Failing to Stem the Tide: Lebanese Migration to French West Africa and the Competing Prerogatives of the Imperial State

2011 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 450-478 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Kerim Arsan
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Palm Oil ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
West African ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
The Government ◽  
Territorial Government ◽  
Mediterranean Migration ◽  
Imperial State

In the years before 1939, the functionaries of Afrique Occidentale Française, or AOF, as France's West African possessions were known, consistently failed to introduce effective legislative controls upon Eastern Mediterranean migration under their purview. This was not for lack of trying; from 1905 onwards, administrators both in the territorial government of Guinea and in the Government-General of the Federation in Dakar repeatedly attempted to close their gates to these interlopers of empire, most of them from present-day Lebanon, who first began to venture into West Africa in the last years of the nineteenth century. By the late 1930s, some six thousand citizens of the Mandatory states of Lebanon and Syria resided across AOF. Most worked as produce brokers, shopkeepers, and traders, buying up groundnuts, palm oil, or kola nuts from African producers, and supplying them in turn with consumer goods such as textiles and clothes, processed foodstuffs, alcohol, and matches. Despite their attempts to channel and stem this flow of men and women, AOF administrators proved unable to impose effective legislative checks upon their movements.

The Archival System of Former French West Africa

1965 ◽  
Vol 8 (01) ◽  
pp. 48-58
Author(s):  
G. Wesley Johnson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Current Status ◽  
World War ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Parent Organization ◽  
Equatorial Africa ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government

In September and October of 1964, I visited the various centers once forming links in the archival system of French West Africa. Contrary to what occurred in Equatorial Africa, the French left these archival holdings in place, except for current material which was shipped to the rue Oudinot (Ministry of Colonies) in Paris. The center of the West African system was the Archives of the Government-General in Dakar (later the High Commission). Based originally on the Senegalese holdings, this archive became an independent agency of the federal government and was the parent organization of subsidiary archives for Senegal, Mauritania, Soudan, Upper Volta, Niger, Dahomey, Ivory Coast, and Guinea. It was parallel in structure to the Institut Français d'Afrique Noire (IFAN), which also had its headquarters in Dakar and maintained subsidiary centers for each territory. In some cases, the archives and IFAN centers were amalgamated (during World War II) and the history of the two organizations is often inseparable. This survey is an attempt to describe the establishment and development of these archival centers, how their material was organized and can be used for research, and their current status in the independent countries.

Drought and Dependence in the Sahel

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Ball
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Development Strategy ◽  
Safety Margin ◽  
West African ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Ecological Stability ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
Economic Stagnation ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between human activity and environmental degradation has been documented in numerous studies. With regard to West Africa, E. P. Stebbing was already warning of ecological degradation due to overcultivation and overgrazing in the 1930s. Less well documented are the reasons why people who understand many of the requirements of ecologically sound farming and herding nonetheless mismanage natural resources to the point of disaster. An examination of the 1968–1973 drought in the Sahel zone of West Africa (formerly French West Africa) suggests that the lack of economic autonomy for Sahelian countries is a major cause not only of their economic stagnation and underdevelopment but equally of the degradation of their ecosystems. Specific policies, initiated during the colonial period and continued by independent governments, can be identified as reducing the ability of West African farmers and herders to exploit their environment with an adequate safety margin. Largely as a result of the 1968–1973 drought, there has been an upsurge of interest in the Sahel on the part of international and national aid agencies. However, it is very possible that the programs devised by these groups will promote neither economic autonomy nor ecological stability for the countries in that region. A development strategy based largely on self-reliance, on the other hand, could be more successful in protecting both the populations and the ecology of the Sahel.

West Africa

2019 ◽  
pp. 19-40
Author(s):  
Eleanor M. Fox ◽  
Mor Bakhoum
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Institutional Environment ◽  
Competition Law ◽  
West African ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Western Africa ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
Open Markets ◽  
The International Monetary Fund ◽  
Striking Fact

This chapter details how eight nations of Western Africa—Senegal, Mali, the Ivory Coast, Benin, Togo, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Guinea Bissau—transformed from government-controlled economies to market economies. The French West African states have adopted laws to open markets and protect competition, often at the behest of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). However, the project has been set back by political and economic instability, the lack of human and financial capital, and regional preemption of domestic competition law. It is a striking fact that there is virtually no competition law enforcement in French West Africa and no merger control law. The obstacles may ultimately be overcome with focus, leadership, will, and a reset of the institutional environment to allow national law to work hand in hand with regional law.

French Policy and the Origins of the Scramble for West Africa

1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. W. Newbury ◽  
A. S. Kanya-Forstner
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
West African ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Formal Expansion ◽  
New Imperialism ◽  
The Government

This paper is a contribution to the current debate about the origins of the scramble for West Africa. It analyses the internal dynamics of French expansion and argues that the crucial change in French African policy occurred not in 1882–3, as commonly assumed, but in 1879–80. The policies adopted at this time, although their roots can be traced back to the governorship of Louis Faidherbe in Senegal, were distinguished by a new willingness on the part of the government in Paris to establish political as well as economic claims to West African territory, and by its readiness to bear the financial and military burdens of territorial expansion. Changes in French domestic politics or foreign relations cannot adequately account for this transition from informal to formal expansion, nor can it be explained solely in terms of commercial agitation in France or West Africa. The influence of public opinion and of colonial agents on the formulation of policy was more significant, but the crucial decisions were taken by the policy-makers themselves, and in particular by Charles de Freycinet (Minister of Public Works and later Prime Minister) and Admiral Jean Jauréguiberry (Minister of Marine and Colonies). They, above all, were responsible for inaugurating the era of French imperialism in West Africa. The new imperialism was most apparent in the drive to create a vast territorial empire in the Sudanese interior. But it was also evident in the intensification of commercial rivalries along the West African coast, and the paper argues that French actions there in 1882–3 were the continuation of policies adopted three years before rather than immediate responses to the British occupation of Egypt or to the growth of popular support for African expansion. Accordingly, the beginnings of French imperialism in West Africa are advanced as the principal cause of the scramble.

From Sail to Steam: the Impact of the Steamship Services on the British Palm Oil Trade with West Africa, 1850–1890.

1989 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Lynn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Palm Oil ◽  
West African ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Important Impact ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Impact

In the late nineteenth century the West African palm oil trade entered a period of difficulties, characterized mainly by a fall in prices from the early 1860s. Part of the reason for this lay in the introduction of regular steamship services between Britain and West Africa from 1852. As steam came to replace sail so the palm oil trade underwent major changes. These changes can be quantified fairly precisely. One effect of the introduction of steamers was the concentration of the British side of the oil trade once again on Liverpool, its original centre. Another effect was the increase in the number of West African ports involved in the trade. The most important impact was the increase in numbers of traders in oil trade from around 25 to some 150. The resulting increased competition in the trade led to amal-gamations becoming increasingly common – a process that culminated in the formation of the African Association Ltd in 1889. It was also to provide the context for the pressure exerted by some traders for an increased colonial presence in the 1880s and 1890s.

‘Our Strike’: Equality, Anticolonial Politics and the 1947–48 Railway Strike in French West Africa

1996 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Labor History ◽  
West African ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Union Leadership ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
New Imperialism ◽  
African Community ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War

This essay is both a reinterpretation of the place of the French West African railway strike in labor history and part of an exploration of its effects on politics and political memory. This vast strike needs to be studied in railway depots from Senegal to the Ivory Coast. Historians need both to engage the fictional version of the strike in Ousmanne Sembene'sGod's Bits of Woodand avoid being caught up in it. Interviews in the key railway and union town of Thiès, Senegal, suggest that strike veterans want to distinguish an experience they regard as their own from the novelist's portrayal. They accept the heroic vision of the strike, but offer different interpretations of its relationship to family and community and suggest that its political implications include co-optation and betrayal as much as anticolonial solidarity. Interviews complement the reports of police spies as sources for the historian. The central irony of the strike is that it was sustained on the basis of railwaymen's integration into local communities but that its central demand took railwaymen into a professionally defined, nonracial category of railwayman. The strike thus needs to be situated in relation to French efforts to define a new imperialism for the post-war era and the government's inability to control the implications of its own actions and rhetoric. Negotiating with a new, young, politically aware railway union leadership in 1946 and 1947, officials were unwilling to defend the old racial wage scales, accepted in principle thecadre uniquedemanded by the union, but fought over the question of power – who was to decide the details that would give such a cadre meaning? The article analyzes the tension between the principles of nonracial equality and African community among the railwaymen and that between colonial power and notions of assimilation and development within the government. It examines the extent to which the strike remained a railway strike or spilled over into a wider and longer term question of proletarian solidarity and anticolonial mobilization.

Why don’t some cuisines travel? Charting palm oil’s journey from West African staple to Malayan chemical

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-60
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Kevin Pakiam
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Social Context ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Palm Oil ◽  
West African ◽  
Malay Peninsula ◽  
The West ◽  
Migrant Groups ◽  
Food Value

AbstractThis study uses food as a lens to examine three historical phenomena: globalization’s limits, the rise of plantation-centric monocultures, and the resilience of social norms within migrant societies. The article scrutinizes the West African oil palm’s initial journey to, and reception within, the Malay Peninsula, one of the world’s largest exporters of palm oil by the end of the twentieth century. The article pays special attention to changes in the crop’s perceived food value during the interwar years, a facet overlooked by earlier scholarship. Five different migrant groups in Malaya – planter households, Asian cooks, colonial officials, government chemists, and estate labourers – played critical roles in transforming palm oil into a crop purely for industrial purposes, rather than subsistence. The peculiarities of Malaya’s social context are further sharpened by comparisons with Latin America and West Africa, where different clusters of migrants propagated the oil palm’s subsistence cultures, instead of shunning them.

scholarly journals Guinea- Bissau

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (312) ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Central Bank ◽  
Technical Assistance ◽  
West African ◽  
Guinea Bissau ◽  
The Government ◽  
External Sector ◽  
The Imf

A technical assistance (TA) mission on external sector statistics (ESS) visited Guinea-Bissau during February 3 to 7, 2020. The mission was conducted in Bissau at the request of the National Directorate for Guinea-Bissau of the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO-DNGB). The mission assisted in improving the quality of ESS. This was the fourth and final mission under the JSA-AFR project for improving ESS in 17 francophone countries of Central and West Africa, financed by the government of Japan and administered by the IMF.

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