Civilization: The West and the Rest (30 page)

But the so-called Springtime of the Peoples was not confined to Europe. Like so many other Western ideas in the nineteenth century,
French-style revolution swiftly became a global phenomenon. Across the British Empire there was unrest – in Ceylon, Guiana, Jamaica, New South Wales, the Orange River Sovereignty, the Punjab and Van Diemen’s Land.
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Even more remarkable were the events in French West Africa. There, unlike in British colonies, radical political change had the backing of a revolutionary government in the metropolis.

All this serves to illuminate the most distinctive feature of French imperialism: its enduring revolutionary character. The British Empire was by instinct socially conservative; with every passing year its administrators grew fonder of local elites, more comfortable with indirect rule through tribal chiefs and ornamental maharajahs. But the French still cherished the hope that liberty, equality and fraternity – along with the
Code Napoléon
and canned food (another Napoleonic invention) – were commodities for universal export.
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France, like all the European empires, had based its overseas empire at least partly on slavery. But in 1848 France’s new republican government declared that slavery would again be abolished throughout the French Empire, including in the West African colony of Senegal. The British had already done this in their empire fifteen years before. But abolition was only the first part of this revolution in French Africa. It was also announced that the newly freed slaves would get to vote – unlike the natives in British colonies. With the introduction of universal manhood suffrage throughout the French Empire, the almost entirely African and
métis
or mixed-race electorate (whites accounted for only 1 per cent of the total) voted in the elections of November 1848 and chose the first man of colour ever to sit in the French National Assembly.
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Although the right to send a deputy to Paris was withdrawn from Senegal by the Emperor Napoleon III in 1852 and not restored until 1879, the practice continued of electing the councils of the
quatre communes
(Saint-Louis, Gorée, Rufisque and Dakar) on the basis of universal manhood suffrage.
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The first multiracial democratic assembly in African history met in what was then the colonial capital of Saint-Louis.

Contemporaries recognized what a huge departure this was. ‘The visitor to the Council’, wrote one British visitor to Saint-Louis, ‘will frequently witness a black president calling a European member to
order for rowdiness … Black members have unmercifully criticised officials in Senegal. No British colony would tolerate the attacks which the natives make upon European officials in Senegal.’
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For the British, empire was about hierarchy in the same way that society at home was about class. At the top was Victoria, the Queen and Empress. Every one of her 400 million subjects was arranged below her in an elaborate chain of status, all the way down to the lowliest punkah wallah in Calcutta. The French Empire was different.

To the revolutionaries of 1848, it seemed self-evident that colonial subjects should be transformed into Frenchmen with the maximum possible speed. In the jargon of the time, Africans were to be ‘assimilated’. At the same time, intermarriage (
métissage
) between French officials and African women was positively encouraged.
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This progressive imperialism was personified by Louis Faidherbe, an experienced soldier who became governor of Senegal in 1854. In Saint-Louis Faidherbe oversaw the building of new bridges, paved roads, schools, quays, a fresh water supply and the introduction of a regular ferry service on the river. ‘Villages of Liberty’ were founded throughout Senegal for emancipated slaves. In 1857 Faidherbe set up a Senegalese colonial army – the Tirailleurs Sénégalais – transforming the African soldier from indentured military labourer to fully fledged regular infantryman. A school was established for the sons of native chiefs.
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Faidherbe himself married a fifteen-year-old Senegalese girl.

‘Our intentions are pure and noble,’ declared Faidherbe towards the end of his time as governor. ‘Our cause is just.’ Of course, his mission was more than to civilize. ‘The aim’, he declared in 1857, was ‘to dominate the country at as low a cost as possible and through commerce [to] get the greatest advantages’.
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He was under instructions to extend French influence inland and to achieve Senegal’s
mise en valeur
(economic development) by challenging the indigenous African control of the trade in gum arabic, made from the sap of acacia trees, and peanuts. Faidherbe’s strategy was to build a chain of French forts along the Senegal River, beginning at Médine below the Félou waterfall. This led inevitably to conflict with the predominant inland powers: the Trarza Moors in Waalo, the Cayor in the south and El Hadj Umar Tall, the Muslim ruler of middle Niger, who later established the Toucouleur Empire in neighbouring Mali.
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Gradually and inexorably,
however, these African rivals were forced to retreat. In 1857 French forces overthrew the Lebu Republic, turning the capital Ndakarou into the new colonial city of Dakar. The city centre today remains a monument to the French colonial vision, from the white Governor General’s palais to the broad Avenue Faidherbe, from the boulangeries with their fresh, fragrant baguettes to the patisseries serving café au lait. To formalize the process of Gallicization, the entire country was divided up into arrondissements, cercles and cantons. By the time Faidherbe stepped down in 1865, a Frenchman could stroll around Saint-Louis and take real pride in his country’s achievement. The former slave markets had become proud outposts of Gallic culture. The erstwhile victims of imperialism had been transformed into citizens with the right to vote and the duty to bear arms. As the journalist Gabriel Charmes put it:

If in these immense regions where only fanaticism and brigandage reign today, [France] were to bring … peace, commerce, tolerance, who could say this was a poor use of force? … Having taught millions of men civilization and freedom would fill it with the pride that makes great peoples.
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Of course, the reality of French imperialism could not possibly live up to this exalted billing. The biggest challenge was to attract competent officials from France. Those volunteering to serve in West Africa, one of Faidherbe’s successors suggested bluntly, were generally ‘persons who if not compromised at home were at least incapable of making a livelihood’ there: if not petty criminals then drunks and bankrupts.
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As one settler put it in 1894, the colonies were ‘the
refugium peccatorum
for all our misfits, the depository of the excrement of our political and social organism’. When a man left for the colonies, recalled the director of the Ecole Coloniale, his friends asked: ‘What crime must he have committed? From what corpse is he fleeing?’
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A number of colonial officials became notorious for their brutality towards the natives; one man, Emile Toqué, celebrated Bastille Day in 1903 by blowing up a prisoner with gunpowder.
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Most colonial officials probably shared the view of at least one professor at the Ecole that their African subjects were all intellectually retarded. The
indigénat
code empowered them, if they saw fit, to jail fractious natives for up
to fifteen days for forty-six different offences, most of which were not considered unlawful in France.
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There was no mechanism of appeal. Forced labour (the
corvée
) was an integral part of the tax system in West Africa; that was how the Dakar–Niger railway was built. For a worker in a rubber plantation, the head tax in the French Congo was equivalent to as many as a hundred days of work a year. Hostages were taken when villages fell behind with their dues. Some officials – like the one in French Sudan who was charged with multiple murders, at least one rape, grievous bodily harm, miscarriages of justice and embezzlement – appear to have taken the novelist Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz as a role model.
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One man, named Brocard, decapitated on ‘compassionate grounds’ a prisoner who had gone blind as a result of the filthy conditions in his cell.
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The culmination of such madness was the mission of Paul Voulet and Julien Chanoine to Lake Chad (1898–9), which left a trail of incinerated villages, hanged natives and even roasted children in its wake, until finally the African soldiers under their command mutinied and murdered both men.
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Nevertheless, the standard of French colonial administrators clearly improved, especially after the First World War, when the Ecole Coloniale attracted not only better students but also distinguished ethnologists like Maurice Delafosse and Henri Labouret. As the Ecole’s director, the saintly Georges Hardy personified the
mission civilisatrice
. At the same time, the French made a real effort to attract and train native talent. Faidherbe made his thinking clear in a speech he gave while awarding the rank of second lieutenant to a soldier named Alioun Sall:

This nomination … demonstrates that, even for loftier positions in our social hierarchy, colour is no longer a reason for exclusion … Only the most capable will succeed. Those who obstinately prefer ignorance to civilization will remain in the lowly ranks of society, as is the case in all the countries of the world.
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In 1886 the son of the king of Porto Novo (later Dahomey/Benin) joined a dozen Asian students at the Ecole Coloniale. Each year from 1889 until 1914 the ‘native section’ of the Ecole admitted around twenty non-French students.
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It was clearly thanks to the French idea of a civilizing mission that a man like Blaise Diagne, born in a modest
house in the old slave trading centre of Gorée in 1872, could join the colonial customs service and rise through its ranks. Such an ascent would have been much harder – indeed, almost inconceivable – in British Africa. In 1914 Diagne ended up as the first black African (of unmixed race) in the French National Assembly, no mean feat for the grandson of a Senegalese slave. Compared with the ethos of the other European empires of the time, there is no question that the French Empire was the most liberal in design. In the communes of Dakar the Wolof song that was sung to celebrate Diagne’s victory succinctly summarized the new political situation: ‘The black sheep [has beaten] the white sheep.’
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The supreme back-handed compliment to French imperialism was paid in 1922 by one ‘Nguyen Ai Quoc’, in a letter to the Governor General of another French colony on the other side of the world: Indo-China. ‘Your Excellency,’ began the author, whose real name was Nguyen Sinh Cung, and whose fluent French he owed to his time at the Hue
lycée
:

We know very well that your affection for the natives; of the colonies in general, and the Annamese in particular is great. Under your proconsulate the Annamese people have known true prosperity and real happiness, the happiness of seeing their country dotted all over with an increasing number of spirits and opium shops which, together with firing squads, prisons, ‘democracy’ and all the improved apparatus of modern civilization, are combining to make the Annamese the most advanced of the Asians and the happiest of mortals. These acts of benevolence save us the trouble of recalling all the others, such as enforced recruitment and loans, bloody repressions, the dethronement and exile of kings, profanation of sacred places, etc.
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It was not only French that the Governor’s correspondent had learned at school. Under another pseudonym, ‘Ho Chi Minh’, he would later lead the movement for an independent Vietnam – pointedly citing the 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Man in his own declaration of Vietnamese independence, just as Vo Nguyen Giap, the victor of the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu (and an alumnus of the same
lycée
), had learned the art of war by studying the campaigns of Napoleon. Such was the inevitable fate of a civilizing mission that exported
the revolutionary tradition along with boules and baguettes.
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It was no accident that the presidents of the independent Ivory Coast, Niger, Dahomey and Mali were all graduates of the Ecole William Ponty – as was the Senegalese Prime Minister.
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And yet all of this – the whole French
mission civilisatrice –
was threatened with defeat by one lethal foe – disease – which made large tracts of sub-Saharan Africa almost uninhabitable for Europeans.
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Life-spans a century and a half ago were short enough in the West. Life expectancy at birth in Britain in 1850 was still only forty, compared with seventy-five today. But in Africa the rates of infant mortality and premature death were appallingly high. Life expectancy in mid-nineteenth-century Senegal was probably in the low to mid-twenties.
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So Africa was to be the ultimate testing ground for the fourth killer application of Western civilization: the power of modern medicine to prolong human life.