Political Authority and Rural Development

Abstract

that emerges amongst small groups of people in close quarters. Then in 1905, everything accelerated. Although a decree from Dakar abolished slavery, or at least refused to recognize it, what happened locally mattered more. In 1905–6, an influential set of Muslim scholars began to suggest that colonial rule could be recognized as legitimate, while the sultan of Agadez solicited French forces as allies against the Kel Fadei and other Tuareg groups. In Zinder, a eunuch, bellama Ousman, used the influence he had gained amongst French officers to accuse the sultan and his allies of a plot to murder the foreigners. In response, the French officers deposed their former hosts and sent them south into exile. Ousman appropriated the sarki’s title, claimed ownership over many of the people he had enslaved, and made other royal slaves village chiefs. Lefebvre argues that French actions upended an intricate, polyvalent, and hierarchical social world. Such social upheaval was the most profound effect of occupation. Lefebvre’s goal is to understand this moment for what it was, rather than as either the end of African autonomy or the beginning of colonial rule. Taken on its own terms, this moment is neither a ‘before’ nor an ‘after’. Its richness and complexity emerge from the author’s methodological finesse in weighing her evidence, her skills in Arabic and Hausa, and her remarkably wide and intimate body of sources: bundles of correspondence in both their French and Arabic versions (allowing comparison); the personal papers of various French officers, including many intimate confessions between them; texts collected by a long-serving interpreter, Moïse Landeroin; oral histories collected over the decades by Nigerien and foreign scholars; an astonishing number of photographs and drawings; and — as a jewel in the archival crown — a pair of letters between two lovers, Captain Henri Gouraud and Ouma (sic) Dicko. Their story alone is worth the price of admission. One can only hope to see work this rich in English and in paperback.