12 - Women, Family & Daily Life in Senegal's Nineteenth- Century Atlantic Towns

Summary

The emergence of Afro-European societies on Senegal's Atlantic coast is predominantly a history of women. In the heyday of Portuguese trade along the coast of Senegambia in the early seventeenth century, women served as intermediaries between European sailors and African rulers. In the eighteenth century, African families settled around the European forts built on the coastal islands of Gorée and Saint Louis. Some African women who lived in these settlements entered into unions with European merchants, soldiers or officers, called mariage à la mode du pays (marriage in the custom of the country). Known in the literature as signares, senhoras or nharas, this class of socially esteemed women became associated with inter-racial marriage and entrepreneurial acumen. Signareship resembled the practice of casar on the Gold Coast where elders married free daughters or domestic slaves to Europeans resident in the trade towns. In Senegal, however, the extent to which the extended family played a role in brokering marital alliances to expand the lineage and incorporate strangers is unclear. In Senegal as in the Gold Coast, the women who entered into these unions not only facilitated the encounter between Africa and Europe but also provided the foundation for the expansion of commerce and diplomacy. By establishing Afro-European households, these women laid the groundwork that subsequently allowed French officials as well as male rulers, clerics, traders and urban politicians to establish the patterns of accommodation that made colonialism work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Although historians have paid a great deal of attention to the role of the signares, the literature tends to render the women of Saint Louis and Gorée as one-dimensional figures. For example, interpretations of town life gloss over Muslim women's roles; female slaves are quantified in population data, but scholars rarely address them as individual personalities. French officials typically recorded statistics for the ‘useful [male] population’ of the towns. Furthermore, the administration's bias towards individuals who conformed to French cultural norms meant that extant notarised documents and the civil registries tend to reflect the marital, baptismal, death and property records of women who belonged to European or property-owning, French-educated mixed-race families rather than those of Muslim and African women. One informant reminded me that for the women commonly known by the title signare we rarely know their actual names or the names of their mothers, sisters and friends.