Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T05:35:06.608Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

La Révolte des Femmes: Economic Upheaval and the Gender of Political Authority in Lomé, Togo, 1931–33

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Benjamin N. Lawrance
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

In 1932 the governor of French Togoland announced an increase in taxes on Lomé market women because of the economic downturn caused by the Depression. Both the indigenous city council and a clandestine resistance movement opposed this fiscal plan, warning of social unrest. The strain triggered a protest by market women that spread beyond the colonial capital. This article offers a new explanation of the explosive tension by arguing that an organized male political campaign conjoined with a socioeconomic protest led by market women. It explores women's resistance as a performance of vodou ritual as a vehicle of shame and protest. Ultimately the violent, culturally marked protests marked the gendered perimeters of political authority for both Ewe women and men and further defined Ewe market women's conception of an Ewe self and the emergence of conflicting and contested notions of “Eweness” as a prelude to the independence struggle.

Résumé:

Résumé:

En 1932 le gouverneur du Togo français annonça une hausse des impôts sur les femmes du marché de Lomé à la suite de la récession économique provoquée par la Dépression. Ce plan fiscal fut contesté à la fois par le conseil indigène de la ville et par un mouvement de résistance clandestin, qui menacèrent les autorités de conflits sociaux. Cette tension entraîna chez les femmes du marché une manifestation qui s'étendit au delà de la capitale coloniale. Cet article propose une nouvelle explication à cette tension explosive en soutenant qu'une campagne politique organisée et composée d'hommes s'unit à la manifestation socio-économique menée par les femmes du marché. Cet article examine la résistance des femmes en tant que performance de rituel vaudou comme véhicule de honte et de protestation. En fin de compte, ces manifestations violentes et marquées culturellement définirent les périmètres sexués de l'autorité politique, à la fois pour les femmes et pour les hommes Ewe, et contribuèrent à définir plus précisément la conception par les femmes du marché Ewe d'une identité Ewe, ainsi que l'émergence de notions conflictuelles et contestées d' «Ew-esse» en tant que prélude à la lutte pour l'indépendance.

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , April 2003 , pp. 43 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aduayom, Messan. 1984. “Un prélude au nationalisme togolais: la révolte de Lomé, 24–25 janvier 1933.” Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 93 (24/1): 39–60.Google Scholar
Akyeampong, Emmanuel Kwaku. 2001. Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-Social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana, c. 1850 to Recent Times. Oxford: James Curry.Google Scholar
Allman, Jean, and Tashjian, Victoria. 2001. “I Will Not Eat Stone”: A Women's History of Colonial Asante. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Amenumey, Divine E. K. 1989. The Ewe Unification Movement: A Political History. Accra: Ghana Universities Press.Google Scholar
Appadurai, Arjun. 1991. “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology.” In Recapturing Anthropology, edited by Fox, R. G., 191–210. Santa Fe: School of American Research.Google Scholar
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Asamoa, Ansa. 2000. “Social Institutions.” In A Handbook of Eweland. Vol. 2: The Northern Ewes in Ghana, edited by Gavua, Kodzo, 48–59. Accra: Woeli Publishing Services.Google Scholar
Austen, Ralph A. 1999. Middlemen of the Cameroons River: The Duala and Their Hinterland, C.1600–C.1960. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bastian, Misty L. 2001. “Dancing Women and Colonial Men: The Nwaobiala of 1925.” In 'Wicked' Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa, edited by Hodgson, Dorothy and McCurdy, Sheryl, 110–29. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Bessant, Leslie. 1994. “Songs of Chiweshe and Songs of Zimbabwe.” African Affairs 93 (370): 43–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bluwey, Gilbert K. 2000. “Political Systems.” In A Handbook of Eweland. Vol. 2: The Northern Ewes in Ghana, edited by Gavua, Kodzo, 60–69. Accra: Woeli Publishing Services.Google Scholar
Callahan, Michael D. 1999. Mandates and Empire: The League of Nations and Africa, 1914–1931. Brighton, U.K.: Sussex Academic Press.Google Scholar
Clark, Gracia. 2001. “Gender and Profiteering: Ghana's Market Women as Devoted Mothers and ‘Human Vampire Bats.’” In ‘Wicked’ Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa, edited by Hodgson, Dorothy and McCurdy, Sheryl, 293–311. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Collier, Katharine. 2002. “Ablode: Networks, Ideas and Performance in Togoland Politics, 1950–2001.” Ph.D. diss., Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham, U.K. Google Scholar
Conklin, Alice. 1997. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea in France and West Africa, 1895–1930. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. 1994. “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History.” The American Historical Review 99: 1516–45.Google Scholar
d'Almeida-Ekué, Silivi. 1992 La Révolte des Loméennes, 24–25 Janvier 1933. Lomé: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines.Google Scholar
d'Almeida, Silivi, and Gbédémah, Seti. 1982. Le Gouverneur Bonnecarrère au Togo. Lomé: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines Google Scholar
Ekejiuba, Felicia. 1995. “Down to Fundamentals: Women-Centred Hearthholds in Rural West Africa.” In Women Wielding the Hoe: Lessons from Rural West Africa for Feminist Theory and Development Practice, edited by Bryceson, Deborah Fahy, 47–63. Oxford: Berg Publishers.Google Scholar
Gbédémah, S. Y. G. 1984. “La politique d'association au Togo sous mandat de la France.” Ph.D. diss., Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence.Google Scholar
Gilli, Bruno, 1987. Héviésso et le Bon Ordre du Monde: Approche d'une Religion Africaine. Lomé: Éditions Haho.Google Scholar
Gramsci, Antonio. 1992–1996. Prison Notebooks. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Geurts, Kathryn Linn. 2003. Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Greene, Sandra E. 1996. Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Greene, Sandra E.. 2002. Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Hafkin, Nancy, and Bay, Edna, eds. 1976. Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Hill, Robert A., and Pirio, Gregory A.. 1987. “‘Africa for the Africans’: The Garvey Movement in South Africa, 1920–1940.” In The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa, edited by Marks, Shula and Trapido, Stanley, 209–53. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Isaacman, Allen. 1995. Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty: Peasants, Work, and Rural Struggle in Colonial Mozambique, 1938–1961, Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.Google Scholar
James, Deborah. 2000. Songs of the Women Migrants: Performance and Identity in South Africa. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Lawrance, Benjamin. 2001. “Language Between Powers, Power Between Languages: Further Discussion of Education and Policy in Togoland Under the French Mandate, 1919–1945.” Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 163–64 (41/3–4): 517–39.Google Scholar
Lawrance, Benjamin. 2002. “Shaping States, Subverting Frontiers: Social Conflict and Political Consolidation among the Ewe duko̱wo in the Togoland Mandates, 1919–1945.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University.Google Scholar
Lewis, Barbara C. 1976. “The Limitations of Group Action among Entrepreneurs: The Market Women of Abidjan, Ivory Coast.” In Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change, edited by Hafkin, Nancy and Bay, Edna, 135–56. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Marguerat, Yves. 1998. “Histoire et Société Urbaine: Les Années Anglaises de Lomé (1914–1920), une période méconnue et pourtant decisive.” Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 154 (39/2): 409–32.Google Scholar
Marguerat, Yves, ed. 1999. Dynamique urbaine, jeunesse et histoire au Togo: articles et documents, 1984-1993. Lomé: Presses de l'Université du Bénin.Google Scholar
Martin, Phyllis. 1995. Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pauvert, Jean-Claude. 1960. “L'évolution Politique des Ewé.” In Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 1 (2): 162–91.Google Scholar
Presley, Cora Ann. 1992. Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Robertson, Claire. 1990. Sharing the Same Bowl: A Socioeconomic History of Women and Class in Accra, Ghana. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Rosenthal, Judy. 1998. Possession, Ecstasy and the Law in Ewe Voodoo. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.Google Scholar
Schler, Lynn. 2002. “The Strangers of New Bell: Immigration, Public Space and Community in Colonial Douala, Cameroun, 1914–1945.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University.Google Scholar
Schuerkens, Ulrike. 2001. Du Togo allemand aux Togo et Ghana indépendents: Changement social sous régime colonial. Paris: l'Harmattan.Google Scholar
Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Tété-Adjalogo, Têtêvi Godwin. 1998. De la colonisation Allemande au Deutsch-Togo Bund. Paris: l'Harmattan.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. 1968. The Making of the English Working Class. Hammondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
van Allen, Judith. 1972. “‘Sitting on a Man’: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of the Igbo Women.” In Canadian journal of African Studies 6 (2): 165–81.Google Scholar
van Allen, Judith. 1976. “‘Aba Riots’ or Igbo ‘Women's War’: Ideology, Stratification, and Invisibility of Women.” In Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change, eds. Hafkin, Nancy and Bay, Edna, 59–86. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
White, Luise. 2000. Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar