Table Of ContentThese essays are the work of one of France’s
most distinguished living students of Africa,
at once a pioneer in the modern achieve-
ment of a scientific understanding of the
continent and a fearless critic of all easy
orthodoxies and accepted attitudes. The
English edition of one of Suret-Canale’s
principal works, French Colonialism in Tropt-
cal Africa, 1900-45 (C. Hurst, 1971), was
received as an important contribution to
studies of the colonial system in the vast
territories of French West and Equatorial
Africa.
Written at various times, some of these
essays have responded to particular debates
or the challenges of particular discussions,
which have in no way lost their relevance to
the 1980s and 1990s. Such is the case with
the first essay, where the author considers
the application of a marxist analysis to the
elucidation of Africa’s pre-colonial socie-
ties, a subject on which the last word is far
from said; and with the second essay in
which Suret looks at the historical and social
significance of the Fula (Peul) hegemonies
of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries,
another subject of crucial importance, then
and now, for an understanding of the
growth and variety of West African state
structures.
Other among these essays have marked
steps in the evolution of a coherent under-
standing of the processes of ‘decolonisa-
tion’. In this context the most influential,
perhaps, has been the eighth essay here,
treating of the nature of ‘chieftainship’
within the French colonial system, and the
ways in which the chiefs of the Futa Jalon, in
(then French) Guinea, were dislodged by
the pressures of an anti-colonial national-
ism. The tenth essay belongs to the same
category, and offers Suret’s thoughts on
‘development theory’. And then two quite
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JEAN SURET-CANALE
Essays on
African History
From the Slave Trade
to Neocolontalism
WITH A PREFACE BY
BASIL DAVIDSON
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
BY CHRISTOPHER HURST
C. HURST & COMPANY, LONDON
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CONTENTS
Preface by Basil Davidson page vi
Author’s Preface ix
Translator’s Note xiv
Essays
1. Traditional Societies in Tropical Africa and the Concept
of the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’: Marxism and the
Study of African Societies 1
2. The Social and Historical Significance of the Peul
Hegemonies in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries 25
3. The Context and Social Consequences of the African
Slave Trade 56
4. Senegambia at the Time of the Slave Trade 76
5. Anticolonialism in France under the Third Republic:
Paul Vigné d’Octon 89
6. Guinea in the Colonial System 111
7. The End of Chieftaincy in Guinea 148
8. Colonisation, Decolonisation and the Teaching of
History: The Case of Black Africa 179
9. An Unrecognised Pioneer of the Democratic and National
Movement in Africa: Louis Hunkanrin (1887-1964) 196
10. The Geography of Capital in the Parts of Tropical Africa
under French Influence 220
Bibliography of Works by Jean Suret-Canale Concerning Africa 235
Index 241
MAPS
West Africa xli-Xxili
Guinea 110
PREFACE
by Basil Davidson
The essays which follow here are the work of one of France’s most
distinguished living students of Africa, at once a pioneer in the modern
achievement of a scientific understanding of the continent and a fear-
less critic of all easy orthodoxies and accepted attitudes. If Suret-
Canale is less known in the English-reading world than other French
thinkers over the past two decades, this can only be because useful
teaching seems always to move slowly across language frontiers and
find often a slow acceptance. As it has happened, however, the English
edition of one of Suret-Canale’s principal works, French Colonialism in
Tropical Africa, 1900-45, when published here by Christopher Hurst in
1971, was forthwith received as an important contribution to studies of
the colonial system in the vast territories of French West and Equato-
rial Africa. Now we have again to thank Mr Hurst for giving us, as
both publisher and translator, this new volume of Suret-Canale’s
work.
Written at various times, some of these essays have responded to
particular debates along the way or the challenges of particular discus-
sions, but in any case of a kind which has in no way lost its relevance to
the 1980s and 1990s. Such is the case, for example, with the first essay,
where the author considers the application of a marxist analysis to the
elucidation of Africa’s pre-colonial societies, a subject on which the last
word is far from said but to which this essay adds its characteristic
clarity of mind. Such is again the case with the second essay in which
Suret looks at the historical and social significance of the Fula (Peul)
hegemonies of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, another subject
of crucial importance, then and now, for an understanding of the
growth and variety of West African state structures.
Other among these essays have marked steps in the evolution of a
coherent understanding of the processes of ‘decolonisation’, a horrible
but useful term which has now got itself into use to describe the ending
of formal empires in Africa. In this context the most influential,
perhaps, has been the eighth essay here, treating the nature of ‘chief-
tainship’ within the French colonial system, and the ways in which the
chiefs of the Futa Jalon, in (then French) Guinea, were dislodged by
the pressures of an anti-colonial nationalism. The tenth essay belongs
to the same category, and offers Suret’s thoughts on what has been
sometimes, if sometimes quite misleadingly, called ‘development
theory’. And then two quite different essays, those on Vigné d’Octon
and Louis Hunkanrin, reveal other aspects of this writer’s wide
vi
Preface by Basil Davidson wil
concerns. Here he recovers from oblivion an early critic of French
colonialism, a polemicist and publicist who was seen in those days of
high imperialism - unavoidably, no doubt - as an eccentric and
extremist but whose voice, today, comes down the wind of time with a
bracing gravity and good sense. In comparison with Vigné d’Octon
there is the early nationalist of Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin),
Louis Hunkanrin, whose stubborn intelligence has likewise won
Suret’s sympathy.
These essays are written to be enjoyed as well as to instruct. Aside
from their inherent interest their value will be found, I think, to lie in
their qualities of erudition, lucidity and independence of judgment.
They are produced from a painstaking and even passionate attachment
to the facts. This is an analyst who wants above all to know what really
happened, and, if also possible, why it happened. Yet there is little use
in knowing what happened and why - in so far as either can be
known - unless one can set forth one’s knowledge. This is a writer who
knows how to share his lucidity. And then, thirdly, this is a thinker who
follows no conventional or beaten track. He thinks for himself, no
matter what the cost may have to be.
Now that the colonial period and the culture of outright imperialism
are receding into memory, even into distant memory, it may be hard to
imagine the price in personal toil and turmoil that had to be met by
those who, like Suret-Canale, preferred to stand against the ortho-
doxies of the time. They had to expect the certainty of every sort of
administrative obstacle and established obstruction in the way of their
travels and researches, and yet somehow manage to persevere. They
could hope for no pleasant grants and subsidies, and their tenure in any
particular African place was likely to be brief. It might afterwards be
claimed on behaolf fth e French colonial system, as of the British, that it
was ‘preparing our Africans, step by step, for independence’; one’s
experience on the ground, however, was just the reverse of whatever
such ‘preparation’ might be thought to imply. As only one small
example of that experience, I myself remember being threatened with
expulsion from French Sudan (now Mali) in 1952 for having dared to
interview a local nationalist leader: ‘a person of absolutely no impor-
tance’, I was told by the police commissioner of Bamako, but all the
same the very same person, Mamadou Konaté, who afterwards
became the first president of his country.
Suret-Canale has had to suffer much persecution, whether in Africa
or at home, because he has always taken his own line and followed it.
The nature of his use of Marx shows this independence, for it pursues
no doctrines or dogmas but stands on the principles of analysis which
Marx evolved for the benefit of later development ‘on the spot’. As a
lifelong member of the French Communist party, of course, he might
Vili Preface by Basil Davidson
well be thought to possess a willingness to bend his judgment to that
party’s usually authoritarian discipline. But his work denies it. Over a
long acquaintance I have often disagreed with him, but I have never
once discovered him following any line of thought except his own. It is
perhaps in this quality of staunch independence that his principled
critique of the colonial project becomes most effective.
There is much that one should say about this devoutly committed
thinker: committed, that is, to the search for truth through whatever
entanglements and minefields the fashion of our times may have
erected in its path. Born in 1921, he was still a student - a brilliant
student, one should add - when France was engulfed in the Second
World War. He persisted as a student in so far as that was possible, but
he persisted just as much, or more, in his refusal to stand aside from the
fearsome challenges of those times. As an active patriot even during the
first grim months of Nazi occupation, he was arrested by the German
military authorities in September 1940 and spent the following winter
in infamous jails, only to join once again, when released in February
1941, an active resistance which was then far from being any kind of
widespread movement. And the rest of the war saw him in the ranks of
anti-Nazi defiance.
His African years, following the war, have been spent chiefly in
Senegal and Guinea, and it was there, onwards from 1946, that he pre-
pared himself intensively for the books which he would write during the
1960s: a three-volume study of French West and Equatorial Africa
(written in 1957-72), of which Mr Hurst has already given us, in
English, the middle volume mentioned above; a study of the Republic
of Guinea (1970); a splendid array of specialist papers and studies
(some of which we have here); and latterly, a doctoral thesis on ‘The
Geography of Capital’ in French-speaking tropical Africa, with an out-
line of which this present volume closes. Although by training a geo-
grapher, he is in reality a polymath - he himself would claim, no
doubt, that this is precisely because of his training as a geo-
grapher - and the range of his learning reaches far beyond the limit of
any introductory note. From the benefit ofa long acquaintance let me
add that Suret-Canale has remained a warm and genial participant in
whatever challenges the years continue to bring him. It is excellent that
more of his work should here become available in English.
February 1987
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
This book brings together studies which have appeared in a variety of
periodicals and other publications over the course of two decades. If I
had to write them again today, I would naturally do so differently: they
are dated, and testify both to a particular attitude and to a particular
period. I still maintain and subscribe fully to this attitude, but I will not
pretend that, on certain points, my understanding has not evolved and
(I hope!) deepened. Those who refer to these works undoubtedly need
to look also at what has been published since on the same subjects, as
much to elaborate their own judgment as to discover where correction
or updating is necessary.
It was the struggle for the liberation of Africa which led me to explore
a hitherto unappreciated area of knowledge, the very existence of
which had at times been denied. This does not lead me to claim any
special merit, but I feel no inferiority complex about it either.
The marxism which has determined my attitude is not, and - unless
it were to go against its own principles - would not know how to be, a
means of ‘measuring’ various situations and periods of history. Marx-
ism, as a scientific attitude towards historical material, can do no
more than shed light on one’s research. It does not give sight to the
blind.
We must now define the problems raised in this collection of
writings, as well as those of equal importance which have not been
raised. The first study, which resumes and submits to a refining
process ideas already put forward in the first part of my Afrique Noire in
1958, aimed to establish the nature of class in pre-colonial Africa,
particularly where class antagonisms had led to the appearance of the
state. ‘Colonial’ history and ethnology - 1.e. the history and ethnology
of the colonial period - had as their common failing a refusal, in the
guise of a descriptive empiricism, to take these realities of class into
account. Other authors, both at this period and later, did not always
resist the temptation to impose on these African realities methods of
analysis borrowed from other societies and other periods of history.
The category ‘tributary mode of production’, which Marx (for want of
a more precise definition at the time when he wrote) called ‘Asiatic’ or
‘oriental’, seemed to me to characterise these African societies very
exactly. There have been objections to this definition; some, for
example, believe it to be too general. But the very category ‘mode of
production’ claims to do no more than ‘situate’ (a word used by Marx
himself) social formations which are dependent upon it; it does not
seek to lend itself to detailed ‘deductions’ - the attitude ofa speculative
‘philosophy’ of history, an unscientific attitude which marxism rejects
ix
