Colonial Suspects by Keller Kathleen;

Author:Keller, Kathleen; [Keller, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS001050 History / Africa / West, HIS013000 History / Europe / France
ISBN: 5295165
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2018-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

4

“Powerless with Regard to Our Nationals”

Policing Frenchness and Redefining the Civilizing Mission in AOF

In 1925, while traveling in French Equatorial Africa, the writer André Gide came upon a shocking site: “After an hour’s march through a monotonous steppe . . . we met a great quantity of porters; after them came a file of fifteen women and two men, tied round their necks by one and the same cord and escorted by guards, carrying five-thonged whips. One of the women had a baby at her breast. They were the ‘hostages’ who had been taken from the village at Dangolo, where the guards had been to requisition forty porters by order of the administration.”1 This and other examples of abuse by French colonial administrators fill Gide’s account of his travels, which primarily took him through the other French African federation, but also to the fringes of AOF. However, Gide’s account was more than just a critique of the colonial regime. His anger toward the administration was tempered by his interest in the exotic appeal of Africa and the hope that colonial policies could be improved to benefit Africans. Gide occupied an ambivalent stance toward the French state, as both critic of and adviser to colonial rule.

Gide was never described as a suspicious person in AOF, but many of his fellow French men and women were identified as suspects for behaving in ways that seemed to oppose the state or threaten the reputation of the French in Africa. Like Gide, they occupied an awkward position. They were at times in conflict with the French state but also took advantage of their status as French and appeared confident in their superiority as Europeans to decide what was best for Africa. This chapter explores the lives of French men and women investigated by police as suspects to consider how they were viewed by the administration and how these often marginal members of the French community understood their own place in French colonial Africa.

The culture of suspicion stoked fears among French authorities that African elites might turn against them, especially under the influence of nefarious foreigners with radical political agendas. Authorities quickly discovered that metropolitan French were just as likely as foreigners to propagate communism or other radical political ideologies. Investigations of suspicious French men and especially women can also be understood as part of a larger project of policing French identity and behavior. Like many white European foreigners, French suspects were viewed as dangerous because they were mobile and uncontrollable. But French suspects in particular earned extra scrutiny when they behaved in ways that suggested they might usurp state authority or provoke negative images of Frenchness. I argue that the culture of suspicion embraced by the colonial administration led to the investigation of French suspects in order to thwart political radicalism but also to condemn and shape undesirable behavior on the part of white metropolitans in Africa. Communist French were investigated by police, of course, but so too were royalists and anticlericalists. Impoverished and criminal French were sometimes labeled suspicious as well.

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