And now for a real update
Antoine Bileka, Gateway to the Congo: The Story of Gabon (Libreville: Bioko, 1998)
… Napoleon IV famously said that Senegal was French by birthright but Gabon was French by accident. To say the least, he overstated his case: there are many Africans who would dispute France’s Senegalese patrimony, and there was at least some design to the French presence coastal Gabon. But neither was the emperor’s statement entirely untrue. By his time, the destinies of France and Senegal had been intertwined for centuries, and tens of thousands of Africans had achieved French citizenship; in contrast, Gabon would be a backwater for decades after its initial occupation.
During those decades, however, the fusion of five peoples and four religions would create a society unique in the world.
France had two things in mind when it signed treaties of protection with the chieftains of the Gabon estuary: suppressing the slave trade, and checking British and Portuguese expansion along the African coast. For that, only a small fort was necessary; such was established in 1840, and that was all the French presence that was originally planned.
The first hint of something more came in 1846, when the French navy captured a slave ship in Corisco Bay and seized its cargo. The post at Gabon was nearby and convenient, so the newly freed slaves were released there, and became the founders of the town of Libreville. Three more shipments of slaves suffered the same fate over the next two years, before the Atlantic slave trade was definitively suppressed.
The creation of this French Sierra Leone in Gabon caused some heads in Paris to contemplate actually settling and Christianizing the region. American Congregational missionaries were already active on the estuary, and the powerful Catholic interest in France proposed dispatching its own missionaries in order to counteract them. This required something more than a fort and trading post, and several plans for French settlement were debated during the final year of the Orleanist monarchy.
Ironically, it would be the overthrow of that monarchy that provided the solution. One of the Second Republic’s first acts was to free all slaves throughout the French empire and confer the citizenship of France upon them. Many of the colonial elites, both white and Creole, were concerned that the freedmen would soon achieve political and economic dominance, and as a partial answer to these concerns, the French government offered subsidies to freedmen who agreed to settle in Gabon. The response to this offer was less than hoped for, but between 1849 and 1860, several thousand ex-slaves did go to Libreville and the outlying areas, where they would form the nucleus of French colonialism.
In the meantime, the interior was being shaken by another folk migration: the arrival of the Fang, a Beti-Pahuin ethnic group who had been driven from the Adamawa plateau during the early stages of the Fulani jihad. The first Fang clans arrived in Gabon during the second decade of the nineteenth century. Due to their numbers and military superiority, they were able to overcome the indigenous Mitsogo people, but their conquest was still incomplete when the French arrived; the Fang and allied Beti-Pahuin groups occupied the coastal plain and savanna, but the Mitsogo, and the Baka pygmies, held the hill country.
A minority of the Fang practiced Islam, and these mostly held to their faith, but the remainder came under the influence of two religions: Christianity, brought by Western missionaries, and Bwiti, the faith of the Mitsogo. Bwiti, like many African religions, was animist, centering on worship of ancestors and of the forest god Djengi. What made it different was the discovery, by some unknown Baka prophet centuries past, of the
iboga plant’s hallucinogenic properties. Taken in moderate doses,
iboga produced waking dreams that the Mitsogo viewed as prophecy; in nearly-toxic doses, it produced intense hallucinations often followed by a re-experience of the ingestor’s life story. The Bwiti priesthood made frequent use of the
iboga root, and one of the key rites of passage among the Mitsogo was a three-day death-and-rebirth ritual in which massive amounts of
iboga were taken and the initiates’ life-path made clear. By the 1850s, the Fang – while fearing the Mitsogo as powerful magicians – had begun to incorporate
iboga into their own animist rituals even as an increasing number sought work in the French-held areas and became Christian.
Into this fluid situation, in 1858, came the last of the peoples who would make up Gabon: Afro-Brazilian refugees from the Marianada uprising, some two thousand strong. And their
mães-de-santo brought with them yet a fourth religion: the
candomble, the syncretism of Catholic Christianity with worship of the Yoruba
orixás. And it would be these who would bring Bwiti into the towns.
The
mães, who were no strangers to ecstatic ritual and prophetic trances, were quick to recognize the religious potential of
iboga and to teach that the
orixás (who they had begun to call the “gods of exile”) should be worshiped in conjunction with the gods of the land. They were also accustomed to syncretizing Christian doctrine, and saw what the Fang had not yet seen: the parallel between the Mitsogo initiation rite and the death and rebirth of Jesus. And this initiation became the template for their own.
The first known practice of the
naissance pascale occurred in 1861, but there may have been some version of it enacted the previous year. Like the Mitsogo coming-of-age rite, it was, and remains, a three-day ceremony characterized by playing the eight-stringed ritual instrument and consumption of large doses of
iboga. Among the Afro-Brazilians, however, the ceremony coincided with Easter, and the initiates were ritually crucified during the first eight hours of the rite by being tied standing to crosses with their feet on the ground. In this position, they would experience the first of their visions. After being taken from the cross, they would be led to a darkened room symbolizing a tomb, from which they would emerge, clad in white, on the morning of the third day. By that time, they would be expected to have re-experienced their life, gained insight into their sins, and learned to conquer evil within themselves. The initiates would also be deemed to have partaken of the godhead during their three days of altered consciousness, and words spoken during the rituals were regarded as prophetic revelations.
At first, the
naissance pascale was only for those being admitted to the ranks of the
mães-de-santo, but within only a few years, it was a rite to which all who followed the
candomble faith were entitled. The
candomble, under Bwiti influence, had begun its transformation into a religion in which all people were divine, and in which the onset of adulthood was equated with an infusion and understanding of godhood. Many, especially among the Fang, understood this as a form of pre-emptive ancestor worship, in which the child who “died” during the initiation rite became the ancestor of the reborn adult. When overlaid with the Christian prophetic tradition, and with the protective rituals of the
orixá pantheon (sometimes reimagined as saints and sometimes not), the fused Afro-Brazilian Bwiti faith proved a powerful one.
The reaction of the Church establishment in Libreville to these developments was, of course, one of horror – and, because neither the indigenous peoples nor the Afro-Brazilians had French citizenship, the debate over what to do about these rituals took place almost entirely without them. In 1862, the French governor was persuaded to make the
naissance pascale illegal, and the following year, both the
candomble and Bwiti faiths were banned outright. In succeeding years, different governors would enforce the ban with varying levels of severity, but Bwiti practice in the French-held areas was at best driven underground and at worst persecuted. The opposition to Bwiti also drastically slowed the integration of the Fang and Afro-Brazilians into French society; during the early years, many had married freedmen with French citizenship (as was inevitable in a society where a large majority of settlers were male), but during the 1860s, such marriages became increasingly frowned upon and the colonial government even debated banning them. Catholic freedmen were encouraged, instead, to send for wives from the Caribbean colonies and Guiana, whose Christian credentials were supposedly unimpeachable, although in practice that was not always the case.
With the doors of French society largely closed to them, the Afro-Brazilians sought alliances among the Fang and Mitsogo, marrying among them to create what in time would become a new creole nation. Their faith went with them, and although the missionaries’ Catholicism dominated along the coast, the
candomble-Bwiti fusion took hold in the interior. Also, the remnants of the
yamali-cult of the Marianada, which had taken their conception of the Malê Muslim warriors as quasi-saints, encountered true Islam among the Fang. This would lead in two directions: adoption of some Islamic rituals (such as the Ramadan fast) into Bwiti, and awareness of the Malê among the Fang Muslims. In time, as news of the outside world filtered from the Fang who worked at the ports to those in the interior, Abacarist doctrines of liberation would make their way into the local Islamic faith. The new culture that was taking shape in the interior would be a combative and nationalist one…
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Gaiaye Diagne, Senegal: Rise of a Nation (Dakar: Nouvelle Presse Africaine, 1931)
… The French Empire’s turn to liberalism in the late 1850s would have several obvious effects on Senegal, including a return to local autonomy and an extension of citizenship rights, but the non-obvious effects would arguably be the most powerful ones. In loosening censorship, and in restoring limited democracy and freedom of expression, Napoleon III faced powerful opposition from the clerical conservatives and from the faction at court led by the Empress Eugénie. To mollify them, and to compensate for their losses in the domestic and colonial policy arenas, the emperor allowed them increasing play in shaping
foreign policy, casting France not only as protector of the Papal States but as the patron of Catholicism in the New World. This suited the emperor’s desire to increase French presence on the world stage, and also his increasing view of himself as “protector of the natives,” but also entangled France in an increasing number of Latin American conflicts.
The Wolof
tirailleur regiments recruited by Abdoulaye Diouf played an integral part in these conflicts. They were paid less than French regulars, seen as suitable for service in tropical climates, and experienced in small-unit actions as well as regimental-scale fighting. The
tirailleurs, with both French and Wolof officers, served alongside metropolitan French troops in the ill-starred attempt to install the Habsburg prince Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico, and in the somewhat more successful defense of Brazilian Princess Regent Isabel (a deeply Catholic and abolitionist ruler who was married to a distant cousin of Eugénie) against the
coronels who sought to reduce imperial power to a figurehead.
They fought, as well, outside the tropics, in support of the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia, a somewhat quixotic realm formed by several Mapuche clans who crowned French adventurer Orélie-Antoine de Tounens as their king. Tounens’ plea to Napoleon III on their behalf was calculated to appeal to both his romantic notion of being protector of the natives and his perennial desire to keep Argentina in check, and after the kingdom proved its viability by scoring several military successes against the Argentine state (which was in chaos after the overthrow of Juan Manuel de Rosas), the emperor decided to recognize its claim. The next ship to Patagonia brought a battalion of soldiers, a cargo of rifles and a contingent of missionaries, and in 1863, Senegalese troops served at the bottom of the world.
It would be Brazil, however, that would require the largest commitment of soldiers. By 1865, the
coronels’ resistance to centralized rule had expanded into a full-blown uprising in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais provinces. Isabel was forced to flee to Pernambuco, where slavery was in steep decline and where the Marianada had broken the back of
coronelismo, and a new draft of French troops and
tirailleurs was sent to restore her to the throne. This meant that Napoleon III’s soldiers were on the ground, and in harm’s way, when an alliance of Paraguay, Argentina and the rebellious
coronels invaded Entre Rios and ushered in the Third Platine War…
… In all, more than 20,000 Wolof soldiers took part in the Emperor’s New World adventures – and since, under the law of 1857, service in a
tirailleur regiment conferred French citizenship for the soldiers and their families, this meant that by 1867, Senegal contained in excess of 75,000 African citizens. These greatly outnumbered the white and Creole inhabitants of the province, and were in fact sufficient to warrant a second seat in the
Corps législatif.
Ironically, this would cost Diouf his place in parliament. In order to preserve a strong French and creole voting bloc in at least one of the districts, Senegal was separated into the
quatre communes of St. Louis, Gorée, Dakar and Rufisque on the one hand, and the rest of the colony on the other. The urban seat elected one of the expatriate French liberals who had migrated to Senegal during the preceding decade, while the rural one chose a conservative traditional ruler; while Diouf’s populist party remained strong in the communal and provincial councils, he himself lost the election in the
quatre communes by more than a thousand votes.
He would nevertheless stay on in Paris, because he had by this time formed a close partnership with the Minister for the Colonies, Prince Napoleon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte. The two had known each other since the days when Diouf had exchanged intelligence on Senegalese affairs for favorable treatment of Africans’ cases, and the prince had crafted the mechanism by which the barter of citizenship for military service was made to appear like the gift of a grateful empire rather than the back-room deal it was. Although “Plon-Plon” disliked Diouf’s populist radicalism and disagreed with many of his opinions, he had come to view the Senegalese leader as a canny and loyal political ally and to respect him as a man. In 1864, he appointed Diouf as one of his undersecretaries in the colonial ministry, and over time, he was challenged by the African’s conception of French identity as something defined by citizenship, language and shared values rather than race or religion. He would never fully accept Diouf’s views, but his correspondence of this period shows him coming to grips with the idea that an African Muslim might still be a Frenchman.
To be sure, there were powerful interests who opposed such an expansion of Frenchness: the clerical-conservative faction at court, the French and creole mercantile interests of the
quatre communes, colonial governors seeking absolute power in their fiefdoms. The questions of who could be a Frenchman, what the qualifications of French citizenship should be, and whether something more than mere nationality was necessary to make someone fully French, were still unsettled in the 1860s and would remain so for decades to come. But in 1868, Diouf’s expertise was needed for more urgent matters, as the long-quiescent Toucouleur frontier began to heat up again…
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Ahmadu Odubogun, Faith and Ferment: The Sahel and Sudan in the Nineteenth Century (Ibadan Univ. Press 2005)
… Umar Tall died in 1863, leaving behind him the largest and most powerful empire assembled in the Sahel since the fall of Songhai. His realm included the entire upper and middle Niger as far as Timbuktu and much of the upper Senegal, with Futa Jallon as a loyal ally. And in contrast to the collection of tributary states and ad-hoc armies that characterized the early empire, the Toucouleur kingdom at Tall’s death was a centralized state with a strong standing army.
After the reconquest of the Bambara, Tall had begun to reorganize his empire along the lines of the pre-Tanzimat Ottoman state, redrawing the borders of the conquered kingdoms and dividing them into eyalets and sanjaks. Each had a centrally appointed governor, almost always Toucouleur and usually connected to Tall by ties of personal and family loyalty, as well as an
ulema or jurisprudential council that was generally drawn from the indigenous population. Each administrative unit was also required to supply a quota of conscript troops, who would spend their three years’ service in another part of the empire and would thereafter be eligible for appointment to the civil service. The various laws and customs of the constituent nations were replaced with a single code of law, interpreted by the
ulemas and ultimately by a supreme council of judges which sat in Timbuktu.
Many other things did not change. Tall was fundamentally a reactionary and feared the growth of an urban working class, which was the source of much of the Malê states’ radicalism; thus, he actively discouraged industrialization and did little to improve secular education. Nor, generally, did he favor the merchant class, preferring to imagine his empire as a state of religiously pure scholars and peasants. But the military roads and canals he built were available to merchants as well as soldiers, while the elimination of internal borders and the creation of uniform law eased the spread of prosperity and news throughout the kingdom. Despite Tall’s wishes, the cities of Timbuktu, Djenné and Ségou were twice as populous at the end of his reign as they were at the beginning, and a delayed intellectual ferment was beginning to take root there.
But as in Sokoto, succession would lead to complications. To be sure, unlike Paulo Abacar, Tall had never felt the need to pretend that he was not a king, and had planned for his death, instructing the supreme council of judges to name his successor. After a week of deliberation – most of which was surely for show – the kingmakers named his nephew Tidiani as emperor, as everyone expected they would.
Tidiani lacked his uncle’s charisma or vision, but he was a capable soldier and administrator, and the majority of the people accepted him as emir. One who did not accept, however, was Umar Tall’s son Ahmadu Sekou, who was angry at having been passed over for the succession. He had expected at least a subject kingdom to rule in his own right, but in the new, centralized Toucouleur state, that was not possible. He was forced, instead, to accept the post of commander of the armies – a powerful position, certainly, but one that made him Tidiani’s direct subordinate.
Within five years of Tidiani’s accession, Ahmadu had begun to intrigue among the restive conquered regions, seeking support to make a bid for power. He also sought the aid of Futa Toro, the Fulani kingdom in which his father had been born but never conquered, and which had entered an uneasy alliance with France to forestall Toucouleur conquest. Ahmadu’s recruitment of Futa Toro troops would ultimately bring this French client into conflict with the loyal provinces of the Toucouleur empire, and would put France at risk of being involved in the coming civil war…
