Dealing with government in South Sudan: histories of chiefship, community and state

Abstract

surroundings and the broader imperial worlds which Burtt was connecting. Given how expansively Higgs retells Burtt’s story, this is a great accomplishment. It helps that Higgs is a good writer, which further strengthens her ability to introduce and hold together the many stories her narrative expounds. Among the multitude of historical perspectives retold through Burtt’s journey, one remains so muted as to be almost absent. The photograph opposite the title page is captioned “William A. Cadbury, Joseph Burtt, and an unidentified African man in Luanda”. This more or less sets the tone for much of the work to follow. The plantation workers themselves – the servic ais – are the core of the question that the book’s actors are trying to answer, yet they remain silent and largely unknowable. The debates over their status as slaves were considered then, and are examined here, through measures that have little to do with the workers themselves: death rates, material conditions, the possibility of repatriation, and so on. Higgs incisively analyses the terms through which outsiders litigated this debate, astutely noting that the fundamental question was whether to define labour as slavery because of its material realities or because of the broader degree of freedom afforded to workers to control when and where they worked. The plantation owners preferred the former definition, arguing that they treated the servic ais well enough to forestall any charges of slavery. In contrast, for anyone who subscribed to the view that free work required the free entry and exit of workers, the impossibility of repatriation for servic ais sent to São Tomé (to say nothing of the fact that any children they bore were automatically contracted to the plantation) left little room for ideological manoeuvre. But the question of how the workers themselves might have conceptualised the distinction between slavery and free labour is not something that gets much attention. Could the servic al have spoken? Not with the sources Higgs is using, and quite possibly not at all. Higgs is interested in the servic ais as historical subjects, but Burtt was not: as Higgs notes, he displayed a consistent disinterest in the possibility of actually talking to Africans, was himself deeply influenced by casually racist ideas, and depended upon the offices of Portuguese officials to arrange his investigations. This conundrum is unfortunate, but it does not undermine the value of Higgs’s study. This book is recommended for anyone seeking a highly readable and informative account of the São Tomé cocoa scandal and its relevance within the broader panorama of labour and empire in early twentieth-century Africa.