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In the twenty years between the end of the First World War and the start of the Second, the French empire reached its greatest physical extent. At the end of the First World War, the priority of the French political community was to consolidate and expand the French empire for, inter alia, industrial mobilisation and global competition for strategic resources. The book revisits debates over 'associationism' and 'assimilationism' in French colonial administration in Morocco and Indochina, and discusses the Jonnart Law in Algeria and the role of tribal elites in the West African colonies. On the economy front, the empire was tied to France's monetary system, and most colonies were reliant on the French market. The book highlights three generic socio-economic issues that affected all strata of colonial society: taxation and labour supply, and urban development with regard to North Africa. Women in the inter-war empire were systematically marginalised, and gender was as important as colour and creed in determining the educational opportunities open to children in the empire. With imperialist geographical societies and missionary groups promoting France's colonial connection, cinema films and the popular press brought popular imperialism into the mass media age. The book discusses the four rebellions that shook the French empire during the inter-war years: the Rif War of Morocco, the Syrian revolt, the Yen Bay mutiny in Indochina, and the Kongo Wara. It also traces the origins of decolonisation in the rise of colonial nationalism and anti-colonial movements.
Dempster & Company, which held a virtual monopoly over the carrying trade between the UK and its West African colonies for more or less the entirety of Nigeria’s colonial history. This chapter examines the relationship between Elder Dempster and the medical and governmental authorities within the British Empire. I argue here that this relationship represents an example of the importance of public
of ‘closer association’ without any promise of self-government. The French would remain in firm control of this ‘indivisible French Union’. Inspired by the movement for self-government in British West African colonies, however, French radicals like Leopold Senghor were rebelling against French political control, preparing the way for both ‘self-determination and the federation of all West African
Across the continent of Africa, a web of laws silenced African speech. On the eve of World War II, a small, impoverished group of Africans and West Indians in London dared to imagine the end of British rule in Africa. Printing gave oppositions a voice, initially through broadsheets, tracts, pamphlets, later through books and articles. The group launched an anti-colonial campaign that used publishing as a pathway to liberation. These writers included West Indians George Padmore, C. L. R. James, and Ras Makonnen, Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta and Sierra Leone's I. T. A. Wallace Johnson. They formed a part of International African Service Bureau (IASB), and the communists saw them as "generals without an army, they have no base and must depend on their pens". Padmore saw 'trusteeship' as a concept invoked as far back as the late nineteenth-century conferences that divided up Africa. Pan-Africa, a monthly periodical T. Ras Makonnen put out, reported that Richard Wright urged his listeners to form an international network of 'cultured progressives'. Labour-powered nationalism was to Padmore more than a drive for self-government. With the Gold Coast political ground so unsettled, neither Nkrumah nor the Convention People's Party (CPP) made Wright privy to their operations. Inspired by the movement for self-government in British West African colonies, French radicals like Leopold Senghor were rebelling against French political control. In 1969, when a small American publisher reissued A History of Pan-African Revolt , James added to it an epilogue explaining the 'rapid decline of African nationalism'.
of the term ‘paramilitary’, as well as in identifying differences with the ‘civil’ model. A ‘paramilitary force’ can refer to an organisation structured, administered and operating along military lines. Historically, paramilitary police forces were armed. However, in some territories – West African colonies and the Caribbean for example – firearms were available but were not carried on duty. In the
West Africa. That such grandiose schemes were still thinkable in 1944 demonstrates how little anticipated it was that the actual process of decolonisation would be so swift, and that, within a mere twenty years, Britain would no longer have any West African colonies. The second proposal received by the Colonial Office in 1944 relating to museums in West Africa was drafted by Heiner Meinhard, a German anthropologist who had worked at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin prior to fleeing to Britain in the lead up to the
Responding to the resurgence of verbatim theatre that emerged in Britain, Australia, the United States and other parts of the world in the early 1990s, this book offers one of the first sustained, critical engagements with contemporary verbatim, documentary and testimonial dramaturgies. Offering a new reading of the history of the documentary and verbatim theatre form, the book relocates verbatim and testimonial theatre away from discourses of the real and representations of reality and instead argues that these dramaturgical approaches are better understood as engagements with forms of truth-telling and witnessing. Examining a range of verbatim and testimonial plays from different parts of the world, the book develops new ways of understanding the performance of testimony and considers how dramaturgical theatre can bear witness to real events and individual and communal injustice through the re-enactment of personal testimony. Through its interrogation of different dramaturgical engagements with acts of witnessing, the book identifies certain forms of testimonial theatre that move beyond psychoanalytical accounts of trauma and reimagine testimony and witnessing as part of a decolonised project that looks beyond event-based trauma, addressing instead the experience of suffering wrought by racism and other forms of social injustice.
officers from other West African colonies and the Caribbean islands also brought distinctive patterns and dimensions to civil police work. Constabulary ordinances drew on examples from a variety of colonies. Whatever the source of ideas and practices, they were adapted and shaped to the particular conditions of policing the Gold Coast. The system, in both origin and development, was essentially hybrid
: in general, colonial governments in all empires relied as much as possible on indirect taxes levied on trade, only then imposing direct taxes. East African colonies, which received a far smaller proportion of overall revenue from trade taxes, were forced to rely more heavily on administratively challenging direct taxes, while West African colonies seemed in a fortunate position with the option mostly to cover their expenses from indirect sources. 48 While East African colonies routinely relied on
spheres of influence, as well as in our territories, slave raiding, and it is slave raiding which has been the great curse of Africa. (Chamberlain, Royal Niger Company Bill 1899: 1,292–5) Chamberlain got his bill and the money to fund the West African possessions. The support he had for his ideas of a more potent state then fed into grander ideas about the colonial project, and it was in this spirit that conquest of the West African colonies began. The press promoted popular support for the policies of expansion and imperialism as inherent to a newly shaped national