Le Gouvernement Des Colonies, Regards Croisés Franco-Britanniques
2005; Boston University; Volume: 38; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2326-3016
Autores Tópico(s)African history and culture studies
ResumoLe Gouvernement des colonies, regards croises franco-britanniques. By Veronique Dimier. Brussels: Editions de l'Universite libre de Bruxelles, 2004. Coll.: Sociologie politique. Pp. 288; bibliography. euro 23.00. While studies of imperialism, neocolonialism, or the post-colony continue to proliferate, studies of colonial policies (especially of their administrative or managerial aspects) have sunk below the horizon line of current Africanist research -or, what may be worse, they have become ossified in an undisturbed sediment of received knowledge where the notions of or rule, their roots, their instrumentalization, and most of all, their ideological or political ramifications have been reduced to the level of stereotyped cliches. This may be especially true in the English-speaking world (including the United States) where assertions about France's wrongheaded assimilationism, or about the way in which Britain's supposedly enlightened cooptation of (and for) traditional institutions were the natural ingredients of an unwaveringly liberal commitment to bring her colonial subjects to democratic self-government. The occasional correctives notwithstanding (e.g., regarding Britain's postwar scrapping of the Lugardian model of indirect rule in favor of the decidedly nontraditional British model of local government), this alleged contrast between the French and British approaches to (or politique indigene) remains largely unchallenged. It may therefore be useful to review -and to do so in English-the remarkable work of Veronique Dimier, a French scholar now teaching at the University of Brussels, but whose research was carried out on both sides of the Channel while she was, appropriately enough, a fellow at Oxford's St. Antony's College, an institution founded and endowed by Antonin Besse, a French entrepreneur who made his fortune in Aden and the Horn by picking up the trails left by his unlucky (if more famous) predecessor, Arthur Rimbaud. ' In addition to the abundant literature published on the subject, mostly in the first half of the twentieth century, her sources cover a wide range of archival materials-primarily at London's Public Records Office, at Oxford, or at the Centre des archives d'Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence-including the private papers of such key figures as Lord Lugard, Margery Perham, Robert Delavignette, and others. Dimier starts, as a baseline, with the broadly received assumption that France applied in her tropical African colonies a form of direct rule entailing the dismantling of indigenous customs and institutions-or, at the very least, their reduction to the rank of mere cogs in a centralized, unitary system aimed at assimilation, reflecting her egalitarian, republican culture -while Britain's pragmatism and conservative liberalism favored an indirect, decentralized, and diversified form of rule founded on the respect for native customs and chiefs seen as partners and intermediaries. Widely accepted in British circles (and propagated in the United States as early as 1928 by Raymond Buell, later assisted by the many British expatriates who staffed America's first African studies programs a generation later), this view was actively challenged by French scholars and administrators bent on highlighting the many similarities between French and British colonial policies in sub-Saharan Africa. Dimier wastes no time in arbitrating this debate (which has long since been settled with the observation that practical constraints repeatedly led both powers to depart from their alleged models, and even to borrow from each other's methods), but carefully investigates the academic and scientific rationalizations proffered by colonial administration specialists in the two countries. Five chapters are devoted to the emergence of claims that colonial administration could be treated as a science, to the shifting rationalizations advanced to legitimize colonization (and to the priority to be given to welfare), to the proper role and training of colonial officials, or to the appropriate balance between theory and field experience. …
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