-
‘That man can work, he must have liberty…’:1 Mauritanian
haratine and the Colonial Labour Discourse A new social hierarchy,
founded uniquely on wealth, is being established [here].
Politically, it is difficult to predict the consequences of this
evolution which consecrates the importance of work and which
destroys the ancient seigneurs….Practically, this evolution has
developed on the one hand poverty, materializing … in a number of
prostitutes and poor…, on the other, [it has] created a new class:
‘the working class’.2 [1943]
People worked both in pre-colonial and colonial Mauritania. If
we are to believe French
colonial records, what was distinctive about ‘colonial’ work and
those who engaged in it
was the emergence of a particular “class”, autonomous in its
identity and independent of
those who employed it – E.P Thompson’s proverbial ‘working
class’.3 However, in our
post-modern, post-colonial era, this avowedly Marxist concept
has much less currency
than it did a generation ago. And analysis of records – texts –
of any kind occupies itself
more with concerns of ‘discourse’, narrative ‘tropes’,
deconstruction and contextual
‘rubric’ than of descriptive or ‘factual’ information. So
clearly, to seek ‘a working class
in the making’ in the colonial records is not only passé
according to contemporary
scholarship, it is impossible. No longer can one look to text
for truth.
The problem is those people who worked in pre-colonial and
colonial Mauritania, still
‘work’ in post-colonial Mauritania – workers (and ‘working
people) remain critical to
contemporary Mauritania’s reality. And from my understanding of
Mauritanian social
1 Marius Moutet, press conference, 1937. The quotation continues
“…that is, that he can apply himself to his own cultivation…It is
also necessary to free the worker from certain corvees [forced
labour recruitment]”. Cited (and extensively footnoted) in
Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: the labor
question in French and British Africa (Cambridge University Press,
1996), p.74. 2 Archives, Atar (RIM – hereafter AATAR), Rapport
politique annual, ‘Notes’, 1943. 3 Edward P Thompson, The Making of
the English Working Class (Penquin Books Ltd., 1968; first pub.
Victor Gollancz, 1963).
-
history to date, the ‘identity’ of those who work is central to
explaining how other
‘groups’ (or classes) see themselves.4 Therefore, the claim that
colonialism ‘created’ a
working class in Mauritania deserves exploration. Perhaps there
is still something to be
drawn from Thompson’s perceptions of process that has relevance
for a post-colonial
questioning of reality.
In Search of a Working Class
At first glance, there would seem to be little question about
who constituted this new
‘group’ of workers. French colonial rule of Mauritania resulted
in rapidly expanding
agriculture (flood-fed cultivation and irrigated oasis
agriculture ), pastoralism (some
transport animals but mostly meat-supplying sheep and cattle)
and commerce (largely
centered on the flourishing colony of Senegal, involving exports
of foodstuffs and
imports of French manufactured goods like cloth). Put another
way, it necessitated that
more work be accomplished. It also introduced a series of laws
to eliminate slavery and
the slave trade, and promoted French schooling. The combined
effects of this
‘colonialism’ was a tendency on the part of Mauritanians to free
slaves and to send the
children of slaves and newly-freed slaves ( haratine), to
school. Muslim masters,
reluctant to enter the secular world of French work or to have
their children do so,
thereby ‘made’ a class of French speaking, wage-earning,
haratine labourers that was
sure to reproduce itself. This, then, was the ‘new working
class’ claimed by French 4 E Ann McDougall, “Topsy-Turvy World:
slaves and freed slaves in the Mauritanian Adrar, 1910-1950”, in R
Roberts and S Miers, The Ending of Slavery in Africa (University of
Wisconsin Press, 1988), 362-88; Meskerem Brhane, “Narratives of the
Pst, Politics of the Present: identity, subordination and the
haratines of Mauritania”2 Vols., (PhD, Dept. Political Science,
University of Chicago, 1997); Urs Peter Ruf, Ending Slavery.
Hierarchy, Dependency and Gender in Central Mauritania (Bieflefeld
Transcript Verlag, 1999 – from Dissertation, Bielefeld, 1998); E
Ann McDougall, Neskerem Brhane and Urs Peter RUf, “Legacies of
Slavery, Promises of Democracy: Mauritania in the 21st Century” in
Malinda S. Smith(Ed), Globalizing Africa (Africa World Press,
2003), 67-88.
-
administrators, as the direct product of their policies. But is
the story so simple?
If we return to the gist of Thompson’s ‘English working class’,
he asserted that it was an
historical phenomenon and very much a ‘cultural’ affair. Most
famously he asserted that
it ‘made itself’ as much as it ‘was made’: “[it] owes as much to
agency as to conditioning
… The working class was present at its own making”.5 The
narrative description I
provided above speaks only to what Thompson would term “the
productive relations into
which men are born – or enter involuntarily”; it does not
address how these “experiences
were handled in cultural terms”. Most problematic, however, is
the fact that all agency is
attributed to the actions of the French colonizers and the
Mauritanian masters. To
conclude with Thompson’s still seminal words, “class is defined
by men as they live their
own lives”. One element missing from our understanding of the
Mauritanian
phenomenon then, is the agency and the ‘lived experience’ of the
haratine themselves.6
The narrative also raises a second issue. In an article on the
ending of slavery in
Mauritania some years ago, I identified the process of freeing
male slaves as being key to
understanding colonial social and economic change. I posed the
unanswered question
‘why, under what circumstances, would a master decide to free a
male slave – as opposed
to not freeing him’.7 While I thought I knew why masters were
not freeing female
5 Thompson, English Working Class, p.9. 6 Ibid., pp.10,11. In
“Topsy-Turvy World”, I argued this in slightly different terms:
that because the colonial economy was primarily about ‘work’ and
that “all work was customarily performed by servile groups,
colonial labour requirements had a social impact on Mauritanians
which far outweighed its broader economic significance. The
categories ‘master’, ‘slave’, and ‘hartani’ remained unchanged, but
the experience of being a master, a slave or a hartani did not” (p.
365). I pick up this last point in the second half of this paper. 7
McDougall, “Topsy-Turvy World”, p.365, Ft.4
-
slaves8, was my logic that male slaves were being liberated
specifically to form a wage-
labour working force necessarily the logic of Mauritanian
masters? Were masters
consciously creating a class of workers?9
Finally, a third question, one belonging more properly to recent
work on language and
discourse than to Thompson’s social history analysis, namely: to
whose ‘discourse’ did
the concept of ‘working class’ actually belong? Was it something
acknowledged by
haratine themselves? Thompson’s ‘class consciousness’, that is
how experience
“embodied in traditions, value systems, ideas and traditional
forms”10-- was it ever
‘bought into’ by masters or slaves? When the French spoke of la
class ouvriere, it was
often in the context of discussions of slavery – or more
precisely, the ending of slavery.
The terms ‘slave’ and ‘slavery’ were constantly evolving during
the colonial period.
Often, both concepts were subsumed to discussions of ‘respecting
local customs’ – here
meaning Islam and the perceived role of slavery and slaves
within this religion11. But as
has been demonstrated elsewhere, slavery emerged as a point of
intersection between the
overtly political agenda of the French in Paris, the colonial
administrators on the ground,
and the local Mauritanian elites. Each used the volatile and
politically sensitive subject
for their own purposes. Often issues ostensibly about ‘slaves’
or ‘slavery’ were not really
8 Ibid., p. 365 for general terms; stories of masters resisting
freeing female slaves, pp.370-2. 376,7.Masters made it quite clear
that female slaves were the source of children and hence, future
slaves. I will return to this in the final section of the paper. 9
In this sense, Thompson would probably reject the question, arguing
that no one class can create another, that classes are created
through process. Nor do I believe that he would consider one
‘class’ recognizing the existence of another necessarily pertinent.
That said, he was not writing of slaves in a colonial society. 10
Thompson, English Working Class, p.10. 11 Both the term and concept
will be discussed further, below.
-
about the institution or its victims at all12. Is it also
possible that what we think we know
about the creation of a haratine ‘working class’ and the process
underlying that creation
fall into that same category of analysis?
Was la class ouvriere also more a part of French colonial
discourse than Mauritanian
experience? Most of what we have seen of both masters and
slaves, we have seen
through the lens of colonial administrators, through words
intended primarily for
superiors located in Dakar and Paris13. Moreover, the French
were not alone in the world
of colonialism and the audience for edited versions of local
reports was, from at least the
mid-1920s, an international one. With the intervention of the
League of Nations, the
International Labour Organization and finally, the United
Nations into labour issues,
global templates were created to make sense of systems of labour
and categories of
labourers; ‘language’ shoehorned varied and specific experiences
into a largely universal
discourse.14 Where in this larger discussion should we situate
the haratine workers of
Mauritania?
12 See for example my study of the infamous Dahomean exile,
Louis Hundanrin: “Setting the story straight: Louis Hunkanrin and
un forfait colonial, History in Africa 16 (1989):285-310. 13 While
“Topsy-Turvy World” used some oral evidence, and “Legacies of
Slavery” drew on contemporary interviews, most of the colonial
analysis relies heavily on archival records. On the importance of
debate over slavery between “senior administrators and jurists” in
Paris and Dakar, and the field administrators on the ground, Martin
Klein speaks of a “chasm” in large part because of the
‘conservatism’ of the latter and their concern about how to
administer laws. (Martin A Klein ,Slavery and colonial rule in
French West Africa, (Cambridge University Press, 1998); see Chapter
8 “The imposition of metropolitan priorities on slavery”,
especially pp.131-40. 14 Frederick Cooper references the importance
of this ‘universal’ discourse in several parts of his seminal study
of labour in French and British Africa. He draws attention to the
emergence of concerns specifically over ‘forced’ labour in the
1920s, the involvement of the League of Nations with the 1926
‘Anti-Slavery Convention’ and the investigation of the
International Labour Organization into forced labour that resulted
in the ILO ‘Forced Labour Convention’ of 1930. He similarly traces
the concerns of the United Nations over ‘social’ issues that
included labour in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. These
discussions will be addressed (with specific page references),
below. See Decolonization and African Society. The labor question
in French and British Africa (Cambridge University Press,
1996).
-
The Language of Labour
From the beginning of their involvement with Mauritania, French
colonial officials found
themselves dealing with a society in which ‘superior classes’-
nobles, warriors, religious
clerics (marabouts) depended upon inferior classes given solely
to work. The latter had a
relation to the former analogous to the “vassalage of the Middle
Ages”; with time, this
had become for some a consensual custom – such was the case with
the ‘tribes’ of
haratine or affranchis15. In the context of the central region
of Tagant, these anciens
captifs affranchis were identified as constituting an important
part of the ‘labouring
class’, deserving of French protection, support and ‘favour’.
The others were esclaves or
captifs – serviteurs naturels who comprised the majority of the
labouring class and even
worked for haratine16 . Bordering the Senegal river, the
commandant in the cercle
[administrative region] of Brakna clearly distinguished the
‘slavery’ of Mauritania from
that of Senegal, noting that while the latter were primarily
long-term ‘captifs de cas’,
those in Mauritania were not ‘ready’ for liberation. He
explained that the rule was to act
with ‘prudence’, maintaining the status quo. He liberated slaves
beaten by their masters
and prohibited all outright purchasing and sale of slaves but
otherwise he respected the
“morals, customs, property and religion” of the Mauritanian
nobility as had been
promised them at the time of their submission to the French17.
Summarized, while it was
desirable to apply French conceptions of a social state based
upon the role of the
15 Archives Nationales de la Republique Islamique de la
Mauritanie (hereafter ARIM) 1905-1908, series E1-61 “Esclavage”;
letter circulated to all Commandents de Cercle in Mauritania
(regarding anti-slavery decree of 1905), March 1906. 16 Ibid.
Response of Comt. Tissot (Tagant), September 1906. 17 Ibid., Letter
Resident Brakna to Governor General Mauritania, 25 December 1905,
E1 61. Apart from individual reports, there are several decrees and
circulars dealing with the subjects of the slave trade and slavery
(eg December 1905, February and March 1906, May/June 1907, April
1908) also in this file.
-
(understood ‘free’) individual, to wrench this individual too
abruptly from his “natural
group” would be to “sow social disorder”. Mauritania was not yet
“ripe enough for the
exercise of full individualism” or for the “progressive and
definitive freeing of the
labouring masses”18.
This special understanding was articulated even more clearly a
decade later in 1918, as
Governor Gaden explicitly distinguished between domestic slavery
and the slave trade.
He also introduced explicitly a concern that would dominate the
coming decades: work.
In effect all the agreements we have made with the Moors show
that we will
respect their social structure, property, customs and religion.
We have therefore
recognized a situation of fact: The slaves stay in the family of
their owner for
whom they constitute the labour force. …Having recognized this
state of affairs,
we do not want to say that we will authorize trade… This
traffic, in addition to
being reprehensible, is also contrary to the interests of owners
who lose a worker
they are not able to replace, since the peace which we have
brought to Mauritania
no longer permits them to bring slaves from the south. … It can
happen that in
certain contracts between Moors, for the constitution of a bride
price for example,
it is specified that a slave be given by the spouse. This is
not, in my opinion, an
act of slave trading – a slave whose condition we have already
recognized,
remains in the family and does not leave the country. This is
not a loss for the
18 ARIM E1 61 “Esclavage”, letter circulated to Mauritanian
commandents de cercle (regarding Anti-Slavery decree 1905), March
1906.
-
masters. These are the only transactions to which we can close
our eyes.19
By 1928, the official rhetoric had not changed in substance, but
had
evolved somewhat in language and context. What had earlier been
referred to as captifs
and captifs de cas were now serviteur and serviteurs nes,
literally those born into
‘service’. And while the obligation to respect usages et
coutumes continued to be
referenced, it was now in the context of acknowledging that “it
is not possible for us to
maintain this integral dependency that sooner or later should
end”. So the French had to
both assist masters who would progressively lose the rights of
their traditional social role,
and exercise close control over the “serviteurs nes [who were]
now disengaged from their
servitude”20. In 1929, the Commandant of the Adrar sent a
lengthy missive to his
subordinate administrators in the towns of Atar and Shingit and
the cercle commander in
Traraza. In the context of addressing a particular case21, he
focused discussion on the
basic issues characterizing French treatment of slavery in
Mauritania: “In all our
colonies, we have formally condemned slavery. But in Muslim
countries we have
recognized officially [emphasis in original] an existing social
state: that of the ‘serviteurs’
which constitutes labour within the family and Muslim
organization such that it is fixed
by the religion and Muslim law . What we do not permit is the
reduction to servitude by
force those of a free condition…”. Most of the remainder of the
document discussed
19 Correspondence, Resident Shinqit to Commandant du Cercle de
l’Adrar, October-November 1918, ARIM E1 28 20 Circular from Saint
Louis to all the circles and residences of Mauritania, section
entitled ‘Serviteurs’, ARIM E2 135, 1928. 21 It concerned a slave
wishing to be repatriated to Morocco, and spoke to concerns about
the still troubled relationship the French had with the grandes
nomads, the Regueibat.
-
affranchissement or liberation of said ‘serviteurs’, inheritance
and the custom of hiring-
out a ‘legitimate captif’ in the special terms of Muslim
law:
The freeing of a serviteur is recommended by the Muslim Religion
and we should
encourage it. The rachat [buying back] is legitimated by the
loss suffered by the
patron who has raised and maintained the serviteur and loses the
fruits of his
labour [my emphasis]. The division of serviteurs belonging to a
family as part of
inheritance is legitimate since they are an integral part of the
family. We have not
intervened in these distributions regulated by Muslim law and
which rely on the
competence of the qadis. … The hiring out [location] of a
legitimate captif in
Muslim law ought to be considered as a work contract between the
patron,
entrepreneur who has raised and maintained the serviteur and the
employer who
benefits from his work. We should authorize such a contract only
with the consent
of the serviteur22.
This evolution of the discourse, in which Islam played an
increasingly prominent role and
the slippage around the language of slavery became increasingly
transparent, was clearly
rooted in the context of the nineteenth-century ‘slavery and
abolition’ discourse. But in
the post WWI years, it could not long remain oblivious to what
soon developed into a
discrete, international rhetoric generated around colonial
labour practices. The League of
Nations, formally constituted in 1920, entered the fray in the
aftermath of highly
publicized forced labour scandals in several African colonies,
and just as imperial powers
like France were discussing the practical implications of moving
to policies of completely
22 Capt. Reviers de Mauny, Cmdt. de Cercle de l’Adrar, circular,
December 1929, ARIM E1 18 “Esclavage”.
-
‘free’ labour23. In 1926, it passed an ‘Anti-slavery Convention’
that reiterated much of
the language of earlier documents, directly referencing the
Congress of Brussels 1889-90
regarding the suppression of all ‘vestiges of’ the slave trade
and the ‘progressive’
abolition of slavery ‘in all its forms’24. In terms of both
language and concept, the
importance of the Convention was the international
acknowledgement that the labour
practices of a member government could be analogous to slavery;
the problem then
became how to define when labour became unfree25. The
International Labour
Organization (founded in 1919), autonomous but working closely
with the League,
undertook to find out. Detailed questionnaires were sent to
member states, the results of
which shaped the passing of the Forced Labour Convention in
193026. In his seminal
work on ‘the labour question in French Africa’, Frederick Cooper
explored extensively
this era in which colonial administrators sought creative
language that could reshape the
issue of forced labour into discussions of taxation, military
service and infrastructures
meant to ‘bring liberation’ to Africans. Metaphors
notwithstanding, their efforts were in
vain27. The conference of 1930 passed a convention on colonial
labour that included all
forms including those employed in French colonies; France did
not ratify it until 1937.
23 Cooper, Decolonization, pp.28,9. 24 “La Conventionion
Relative a L’Esclavage” was signed in Geneva in September 1926,
ratified by the French Government December 1926. Copy consulted as
published in Bulletin de la Comite de l’Afrique, Renseignments
Coloniaux 9 (1931):517-9. 25 Cooper, Decolonization, p.29. 26 The
recommendations were submitted to the ILO in 1929, leading to the
convention of 1930 (Cooper, Decolonization, pp.28,9). 27 In Cote
d’Ivoire, ‘compulsion’ was a question of taxation and military
recruitment, therefore (it was argued) belonging to the question of
‘national sovereignty’, not to labour. Cooper refers to la deuxieme
portion, the portion of required military service devoted to public
works, as a ‘metaphor’. In Dahomey, it was claimed that forced
labour in the private sector had been suppressed, but that a
certain ‘pressure’ and ‘constraint’ remained with respect to the
public-works labour necessary to complete ‘the work of liberation’
the new improved infrastructure was bringing to Africans: forced
labour would ‘liberation’. (Cooper, Decolonization, pp. 38 ).
-
This did not mean, however, that France was insensitive to the
ongoing international
judgment of the League. In June 1931, the then Minister of the
Colonies placed the
‘Present Problem of Slavery’ squarely in this new context for
his colonial Governor
Generals. In a lengthy document, Reynaud set out the connection
between the concerns
of the League of Nations over forced labour – “the polemics and
numerous works,
articles and conferences to which the question of forced labour
like that of the actual
vestiges of forms of slavery have given rise” – and the current
situation in the French
colonies. “It is no longer enough, in effect, to refer to French
colonial legislation
abolishing slavery, it is absolutely necessary to detail exactly
what vestiges of slavery
remain in our diverse, faraway possessions”. He then went on to
request documentation
on the ‘remnants’ of domestic slavery (interestingly
differentiated from captivite de
case), of tribal or ‘chiefly’ slavery, of pawning, of ‘hidden’
trafficking in women and
children and of all non-remunerated forms of labour.28
The word games continued. In French West Africa, language used
to justify the forced
labour of the Office du Niger (Soudan) echoed the ‘working for
liberation’ language
heard earlier: building their own infrastructure (albeit by
compulsion) would eventually
bring about the creation of a much-needed ‘work ethic’ among
Africans otherwise not
attracted to wage labour29. Cooper draws attention to another
striking example around the
issue of unemployment. It was argued that since the African
family had access to land
and took care of its own, only the most ‘detribalized’ of
Africans, those in urban
situations, could ‘count’ as unemployed. According to Cooper,
this was discourse typical
28 Minister of the Colonies, Reynaud, to Governor Generals and
Governors of the Colonies: “Le probleme present de l’esclavage”,
june 1931. ARIM E1 18 “Esclavage”. 29 Cooper, Decolonization,
pp.89,90.
-
of the 1930s, an example of how drawing on perceptions of the
‘peculiar nature of
African society’ “could define an entire problem [in this case
mass rural under and
unemployment] out of existence”30. The linking of the
‘detribalized’ African with a
social and economic problem is also notable, especially when
compared with the ideals
expressed in the early Mauritanian documentation about the
ultimate desirability of
creating the individual ‘freed’ from his ‘natural group’. The
language reveals a real
contradiction: how to ‘free’ from a relation defined by a forced
labour without ‘freeing’
from tribal affiliation, when the former was an integral part of
the latter? It masks, on the
other hand, the evolution of French policy from a concern with
ending slavery per se to a
need to re-define free labour.
It is clear that France was sensitive to the fact that it had
supported the principle of free
labour in 1930 but not ratified the convention sanctifying it
until seven years later.
Cooper notes that it is difficult to know exactly what officers
were thinking and doing in
the interim. He does, however, draw on a document dated 1937 in
which one Governor
General expressed concern about the ‘morality’ of asking
administrators on the ground to
apply – “on paper only” – labour regulations inapplicable in
practice. Or, as Cooper
concludes: “they were supposed to write reports in the
international language of free
labour, while day by day, they exercised power in ways that
could not be discussed” [my
30 Cooper, Decolonization, p.42 Similar tricks of the tongue
continued to tackle the labour issue in Cote d’Ivoire. On the eve
of French ratification of the ILO convention in 1937,
administrators introduced the Apostulate du Travail whereby
administrators, while continuing to ‘encourage work’ by Africans
were to cease being ‘purveyors of work’ and become ‘inciters’
instead. Interestingly, the policy generated complaints that
removing the administration from formally managing labour opened
the door to private purveyors, who would abuse both the situation
and the Africans. It was said that chiefs would sell anyone (the
old, the sick) to private employers for high prices: “we have
returned to slavery” colons [settlers] cried. Cooper points out the
irony here, that ‘anti-slavery language’ was being invoked to
support forced labour; in effect colons were using new language to
justify old practices (Ibid., 79-83).
-
emphasis]31. Mauritania may have lain outside the mainstream of
the labour discourse
deliberations – indeed its ‘Maures’ were written off completely
as people who would not
work32, but it was nonetheless directly affected by them. The
sensitivity to using the term
‘serviteurs’ rather than ‘captifs’ or ‘esclaves’, to officially
‘defining’ serviteurs and
serviteurs nes such that they could not be confused with ‘unfree
labour’, and to
establishing in lengthy reports and circulars the ‘peculiarity’
of Mauritania’s Muslim
society – all resonate strongly with the ‘language of
international labour’ created by the
League of Nations and the ILO in the 1920s and 1930s.
‘Imagining the Working Class33’
It was in the 1940s and 1950s that France began to ‘imagine’ the
African working class.
The pre-war focus on ‘work’ had been directed to freeing the
African labourer, initially
from slavery, later so that he could become more like the French
peasant. This had been
articulated best by the Popular Front government in 1937: “That
man can work, he must
have liberty, that is, that he can apply himself to his own
cultivation”34. By the late
1940s, responses to a post-war economy both in Europe and
Africa, the latter marked by
increasing urbanization and labour unrest, had adjusted the
image of the ideal African.
Now, the ‘worker’ was the desired outcome of colonization. An
Inspection General du
Travail was created to provide the bureaucratic framework for
overseeing this transition
and between 1947 and 1952, the French Assembly struggled to come
up with an
31 Ibid, p.31. 32 That fact is underscored by Cooper’s almost
total lack of reference to the region. Mauritania is referenced
only once, in a footnote, and then as an ‘exception’ to a policy,
p.76. And ‘Maures’ are mentioned only once in the context of noting
who of the West African population would not work (p.40). 33
Borrowed from the title of Cooper’s Part III “The Imagining of an
African Working Class”, Decolonization. 34 Marius Moutet, press
conference 1937; cited in Cooper, Decolonization, p.74.
-
acceptable Labour Code for the Inspection to apply. As African
deputies put it, “work
itself does not change” – Africans knew what work was as well as
French administrators
did; what was at issue was “to define the salariat, that is the
worker”. In the end, what
was essentially defined was what the worker was not – in other
words, what was to
remain ‘peculiarly African’ about him. This was articulated in
1948 by one of the labour
‘inspectors’:
In regard to family labour, it is worth remembering that the
immense majority of
cases of this do not fit the mold of wage labour, but are
regulated by custom…The
framework of the family, which comprises a true system of
social
security…draws its principal force from ties of a religious
nature, which have not
been unaffected as a result of contact with western civilization
but whose value
and solidity we must be careful not to underestimate. It is
possible that under
cover of these ties abuses can be committed. At the same time,
the possible
victims…retain the freedom to leave the family circle when they
want to…35.
It is interesting that white settler interests articulated their
objection to this ‘protection’ of
black Africans’ right to exploit ‘family’ labour outside the
constraints of the labour code
accusing the assembly of ‘consecrating feudal rights’ – an
striking echo of the language
used the Atar administrator quoted at the outset of this chapter
-- under cover of a
euphemistic expression, ‘customary rights’36. They lost, both
this particular battle and
the larger war. The Code was finally accepted by the Assembly in
November 1952. But
the lengthy debates revealed the extent to which ‘African
peculiarity’ remained central to
the labour discourse.
35 Inspector Combier, note to the ministry,1948, cited in
Cooper, Decolonization, p.295. 36 Ibid., the speaker was Jules
Castellani.
-
Apart from defining the worker, discussion had tended to focus
around two aspects of
this new ‘class’: migration and stabilization. The migrant
labour systems that had served
as the infrastructure of colonial economies were now seen as
undermining the need for a
stabilized work force. From 1947-1948, the ILO, the
Inter-African Labour Conferences
and the United Nations repeatedly addressed these questions and
again, information on
the ‘labour situation’ was demanded from administrators in all
colonial territories. As had
been the case with the earlier focus on forced labour, these
internationally articulated
concerns established the acceptable framework for discussion.
They did not determine
government policy in Paris or West Africa, but they did, as
Cooper has argued, condition
the language used and force colonial thinking to engage, “one
way or another” with this
international discourse.37 Mauritania’s administrators were no
exception. In June 1950,
they received a United Nations questionnaire from the Governor
General of French West
Africa on the subject of ‘Esclavage en Mauritanie’. The
responses, collected and
submitted by Mauritania’s governor, were a kind of anthology of
documents from the
1940s; they reveal a lot about the shape of the discourse that
was evolving around the
‘work’ and ‘labour’ issue in the colony by 1950. The respondent
from the Tagant region,
for example, reviewed the evolution of French policy towards
slavery from the time of
occupation, noting that recently accepted conventions regarding
captifs meant that in “in
the future.. one could no longer recognize the devolution de
serviteur through inheritance
or reclamation. … Also, one can no longer speak of ‘captifs
belonging to…[someone,
some family, some tribe]’ but only of ‘serviteurs being part
of…[said family, tribe].
Tomorrow, it will be without question travailleurs [workers]’.
He went on to address the 37 Decolonization, p.363.
-
term serviteur, assuring his superiors that “it is not in effect
an elegant euphemism – it
translates faithfully the reality. Serviteur-ne is the family
domestic who follows the tent
in its movements, it is even more the agricultural worker…”38.
His counterpart further
east in the Hodh was more skeptical of the ‘faithfulness’ of the
terminology, commenting
that because “we no longer officially tolerate slavery and
because there are officially no
longer slaves, by a delicious euphemism, they have become
serviteurs”.39 In the southern
agricultural region of Gorgol, his colleague echoed this
sentiment with the comment
“what is a serviteur if not an esclave?40
Euphemism or not, there was an unease everywhere about what the
discourse meant for
Mauritanian reality. The administrator from the Tagant had
continued in his observations
about the serviteur ne being above all the agricultural worker:
“The day when this
ideology, not yet valid [fully accepted] achieves the
suppression of this class of
serviteurs, it will have succeeded in pushing the tribes that we
should be interested in
sedentarizing (at least partially), back into exclusive
nomadism. The Moors, if need be,
will herd but they will not cultivate and it is known that if
they lack their captifs, they
will in their turn, abandon date-palm [cultivation – literally
‘they will lack date-palms’]. I
think that one will thusly serve neither the cause of the
administered nor our own”41. Like
earlier circular arguments, this one too embedded itself in most
of the overall report. As
the situation with serviteurs improved and as freed slaves
became ‘reclassified’,
structured work was needed for them. But as ‘masters’ lost their
labour force, they
38 Archives Nationales du Senegal, AOF (hereafter AS), Rapport
des Nations Unies sur l’esclavage, 1950. “L’esclavage en
Mauritanie”, 2K15 174 MAURITANIE. Section on Tagant, August 1950.
39 Ibid., anonymous response that appears to be drawn from a report
from the Hodh, 1949. 40 Ibid., Gorgol, July 1950. 41 Ibid,
Tagant.
-
abandoned the oases and returned to herding, thereby leaving the
newly freed slaves
destitute and the economy in a downward spiral. This perspective
was reinforced by
numerous references to slaves’ inability to ‘manage being free’
– quickly turning to theft,
murder or a new master. Even the ‘liberty villages’ that were
“meant to teach slaves
about work as an ‘apprenticeship to liberty’ [my emphasis] were
failures; thus envisaging
the freedom “pure and simple” of slaves was illusionary.42
Reading the summary of these responses provided by the
Mauritanian Governor, M. E
Terrac to the Governor General of the AOF, 31 August, 1950, one
could be forgiven for
thinking the date mistaken by two or three decades. The contents
spoke mostly to the
continued existence of serviteurs and Terrac referenced the same
rhetoric as his
predecessors in seeking the ‘peculiarity’ of the Muslim society.
He pointed out that the
serviteur situation was integrally tied not only to ‘religion’
(as one might understand
custom), but to Islamic law. This was confirmed in a report from
Atar in which it was
noted that while legally slavery no longer existed, in practice
the slaves who were there
when the French arrived “by virtue of Qur’anic law” remained
with their masters as
serviteurs: “it is the same today with their descendants”.43
This was a semi-fedual
society, maintained by Islam “that resisted any attempts at
modification. Given the
current state of Mauritanian society, an attempt to free all of
the remaining serviteurs
immediately is not envisaged. … it would only bring to
Mauritania economic ruin and
social disorder.”44
42 Ibid., Adrar, referencing an anonymous report from 1949. 43
Ibid., anonymous letter dated 20 June, Atar, 1950. 44 Report
Governor of Mauritania to Governor General, AOF, 31 August 1950, AS
2K15 174 MAURITANIE.
-
However, this same report emphasized the importance of a new
social category –
implicitly the ‘answer’ to the slavery problem – namely, the
affranchi or hartani45. One
respondent, the same who spoke of the serviteur ne as a
euphemism, also wrote that
“liberated by the Moor, conforming to Moorish custom, the
captive becomes affranchi,
not breaking with that which has previously constituted the
normal conditions of his life,
and it is thusly that is formed this so interesting class of
modest, economic, working
haratine. 46” The freed slave was not actually new of course,
nor was it created by French
policy. As we saw earlier, the status had been noted from the
outset of colonial rule, and
identified as potentially the most immediately useful to French
labour needs. What is
revealing here is the argument that the haratine could only be
‘made’ through the
customary liberating process of the Muslim master: “ Freed by
us, to the contrary, the
captive, probably because he has left the traditional life,
gives nothing of value…” 47.
Here, a significant shift in the importance now attached to
retaining the ‘natural group’
connections and avoiding the Mauritanian equivalent of the
‘detribalization’ that was
proving so problematic elsewhere.
The local-level archives frequently mention haratine, mostly in
terms of agricultural
labourers and herders. They were therefore especially important
in the southern circles
and the eastern Hodh. In his summary “Sur la question des
serviteurs en Mauritanie”,
45 Ibid.. 46AS, Rapport des Nations Unies sur l’esclavage, 1950.
“L’esclavage en Mauritanie”, 2K15 174 MAURITANIE. Section on
Tagant, August 1950. 47 The report continues with a fascinating
observation:”… and as he is at heart, like all black slaves, a
beidan, he will, like a beidan, use this excessive liberty to
abandon his tools and loiter around the military posts.” (More on
the significance of this observation, below.)
-
Governor General Poulet spoke specifically to what he referred
to as the continuing
social problem in the south and east posed by this ‘numerous
population of servile
origin’. “This actual caste of serviteurs that one calls today
by the generic name of
harratine (affranchise) is some 70,000 strong, comprising
approximately one-seventh of
the Mauritanian population”. He located almost half in the east
and just over half in the
south, with a few thousand located in the central regions.48 It
is notable that he explicitly
equates haratine with serviteurs. So too does another, even
lengthier report, by the
Governor of the French Soudan in direct response to the United
Nations’ questionnaire.
In 1944, the boundary of eastern Mauritania had been adjusted
such that the dhar
(escarpment) Tishit-Walata, with its oases, pasture and
salt-flats was detached from the
French Soudan and added to Mauritania’s cercle of Tagant49. In
so doing, the
administration divided ‘masters’ based in Tishit, neighbouring
Akreijit and Walata from
their numerous herding and cultivating haratine, who remained in
the Soudan. The issue
of whether or not these haratine should be permitted to return
to Mauritania was the
subject of much discussion at the time50. Most ultimately
remained in the Soudan51 in
spite of being registered in Mauritania and there, continued to
engage the concern of local
48 AS 2K15 174 MAURITANIE. “Apercu Sommaire sur la question des
serviteurs en Mauritanie:, G. Poulet, 17 May, 1949. The figures he
gives were probably drawn from the 1940-43 census (ARIM B70
Rencensement, 1940-3): Cercles Aioun (east) 30,000; Assaba and
Guidimakha 15,000; Brakna 12,000; Gorgol 4,000; Trarza 5,000
(south); Tagant 2,000; ‘other (including Adrar) 2,000 (central). 49
This creation of a new frontier and its economic impact on Tishit
is discussed in E Ann McDougall, “From Prosperity to Poverty: an
economic history of Tishit (c.1905-1945), Masadir, Cahiers des
Sources de l’Historie de la Mauritanie 3 (Faculte des letters et
des sciences humaines, University Nouakchott: 2002),115-29.
Unfortunately, no bibliography was published with this article,
rendering some footnotes difficult to follow. 50 ARIM Letter
Commandant Tagant to Governor General, March 1940; Archives RIM,
Tichit, Rapports Annuels, Carton #7, 1940. Later the discussion is
reprised in “Enquete du Conseil Economique et Social des Nations
Unies sur l’esclavage de la territoire en AOF, 1948-52” AS 2K15
174. (See below) 51 In the “Enquete du Conseil Economique et Social
des Nations Unies sur l’Esclave de la Territoire en AOF, 1948-52”,
a very approximate haratine population of 2,000 to 3,000 is
identified as living in the Sub-division of Aioun-al-Atrousse. That
said, the same report notes that agricultural villages (adabaye) in
the interior of the cercle were not included. It is not clear
whether the ‘guesstimate’ above was meant to extend to these
unknown centers or not. AS 2K15 174 MAURITANIE.
-
administrators. Hence their appearance in a twenty-five page
report filed in January, 1950
entitled “The problem of serviteurs in the Western Soudan”. Its
auther, the Governor
General of the French Soudan, noted that in fact these were ‘ex’
serviteurs of the Moorish
nomads, known globally as ‘haratine’. The slippage is complete
as he then defines
‘l’abd’, literally slave, as being hartani, suggesting this term
is the ‘considerate’ one to
use. “This is”, he continued “le serviteur properly speaking”.
Thus, while acknowledging
the ‘real’ continuance of a social hierarchy and set of labour
relations little (if any)
different from the early days of occupation, the discourse
obscures that reality in
suggesting that all are ‘generically’ freed.
It accomplishes this in other ways as well. Above, I noted that
in the report on the Tagant
region, the Commandant had commented upon the importance of
haratine being created
by the masters themselves, not the French administration. He had
gone on to editorialize
that, “ as he [the hartani] is at heart, like all black slaves,
a beidan [‘white’ Moor,
master], and he will, like a beidan, use this excessive liberty
to abandon his tools and
loiter around the military posts.52”The Governor General of the
Soudan echoed an
important aspect of this observation in introducing the haratine
as those who had “made a
family [among] and adopted the language and customs of their
beidane masters”53.
Among the most important of those adopted ‘moeurs’ was Islam.
According to Poulet,
for example, the extent of haratine respect for the religion of
their masters slowed their
52 AS, Rapport des Nations Unies sur l’esclavage, 1950.
“L’esclavage en Mauritanie”, 2K15 174 MAURITANIE. Section on
Tagant, August 1950. 53 AS, Report Governor General French Soudan
to Governor General AOF, January 1950, 2K15 174 SOUDAN.
-
own social and political evolution, and made them vulnerable to
the continued
exploitation of those same masters.54
Islam, in fact, played a key role in the discussion of haratine,
just as it had two decades
earlier when the categories of serviteur and serviteur ne were
legitimated in terms of
‘Muslim’ society. Even as French administrators c.1950 attempted
to use the
‘serviteur/haratine/affranchis’ discourse to suggest change in
their own terms, they also
acknowledged a certain ‘lag time’ from the point of view of
Mauritanians who continued
to interpret their society through the prism of Islam. Poulet,
for example, pointed out that
while according to French law all categories of serviteur were
now regarded as free, the
‘Moors’ themselves continued to differentiate between an ‘abd or
slave and a hartani
(affranchi), freed slave, according to Islamic Law55. In a
sense, Poulet echoed earlier
observations about Mauritania’s ‘special’ situation. But his
counterpart writing from the
Soudan side of the frontier turned the argument on its head. In
some detail, he examined
just exactly what Islamic law had to say about serviteurs and
recommended, in
conclusion, that the French could use Islamic law to ‘manage’
the problem. He argued
that the ‘customs and rules of the Qur’an’ with respect to
freeing slaves, purchasing their
freedom, recognizing the family and patrimony of the
affranchise, and establishing work
conditions were favourable to French aims. “It is up to us to
make Qur’anic law, assez
liberal, work to our profit in matters before the indigenous
courts [eg. Liberation,
purchasing of freedom], using qadis and the religious chiefs.”
Islam could also work to
address concerns around establishing viable and stable families
for the serviteur (part of
54 AS, “Apercu sommaire sur la question des serviteurs en
Mauritanie”, G. Poulet, 17 May 1949, 2K15 174 MAURITANIE. I will
return to his analysis in more detail, below. 55 Ibid.
-
the larger labour discourse in which international interests
were represented). “Here too,
the subtleties of Muslim law, ‘preliminary liberation’
[affranchissement prealable], the
well understood concerns of the master and the chief, who have
every interest in
conserving [ties with] the ex-serviteur and protecting his
goods, [following] the example
of the [free] black cultivators, should permit rapidly enough
the constitution of a proper
patrimony for the haratine … (salary, animals, land, tools,
furniture). This patrimony
will be transferred to inheritors by means of succession,
according to the Qur’anic
principles….”. Finally, in terms of ‘work’, we should substitute
a work contract for
servage: “the serviteur becomes a salaried worker, continuing to
work for his master,
who becomes, then, a ‘patron’.” The report cautioned against
shareholder-types of
arrangements, the social evolution being still ‘too primitive’
and the mentality of the
liberated slave still confusing “liberty with a license to do
nothing and above all, to refuse
often to work for his old master” 56.
At the same time, the report in several places engaged
explicitly with ‘issues’ that would
have resonated with its international readership. Building on
references to the ongoing
discussion about creating ‘stable workers’ through the
introduction of the ‘constitution of
the haratine family’, and the inferences that a newly liberated
slave would simply not
work, the Governor General brought up the sensitive issue of
‘social disorder’ and
‘detribalisation’. Having clearly established that these
‘servile classes’ were a natural
reservoir of labour, he went on to iterate another reason why
social change should take
place within the ‘traditional’ political (and religious)
domain:
56 AS, Report Governor General French Soudan to Governor General
AOF, January 1950, 2K15 174 SOUDAN (pages 15-17).
-
Detribalized serviteurs too often constitute miserable plebians,
living outside of their
original framework, in conditions worse than their former
[servile] state. ...[if not
careful, we risk alienating the ‘free’ Arabo-Berber elements of
this hierarchical
society] without sufficiently attaching classes of servile
origin who, too rapidly
emancipated, incapable of using well a liberty freshly acquired,
without resources and
without contexts, would constitute a miserable proletariat,
detribalized,
uncontrollable”57 [my emphasis]
The terms ‘detribalized’ and ‘proletariat’, so completely
dissonant with this rural, clan-
based, nomadic world were not used accidentally, Nor, I would
argue, were they used by
administrators ignorant as to what constituted ‘detribalization’
or a ‘proletariat’
elsewhere. The terminology deliberately referenced the whole
debate developing within
the international discourse of labour modernization and the one
unfolding vigorously in
the rest of decolonizing, urbanizing Africa. Even as the
framework for discussion
remained rooted in the language of serviteurs and servage, the
signifiers – ‘detribalized’
and especially ‘proletariat’, in conjunction with scattered
references to work contracts
and salaried workers – was deliberately intended to draw readers
of Mauritanian reports
into the familiar discourse from which they were meant to infer
achievements in social
and economic stability and modernity. It was also a discourse
intended to shift the focus
away from the now anachronistic discussion of forced labour
towards one more
consonant with post-war development: the creation of stabilized
workers. This salaried
class, however, had first to become sufficiently Europeanized to
respond to the
57 AS, Report Governor General French Soudan to Governor General
AOF, January 1950, 2K15 174 SOUDAN (pages 3,23).
-
appropriate stimuli – or as Cooper put it, if the African worker
could be convinced to
behave like the European worker, he could become the European
worker. [my emphasis]
As administrators in Mauritania kept repeating, this would take
‘time’. The paradox in
this case is that for this goal to be achieved, for ‘recent
liberty’ to move past being
misinterpreted as ‘a personal license to do nothing’, freedom
for the haratine would have
to continue to be curbed -- just as it had long been -- by
Islamic ‘custom’ and law. What
this reveals to us is that by negotiating between the two
discourses, French administrators
in Mauritania and the Soudan were able to argue for maintaining
‘traditional Islamic
management of labour’ and ‘customary Islamic practices of
liberation’ while
simultaneously claiming to be ‘making’ the haratine into a
recognizable working class.
This was no mean feat.
Negotiating the Discourse(s): masters, haratine and the ‘new
working class’
It was 1943 when the Commandant of the Adrar wrote: “A new
social hierarchy, founded
uniquely on wealth, is being established [here]. Politically, it
is difficult to predict the
consequences of this evolution which consecrates the importance
of work and which
destroys the ancient seigneurs.” [my emphasis] . Practically,
what the evolution had
created was an urban ‘underclass’ of poor, including
prostitutes, and a working class
whose success was measured in agricultural and commercial
activities. It was little short
of a revolution in the making. Or so the language would lead us
to believe. ‘Consecrating
work’ would ‘destroy the seigneurs’ who directed this
feudal-like society. Unlike the
references to the emergence of a ‘miserable proletariat’ just a
few years later, this
observation about the making of a Mauritanian working class is
evidently ambivalent.
-
Contrasted to poverty and prostitution, it was clearly a
desirable revolution. But as a
‘destroyer’ of the seigneur and his feudal society, its longer
term consequences were less
certain. So, as historians, how should we read this apparently
important evolution in
Mauritania’s central Adrar region, evolution that was even more
significant (it would
seem) than in some of the other regions we’ve discussed above58?
I would like to
suggest that we read it in the same way we have suggested for
the literature more broadly
speaking – that is, as a negotiated discourse that is at the
same time revealing of some
experienced ‘reality’. On the one hand, the juxtaposition of
‘wealth based’ and ‘work
consecrated’ was clearly meant to jar against the notion of
‘feudal’ society with its
seigneurs and vassels such that the ‘outcome’ – major social
change along a progressive
continuum – was an indisputable given. This was a reflection, of
course, of the extant
understanding of the ‘evolution’ of French society itself and
‘western’ civilization more
generally, aimed at an audience conversant with both. But to the
extent that what was
being described was in fact occurring, was it understood in the
same way by Mauritanian
masters and haratine? Keeping in mind what other reports
acknowledged about the
different perceptions of serviteurs when seen through the prism
of Islamic law and
society, is it perhaps possible that another ‘reality’ was
embedded in this particular
‘discourse negotiation’ as well?
As a first step in what is in essence another whole study of
masters’ and haratine
perspectives, let me return to the research that gave rise to
this interest in the first place
and to the ‘Topsy-Turvy World’ of Hamody of Atar. The essence of
that analysis was
58 Ibid., reference to Political Report 1943-44. It was actually
an excerpt from a March 1945 report that concluded this ‘evolution’
was not quite so evident elsewhere.
-
that to whatever extent the external structure of colonial
Mauritanian society appeared to
remain the same, with its ‘feudal’ classes of ‘masters’,
serviteurs and haratine, the
experience of being a master, a serviteur or a hartani changed
significantly in the context
of the colonial political economy. The issues facing the Adrar,
and especially its two
major oasis towns, Shinqit and Atar, were not dissimilar to
those elsewhere in the colony,
namely a need to increase agricultural output. However, the
problems of production had
been exacerbated by several years of consecutive drought in the
1920s. This led to
intensified pressure in the 1930s by local administrators on
clan heads not only to revive
declining date palm groves but to plant new trees, to extend
gardens planted in their
shade and to put new lands into wadi-fed grain cultivation.
Masters, hard-pressed to meet
French demands enforced by fines and the threatened reallocation
of their land, and the
simultaneous tendency of their slaves to seek emancipation under
new anti-slavey laws,
turned to hartani labour. Haratine traditionally contracted with
masters to supply labour
in return for various shares of the harvests in subsequent
years. There is good reason to
believe that the emphasis the administration placed on more
fully exploiting Mauritania’s
agricultural potential during the 1930s resulted in the
increased use of such ‘customary
contracts’ and a consequent enlarged hartani class – at least
enlarged relative to the
number of remaining serviteurs. Census material for the
subdivisions of Atar and
Shinqit between 1910 and 1954 suggests that the percentage of
the servile population
identified as hartani rose from being no more that one- to
two-percent in 1910 when the
French first established their presence, to being close to
fifty-percent by 195059. Even
allowing for the considerable inaccuracies caused by terminology
and data collecting
59 Archives Shinqit, rencensements 1910, 1930, 1943-4; Archives
Atar, recensements 1948-54.
-
practices60, this would suggest that some notable change was
underway. It is possible that
in some instances, masters were simply trying to slow the stream
of runaway slaves by
offering them something better; in most cases, however, the
significant factor was Islam.
According to Islamic law, masters could not enter into contracts
with non-free people.
Serviteurs, therefore, could not be engaged to do the work now
required. Indeed, even
French officials commented on this ‘constraint’ in the context
of recommending a move
towards contracted labour in general terms. Masters were
therefore strongly pushed to
enlarge their retinues of haratine.
A second point of importance is the fact that the slaves being
freed were mostly males. A
hartani was entitled to enter into contracts, amass property and
bequeath inheritance. He
could also take a wife and ‘own’ his own children, provided his
wife was herself free, a
hartania61. He had incentive to work. At the same time, Islamic
custom dictated that he
continued to have a responsibility to his former masters’s
family, the nature of which
varied according to whether he continued to live as part of
those extended families or
established himself and his family as an independent herder or
cultivator, often in villages
called adabaye. This responsibility usually included
‘hospitality’ to former masters and
their families, annual payments or ‘presents’ in kind and
contributions to the clan’s
collective obligations such as taxes and crime compensation. The
relationship was a
60 See my discussion of this in “Salt, Saharans and the
Trans-Saharan Slave Trade: nineteenth-century developments”, in
Elizabeth Savage (ed.), The Human Commodity. Perspectives on the
Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, special issue Slavery and Abolition 1,13
(April 1992), pp.76-80. It is notable that in most regions of the
colony, ‘slaves’ (usually captifs or serviteurs sometimes noirs)
were clearly distinguished from each other in individual
categories. But in the central Adrar, haratine were for the most
part counted among the bidan or whites, becoming for all intents
and purposes, invisible to the historian in the more recent
censuses. 61 Haratine could and did marry slave wives but any
children that issued would then belong to her master, not the
hartani. When they were from the same family – that is to say they
shared the same master, this issue was considered less
constraining.
-
permanent one, inherited by his descendants. Therefore, the
hartani was potentially of
greater value to the master’s family, in both the short and long
term, than the serviteur.
According to Poulet, writing in 1949, masters were successful in
cultivating these
relationships. From his perspective, this was a negative facet
of Mauritanian society,
reflecting “the conservative spirit of the maures blancs who use
all the resources of
Muslim casuistry and the respect of their serviteurs for the
religion [of Islam] ultimately
to maintain them in the untutored state [etat inculte] one finds
them in today”[my
emphasis].62
If Islam was a ‘tool’ in the arsenal of beidan masters to retain
their male labourers, it was
the single most important influence on their treatment of female
serviteurs. By law, once
a woman became a hartania, her labour and reproductive capacity
passed from her
former master to the man she married; consequently, masters were
more reluctant to free
female slaves. That said, to the extent that masters could
benefit from the collective
family labour of haratine, either in adabaye (which they
continued to control and whose
land they continued to own) or en brosse tending to herds, there
was still much to be
gained through the ‘customary’ relationship with the freed
slaves the French were
identifying as their new ‘working class’63. Moreover, evidence
suggests that masters’
62 AS, “Apercu sommaire sur la question des serviteurs en
Mauritanie”, G. Poulet, 17 May 1949, 2K15 174 MAURITANIE. 63 In her
1997 dissertation on “Narratives of the past, politics of the
present” dealing with contemporary haratine in Mauritania, Meskerem
Brhane recounted haratine life histories. Several of them located
origins in maternal ancestors and linked concepts of ‘resistance’
to female hartania seeking support against bidan masters in
adabayes. Brhane interpreted these stories as a kind of
‘counter-hegemonic narrative’, privileging female ancestors in
resistance to a society whose dominant group saw itself in terms of
patrilineal descent. But it is equally possible to see them as a
reflection of experienced reality: as a reflection of the 1930s and
1940s when male slaves were increasingly being freed, when female
slaves were increasingly being valued by masters as important
sources of reproduction, and when adabayes were seen as
alternatives for women whose masters would not free them willingly.
See especially Chapters 3
-
understanding of what they were doing, at least in the early
1930s when we believe this
enlarged hartani class may have had its origins, was clear.
Again, drawing on Islamic
practice, masters spoke of their slaves as ‘children’ who they
wanted to keep, protect and
put to work; and they specifically rejected French attempts to
interfere with Islamic
inheritance procedures by which female slaves, being ‘property’,
were shared among
inheritors. “To receive even one-quarter of a female slave”,
they explained “gives a
possible profit of one or several children tomorrow”. This
‘right’ had been formally
recognized by the French in 1929, as we saw earlier; masters
were not going to give it up
in the 1930s. Access to new commercial sources of slave labour
had been strangled by
French policy regarding trade; access to continued slave
reproduction in the domestic
context in which respect for ‘custom and religion’ had been
promised, remained intact64.
So, did ‘consecrating the importance of work’ lead to the
‘destruction of the seigneur’ as
the Atar administrator would have it? In ‘creating’ haratine,
did masters see themselves
transforming their society? I would argue that the evidence,
limited though this sampling
is at present, suggests otherwise. It is entirely consistent on
the one hand with French
perceptions of a seigneur – ownership of land in the hands of
the noble, labour in return
for a share of the harvest in the hands of the ‘vassal’ or
hartani. And this particular socio-
economic relationship appears to have expanded in the 1930s and
1940s. However,
looked at from the masters’ point of view, it is also consistent
with their understanding of
society and their position within it. The focus in this paper on
‘discourse’ and language is
“When a camel talks: reclaiming the past through oral narratives
of family history” and Chapter 4 “My master is my cousin and other
ambiguities of subservience”, pp.163-211. Unfortunately, this
superb thesis has yet to be published. 64 Ibid., pp. 364-79;
quotation p.376.
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meant to open up for us the masters’ understanding of the
dialogue and negotiation in
which they were engaged with the French. What I argued above was
that the movement
between the language of the ‘slavery/abolition’ and
‘labour/modernization’ issues left
considerable space for negotiation, especially at the local
level. The turn to Islam as part
of the solution to the slavery question by French administrators
and then by extension, to
the production of the ‘class’ they needed to satisfy their
labour needs, created a niche
Mauritanian beidan could share with their own ‘masters’, the
French. In using Qur’anic
custom and law to manage labour, Mauritanians could
simultaneously obey colonial
authority and exercise their own. Or, to be more precise,
continue to exercise their own.
That French administrators obliged to speak the language of
international labour laws
were intersecting with a completely different discourse, derived
from different realities
and geared to achieving different ends, was of little import to
Mauritanian beidan masters
who saw themselves preserving, not transforming, their
society.
But what of the haratine? If the general picture is to be
believed, they were occupying a
larger part of Mauritanian society both in terms of expanded
settlement and absolute
numbers. Poulet’s 1949 account described half of them, the
haratine in the south, as
‘vigourous and politicized’ -- “beginning to become conscious of
their utility [to masters
totally dependent upon them]… and to search for an officially
recognized ‘place’ in their
communities”. He clearly understood that this ‘place’ should be
at least independent of (if
not in conflict with) ‘masters’; consequently, he saw the extent
to which Islam drew
haratine back into the world of their masters as
retrogressive65. It is questionable that all
haratine would have agreed with him. Indeed, the fact that so
many of them apparently 65 Refer to discussion, above p. ??
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adopted the ‘customs and language of their beidane masters’66
suggests otherwise. In
“Topsy-Turvy World”, I focused on the relatively commercialized
world of the Adrar to
trace the fortunes of several haratine who were able to profit
from moving between the
two worlds. The French need for transporters, cooks, bakers,
barbers, ‘boys’, interpreters,
guards, tailors, well-diggers, and shepherds was satisfied
mostly by haratine. Haratine
also ‘negotiated’ between the cultures of both French and
Mauritanian masters in the area
of commerce, often beginning with petty trade operations and
building them into
substantial commercial businesses67. In Atar, the most famous of
these was Hamody. The
outlines of his story having been told elsewhere68; what is of
importance here is the fact
that his initial success as a butcher and seller of tanned skins
in the French commercial
sector was completely rooted in his beidan connections, his
access to both financial and
animal capital. By the late 1930s, he was recognized as the
administrative chief of the
Awlad Bou Sba clan in Atar, and during the 1940s he acquired an
enormous amount of
property (land and buildings) from his beidan neighbours. During
difficult times, he
provided food and credit for people of all social classes in the
town. Perhaps most
significant for this discussion, however, is the fact that
throughout his career Hamody
invested in slaves. He purchased males to work in his business,
herd his animals and
cultivate his date-palm groves; females were bought to mate with
the men and to work in
his large household. He was reputed to buy ‘only slaves of
quality’, and like the masters
discussed above, to free males he considered capable of being
successful haratine69. At
66 The specific reference here was to the haratine living on the
Soudan side of the frontier in the late 1940s; how much more
likely, then, was it that those living among their masters would
have done the same? This suggestion is confirmed by the evidence
discussed, below. 67 McDougall, “Topsy-Turvy World”, pp. 369-71. 68
“Topsy-Turvy World” , pp. 379-84. 69 The fact that he bought
‘slaves of quality’ was emphasized in interviews I undertook in
1984; that he did so in order to assure they would make good
haratine was added to the information through interviews with
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his death in 1961, he was said to have bequeathed some 200
slaves and a large portion of
Atar’s rich date-palm groves and commercial property, to his
thirteen children.
Hamody’s extraordinary success was not typical of haratine
fortunes in colonial
Mauritania, but the process by which he ‘arrived’ was a path
open to everyone. It
exploited traditional socio-economic relations to take advantage
of new opportunities in
the colonial economy. In my account of his life in “Topsy-Turvy
World”, I emphasized
the extent to which “‘rising expectations’ from the 1930s
contributed to a growing
consciousness of being hartani as distinct from ‘slave’. To own
a slave or slaves was not
only an achievement”, I argued, “it was a concrete realization
of the difference between
the ‘slave’ and the ‘freed-slave’ condition’.70 I went on to
conclude that there was much
about the colonial world to support and encourage hartani
ambition, that colonial
authorities acknowledged fully the worth ethic and economic
productivity they came to
associate with the hartani class. But that at the same time, in
the world of their masters
where traditional ‘custom and religion’ pertained, haratine
remained ‘freed slaves’ with
all the social constraints this entailed. Contrary to the
expectations of French
administrators, haratine in this ambiguous position did not
develop a ‘political
consciousness’ with other serviteurs and grow increasingly
dependent on their position as
salaried, contract workers. Rather, they continued to identify
with the social system and
the beidan nobility that promised both material gain and social
security71.
his family in December 2004-January 2005. I am currently engaged
in writing a more expansive account of Hamody of Atar and his
‘extended family’ – his haratine and their descendants. 70
McDougall, “Topsy-Turvy World”, p. 383. 71 Ibid., pp.382-4.
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I think that argument can be nuanced even further now to better
reflect the changing
‘shape’ of the haratine class itself. If our understanding of
the colonial process of freeing
male slaves is correct, then a subtle shift in the composition
of ‘customary’ extended
families was also occurring. To the extent that haratine not
only engaged with beidan in
the context of these relations but tended to mirror them in
their own, the significance of
slave ownership per se may have diminished in favour of ties to
their ‘own’ haratine.
Concomitantly, the centrality of female slaves and female
haratine to the evolution of
this ‘class’ may also have responded to these changing
conditions. And the fact that
hartani women worked, while beidan women did not, means the
emergent class, however
it came to define itself, was unique in characteristics that can
only be articulated in terms
of gender72. Hamody’s family history would suggest all these
points are worth further
investigation, and clearly they are relevant to any future
discussion of the ‘making of a
working class’. What is ironic about this situation is that both
the ‘seigneurs’ (apparently
in no danger of extinction) and the ‘new haratine working
class’, mediating as they were
between very different perspectives and discourses, solved the
problem worrying the
French authorities elsewhere in the colonies – namely, how to
ensure that the working
class could and would reproduce itself. Even as they spoke of
the potential social
upheaval of the new proletariat if not ‘handled carefully’, and
of the unknown
consequences of ‘consecrating the importance of work and wealth’
in the Mauritanian
social hierarchy, the French – like the masters and haratine
themselves, were fully aware
72 McDougall, “Topsy-Turvy World”, p. 370,1. What emerged from
the archives showed fairly limited possibilities for women; my
recent interviews with the Hamody ‘family’, on the other hand,
suggest that the hartania played a very active role in defining
whatever this ‘working class’ was or was not becoming. I hope to
pursue this in the context of writing the family history. I would
like to take this opportunity to thank the family, and especially
Mohamed Said ould Hamody, for sharing so much of their history with
me.
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that Mauritania’s workers continued to root themselves and their
reproduction in female
serviteurs. Some things were not really ‘new’ about the new
working class, after all.