Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-54qdv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-09T23:48:22.714Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Forced Labor, Resistance, and Masculinities in Kayes, French Sudan, 1919–1946*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2014

Marie Rodet
Marie Rodet*
Affiliation:
SOAS, University of London
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this article I analyze how African gender categories have interacted with those produced and imposed by French colonization and how these forced interactions may have given rise to specific kinds of resistance from local populations. Using the case study of forced recruitment for the private agricultural firm Société Anonyme des Cultures de Diakandapé (SACD) in the region of Kayes in Mali from 1919 to 1946, I examine the complexities of resistance to forced labor from a gender perspective, with a special focus on how resistance was shaped by struggles around (re)construction and (re)definition of local and colonial masculinities.

Information

Type
African Labor Histories
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 86 , Fall 2014 , pp. 107 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2014 

Introduction

The historiography of labor in Africa has focused primarily on the emergence of an African urban working class and on the colonial construction of masculinities;Footnote 1 only limited notice has been taken of the gendered consequences of labor migrations, whether voluntary or forced, on the societies of origin. Furthermore, women only rarely appear in these studies.Footnote 2 For example, Cooper interprets the withdrawal of women from the colonial workforce as a means for the colonial administration to exercise social control over African families and ensure the reproduction of a new generation of industrial workers.Footnote 3 However, he is actually examining a 1950s' colonial ideology of labor which, in practice, was rarely realized before the postcolonial era. Although the colonial administration had, indeed, long denied the use of women's labor, this did not mean the practice was any less common, notably on colonial building sites.Footnote 4

Studies of masculinities in West Africa have often tended to forget that men were, above all, fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers.Footnote 5 The presence of women on colonial building sites—along with men's flight from forced recruitment—should therefore be reconsidered in the broader framework of the constructions of local masculinities, which were closely linked to starting a family and shaping it into a viable economic unit. It is therefore important to study men in relation to their family context, in order to avoid reapplying the colonial vision of the “single worker,” indispensable to the economic development of the colonies and easy to uproot with offers of work in expanding colonial economic hubs.Footnote 6 For these populations, it was often much more important to preserve and improve the social position already established within their family structures of origin than risk an uncertain process of colonial proletarianization, seen as inseparable from certain forms of emasculation.Footnote 7

In this article, masculinities are defined as a matrix of performed identities, behaviors, and power relations that are associated with the male sex. Masculinities are both socially constructed and reconstructed through time. Constructs of masculinities implied in colonial notions such as breadwinner, employee, and proletarian were contested, manipulated, and reconstructed by African men in various economic and social situations, with complex effects on all those concerned. The 1920s and 1930s were generously peppered with local acts of resistance to the imposition of models of colonial masculinities and more generally against colonial attempts to control the African family.

According to John Iliffe, attaining the status of “Big Man” would remain one of the obligatory objectives of adult masculinity in Africa throughout the twentieth century.Footnote 8 This status, a sort of “hegemonic masculinity,” as defined by Connell,Footnote 9 is based on principles of seniority and the position at the head of a family in societies where marriage and fatherhood permit the accumulation of wealth and the attainment of a certain social position by providing access to land and the labor of dependents.Footnote 10 The profits amassed from the family economy could, consequently, be reinvested in polygamous marriages, which further allowed the family to grow, enlarging the workforce and therefore increasing the number of plots cultivated in an expanding agricultural system. This simultaneously reinforced the prestige of the “Big Man” with his many dependents.

It therefore seems appropriate to rethink resistance to forced labor as a possible strategy for maintaining and preserving these local norms of mostly family-oriented masculinity in the face of colonial attempts to impose other models, which rested largely on waged employment and productive masculinity. But these resistance attempts could also foster further tensions within local communities in the form of competing masculinities, entailing specific generational conflicts for wealth accumulation.

In this article, I analyze how African categories of gender interacted with those produced and imposed by colonialism within the framework of forced labor and how these forced interactions could lead to resistance on the part of local populations. Imposed colonial models of masculinity, which rested largely on waged—and, in practice, mostly forced—employment, disrupted traditional possibilities of accumulating sufficient social and economic wealth to establish an independent household. Yet, reactions to colonial control and forced labor must be considered not only in terms of gender, but also in relation to the sociocultural milieus of the workers, which were expressed differently depending on the generational position of recruits and their specific regional and historical contexts. It is therefore important to consider different, changing experiences of forced labor in intersectional terms.Footnote 11

I examine these issues within the context of forced recruitments for the Société Anonyme des Cultures de Diakandapé (SACD) in the region of Kayes in Mali from 1919, when the business started operating in that region, until the abolition of forced labor in 1946. My analysis is based on colonial documents collected in governmental archives in Bamako, Dakar, and Aix-en-Provence, dealing mainly with issues of labor and forced recruitment for the SACD, but also for other public and private sites in Mali. Unfortunately, the business archives of the SACD could not be located for this study.

Although this official documentation is often brief and elusive when it comes to the working conditions in these forced labor camps and is little concerned with local understandings of labor and gender, it remains a precious source of information about labor conflicts and resistance against forced recruitment in French West Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. Colonial inspection reports are especially useful sources, helping us to read other colonial documentation against the grain. Indeed they provide, for the time, a rather critical view of working conditions on these sites and an attempt to understand what may have caused labor conflicts. These particular sources have been used by previous historical studies of the SACD to examine the methods of forced recruitment and the dire working and living conditions on the sites.Footnote 12 They have also been deconstructed to make visible the presence of women and children in forced labor camps in Kayes.Footnote 13 While this analysis of forced recruitment of women and children in Kayes has the merit of being one of the very first works to apply a gendered perspective to issues of forced labor in French West Africa, it failed to analyze patterns of resistance to forced labor.

It is therefore the ambition of this article to demonstrate that resistance against forced labor in French West Africa was ultimately informed by the complex confrontation between local and colonial understandings of gendered constructions. I will begin by providing a brief overview of the historiography of labor in colonial Africa and its urban and gendered biases. I then move to the colonial masculinist construction of the African worker in which the maleness or masculinity of the labor force is taken for granted while women's work is relegated to “family labor.”Footnote 14 This model came in conflict with the local sexual division of labor and constructions of masculinities. Finally, I use the case study of forced labor recruitment at the SACD to demonstrate that methods of forced labor in French West Africa inspired specific forms of resistance that need to be understood as opposition to both colonial violence and imposed models of colonial masculinities, and also to local seniority.

A Historiography with Separatist Tendencies

The colonization of Africa has long been interpreted as a process of industrialization and agricultural modernization in which peasants, assumed to live in a subsistence economy,Footnote 15 were transformed into urban proletarians. In this context, colonial education was supposed to become the essential tool for creating a modern proletariat, particularly through the suppression of older forms of social distinction.Footnote 16 In Kenya, the colonial authorities did not plan to provide social benefits until the second generation of African industrial workers, believing that only a reliable workforce, born and raised in towns, was worth such an investment.Footnote 17 In Senegal, access to family allowances and other benefits was, until the 1950s, reserved for so-called “evolué” workers, whose lifestyle and children's education corresponded to European standards. Evolués had to have a salaried job, and their wives' maternal health had to be monitored by colonial medical services.Footnote 18 Studies of African colonial labor have therefore concentrated primarily on the male urban proletariat and on the forced recruitment of men, broadly reaffirming the colonial view of an exclusively male workforce in Africa, with women and children remaining in rural spaces under the patriarchal control of community elders, except when they were encouraged to join their husbands for the sake of family stability.

The male workforce—its recruitment and its movement toward development hubs—was indeed a priority and near obsession for the colonial administration. Above all, it set out to determine how many workers the administration could manage to obtain and what degree of coercion it could bring to bear upon them without being accused of resorting to forced labor or the disintegration of indigenous society.Footnote 19 At the same time, the colonial authorities increasingly feared, particularly from the beginning of the 1930s and the world economic crisis, the development of an idle and “detribalized” African proletariat on the margins of colonial towns.Footnote 20 The workforce, formed as an adjustable variable in the empire's economic development, therefore had to remain mobile.

Feminist studies on the question of labor and women in Africa during the colonial period have tended to focus exclusively on the ways in which colonization reinforced African masculinities by relegating women to the domestic sphere. These studies, in concentrating principally on the impact of the double colonial and patriarchal domination of women, have often ignored the complex relations between men and their households.Footnote 21

The colonial authorities tried to impose upon African societies the ideal of the husband and father as the family's sole breadwinner. However, this idea would not become a reality until well after independence, and even then only in certain West African cities. In practice, the presence of women alongside men in labor migrations, both voluntary and forced, is certainly no coincidence. Women were actually at the heart of the systems of production of the societies concerned. They consistently joined their labor with that of men to ensure the survival of their families. Furthermore, in West African societies, constructions of gender have long been formed around the male duty to establish an economically viable family unit. In the case of forced labor, the fact that colonial documents rarely mention the presence of women is primarily due to deliberate omission.Footnote 22

It is therefore important to reconsider the forced migrations in West Africa from a perspective that considers both male and female experiences, abandoning separatist approaches. Although it may now seem obvious that the categories “masculinities” and “femininities” are mutually constructed, historical studies still struggle to understand them in this way, particularly in francophone West Africa, where some of the historiography is still steeped in colonial masculinist discourses on labor.

Colonial Sources: A Masculinist Representation of Labor

Defining colonial forced labor

Under the mise en valeur program for the colonial empire, launched by the French Minister of the Colonies, Albert Sarraut, in 1921, the colonial administration began a series of major construction projects in French West Africa aimed particularly at ensuring the provision of raw materials to metropolitan France.Footnote 23 In French Sudan, two major strategies were adopted: the establishment of the Office du Niger in 1919 (although it was not really organized until 1932), and support for private agricultural businesses. The scale of these projects increased the labor needs of both private businesses and public construction sites, requiring unprecedented levels of recruitment.Footnote 24

The line between forced and free labor is often unclear in the colonial archives, particularly from the 1920s onward. That which is officially designated free labor is not necessarily so, while on colonial construction sites, we find workers with a wide variety of statuses, ranging from voluntary employees to administrative or military recruits, to families of workers who are not officially recruited but who contribute, in one way or another, to work on the sites. Moreover, sometimes workers recruited as forced labor for a period of time chose to continue working for the same business, as salaried employees, after the end of their initial term of service.Footnote 25 Finally, when the administration tried to orient or encourage—and thus control—certain forms of free labor, such as the migrations to the Senegalese peanut basin, these rapidly turned into new forms of forced labor.Footnote 26

This ambiguity in the sources reflects the ambivalence of colonial discourse on forced labor. Forced labor was supposed to educate “lazy natives,” in preparation for the economic development of the territory.Footnote 27 The Decree of October 22, 1925 and its application Order of March 29, 1926Footnote 28 aimed to regulate the use of indigenous labor in the commercial, industrial, and agricultural enterprises of French West Africa and to theoretically guarantee certain standards of employment, health, and hygiene to the workers recruited by these private businesses. Despite the existence of this legislation, the labor system that prevailed until 1946 was most often one of forced labor. However, the French government could not entirely ignore the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) Convention of June 26, 1930, condemning forced labor in all its forms.Footnote 29 France ended up adopting the Convention in 1937. However, the French Decree of August 11, 1938 stipulated that “in regions where a shortage of labor causes difficulties for industrial and agricultural businesses in employing the workers they need, they can ask for support from the local administration in recruiting the laborers required for the functioning of their operations.”Footnote 30 Although the government rarely took into account the resolutions of the ILO,Footnote 31 it did attempt to accommodate French and international public opinion.Footnote 32 The colonial administration was therefore cautious in the vocabulary it employed in official documents, particularly in cases where labor was being requisitioned for private businesses, which was condemned by the League of Nations' Slavery Convention of December 25, 1926, covering slavery and all other forms of labor resembling it.

Women do not appear in this theoretical framework as workers because their recruitment into the system of forced labor was forbidden;Footnote 33 instead, they were used to ensure the reproduction of the workforce in their roles as wives and mothers, and as cooks who fed workers in the camps. Women's labor was not directly addressed in the legislative system of French West Africa until 1936, with the promulgation of the Decree of September 18 on the regulation of women and children's work.Footnote 34 This shows that the colonial administration was aware of the agricultural work carried out by women, but nevertheless continued to define labor as predominantly male and salaried. The introduction of a category of “women and children's work” in the annual reports of the territorial labor inspectorate from 1946 onward shows that the colonial administration continued to see the working woman as an anomaly amongst male workers who represented the norm.Footnote 35 Furthermore, women were not included in counts of the working population. The colonial administration placed women's labor in a strictly familial framework: “Salaried women remain, and will long remain, the exception when compared with the vast majority who, in town and countryside alike, are called only to undertake family work.”Footnote 36

Women's work on colonial construction sites, regularly observed by the various labor inspection services, was systematically denied by the local colonial authorities concerned: when they were obliged to acknowledge women's presence on the sites, they claimed that they were simply the “accompanying spouses and daughters” of the recruited workers.Footnote 37 It is likely that the local administration did not much care about the presence of women on the building sites, as long as the work was completed. In fact, women's participation proved indispensable for the completion of these construction projects, which generally exceeded the labor capacity of the villages. The colonial administration deliberately ignored women's labor on the sites because women were not supposed to be recruited for that kind of “work,” according to employment legislation, unless it was part of their “traditional” role, as in the example of “the cooking [being] the women's responsibility.”Footnote 38 However, the difficulties faced by the colonial administration and private businesses in recruiting and retaining workers gradually led them to reconsider the place of families in projects dependent on migratory labor: “By more widely authorizing married workers to bring their families with them, rather than only allowing the presence of women who can be used as cooks in the camps (as is too often the case), we will facilitate family life.”Footnote 39

Colonial recruitment of workers onto the sisal plantations of Kayes

The Société Anonyme des Cultures de Diakandapé (SACD) was founded in 1919 by Louis and Marius Renoux, and in 1929 it took over the Société Anonyme des Plantations d'Ambidédi and la Société des Plantations de Kayes Ndi.Footnote 40 After various mergers, the SACD possessed a total of six plantations (Samé, Diakandapé, Dar Salam, Dialla, Kayes Ndi, and Ambidédi).Footnote 41

At the start of the 1920s, the SACD made attempts to recruit workers in the different cercles (districts) of the region of Kayes: Bafoulabé, Kita, Nioro, Satadougou, and the subdivision of Yélimané. However, the recruitment of a workforce was one of the major difficulties faced by the colonial administrations. The problem was not recruiting labor, since there was a well-developed system of “active propaganda” run by such intermediaries as the canton and village chiefs, but rather preventing the desertion of workers from building sites after they had begun to work.Footnote 42

In the cercle of Kayes, it was the younger members of the population who traveled to Senegal and the Gambia to cultivate peanuts, joining the group of seasonal migrants known as navétanes. The colonial administration therefore decided to recruit from among heads of family.Footnote 43 Soon the question of whether or not the families of recruited workers should accompany them became important. In the cercle of Bafoulabé, employment periods lasting one year encouraged the laborers to bring their families with them, creating additional costs for the company, according to the employer. This situation led Bafoulabé's cercle administrator to propose, in 1923, the reduction of the engagement to one month.Footnote 44 Faced with local populations' resistance to recruitment, the colonial administration in Mali decided to recruit from more distant cercles and even from other colonies in the Federation. The authorities thus began to draw workers from the cercle of Koutiala, and even from Upper Volta (Ouahigouya, Dédougou).Footnote 45 In 1929, 1,030 out of the total 1,160 contracted laborers came from the eastern and southern regions of French Sudan.Footnote 46 Despite the administration's increasingly tight controls over recruitment, desertions continued. In an attempt to mitigate these huge losses of manpower, the SACD called upon the second portion of the contingent until 1946, notably during the war.Footnote 47 The administration further organized forced labor recruitments, notably of women and children, on behalf of private companies until 1946.Footnote 48

Working conditions on the sisal plantations

Once recruited, workers were assembled on the site of the plantation in camps installed near the building sites. A genuine, autonomous village was thus constituted for the workers, whose everyday lives were strictly regulated.Footnote 49 However, numerous reports from plantation inspections emphasize that these encampments were often in a state of disrepair and sometimes overpopulated.Footnote 50 Cases of dysentery were also mentioned in the reports.Footnote 51 Furthermore, there were many work accidents, and in 1937 the administration even approached the SACD to suggest that they provide workers with aprons or leg-coverings to protect them against pricks or wounds, which could become infected.Footnote 52 The archival documents show that women and children participated in various tasks producing goods and services on the plantations—remunerated or not, officially or not—on behalf of the sisal companies. Some women prepared meals for the single male recruits, who paid them in cash at the end of each month.Footnote 53 Since these women were not formally employed, their work has left few traces in the colonial archives that generally refer only to male workers, assumed to be single.

Workers' wives could be officially employed as cooks by the company, earning, on average, their own food ration plus three francs per man fed per month; this workforce supplemented the cooks hired on the spot from neighboring villages.Footnote 54 In 1929, there were thirty such women working for the SACD (twelve in Ambidédi, four in Diakandapé, six in Samé, and eight in Dar-Salam, serving a total of 1,160 workers), representing one cook for about thirty-eight workers.Footnote 55 By working as cooks, these women seem to have remained confined in their domestic role. African women were certainly always in charge of carrying out domestic duties; however, their agricultural work was also a necessity, as the domestic unit was the same as the production and consumption unit and based on both female and male labor.Footnote 56 Other documents demonstrate that both women and children participated in agricultural work on the SACD sites. They helped their husbands and fathers to cut or bundle the sisal to increase their yield and thus improve the family's earning prospects by meeting the imposed quota of eighty to a hundred, or even a hundred, and twenty sisal bundles a day.Footnote 57 Children older than twelve were allowed to work on the plantation: in 1938, they earned 1.50 francs a day and a small portion of food.Footnote 58

The recruitment of women and children on behalf of private agricultural firms in the region of Kayes, despite the recurrent denial of the local authorities, appears to have been common practice:Footnote 59 “The authorities of the Cercle [of Kayes] face constant problems regarding the supply of a stable labor force to the various planters in the region. The total demand amounted to 2,000 men, women, and children for farms…”Footnote 60 In her report on women's labor in French Sudan, Denise Savineau, the only female colonial inspector of French West Africa, condemned similar practices in the middle-Niger valley and the hypocrisy of what the colonial agricultural firms often designated as “family labor.”Footnote 61 Public and private agricultural firms in French Sudan only considered men who were older than fifteen to be workers, although entire families labored on these sites to assure a minimum level of subsistence. In 1939, the labor inspector Tap noted that there were many children working on the SACD's plantations.Footnote 62 In fact, rather than forcing the SACD to actually improve working conditions on the sisal plantations, it seems that the administrative authorities increasingly prioritized the recruitment of a young, single workforce in the hope of being able to control it more successfully. However, this policy did not preclude further tensions and resistances within local populations.

“Weapons of the Weak”: Everyday Forms of Resistance in the Colonial EnvironmentFootnote 63

Until the 1980s, many studies on African resistance focused primarily on movements resisting colonization or fighting for independence, in an effort to rewrite African histories in opposition to colonial history.Footnote 64 Since the end of the 1980s, however, more and more researchers have attempted to broaden the concept of resistance in Africa,Footnote 65 notably by analyzing various “everyday forms of resistance.”Footnote 66

In French West Africa, a range of discreet, silent reactions, rather than violent ones, seem to have gradually weakened the colonial order and the system of forced labor over time. The most common was desertion by workers, which continued over the entire period of forced recruitment. This form of noncompliance was particularly common in border regions, where migration into another (British or Portuguese) colony represented the simplest means of fleeing French colonial authority. These flights were not only the actions of isolated individuals, but could also involve groups of workers who fled together, or even the relocation of entire villages to neighboring colonies.Footnote 67 Individuals and groups of young people from the region of Kayes escaped both military and forced labor recruitments by migrating to Senegal and the Gambia.Footnote 68 Another common resistance tactic, used by workers who stayed in place, was to perform their tasks slowly or “unwillingly.” To combat this, Sudan's sisal plantations gradually introduced a system of bonuses for productivity.Footnote 69

Most of these behaviors seem to have been spontaneous, requiring little coordination. They were generally done discreetly, avoiding any direct confrontation with the authorities. Above all, they were shaped by the very conditions of labor organization and control.Footnote 70 The fear engendered by repression seems to have determined this form of response. However, these actions are no less political for their discretion, as Scott points out, for they require a certain collusion among workers, as well as the development of some degree of mutual support to prevent denunciations.Footnote 71

Towards the end of the 1930s, laborers' responses to the working conditions on the sites became more direct and forceful. As workers became increasingly aware of their rights, they began to demand better treatment and compliance with labor legislation. Complaints brought to the arbitration board concerning nonpayment of salary, insufficient rationing, or contractual issues begin to appear in the official record.Footnote 72 In 1937, a recruit of the SACD went to the arbitration board of Kayes to demand the termination of his work contract.Footnote 73 While the reasons for this request are not mentioned in the file, the fact that he made this plea only six months after his recruitment on a one-year contract suggests that it may have been due to dire working conditions on site. The worker finally obtained the termination of his contract but was sentenced to pay a twenty franc fine to the SACD for the damages inflicted by the termination. Collective work stoppages and incidents of violence also occurred several times over the course of 1937 on the Société des Sisaleraies et Carburants Africains plantation at Samanko, where employment legislation was rarely respected.Footnote 74 On the Kayes Ndi plantation, eighty-four workers threatened the plantation manager in April 1938, after nonpayment of their January earnings.Footnote 75

It could therefore be suggested that there was a gradual prise de conscience amongst the workers, probably linked to the new conditions of recruitment. The sisal plantations, with the help of the administration, recruited in regions that were progressively farther from the plantations themselves; the social and cultural environments of the areas in which the plantations were based were completely alien to the recruited workers. Communities from Upper Volta were particularly affected by these recruitments. Demands for better working conditions, coupled with the defense of common interests, seem to have gradually replaced desertions, as the latter became logistically more difficult due to the greater distances involved. Furthermore, these workers could no longer bring their families along because of the distance, which certainly worsened their quality of life in these forced labor camps. Everyday workers' resistance on colonial forced labor sites was therefore not limited to production-related demands. It also contested the colonial state's definition of masculinity, which denied them a normal family life and frustrated their aspirations to become “Big Men” in their local communities. In opposition to the colonial model of productive masculinity, African workers struggled to uphold a family-oriented masculinity, with its specific social and economic demands.

Resistances in the Realms of Gender and Intersectionality

Until now, few researchers have examined resistance to forced labor from a gendered perspective and, more particularly, the strategies employed by local populations to resist both colonial masculinities and local seniority imposed by the organization of forced labor recruitment. Here we must take into account another aspect of domination that had a direct impact on forms of resistance and that clearly complicated the colonial subject's relationship with the colonial power: the role of intermediaries and local chiefs in recruitment. In order to ensure successful recruitment, the colonial administration heavily relied on local authorities. Attempts at resistance were therefore aimed not just at colonial domination, but also at local authorities and elders.

The colonial authorities systematically used the local chieftaincies to recruit workers for forced labor on construction sites. They thus attempted to bolster the power of certain chiefs so that these chiefs might satisfy an ever-growing colonial demand for manpower. At the same time, this collaboration may also have helped to delegitimize the chiefs' power in the eyes of the younger generations, who were the first victims of recruitment to forced labor. In 1939, 150 SACD workers did not hesitate to complain vehemently to the canton chief, upon their return to Ouahigouya, about the fact that they had only occasionally been given meat, that they had been required to pay the cooks themselves, and that ill workers had not received the pay they were owed.Footnote 76 When the administration was informed of these facts, it informed the SACD that the authorities would no longer support the company's recruitment efforts if it persisted in ignoring French Sudan's labor legislation.

Tensions were therefore created at the very heart of communities, especially as chiefs seemed to prioritize protecting older members of the community from forced labor:

Boussira Traoré makes an observation about the duration of displacements for manual labor: (Diakandapé: one year), he feels that this measure offers the serious disadvantage of splitting up many families. It is much easier for the young to emigrate to Senegal; laborers are inevitably recruited from among the heads of newly-formed families.Footnote 77

The elders thus attempted to maintain their control over the labor of young people in order to preserve the existing social and economic order in the face of an increasingly complex economic environment. The heads of families tried to lay claim to the earnings of dependents that had been forcibly recruited, to pay capitation tax. But this did not take into account the numerous desertions and the loss of the youngest workers to the groundnut basin.Footnote 78 Indeed, the booming colonial peanut economy could offer alternatives to the traditional networks of resource accumulation for young people wishing to establish themselves. Ultimately, this challenged the elders' power to control the workforce and resource accumulation. It provoked a generational conflict over masculinity construction within these communities. The migrations to the groundnut basin were particularly important in that they enabled the younger generations to break out of total dependence on their elders for the accumulation of enough wealth to marry, notably the dowry, even when they had to pay a portion of their earnings to the heads of their families.Footnote 79 While these migrations to Senegal also allowed families to diversify their revenues, it seems that, over time, a growing number of migrants ended up settling definitively in the groundnut basin, on the coast, and in the towns of Senegal.Footnote 80 In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the elders remaining in the villages complained to the colonial administration about these movements toward the groundnut basin: “This sucking up by Senegal of certain Sudanese elements gets bigger, the emigrants now call their family or ask them to come with them.”Footnote 81

Simultaneously, the colonial authorities' growing fears about the “disintegration of native communities”Footnote 82 encouraged them to recruit ever-younger workers, most of whom were single. The ad hoc recruitment of cooks was then meant as a means of addressing logistical problems and conflicts. But this did not reduce the rate of either desertions or rebellions on agricultural sites—quite the opposite. These recruitments of the youngest workers were bound to frustrate their aspirations to attain a certain level of economic independence and start their own families by delaying their entry into marital and family life. Furthermore, men always had moral and economic obligations to provide for their families. For them, the produce gained from farming was often far more significant than the salaries paid on the sisal plantations.Footnote 83 Finally, voluntary and forced migrations alike could create tensions within families. The relatively recent abolition of slavery in French West Africa (in 1905) had increased the workloads of women and younger family members at the same time that migration recruitments proliferated.Footnote 84 In some cases, the tensions created by these new divisions of labor led to an increase in domestic violence.Footnote 85 At the same time, men's absences often led to divorce on the grounds of family abandonment, or to women leaving the marital home.Footnote 86 Meanwhile, the colonial authorities attempted, together with local authorities, to closely control the movements of their subjects, particularly women and young people.Footnote 87

The private agricultural companies also tried to institute policies to retain their plantation workforces. A system of sharecropping was gradually introduced in French Sudan by most of the private agricultural firms in the colony. In the 1920s, the Société des Sisaleraies et Carburants Africains, which also farmed a plantation in Diamou in the cercle of Bafoulabé, made fifteen hectares of land available for workers and their families to cultivate millet, maize, potatoes, or onions.Footnote 88 Similarly, from 1944 onward the SACD gave its workers access to free land prepared by the company's tractors as part of their program to encourage the resettlement of laborers.Footnote 89

By encouraging the formation of fully functioning villages on or near their plantation sites, private agricultural businesses seem to have ultimately understood the importance of family life for African workers. However, since working conditions on the plantations continued to decline during the 1940s, the number of families who lived on the plantation at Samé continued to fall: there were only twenty families left in 1944, none of whom were there voluntarily.Footnote 90 Following further desertions by workers in 1945, an enquiry uncovered the fact that the company was providing an indigestible diet due to a lack of fatty substance in rice; that the plantation chiefs systematically resorted to the chicotte (a kind of whip); and that daily salary deductions were regularly given to those who did not complete the work they had been assigned.Footnote 91 Furthermore, the SACD continued to pay very low wages: 3.5 francs a day, plus food. In comparison, voluntary laborers on the Dakar-Niger railway were paid 21 francs a day; woodcutters, 4 francs plus rations.

In this section, I have examined how resistance to forced labor could be intimately linked to preserving local norms of masculinities, which included establishing and supporting a family and enhancing one's social position in the local community, with the aim of someday becoming a “Big Man.” Colonial forced labor was at odds with these aspirations because it tended to delay younger workers' entry into marital and family life. Local resistance was also directed against elders who were often complicit with the colonial authorities, targeting especially the younger generations for forced labor recruitment in order to reassert their own power to control and mobilize labor. In this context, it is not surprising that the younger generations increasingly chose to migrate to the Senegambian peanut basin to work for its booming economy and in some cases to settle there permanently. The result was that they could become “Big Men” without having to completely adhere to exploitative models of masculinities, whether colonial or traditional.

Conclusion

The colonial authorities attempted to impose particular notions of masculinity on their West African subjects. These masculinities were essentially based on colonial wage labor, which—from the 1920s until 1946—was, in practice, often synonymous with forced labor. This process tended to delay young men's entry into marital and family life in these communities and was thus in opposition to the local “Big Man” ideal of masculinity. Resistance against forced labor in this context has therefore to be understood as a response not only to employment-centered frustrations but also to clashing definitions of masculinity, with the colonial state trying to promote an idea of productive masculinity, to which African workers opposed a family-oriented masculinity, with its specific social claims and needs.

Local communities opposed colonial oppression in different ways, depending on the intersection of gender with other facets of identity, such as age, generation, class, and cultural affiliations. These strategies also varied and developed over time: from desertion, to a lack of enthusiasm for the work, to the organization of more violent acts in some instances, as the conditions of recruitment to the plantations facilitated the gradual formation of “class solidarity” among the workers. Ultimately, local constructions of the idea of household and family, as well as the sexual division of labor, although confronted with very different colonial models entailing specific generational and gender conflicts, seem to have endured, at least in part, throughout the colonial period, allowing a certain continuity in the local (re)production of masculinities.

Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Conference “Les changements dans les modèles culturels du travail en Afrique. Une approche comparative,” UCAD Dakar, December 5–7, 2011. I would like to thank Romain Tiquet, Franco Barchiesi, Stefano Bellucci, and the two anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback on this research, as well as Caroline George for translations from French into English.

References

NOTES

1. On this field, see particularly Lindsay, Lisa A. and Miescher, Stephan F., eds., Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 2003)Google Scholar; Moodie, T. Dunbar and Ndatsche, Vivienne, Going for Gold: Men, Mines, Migration (Berkeley, CA, 1994)Google Scholar; Morrell, Robert, ed., Changing Men in Southern Africa (London, 2001)Google Scholar; Morrell, Robert and Ouzgane, Lahoucine, eds., African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; Cooper, Frederick, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Two notable exceptions are Declich, Francesca, “Unfree Labour, Forced Labour and Resistance among the Zigula of the Lower Juba,” in Resisting Bondage in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, ed. Alpers, Edward A., Campbell, Gwyn, and Salman, Michael (London, 2006)Google Scholar; Allina-Pisano, Eric, Slavery by Any Other Name: African Life under Company Rule in Colonial Mozambique (Charlottesville, NC, 2012)Google Scholar.

3. Cooper, Frederick, “Industrial Man Goes to Africa,” in Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, ed. Lindsay, Lisa A. and Miescher, Stephan F. (Portsmouth, NH, 2003), 128–29Google Scholar.

4. Rodet, Marie, “C'est le regard qui fait l'histoire; Comment utiliser des archives coloniales qui nous renseignent malgré elles sur l'histoire des femmes africaines (archives),” Terrains & travaux 10 (2006):18–35 Google Scholar.

5. Mann, , “Old Soldiers, Young Men: Masculinity, Islam, and Military Veterans in Late 1950s Soudan Français (Mali),” in Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, ed. Lindsay, Lisa A. and Miescher, Stephan F. (Portsmouth, NH, 2003), 72Google Scholar.

6. Rodet, Marie, Les migrantes ignorées du Haut-Sénégal (1900–1946) (Paris, 2009), 107–8Google Scholar.

7. Mann, “Old Soldiers, Young Men,” 74.

8. Iliffe, John, Honour in African History (Cambridge, 2005), 111Google Scholar.

9. This concept aims to analyze the processes whereby certain categories of men impose their power upon not only women, but also other categories of men. See Connell, Robert, Masculinities (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar.

10. Lindsay, Lisa A., “Money, Marriage, and Masculinity on the Colonial Nigerian Railway,” in Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, ed. Lindsay, Lisa A. and Miescher, Stephan F. (Portsmouth, NH, 2003), 139–43Google Scholar.

11. The concept of intersectionality originates in African-American feminist theories, which, from the 1970s onward, have attempted to call into question the “white supremacy” of second-wave feminists. This concept allows us to rethink our relationships with others and with ourselves, not only through the prism of gender but by recognizing the way gender identities are shaped by other facets of identity, such as class, culture, sexual orientation, age, generation, and so on. This complexification of gender analysis throws light upon the multiple aspects of oppression and undermines essentialist conceptions of femininities and masculinities.

12. Fall, Babacar, “Une entreprise agricole privée au Soudan français: la Société anonyme des cultures de Diakandapé (Kayes), 1919–1942,” in Entreprises et entrepreneurs en Afrique au XIXe et XXe siècle, ed. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine (Paris, 1983), 335–50Google Scholar; Fall, Babacar, Le travail forcé en Afrique-Occidentale française, 1900–1946 (Paris, 1993)Google Scholar.

13. Rodet, “C'est le regard,” 18–35.

14. Rodet, M., “Missing Migrants: The Absence of Women in the History of Rural-Rural Migrations from French Sudan to Senegambia (1900–1932),” in African Mosaic: Political, Social, Economic and Information Technologies Issues in the New Millennium, ed. Zack-Williams, Alfred B. and Udogu, Emmanuel I. (Newcastle, UK, 2009), 156Google Scholar.

15. This view is widely shared by many works from the 1960s: see especially, Berg, Elliott J., “The Economics of the Migrant Labor System,” in Urbanization and Migration in West Africa, ed. Kuper, Hilda H. (Berkeley, CA, 1965), 160–81Google Scholar; Wallerstein, Immanuel, “Migration in West Africa: The Political Perspective,” in Urbanization and Migration in West Africa, ed. Kuper, Hilda H. (Berkeley, 1965), 148–59Google Scholar. For a more general study of African societies in terms of subsistence economies, see Balandier, Georges, “Structures traditionnelles et changements économiques,” Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 1 (1960):1–14 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meillassoux, Claude, “Essai d'interprétation du phénomène économique dans les sociétés traditionnelles d'autosubsistance,” Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines, 1 (1960): 38–67 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meillassoux, Claude, Femmes, greniers et apitaux (Paris, 2003[1975])Google Scholar. Manchuelle calls into question these ahistorical conceptions of an Africa based on economies of self-sufficiency in Manchuelle, François, Willing Migrants: Soninke Labor Diasporas, 1848–1960 (Athens, OH, 1997)Google Scholar.

16. Miescher, Stephen F., Making Men in Ghana (Bloomington, IN, 2005), 62–67 Google Scholar.

17. Cooper, “Industrial Man,” 128–29.

18. Ibid., 133–35.

19. Cooper, Decolonization, 1.

20. Inspection du travail, Gouverneur Tap, inspecteur du travail, Mission février 1937 au Soudan français, March 1937, National Archives of Senegal (hereafter ANS), fonds du Gouvernement général d'Afrique occidentale française (hereafter GGAOF), fonds moderne (hereafter FM) K 151(26). See also Rodet, Les migrantes ignorées, 240.

21. White, Luise, “Matrimony and Rebellion: Masculinity in Mau Mau,” in Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, ed. Lindsay, Lisa A. and Miescher, Stephan F. (Portsmouth, NH, 2003), 177–91Google Scholar.

22. Rodet, “C'est le regard,” 18–35.

23. La mise en valeur des colonies aimed to provide a political doctrine of economic colonization whereby the colonial workforce of the French territories would participate in the Métropole's recovery. See Sarraut, Albert, La mise en valeur des colonies (Paris, 1923)Google Scholar; Andrew, C. M. and Kanya-Forstner, A. S., “France, Africa, and the First World War,” The Journal of African History 19 (1978): 11–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Rapport en conseil de gouvernement, 1925, ANS GGAOF 21 G 37(17); Circulaire Merlin no. 20 A/s. Révision du programme des grands travaux intéressant l'AOF, Gouverneur AOF à lieutenant gouverneur Haut-Sénégal-Niger, February 14, 1925, National Archives of Mali (hereafter ANM) Hamdallaye (FR) A 251.

24. Manchuelle, Willing Migrants, 148.

25. This was the case on certain logging and railway construction sites where, once their period of forced labor ended, some continued to work for the same company as free waged labor. Interview in Kidira with Ibrahima Dabo, November 22, 2003.

26. Rodet, Les migrantes ignorées, 248–50.

27. Gouverneur général de l'AOF Jules Carde, “Discours, Conseil de Gouvernement,” Journal Officiel de l'Afrique Occidentale Française (hereafter JO AOF) (November 1922): 845. See also Fall, , Le travail forcé (Paris, 1993), 258–59Google Scholar.

28. JO AOF 1124 (April 3, 1926):301–04.

29. Nevertheless, the French delegates at Geneva initially abstained from voting and refused to sign the Convention. At this point, the French government decided to issue its own document on compulsory labor for public purposes, the Decree of August 21, 1930. Officially adopted to prevent abusive labor requisitions, this text actually makes exceptions “in the case of force majeure” and for “customary” labor, leaving a wide margin for interpretation by local administrations. See Suret-Canale, Jean, Afrique noire occidentale et centrale. L'ère coloniale (1900–1945) (Paris, 1964), 326Google Scholar.

30. Rapport sur le travail et la main-d'œuvre indigène, undated, ANS GGAOF K 66(19).

31. Circulaire no. 525 AP/1. A/s. Application du décret du 12 août 1937 mettant en vigueur la convention sur le travail forcé ou obligatoire adoptée en 1930 par la Conférence internationale du travail, Gouverneur général AOF à gouverneurs des colonies du groupe et gouverneur Dakar et dépendances, September 27, 1938, National Archives of Outre-Mer (hereafter ANOM), fonds ministériel, Affpol 2808.

32. Particularly following the publication of Londres, Albert, Terre d'ébène (Paris, 1929)Google Scholar, which, following an investigation in Africa lasting several months, denounced the use of forced labor in the colonies.

33. In French West Africa, women were exempt from 1918 onward. See Arrêté relatif au régime des prestations dans les colonies et territoires de l'AOF, September 23, 1918, ANOM Affpol 2808.

34. These Decrees can be found in ANS GGAOF K 192(26).

35. Cooper, Decolonization, 93.

36. Circulaire De Coppet, November 4, 1936, ANS K 192(26).

37. Rapport Demaret, 1919, ANOM Affpol 3049.

38. Rapport sur la visite des camps et chantiers du consortium, du STIN, et de l'Office du Niger, March 10, 1937, ANS K 151(26).

39. “Soudan—La condition morale des travailleurs dans le problème de la main d'œuvre au Soudan Français,” Bulletin service intercolonial d'information, October 22, 1937, ANOM Commission Guernut 50 B 12.

40. Fall, “Une entreprise agricole,” 335–50.

41. For more information on the structure of the SACD, see Rodet, Les migrantes ignorées, 224.

42. Rapport sur le prix de la main-d'œuvre, Soudan français, 1936, ANS GGAOF K 212(26): Gouverneur du Soudan français Rougier à secrétaire général Desanti, March 12, 1938, ANS GGAOF 15 G 22.

43. Administrateur cercle de Kayes à gouverneur Soudan français, September 3, 1923, ANM S 50.

44. Étude sur la question de la main d'œuvre, Cercle de Bafoulabé, 1923, ANM S 50.

45. The colony of Upper Volta was dissolved in 1932 and divided between the Côte d'Ivoire, French Sudan and Niger. It was revived in 1947.

46. Inspecteur des affaires administratives à lieutenant gouverneur du Soudan français, A/s. Main d'œuvre contractuelle dans la région de Kayes, December 15, 1929, ANM Koulouba S 25.

47. The French colonial authorities used a number of the colonial conscripts, the second portion, to work on colonial public and private building sites. See Inspection du travail, Rapport annuel sur l'emploi de la main d'œuvre, Soudan français, 1942, ANS GGAOF 2 G 42/23; Société des Cultures de Diakandapé à gouverneur Soudan français, 10 July 1942, Société des Cultures de Diakandapé à gouverneur Soudan français, A/s. Recrutement demandé à l'administration, 22 September 1942; télégramme-lettre confidentiel 51/c, Cercle de Kayes à gouverneur, 31 May 1946, ANM Hamdallaye 1 R 2763.

48. Rapport 3, 1937, ANOM Commission Guernut 13; Tournée Coppet, 1937, ANS GGAOF 17 G 377(126); Rapport 14 sur la tournée du 8 au 14 novembre Kayes—Tamba-Counda—Kaolack, Inspection du travail, November 22, 1937, ANS GGAOF K 274(26); Rapport de mission du gouverneur général Tap, inspecteur du travail, Cercle de Kayes, January 1939, ANS GGAOF K 217(26).

49. Babacar Ndiaye, “La culture du sisal au Sénégal et au Soudan français (1920–1959): essai d'une histoire des entreprises impériales,” (Mémoire de maîtrise, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, 1995), 84.

50. Rapport 3, 1937, ANOM Commission Guernut 13;Tournée Coppet, 1937, ANS GGAOF 17 G 377(126); Rapport 14 sur la tournée du 8 au 14 novembre Kayes—Tamba-Counda—Kaolack, Inspection du travail, 22 November 1937, ANS GGAFO (FM) K 274(26); Rapport de mission du gouverneur général Tap, inspecteur du travail, Cercle de Kayes. Janvier, 1939, ANS GGAOF K 217(26).

51. See ANM S 25. See also Fall, “Une entreprise agricole.”

52. Gouverneur de l'AOF à Monsieur Renoux Directeur de la Société des cultures de Diakandapé, Mesures à prendre pour protéger les manœuvres contre les piqûres d'épines de feuilles de sisal, November 27, 1937, ANS GGAOF K 311(26).

53. Rapport d'inspection no. 4/I.T. au sujet de l'application de la réglementation en matière de travail indigène sur la plantation des Sisaleraies et Carburants Africains du Samanko, janvier 12, 1938, ANS K 212(26).

54. Administrateur des colonies, chef subdivision Kayes à délégué du gouverneur, September 13, 1929, ANM S 25.

55. Inspecteur affaires administratives à lieutenant gouverneur Soudan français, A/s. Main d'œuvre contractuelle dans la région de Kayes, 15 December 1929, ANM S 25.

56. Rodet, Les migrantes ignorées, 212.

57. Rapport 3, 1937, ANOM Commission Guernut 13.

58. See ANS, K 192(26).

59. Enquête sur la main d'œuvre, Soudan français, 1926, ANS GGAOF K 92(26).

60. Rapports politiques Soudan français, 4th term 1922, ANS 2 G 22/11.

61. Rapport Savineau, 36, ANS GGAOF 17 G 381.

62. Rapport TAP, Kayes, 1939, ANS K 217(26).

63. This term is borrowed from the title of Scott's, James C. famous work, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT, 1985).Google Scholar

64. For a summary of this historiography, see especially Ranger, Terence, “The People in African Resistance: A Review,” Journal of Southern African Studies 4 (1977):125–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, “Révoltes et résistance en Afrique noire: une tradition de résistance paysanne à la colonisation,” Labour, capital & society 16 (1983):34–63 Google Scholar.

65. Crummey, Donald, ed., Banditry, rebellion and social protest in Africa (London, 1986)Google Scholar; Isaacman, Allen F., “Peasants and Rural Social Protest in Africa,” in Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America, ed. Cooper, Frederick, Isaacman, Allen F., Mallon, Florencia E., Roseberry, William, and Stern, Steve J. (Madison, WI, 1993)Google Scholar; Ortner, Sherry B., “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1995):173–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Abbink, Jan, de Bruijn, Mirjiam, and van Walraven, Klass, Rethinking Resistance. Revolt and Violence in African History (Leiden, NL, 2003)Google Scholar; Allina-Pisano, Eric, “Resistance and the Social History of Africa,” Journal of Social History 37 (2012):187–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66. Scott, Weapons of the Weak and “Everyday Forms of Resistance,” The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies 4 (1989):33–62 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an accurate and critical analysis of this historiography relating to Africa, see also Cooper, Frederick, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,” American Historical Review 99 (1994):1516–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar (1994) and Allina-Pisano, “Resistance,” 187–98.

67. Asiwaju, A. I., “Migrations as Revolt: The Example of the Ivory Coast and the Upper Volta before 1945,” The Journal of African History 17 (1976):577–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68. Rapport sur la tournée effectuée du 12 septembre au 25 septembre 1918, Cercle de Bafoulabé, ANM Koulouba 1 E 17.

69. Rapport 3, 1973, ANOM Commission Guernut 13.

70. Romain Tiquet, “Resistance or Adaptation? A New Approach to Forced Labour Analysis in the Senegalese Context (1930–1946),” ASA Conference Baltimore, unpublished paper, November 2011.

71. Scott, “Everyday Forms of Resistance.”

72. Ndiaye, “La culture du sisal,” 77–81.

73. Rapport annuel sur le travail de la main-d'oeuvre au Soudan, 1937, ANS GGAOF 2 G 37/38.

74. The Société des Sisaleraies et Carburants Africains had committed the following infractions: depriving ill men who were not present at morning roll call of their ration and salary; reducing the salary of daily laborers from two and a half francs to two; violence toward employees by M. Lochon, company director. See Rapport d'inspection au sujet de l'application de la réglementation en matière de travail indigène sur la plantation des Sisaleraies et Carburants Africains du Samanko, Soudan français, 1938, ANS K 212(26).

75. Lettre 422/B.T., A/s. Incidents survenus sur les plantations de Diakandapé, Gouverneur p.i. Soudan français à gouverneur général AOF, April 27, 1938, ANS GGAOF K 13(1).

76. Lettre 7670/B.T., A/s. Main d'œuvre, Gouverneur p.i. Soudan français à directeur Société des Cultures de Sisal de Diakandapé, November 15, 1939, ANS K 274(26).

77. Extrait du procès-verbal de la session du conseil des notables, Cercle de Nioro, septembre 3, 1923, ANM Koulouba S 50.

78. Rapport sur la tournée effectuée du 12 septembre au 25 septembre 1918, Cercle de Bafoulabé, ANM 1 E 17.

79. See Manchuelle, Willing Migrants.

80. Rapport sur l'application de la réglementation du travail indigene, AOF, 1933, ANOM CG 50 B 12; Rapport politique trimestriel, Cercle de Nioro, 1st term 1933, ANM 1 E 36. The administrator of Nioro repeated similar fears in his report from the second trimester of the same year, emphasizing that half of all migrants who left for Senegal did not return. Similar phenomena were observed in Satadougou, Kayes, and Bafoulabé. In Bafoulabé, the Commander of the cercle estimated in 1932 that more than one in ten navétanes had not returned from the previous season. Rapport économique, Subdivision de Satadougou, 2nd term 1935, ANM 1 S 2684; Rapport politique trimestriel, Cercle de Kayes, 2nd term 1934, ANM 1 E 19; Rapport économique trimestriel, Cercle de Bafoulabé, 2nd term 1932, ANM 1 E 68. Reports on the region of Sine Saloum in Senegal from 1926 to 1935 regularly note the creation of new villages in the region by former navétanes. See Rapport politique annuel, Cercle de Kaolack—Sine-Saloum. Senegal, 1926, ANS GGAOF 2 G 26/68; Rapport politique annuel, Cercle de Kaolack—Sine-Saloum, Sénégal, 1927, ANS 2 G 27/85; Rapport politique annuel, Cercle de Kaolack—Sine-Saloum, Sénégal, 1935, ANS 2 G 35/82.

81. Administrateur des colonies Levasseur à lieutenant gouverneur Soudan français, mars 17, 1934, ANS GGAOF 21 G 36.

82. See Rodet, Les migrantes ignorées, 166.

83. Annexe II PV des séances tenues par la sous-commission au cours de son voyage, 1937, 59, ANOM Commission Guernut 13.

84. See Manchuelle, Willing Migrants.

85. See Burrill, Emily, “Disputing Wife Abuse. Tribunal Narratives of the Corporal Punishment of Wives in Colonial Sikasso, 1930s,” Cahier d'Etudes Africaines 187–88 (2007): 603–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86. See in particular the numerous divorce procedures initiated for abandonment and desertion and brought to the provincial courts of Kayes from 1908 to 1920 in ANM Koulouba 2 M 123.

87. Rodet, Marie, “Continuum of Gender Violence: The Colonial Invention of Female Desertion as a Customary Criminal Offense, French Soudan, 1900–1949,” in Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, ed. Burrill, Emily, Roberts, Richard, and Thornburry, Elisabeth (Athens, OH, 2010), 74–93 Google Scholar.

88. Lettre inspecteur affaires administratives, December 15, 1929, ANM S 25.

89. Note au sujet de l'installation de famille de travailleurs sur les plantations de Samé, Cercle de Kayes, November 2, 1944, ANM S 800.

90. Rapport annuel sur le travail et la main-d'œuvre, Cercle de Kayes, 1944, ANM Hamdallaye S 800; Rapport No. 40/IT. de tournée à gouverneur Soudan français, A/s. Expérience de sédentarisation entreprise à Kayes par la Société des Cultures de Diakandapé, March 13, 1946, ANM Koulouba 1 R 2763.

91. Télégramme-lettre 90/c, Cercle de Kayes à gouverneur Soudan français, 1945, ANM 1 R 2763.