forced Labor in Senegal: As Exemplified by the Société des Salins du Sine-Saloum Kaolack 1943–1956,” in Forced Labour and Migration: Patterns of Movement within Africa, eds. Zegeye, Abebe and Shubi, Shubi Ishemo (London, 1989), 269–88Google Scholar. See also for French and British Central Africa, Keese, Alexander, “Slow Abolition within the Colonial Mind: British and French Debates about ‘Vagrancy,’ ‘African Laziness,’ and Forced Labour in West Central and South Central Africa, 1945–1965,” International Review of Social History 59 (3) (2014): 377–407CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Fall, Babacar, Le travail forcé en Afrique-Occidentale française: 1900–1946 (Paris, 1993), 346Google Scholar.

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9. See in particular Iba Der Thiam, “L’évolution politique et syndicale du Sénégal colonial de 1840 à 1936” (PhD diss., Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1983), 4462; Cooper, Frederick, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996), 677CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Guèye, Omar, Sénégal: histoire du mouvement syndical. La marche vers le Code du travail (Paris, 2011), 389Google Scholar.

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14. This Foucaldian concept has to be understood as including the practices and strategies (mentalities, rationalities and techniques) through which populations are governed. Foucault, Michel, Sécurité, territoire, population: cours au Collège de France (1977–1978) (Paris, 2004), 435Google Scholar. For a critical analysis of the term governmentality in the field of colonial studies, see Cooper, Frederick, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005), 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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17. To have more detailed elements on the frictions between a “colonial” and an “African” representation of work, see Diop, Alioune, Le Travail en Afrique Noire (Paris, 1952), 96–100Google Scholar; d'Almeida-Topor, Hélène, Lakroum, Monique, and Spittler, Gerd, Le travail en Afrique noire: représentations et pratiques à l’époque contemporaine (Paris, 2003), 355Google Scholar. For the Senegalese context, Babacar Fall has tried to analyze the institution of work within the pre-colonial context, by looking at agro-pastoral societies experiencing integration into the system of global capitalism. Fall, Babacar, Sénégal: le Travail au XXème siècle (Paris, 2011), 14–25Google Scholar.

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21. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 30.

22. For an in-depth analysis of the general discussions at the conference and the peculiar French position, Maul, Daniel Roger, “The International Labour Organization and the Struggle against Forced Labour from 1919 to the Present,” Labor History 48 (4) (2007): 477–500CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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24. Catherine Mornane Bogosian, “Forced labor, resistance and memory: the deuxieme portion in the French Soudan, 1926–1950” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsyvania, 2002), 273.

25. Bâ, Babacar, “La prison coloniale au Sénégal, 1790–1960: Carcéral de conquête et défiances locales,” French Colonial History 8 (2007): 81–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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28. Circulaire générale sur le régime des prestations, Dakar, October 12, 1930, K186(26); ANS GGAOF.

29. Lettre du gouverneur général De Coppet à M. le ministre des colonies Moutet, Dakar, January 25, 1937; K8(1), ANS GGAOF.

30. Conseil Colonial du Sénégal, November 1936, 61.

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36. Awenengo Dalberto, “Les Joola, la Casamance et l’État,” 53.

37. Ibid., 94.

38. Ibid.

39. Thiam, “L’évolution politique et syndicale du Sénégal,” 2526.

40. Colonial archives and interviews conducted in Senegal show clear evidence of the use of children and women for road labor. See, for instance, Enquête sur gestion financière dans le cercle de Sédhiou, 1937, 11 D1/237, ANS GGAOF; Interview with Mamadou Badji, February 26, 2013.

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45. Oussouby Touré stressed that the first flights of villagers from requisition in Casamance into Gambia occurred in 1908. Oussouby Touré, “Mouvements de populations et projets de développement des économies rurales de la Haute-Gambie: Etude de la région du Wuuli” (Ph.D. diss., Paris 7, 1983), 171.

46. Journal du poste de Ziguinchor, tour of March 8, 1935, 11 D1/352, ANS GGAOF.

47. “Migration as protest proved far less costly to Africans and had much the same effect on the colonial authorities as did the other more militant forms of protest.” Asiwaju, “Migrations,” 593–94.

48. Journal du poste de Ziguinchor, tour of February 27, 1935, 11 D1/352, ANS GGAOF.

49. Journal du poste de Ziguinchor, tour of March 10, 1935, 11 D1/352, ANS GGAOF.

50. Journal du poste de Ziguinchor, tour of September 9, 1935, 11 D1/352, ANS GGAOF.

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53. In particular Isaacman, “Peasants,” 32–37; Scott, “Everyday Forms,” 50–53.

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55. For a detailed overview of the debates on the definition of resistance, Scott, James C., “Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance,” Journal of Peasant Studies 13 (1986): 5–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56. The term was employed by the administrator. The word flight already gives an interpretation of the event, as in comparison with migration or moving.

57. Rapport de tournée sur exode de population, April 1934, 13 G 22, ANS GGAOF.

58. Ibid.

59. Courrier confidentiel de l'administrateur du cercle de Kolda à l'administrateur supérieur de la Casamance, July 5, 1934, 13 G 22, ANS GGAOF.

60. Ibid.

61. Isaacman, “Peasants,” 33.

62. The use of resilience is inspired by an article of Denis Peschanski, a specialist in the history of France during the Second World War. He used it as an intermediate concept to characterize behaviors which belong neither to French Resistance nor to collaboration under Vichy Regime. Peschanski, Denis, “Résistance, résilience et opinion dans la France des années noires,” Psychiatrie française 36 (2006): 194–210Google Scholar.

63. Journal du poste de Ziguinchor, tour of February 27, 1935, 11 D1/352, ANS GGAOF.

64. For an inspiring article on the application of Foucault's theory of power in Africa, see Bayart, Jean-François, “Foucault au Congo,” in Penser avec Michel Foucault: théorie critique et pratiques politiques, ed. Granjon, Marie-Christine (Paris, 2005), 183–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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66. Since the Law on freedom of speech of July 1881, extended in colonial territories.

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68. Barry, Histoire des médias au Sénégal, 151.

69. Henri Bellamy, “Après le vote sur le travail forcé: les colonies sont-elles faites pour les Colons ou pour les indigènes?” Le périscope africain, August 23, 1930.

70. During the discussions regarding forced labor at the ILO convention, Diagne defended with a special fervor the upholding of mandatory forms of labor in the French empire. By ratifying the Convention in 1937, the Popular Front imposed a posthumous repudiation of Blaise Diagne's legacy. For more details, Person, Yves, “Le Front populaire au Sénégal (mai 1936–octobre 1938),” Le mouvement social 107 (1979): 77–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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72. Jean Fremigacci analyses quite eloquently the reappropriation of the vocabulary of Ancien Regime by the first generation of colonial officials in Madagascar. Fremigacci, Jean, “L'administration coloniale: les aspects oppressifs,” Omaly Sy Anio 7–8 (1978): 10–12Google Scholar. See also Bâ, Amadou Hampaté, Mémoires; l'enfant peul; oui, mon commandant (Arles, 2000), 519Google Scholar.

73. Anonymous, “Les Chefs indigènes”, Le périscope africain, March 7, 1931.

74. According to the “custom,” the chiefs could take a certain percentage of the crop and employ villagers to do involuntary work on their own fields for a certain amount of days. Zuccarelli, “De la chefferie,” 227–28.

75. Boniface, “Travail forcé (suite),” Le périscope africain, September 20, 1930.

76. Ibid.

77. Lettre de l'inspecteur des affaires administratives de la Rocca au gouverneur de la colonie du Sénégal, Inspection de la société de prévoyance du Sine-Saloum, November 13, 1934, ANS GGAOF, 13 G 6.

78. Lettre du directeur des affaires politiques et administratives au gouverneur général, Demande de retrait de distinction honorifique à un chef de canton, May 4, 1938, ANS GGAOF, 13 G 6.

79. L'action sénégalaise, 1931–1934.

80. Anonymous, “Echos,” L'action sénégalaise, October 7, 1931.

81. Ibid., December 6, 1931.

82. Question adressée à l'Assemblée nationale par le député Ramette au ministre des colonies à propos du chef de canton de Dimar, November 18, 1935, box 599, folder 6, ANOM AP.

83. Barry, Histoire des médias au Sénégal, 151.

84. Fremigacci goes even further in his critical analysis of the colonial administration in Madagascar, describing the connivance amongst colonizers and colonized as a “reign of bluff.” Fremigacci, Jean, “Le colonisé, une création du colonisateur,” Omaly Sy Anio 5–6 (1977): 231Google Scholar.

85. Wachtel, Nathan, La vision des vaincus: les Indiens du Pérou devant la conquête espagnole, 1530–1570 (Paris, 1971), 399Google Scholar.