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Scholars have frequently complained about the paucity of ethnographic and historical sources on equatorial Africa, but even a cursory review of the published literature on the anthropologies and histories of the region would require a lengthy tome. Already by 1914, colonial administrator Georges Bruel published a bibliography on French Equatorial Africa
The Victorian gorilla was the most Gothic of animals. Described by Western science only in 1847, it was brought spectacularly to public attention in 1861 by the French-American gorilla hunter Paul du Chaillu‘s Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. As du Chaillu described his quest for this ‘hellish dream creature’, his narrative devotes a considerable amount of space to the struggles he endured in obtaining sufficient food. Particularly, du Chaillu is obsessed with meat: how to get it, what species to eat, how, indeed, to avoid being eaten himself. This essay explores the ways in these dietary anxieties become entwined with the monstrous figure of the gorilla, and, most significantly, how du Chaillu‘s narrative destabilises established conceptions of the relation between meat-eating and identity.
Many questions present themselves when considering the historical relationship between anthropology and empire following the Scramble for Africa. These include the extent of imperial fortunes in Africa, rising and falling with officials' knowledge of the people under their jurisdiction. This book looks at the institutional frameworks of anthropology, and shows that the colonial project to order Africa, intellectually and politically, was a messy and not-so comprehensive endeavor. It first considers the roles of metropolitan researchers and institutes such as the colonial ethnographers active in French West Africa, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in Berlin, and the British-based International Institute of African Languages and Cultures. The book deals with the role of African ethnograpghers for their study on African teaching assistants and schoolmasters-cum-ethnographers, and the study of Jomo Kenyatta's journey to produce
of thirteen in one day helped to ensure his place in hunting lore. His book Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa , published in 1898, and his continued presence in East Africa as a hunter and safari guide, made him a celebrated figure. 12 But he was a morose man who shunned human company and eventually took his own life. Another famous elephant hunter of East Africa was W. D. M. ‘Karamojo’ Bell
theme, and, finding the continent where their heroes could best exert themselves, put them into equatorial Africa, on the ultimate boundary between civilisation and savagery. Joseph Conrad’s words that the white invasion of the Congo was ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration’ 23 are a now well-known judgement on the Société Belge
referendum as he organised De Gaulle’s tour through France’s African colonies of Madagascar, French Equatorial Africa (AEF) and French West Africa (AOF). Even though he succeeded in his undertaking, this feat should not obscure the fact that he also participated in redrawing the map of decolonised French Africa. Indeed, Foccart supported Houphouët-Boigny’s conception of a federal French-speaking West African against Dia’s and Senghor’s idea of a French-speaking West Africa confederation. The federal solution was based on direct, bilateral links between Paris and each
française’ (Senghor 1962: 23), the request for full independence by the leaders of the Mali Federation to the Executive Council of the Community on 11–12 December 1959, and De Gaulle’s speech in Dakar on 13 December 1959, paving the way for the series of independences of 1960.49 Independence for the two French trusteeship territories, Cameroon on 1 January and Togo on 27 April, accelerated changes in the Community. In the space of 162 Anglo-French relations twenty days in August 1960, ten new African states had emerged in West and Equatorial Africa. On the last day of
Rivers’ position often became lost, as the psychic became naturalized. Such ideas keep reappearing in equatorial Africa in the interwar and postwar periods, where Belgian and French colonial officials, missionaries and doctors worried about the psychological consequences of colonialism on birth rates and the fecundity of women. Outcries about depopulation and race suicide were not limited
west, through French Sudan to Niger in the East – provided vital links with Morocco, Algeria and French Equatorial Africa (Afrique Equatoriale Française (AEF)). 2 Although subservient to the same colonial authority, many of the subject peoples of AOF were as diffuse in culture, language, religion and economic activity as they were supposedly united by the shared experience of French rule. In short
would always remain colonies d’exploitation , so called because of their unsuitability for European settlement as colonies du peuplement . The economy of French Equatorial Africa, for example, was dominated by low-cost extraction of hardwood timber and rubber. Island territories, such as Martinique, Guadeloupe and New Caledonia, with longer histories of French colonisation