Portrait of Two Ladies in Hospital Interiors of Colonial Africa

The article examines the fate of two Russian women doctors who worked in the 1920s–1930s in French Western and French Equatorial Africa. The purpose of the research is not only to tell the reader in detail about the life path and work in Africa of two Russian emigrants of the first wave, but also to look inside and to analyze historical material from the point of view of women’s experience and understanding of specific social and personal-psychological life collisions arising from the gender-determined circumstances of their emigrant life.

Outrageously Real

This chapter dismantles the common distinction between modernist aestheticism and documentary reference by studying André Gide’s factual writings. In his recollections of his experiences as a juror (Souvenirs de la cour d’assises, 1914) and his reports on court cases in the Nouvelle Revue Française series “Ne jugez pas” (“Judge Not,” 1930), Gide’s ostensibly impersonal organization of testimonial evidence produces a complex polyphonic construction that claims to let documents speak for themselves, while in fact articulating them within a larger discourse. In Voyage au Congo (1927) and Le Retour du Tchad (1928) Gide’s politically engaged writing on French Equatorial Africa enters into dialogue with the largely apolitical documentary film-making practices of his travelling companion Marc Allégret. Commenting on Allégret’s cinematic practices, Gide both reflects on the limitations of documentary and attempts to rival film’s visual capture of living gesture.

Eugénie Éboué-Tell and Jane Vialle

Chapter three functions as a bridge between the first two chapters on locating possibilities for liberation in the grey area of Antillean departmentalization, and the next two chapters on African women’s demands for independence. It examines the ways in which Eugénie Éboué-Tell’s and Jane Vialle’s work in the French senate connected the anticolonial activism of women in the Antilles and French Equatorial Africa, and extended this activism beyond the borders of imperial France to include the United States. Both women forged transnational black feminist networks and thus claimed multiple communities and political affiliations that often defied imperial and national borders.

Eslanda Robeson

Eslanda Robeson’s transnational anti-imperialist activism brought her into contact with most of the women examined in this study. This chapter therefore takes a broader geographic view of black women’s decolonial politics by analyzing Robeson’s travel journals chronicling her journeys through Southern Africa in 1936 and French Equatorial Africa in 1946. Her Global South project displaces subjection to imperial rule as the imagined connection among the people of Africa, Asia and the Americas. She envisions the Global South as defined by concerted acts of resistance against imperialism, and highlights women’s roles in leading or carrying out these acts of resistance.

Workshop Report: Tracing Legacies of Violence in French Equatorial Africa

This report offers an account of an international workshop held at the Omar Bongo University in Libreville, Gabon, from 23 November to 27 November 2018. Bringing together specialists on and from Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon, participants reflected on the ways in which different forms of violence have historically had – and continue to have – an impact on social fabrics and several dimensions of politics. The workshop also sought to relate these legacies of violence to the region’s economies of extraction. The region is confronted with social and political turmoil that receives little international attention. The combination of simmering and open instability and the relatively marginal position of the region vis-à-vis the wider continent risks propelling several countries into outright political strife with regional repercussions. The debates concluded that further thinking on how violence permeates every aspect of social and political life is much needed.