History and French

Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF) saw a number of dramatic upheavals between the Brazzaville Conference in 1944 and full independence in 1960, including the introduction of a new political system of semi-autonomous assemblies, the acceleration of economic changes associated with wage labour, urbanisation and globalisation, and diplomatic shifts as emerging African nations positioned themselves on the international stage. Niger’s political development in this period has generally been ignored by scholars, despite the fact that its nationalist movement was arguably the most contested and divided in AOF. This has begun to change with the 2013 publication of Klaas van Walraven’s full-length study of Sawaba, Niger’s most radical nationalist movement which was suppressed after campaigning against accession to the French Community in 1958. However, van Walraven accepts Sawaba’s own self-presentation as ‘Niger’s modern social movement’ and focuses on its high politics, without questioning who was excluded from this imagined nationalist community. This essay aims to deconstruct, rather than reproduce, the process by which Sawaba invented a national community. It shows how Nigerien nationalists used gendered and generational constructions to associate their movement with notions of ‘modernity’, and explores the broader effects of this process on Nigerien society.

Ever since the beginning of the colonial period, both supporters and critics of the colonial project have argued that Europe’s colonisation of Africa marked a transformation in human interactions with the environment. Although such arguments encompass significant diversity and disagreement, they all share the assumption that pre-colonial Africans simply reacted and adapted to the environment, without playing a conscious role in its management; the colonial powers, by contrast, began to dominate and shape Africa’s landscape. This essay examines colonial forestry policies in West Africa, challenging the idea that traditional African relationships with the environment were determined by passivity or thoughtlessness, and the assumption that colonial policies demonstrated new levels of human agency and capacity to impact on West African forests. While colonisation was not without implications for forest management, therefore, it did not represent a fundamental transformation in human relations with the forest environment.

From the 1980s, social developments and increases in literature led to the development of a Hausa-language popular literature in northern Nigeria. This literary movement, known as littattafan soyayya, has received growing critical attention since the late 1990s, much of which has focused on questions of gender relations and female identity. One prominent female writer of littattafan soyayya is Balaraba Ramat Yakubu, whose novel Alhaki Kukuyo Ne was recently translated into English as Sin is a Puppy That Follows You Home. This essay will consider how this work fits into the development of Hausa literature, and the extent to which it supports a reading of littattafin soyayya as a vehicle for women’s emancipation and African feminism.

For much of the twentieth century, academic and legal discussions of slavery were defined by the Western imaginary of the New World plantation slave. This led to its definition as the opposite of 'freedom', and to a particular focus on slave as commodity property. The inadequacies of this conception of slavery have become increasingly apparent as other historical forms of slavery have been studied more closely. This essay considers some alternative proposals for defining and conceptualising slavery, particularly considering the status and experiences of slaves in nineteenth and twentieth century West Africa.

This essay considers the extent to which the Umarian jihad drove social and political, as well as military, changes. It argues that, while the jihad of Umar Tall and the Tukulor Empire led to major transformations in society, these did not take the political, religious or institutional form seen in other nineteenth-century West African jihads. Rather, they were primarily in the field of the military, and in the interaction between military culture and the rest of society. More broadly, this short case study demonstrates the ways in which warfare and the military are embedded in the socio-economic structure of their society, and become more so in periods of militarisation. Militarisation is essentially a process of socio-economic transformation, as warfare becomes a major economic and cultural force; the Tukulor Empire’s period of militarisation demonstrates how warfare can shape social structures, and be shaped by them in return.

Many historians have argued that the colonial powers used conscripted African force in order to bolster their own position within Africa. Reid and Killingray state that their primary function was to maintain internal control over the colonies,  whereas Lee argues that it was to particular sites of particular economic and international strategic significance, with internal colonial control being “very secondary”.  Despite this disagreement, the two share a view of colonial troops which centres on their use within Africa – and are thus deeply rooted in the British colonial experience, which saw little international use of African troops.  In the tirailleurs sénégalais, by contrast, the French built up an army which was predominantly used internationally, and which was maintained using conscription from 1912 to 1960. This unique experiment in mass conscription of colonial soldiers during peacetime, and their large-scale deployment in European conflict and in far-flung colonies, is thus an exception to these generalisations about the internal uses of African conscripts. This essay therefore considers how both French and African motivations shaped the tirailleurs sénégalais as a force, and then analyses its military, social, cultural, political and economic effects.