Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Déjà vu all over again, Waziristan edition
Looks like I'm not the only one confronted with archive-induced déjà vu.
Taking down the failed state
On the margins of a seminar about the situation in Darfur with the Sudanese anthropologist Munzoul Assal (trained in Norway, a happy coincidence that meant that over lunch I had a rare chance to alternate between all the languages I know -- English, French, Norwegian, and Arabic) here in Paris last month, one interlocutor's chance mention of the term "failed state" prompted a brief, but heated, discussion about using this term to describe Sudan. The consensus: please can we get rid of this term? It impedes rather than facilitates analysis.
Since Foreign Policy magazine/the Fund for Peace have recently unveiled their rankings of the world's states most at risk of failure, and because I have so far devoted more time to discussing historical state formations than those presenting today, I'd like to return to this issue of how to analyze the state in Central Africa. On the FP/FfP rankings, Sudan, Chad, CAR and the Democratic Republic of the Congo occupy four of the top eight "most failed" spots.
As I see it, the main problem with the term "failed state" is that it assumes that states come in a one-size-fits-all model. In so doing it excises all the differing histories that led to the diverse political forms that exist within todays' umbrella category, the state. (Keep in mind that the idea that the world is composed of a vast number of equal and sovereign states is a very recent one, with colonies a normal feature into the 1970s.) All of the French Congo (Gabon, CAR, Republic of Congo, part of Cameroon), for instance, was privatized. The vast terrain was divided among forty concessionary companies who ruled from their factoreries in hopes of extracting profit. The few, underfunded civil administrators lamented to no avail how difficult it was to reclaim power from the concessionaires, who generally relied on forced labor and brutal sanctions and flagrantly ignored all the workers' rights laws the French tried to pass. To assume that a situation like that will transform itself into a Habermasian idyll without some kind of massive inputs is ridiculous. And to assume that it will soon collapse into anarchy is also ridiculous, an unhelpfully literalist interpretation of Hobbes' state of nature.
But more to the point, the idea that a set of indicators, no matter how well chosen, will produce reliable rankings about something as difficult to quantify as political life and prospects is dubious, even among those friendlier to statistics than anthropologists tend to be. Sebastian Ziaja at GDI (the German Development Institute -- the Germans seem to be producing a lot of clear-sighted research) has compared the various indices of state failure. In a soon-to-be-published paper, he shows that they have surprisingly high rates of divergence.
For the thing is, the factors that appear on the surface to threaten anarchy -- refugee flows, for instance -- can actually produce relatively persistent political regimes. Scholars of West Africa's recent conflicts have amply demonstrated how "warlord states" produce profit and security for those at the top.
Alex de Waal, who has had the benefit of a kind of anthropological fieldwork among Sudan's leaders while working for the African Union during peace negotiations on Darfur, suggests that Sudan should be understood as a "turbulent state": "constantly full of almost random motion, inherently unstable, yet never showing any fundamental change in its condition" (from a lecture available here; he discusses the term more fully in his chapter in The War in Darfur and the Search for Peace, which he edited). Peripheral areas like Darfur are crucial to a turbulent state, because the destablization there helps those in the center remain among the ruling elite. The ruling elite itself is turbulent and consists of multiple loci of power and unstable coalitions.
De Waal notes that it is tempting to see Sudan as a gyroscope, always tilting and yet never off-balance. But to do so would be to make the mistake most commonly associated with social anthropologists of the 1930s-50s. They saw all facets of human life as performing a function within the structure of the society (hence their school is often described as "structural-functionalist"), which served to reproduce a stable equilibrium, despite the appearance of conflict. But of course, any such system is always changing, and always full of conflicts, making it difficult to predict what the future holds. So the gyroscope's implication of balance is misleading.
Roland Marchal develops a version of the turbulent state theory in his analysis of Sudan's neighbor, Chad. He describes how conflict and dissent in Chad's peripheral regions, particularly those bordering Cameroon, CAR and Sudan, has long been the justification both for repressive tactics throughout the country and for the existence of the state itself, which because of the unrest appears as the go-to container of stability. The situation reproduces itself as the Sudanese and Chadian leaders court and support each other's armed challengers.
The northeast CAR serves as an additional rear base. At the same time, this ground produces a similar dynamic within CAR, in which "rebel" groups emerge in the hinterlands and demand inclusion in the capital. These armed groups in the peripheries, then, strengthen the "failed" central state by providing a justification for its existence and an impetus for programs like security sector reform (SSR -- restructuring, training, and equipping the military), which, despite decades of attempts, has yet to fundamentally alter the center/destabilized peripheries dynamic. And given the poor record of the military, which grows out of the heinous abuses of the colonial guards, further attempts to empower it seem unlikely to better the situation of the country's peaceful inhabitants, who don't care so much about the military or armed groups as for some small improvement in their standard of living.
At this point, I'm eager to go into the mid-century anthropologist Max Gluckman's fascinating work on cycles of rebellion, but this post has meandered enough as it is.
A final word on "failed states": some might say that the term "failed state" is useful for advocacy and grabbing people's attention. But advocacy based on slippery analysis doesn't tend to produce lasting solutions. Iraq was described as a kind of failed state in 2003; it remains near the top of the rankings today.
Since Foreign Policy magazine/the Fund for Peace have recently unveiled their rankings of the world's states most at risk of failure, and because I have so far devoted more time to discussing historical state formations than those presenting today, I'd like to return to this issue of how to analyze the state in Central Africa. On the FP/FfP rankings, Sudan, Chad, CAR and the Democratic Republic of the Congo occupy four of the top eight "most failed" spots.
As I see it, the main problem with the term "failed state" is that it assumes that states come in a one-size-fits-all model. In so doing it excises all the differing histories that led to the diverse political forms that exist within todays' umbrella category, the state. (Keep in mind that the idea that the world is composed of a vast number of equal and sovereign states is a very recent one, with colonies a normal feature into the 1970s.) All of the French Congo (Gabon, CAR, Republic of Congo, part of Cameroon), for instance, was privatized. The vast terrain was divided among forty concessionary companies who ruled from their factoreries in hopes of extracting profit. The few, underfunded civil administrators lamented to no avail how difficult it was to reclaim power from the concessionaires, who generally relied on forced labor and brutal sanctions and flagrantly ignored all the workers' rights laws the French tried to pass. To assume that a situation like that will transform itself into a Habermasian idyll without some kind of massive inputs is ridiculous. And to assume that it will soon collapse into anarchy is also ridiculous, an unhelpfully literalist interpretation of Hobbes' state of nature.
But more to the point, the idea that a set of indicators, no matter how well chosen, will produce reliable rankings about something as difficult to quantify as political life and prospects is dubious, even among those friendlier to statistics than anthropologists tend to be. Sebastian Ziaja at GDI (the German Development Institute -- the Germans seem to be producing a lot of clear-sighted research) has compared the various indices of state failure. In a soon-to-be-published paper, he shows that they have surprisingly high rates of divergence.
For the thing is, the factors that appear on the surface to threaten anarchy -- refugee flows, for instance -- can actually produce relatively persistent political regimes. Scholars of West Africa's recent conflicts have amply demonstrated how "warlord states" produce profit and security for those at the top.
Alex de Waal, who has had the benefit of a kind of anthropological fieldwork among Sudan's leaders while working for the African Union during peace negotiations on Darfur, suggests that Sudan should be understood as a "turbulent state": "constantly full of almost random motion, inherently unstable, yet never showing any fundamental change in its condition" (from a lecture available here; he discusses the term more fully in his chapter in The War in Darfur and the Search for Peace, which he edited). Peripheral areas like Darfur are crucial to a turbulent state, because the destablization there helps those in the center remain among the ruling elite. The ruling elite itself is turbulent and consists of multiple loci of power and unstable coalitions.
De Waal notes that it is tempting to see Sudan as a gyroscope, always tilting and yet never off-balance. But to do so would be to make the mistake most commonly associated with social anthropologists of the 1930s-50s. They saw all facets of human life as performing a function within the structure of the society (hence their school is often described as "structural-functionalist"), which served to reproduce a stable equilibrium, despite the appearance of conflict. But of course, any such system is always changing, and always full of conflicts, making it difficult to predict what the future holds. So the gyroscope's implication of balance is misleading.
Roland Marchal develops a version of the turbulent state theory in his analysis of Sudan's neighbor, Chad. He describes how conflict and dissent in Chad's peripheral regions, particularly those bordering Cameroon, CAR and Sudan, has long been the justification both for repressive tactics throughout the country and for the existence of the state itself, which because of the unrest appears as the go-to container of stability. The situation reproduces itself as the Sudanese and Chadian leaders court and support each other's armed challengers.
The northeast CAR serves as an additional rear base. At the same time, this ground produces a similar dynamic within CAR, in which "rebel" groups emerge in the hinterlands and demand inclusion in the capital. These armed groups in the peripheries, then, strengthen the "failed" central state by providing a justification for its existence and an impetus for programs like security sector reform (SSR -- restructuring, training, and equipping the military), which, despite decades of attempts, has yet to fundamentally alter the center/destabilized peripheries dynamic. And given the poor record of the military, which grows out of the heinous abuses of the colonial guards, further attempts to empower it seem unlikely to better the situation of the country's peaceful inhabitants, who don't care so much about the military or armed groups as for some small improvement in their standard of living.
At this point, I'm eager to go into the mid-century anthropologist Max Gluckman's fascinating work on cycles of rebellion, but this post has meandered enough as it is.
A final word on "failed states": some might say that the term "failed state" is useful for advocacy and grabbing people's attention. But advocacy based on slippery analysis doesn't tend to produce lasting solutions. Iraq was described as a kind of failed state in 2003; it remains near the top of the rankings today.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Archives and their (dis)contents
Near Sheki, Azerbaijan, site of the rebellion Bruce Grant studied
Bruce Grant, an anthropologist at NYU, describes how one paragraph among the hundreds of pages he read in Azeri archives arrested his attention: "From the end of 1929 to April of 1930, the political situation in [our region] was good. In April, a few kulaks and bandits raised a commotion and spread discontent. Currently, however, our political situation can be considered average." What, he wondered, did "average" mean in the context of November 1930 Ajerbaijan, when the report was written? And what, for that matter, did "good" mean? The "kulaks and bandits" in question were the grandson of a Sufi-style saint and his followers, who fought a rebellion against the Soviet presence.
Moments like these occur frequently during archival research. You ask for a carton number, and the archivist returns with a box the size of several telephone books stuffed with reams of largely unordered pages, some handwritten in mystifying cursive, some purple mimeograph bleeding-ink typeface. It becomes a real-life jigsaw puzzle. Even simple sentences demand cross-references that would have been obvious to the people involved at the time, but which now are entirely mysterious. Sometimes those cross-references appear in the other documents, but sometimes they don't. Colonial political reports were submitted trimestrally, semestrally, and annually. Why, then, in the case of Ndele, were only the reports from 1936 and 1948 saved? Can any inference be made on that basis? Probably not. Still, one wonders.
During my time at the colonial archives in Aix, I had the privilege of watching a master at work. Fred Cooper is one of the leading historians of modern Africa, and he was in Aix to research citizenship in post-WWII French West Africa. In 1946, former French subjects became French people with "the quality of citizenship". Though a highly ambiguous category, "the quality of citizenship" became a way for people to make claims on rights in ways they never had before. Fred went through carton after carton, quickly assessing each document: some he would photograph, some he would quickly note, and many, many he simply whizzed past.
As a part-time historian at best, I found I lacked that facility. Too often, I would stop to ponder word choice (how odd, for instance, that the French referred to Sultan Senoussi as the "sovereign" even as their treaty stripped him of all sovereign powers), wonder about the backgrounds and characters of the people writing the documents (was he really a slacker, as his higher-ups said, or rather the only one who could see clearly?), and get dragged down side paths by stray sentences or details that caught my eye (funny that the 1935 Oubangui-Chari census listed Turks -- as well as Brazilians, Americans and Syrians -- under the category "European": new evidence for EU accession hearings?).
But more than anything else, I found myself slowed by the continual voice in my head wondering about the relationship of all this history to the situation I will find when I start my fieldwork. Sometimes I felt I kept seeing examples of how history repeats itself. For instance, for security reasons, the French sited their garrison in Ndele over a kilometer from Senoussi's fort. This meant that they actually had very little idea of what was going on over there, and Senoussi was able to sign treaty after treaty saying he'd relinquished the slave trade while having done nothing of the sort. Similarly, for reasons of security the UN base today sits behind a massive, concertina wire-iced concrete wall at the outskirts of town, and many employees have only a spotty idea of what is going on outside. (I write this while wary of the direct parallel it suggests between the French and the UN. Please take it as a musing for now -- I am certainly not ready to make any such sweeping assessment.) Colonial/imperial projects by their very nature are so full of hubris that they involve repeating a lot of mistakes, as many have pointed out in the case of Afghanistan.
But clearly the relationship between past and present is not simply one of repetition; we don't live in "Groundhog Day." Nor is it a case of building blocks stacking ever-higher toward some noble goal. The anthropologist and historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot, inspired by Foucault, suggests that we are never so steeped in history as the moment when we think we stand outside of it as the omniscient viewer who makes some judgment. Much valuable work has drawn attention to the ways that the voices of women and non-white men have been silenced throughout history. But including more of those voices does not mean that we have a complete understanding of history, for the choices we make about how to bring voices back in, and the analysis we draw, are situated firmly in the present, not in the thousands of little conflicts over power that are occurring at any given point through the years, most of which remain unknown. Trouillot does not intend to undermine the study of history but rather to strengthen it by showing how we are always, irrevocably, creatures of our time. (Even the physicists who claim that backward time travel is highly possible admit that fast-forwarding is impossible.) I find hope -- inspiration for my research -- in having made peace with that.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Ndele
Houses in Ndele, December 2006
If, at the moment they resolved their Senoussi problem, the French glowed with plans to make the lands of Dar al Kuti productive once more, twenty-five years later it was clear even to them that they had fallen short of their goal. "Earlier, it seems, a land of abundance, Ndele barely manages to feed itself: it's a brutal fact," (“Autrefois, parait-il, pays d’abondance, la subdivision de Ndele arrive a peine à se suffire a elle-même: c’est un fait brutal.") wrote an administrator in the town in 1936. He went on to describe how rain fell onto his desk through the holes in the thatched roof, and how he had killed two snakes and a scorpion inside his house the day before (INSIDE the house, he repeated). Perhaps not quite what he hoped for when he joined the colonial service, which at that time still had an idealistic patina for many. His higher-ups saw him as a slacker.
Though never able to entirely sever the connections between Dar al Kuti and the Muslim north, the French did their best to stop them. The transformation of Ndele from "zeriba" (a fortified commercial outpost on a trading network) to colonial town in itself dramatically altered the region's orientation. By the mid-30s, very few pilgrims on the Hajj traveled through the once-well-visited town and no Koranic school operated. The French did their all to arrest and punish any possible "transfuges" (defectors/deserters) who might try to avoid their labor (they still used tipoyes for transport!) and tax requirements by resettling in Sudan, where rumor had it the British allowed people to live more freely.
The French presence was never great, but the various wars they pursued in the early years of their rule ensured their hegemony over potential rivals for a time. In the process, once-rich, vibrant, and violent societies withered. I am hoping my research will show some of the ways how the old connections have regrown, assuming new forms but influenced by historical relationships, in recent decades. But many questions remain:
* Ndele again has a sultan, but his background is not clear from the reports I've found so far in the archives. What are his powers now, and how did he come to have them? I know that some of the contemporary armed group leaders have backgrounds (Gula, Runga) that trace to the losing side of the turn of the century raiding.
* Who are the modern-day bazinguers (the sultan's soldiers), how do they see themselves, and how do the populations they visit see them?
* Again on these bazinguers: who are the elusive elephant poachers (who kill more than 1000 elephants in a single dry season, according to some estimates), rumored to contain Sudanese military officials among their ranks? What are their connections to the various armed groups in the area, and especially the Chadian/Centrafrican military entrepreneurs that pop up at the head of various armed movements over the years?
* What to make of the new presence of the international system, the UN and NGOs, with their benevolent aims and surfeit of unintended consequences?
The perpetual doubt of the dissertator remains: am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Will I find these connections and raiding networks? A foreign visitor to Ndele, where I plan to do research, will likely perceive it as incredibly isolated, poor and remote, barely able to feed itself, just like the administrator mentioned above. Anthropologists like to try to reverse those stereotypes and instead show the fecundity of supposedly stagnant and "underdeveloped" social systems. There is more than a grain of truth, however, in the foreigner's initial perception, and the challenge will be to balance recognition of that reality while also stretching it apart to reveal what it fails to see.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Believe you me
Yesterday I came across a letter sent by a British administrator in Bahr-el-Ghazal in 1918 to his counterpart on the French side of the border apologizing for his inability to come to a meeting. He closed:
"With kind regards, believe you, my dear Sir,
Yours sincerely,
Maud, Captain."
The voice of a dandy suddenly rang out in the silent reading room.
This got me thinking about the different standards of politesse that accompany different languages, and particularly in Arabic, where the first four or five paragraphs of a letter praise Allah and the recipient.
Late 19th century/early 20th century Central Africa saw a momentary surge in diplomatic correspondence in Arabic, thanks to greater integration with the trading societies to the north. Xavier Luffin has written some fascinating articles about the brief flowering of Azande letters to the British, which was quickly squelched by Christian missionaries.
Unfortunately, the recipients of these letters, whether French or English, did not seem to particularly appreciate the salutations extended them by their African interlocutors. Often, translations would include only, "Salutations, etc..."
And yet sometimes those are the parts that communicate the most.
Granted, I did the same.
Yours sincerely,
Maud, Captain."
The voice of a dandy suddenly rang out in the silent reading room.
This got me thinking about the different standards of politesse that accompany different languages, and particularly in Arabic, where the first four or five paragraphs of a letter praise Allah and the recipient.
Late 19th century/early 20th century Central Africa saw a momentary surge in diplomatic correspondence in Arabic, thanks to greater integration with the trading societies to the north. Xavier Luffin has written some fascinating articles about the brief flowering of Azande letters to the British, which was quickly squelched by Christian missionaries.
Unfortunately, the recipients of these letters, whether French or English, did not seem to particularly appreciate the salutations extended them by their African interlocutors. Often, translations would include only, "Salutations, etc..."
And yet sometimes those are the parts that communicate the most.
Granted, I did the same.
The Sultan of Bangassou
I have mentioned Sultan Senoussi several times already. But he was just one of the Sultans of the Haut-Oubangui. To his south ruled the Sultan of Bangassou. He received pride of place in French reports about the rapacious natives. They claimed his people were cannibals who reserved the most-tender flesh of children for their ruler. They characterized his rule as authoritarian, capricious and violent.
I recently discussed this with Thierry, a friend who is a direct descendent of the Sultan of Bangassou. Thierry related a story his grandfather used to tell. He lived in a village undisturbed by outsiders. When they heard gunfire, they thought it was thunder, and shook their heads at the strangeness of thunder on a sunny day. One day, they heard the sultan's raiders from afar. They all ran toward some caves just beyond their houses and hid. But Thierry's grandfather sensed something, he wasn't sure what, and he pulled his family out of the cave, and they ran through the bush. When the raiders arrived, they immediately figured out the village hiding spot, and they gathered thatch, packed it into the cave's opening, and set it ablaze. All inside perished. The raiders then set about pillaging the village; their salary for service to the sultan was free rein to reap the spoils of the areas beyond his domain. (Not unlike the warrior-king system in Norway, mentioned in this post.)
Thierry's grandfather and his young family survived, of course, thanks to the grandfather's premonition. But before long they were incorporated into Bangassou as slaves. With the growing French presence, at around the age of ten Thierry's father went to work for an administrator as a houseboy. A few years later, he and one of the sultan's daughters fell in love, and eventually won the agreement of their families to their union. Thus the son of a slave became royalty.
This suggests one oft-cited difference between slavery of the trans-Atlantic system, the model most Americans and Europeans are familiar with, and slavery in a place like Central Africa. Social mobility tended to be much greater in the latter. Any tendency to romanticize such "traditional" systems, however, is quickly arrested by the memory of all the people who stayed in the cave.
I recently discussed this with Thierry, a friend who is a direct descendent of the Sultan of Bangassou. Thierry related a story his grandfather used to tell. He lived in a village undisturbed by outsiders. When they heard gunfire, they thought it was thunder, and shook their heads at the strangeness of thunder on a sunny day. One day, they heard the sultan's raiders from afar. They all ran toward some caves just beyond their houses and hid. But Thierry's grandfather sensed something, he wasn't sure what, and he pulled his family out of the cave, and they ran through the bush. When the raiders arrived, they immediately figured out the village hiding spot, and they gathered thatch, packed it into the cave's opening, and set it ablaze. All inside perished. The raiders then set about pillaging the village; their salary for service to the sultan was free rein to reap the spoils of the areas beyond his domain. (Not unlike the warrior-king system in Norway, mentioned in this post.)
Thierry's grandfather and his young family survived, of course, thanks to the grandfather's premonition. But before long they were incorporated into Bangassou as slaves. With the growing French presence, at around the age of ten Thierry's father went to work for an administrator as a houseboy. A few years later, he and one of the sultan's daughters fell in love, and eventually won the agreement of their families to their union. Thus the son of a slave became royalty.
This suggests one oft-cited difference between slavery of the trans-Atlantic system, the model most Americans and Europeans are familiar with, and slavery in a place like Central Africa. Social mobility tended to be much greater in the latter. Any tendency to romanticize such "traditional" systems, however, is quickly arrested by the memory of all the people who stayed in the cave.
Slavery vs. forced labor
In the months before a French officer assassinated Sultan Senoussi and his probable successor, colonial officials sent a flurry of reports (flurry at least considering the difficulties of transport through the territory) crescendoing in alarm over the dangers the Sultan posed to their dominance. After Senoussi's death, the French justifications for killing him increased in moralizing and rationality. The moral arguments centered on the fact that the primary driver of Senoussi's economy was slave-raiding. He trades men the way only cattle should be treated, they wrote. Now, the people of Dar el Kuti can be human again, and their land can prosper. The rational arguments centered on the way that Senoussi would agree to their administrative projects, as if he shared in them, and then go and do his own thing (raiding, trading) anyway. This became a critical issue because the French sorely lacked food and labor. They told Senoussi to conscript laborers for their road-building and plantations, and they told him to uproot several villages and re-site them along their supply route, the better for inhabitants to "offer" their services as porters. (The institution of "portage" in CAR has an ugly history. Porters were forced to carry loads as heavy as 65 kg -- for the Americans out there, that's 143 pounds -- and often went unfed and unhoused during their treks.) In sore need of labor and food himself, and with his own projects for expansion, Senoussi did not fulfill these demands.
With Senoussi (and, over a span of some twenty years, the region's other sultans as well) gone, the French system of forced labor became institutionalized through the "impôt" (tax). The continual problem of colonies like Oubangui-Chari was their insolvency. Concessionary companies could turn good profits, but administration required creating a tax base in a place where no one had any money. So people could only acquit their debt through labor, often for a substantial portion of the year. In many of the documents I have found describing the early years of the impôt, administrators' main worry is population exodus -- people fled to Anglo-Egyptian Sudan or even the notorious Belgian Congo to escape such an onerous demand. In theory, taxes are supposed to be a trade: you pay something, you get something back (protection, social services). But people in Oubangui-Chari paid something, and got nothing back. A directive from the Lt. Governor in Bangui in 1918, for instance, ordered administrators to halt treatment for sleeping sickness (too expensive). (The Belgians in Congo, in contrast, still offered it, making their side of the river attractive to Central African sufferers.)
This state of affairs begs a comparison: in what ways was the political economy of raiding and slavery under Senoussi different from the political economy of forced resettlement and forced labor under the French? According to the French, people were happy to be out from Senoussi's grip. Residents no doubt hoped the people of "Dar Franci" (the land of the French) would protect them from raiders while permitting them to live on their own. And with the defeat of the sultanates of Wadai and Darfur, they no longer faced such threats from marauders. But in some ways, the actual changes to their lives were few: they were still being controlled in ways quite different from how they lived on their own.
When tracing the trajectory political life has taken, it is important to parse out both the continuities and the ruptures. Anthropologists, led by Clifford Geertz, are trained to interpret. Historians are trained never to do so. I try to keep my anthropologist tendencies in check when perusing these archives, but refraining from reading into the words is a constant battle when faced with the tedium of fat files of disorganized memos.
I still have many questions about slavery and forced labor, and especially how people experienced them, and I will return to this topic in future posts.
With Senoussi (and, over a span of some twenty years, the region's other sultans as well) gone, the French system of forced labor became institutionalized through the "impôt" (tax). The continual problem of colonies like Oubangui-Chari was their insolvency. Concessionary companies could turn good profits, but administration required creating a tax base in a place where no one had any money. So people could only acquit their debt through labor, often for a substantial portion of the year. In many of the documents I have found describing the early years of the impôt, administrators' main worry is population exodus -- people fled to Anglo-Egyptian Sudan or even the notorious Belgian Congo to escape such an onerous demand. In theory, taxes are supposed to be a trade: you pay something, you get something back (protection, social services). But people in Oubangui-Chari paid something, and got nothing back. A directive from the Lt. Governor in Bangui in 1918, for instance, ordered administrators to halt treatment for sleeping sickness (too expensive). (The Belgians in Congo, in contrast, still offered it, making their side of the river attractive to Central African sufferers.)
This state of affairs begs a comparison: in what ways was the political economy of raiding and slavery under Senoussi different from the political economy of forced resettlement and forced labor under the French? According to the French, people were happy to be out from Senoussi's grip. Residents no doubt hoped the people of "Dar Franci" (the land of the French) would protect them from raiders while permitting them to live on their own. And with the defeat of the sultanates of Wadai and Darfur, they no longer faced such threats from marauders. But in some ways, the actual changes to their lives were few: they were still being controlled in ways quite different from how they lived on their own.
When tracing the trajectory political life has taken, it is important to parse out both the continuities and the ruptures. Anthropologists, led by Clifford Geertz, are trained to interpret. Historians are trained never to do so. I try to keep my anthropologist tendencies in check when perusing these archives, but refraining from reading into the words is a constant battle when faced with the tedium of fat files of disorganized memos.
I still have many questions about slavery and forced labor, and especially how people experienced them, and I will return to this topic in future posts.
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