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Putting the History Back into Ethnicity: Enslavement, Religion, and Cultural Brokerage in the Construction of Mandinka/Jola and Ewe/Agotime Identities in West Africa, c. 1650–1930

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2008

Paul Nugent
Paul Nugent
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Extract

It does not always happen that academic debates result in an agreed victory or a tidy consensus. As often as not, the protagonists lose interest, or the terrain itself shifts. For that reason, it is worth remarking on the fact that after around two decades of debating the roots of ethnicity in Africa, something like a consensus has in fact emerged. The colonial thesis that Africans were born into “tribes” that were rooted in a timeless past has been effectively critiqued by historians and social scientists alike. Arguably beginning with John Iliffe, revisionists advanced a challenging antithesis, namely that colonial administrative practices generated the very identities that officials and missionaries took for granted. In Iliffe's famous formulation: “The British wrongly believed that Tanganyikans belonged to tribes; Tanganyikans created tribes to function within the colonial framework.” Although Iliffe coined the term “the creation of tribes,” it was Terence Ranger's contribution to The Invention of Tradition that really sparked an interest in the historicity of ethnicity in Africa. In fact, this was only one facet of Ranger's overall argument, one that was a good deal more nuanced than he has sometimes been given credit for. Be that as it may, the time was evidently ripe for a historiographical break, and during the 1980s and 1990s historians set about demonstrating that particular ethnic groups were indeed the product of an interplay between European interventions—by administrators, missionaries, employers, and colonial ethnographers—and selective African appropriations—through the agency of Christian converts, educated elites, urban migrants, and rural patriarchs. The steady accretion of case-study material has subsequently culminated in reflections that have distilled the broad comparative lessons. These have been helpful in creating a sense of agreement that the debate was necessary, whilst underscoring that a law of diminishing returns has set in, something more generally true of debates about constructivist approaches to identity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , October 2008 , pp. 920 - 948
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2008

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References

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18 Bakary Sidibé of the Oral History Division in Banjul has coordinated the collection of this important oral documentation.

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21 He also referred to “Usol,” which appears to indicate the village of Thionk-Essil. This would have been a Bainuk settlement before becoming Jola. Mark, A Cultural, Economic, and Religious History, 26–27. The term “Floup” is a source of some confusion because at times it has been taken to refer to a particular subgroup, while at others it has been used for all those we today call Jola.

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27 Interview with Jerreh Demba et al., Kabadio, 19 Feb. 2004.

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34 Ibid., 30.

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36 On the strategies used to defend against enslavement in the sub-region, which included retreating into swampy areas and the building of fortifications, see Mark, Peter, “Portuguese” Style and Luso-African Identity: Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth–Nineteenth Centuries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Hawthorne, Walter, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003)Google Scholar.

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38 A detailed account of the deep-rooted impact of slave trading on one Jola society, based on shrine histories, is provided in Baum, Robert, Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. The changing involvement of the Jola, traced through European sources, is provided by Linares, “Deferring to Trade,” 113–39.

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41 There is a lack of consensus on the etymological origins of the name “Jola.” The anthropologist Louis-Vincent Thomas took “Di-ola” in the language of the Jola themselves to mean “all the visible living.” Louis-Vincent Thomas, Les Diola; essai d'analyse fonctionnelle sur une population de Basse-Casamance, M émoires de l'Institut Français d'Afrique Noire (Dakar: IFAN, 1958). Mark suggests the name is rather of Wolof origin, but without providing any further explanation, in A Cultural, Economic and Religious History, 7. But it is also widely believed that the name comes from Mandinka, where it means “someone who pays back.” Jonathan Vaughan Smith, “The Jolas of Senegambia, West Africa: Ethnolinguistic Identity and Change across an International Border,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Oregon, 1993, 157. This is the version I have repeatedly encountered in the field.

42 According to Lovejoy's estimates, 201,400 slaves were exported across the Atlantic from the Senegambia in the eighteenth century, as compared with 677,400 from the Gold Coast and 1,278,600 from the Bight of Benin (largely synonymous with the Slave Coast). Lovejoy, Paul, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), table 3.4, 50Google Scholar.

43 On the Volta River trade, see Johnson, Marion, “Asante East of the Volta,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana VIII, 1965Google Scholar; and Maier, D.J.E., Priests and Power: The Case of the Dente Shrine in Nineteenth-Century Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

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56 Kea, Ray, “Akwamu-Anlo Relations c. 1750–1813,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana X (1969): 59Google Scholar. It is claimed that before they began their inward migration the Agotime were involved in the salt trade from the Songhaw lagoon. Nene Noe Keteku, “Short History of the Agotimes” (unpub. MS in author's possession), 1–2.

57 Entry in “Introductory Remarks,” listed under “Adampe” within “Dahomean or Slave Coast Languages,” inKoelle's, Sigismund WilhelmPolyglotta Africana, Hair, Paul and Dalby, David, eds. (Graz: Akademische Druk, 1963), 4Google Scholar. “Panyarring” was a recognized procedure for recovering debts by seizing a debtor or his kinsmen. If the debt was not settled, the person might be sold as a slave.

58 I am grateful to Robin Law for confirmation on this point.

59 Greene, Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change, 75.

60 Keteku, “Short History.”

61 It resurfaced in the run-up to the 2004 elections in Ghana when the creation of a new district, separate from Ho, led to a dispute over the site of its capital. The Adaklus insisted that because they were the landowners they should be granted the district capital. This was supposed to happen, but the decision was overturned and Kpetoe was selected instead. This produced a tremendous amount of ill feeling in which deep history came to the fore.

62 Cornevin, Histoire du Togo, 61. The author notes that the Adames came from the borders of Lake Aheme, having fled from Dahomean attacks. He also asserts that the Zukpe and Nyitoe people came from Lekpo on the Volta, but these villages deny that they are of the same origin. Nene Keteku refers to the Nyitoe people speaking a variant of Adaklu-Ewe, which may indicate that they were there when the Agotime arrived. Interview, Kpetoe, 26 Mar. 2001.

63 Keteku, “Short History,” 7.

64 Ranger suggests the term “imagination” is not much of an improvement. See his “Invention of Tradition Revisited.”

65 Symptomatic of this problem is the position outlined in Dirks, Nicholas, “Introduction: Colonialism and Culture,” in Dirks, Nicholas B., ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: Comparative Studies in Society and History Book Series, University of Michigan Press, 1992), 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Meyer, Birgit brings this out particularly well in Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh and London: Edinburgh University Press for International Africa Institute, 1999)Google Scholar.

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68 This is documented at length in Roche, Histoire, chs. 6–7.

69 National Archives of the Gambia, ARP 33/1, “Reports on Kombo, Foni and Kiang (1894–99),” Report on Kombo, Fogni and Kiang for 1898–1899 by Sitwell, Travelling Commissioner, 29 June 1899.

70 NAG ARP 33/2 “Reports on Kombo, Foni and Kiang (1900–01 and 1906–07),” Report from the Travelling Commissioner, Sangster, 26 Sept. 1901.

71 On Jola conversion, see Fay Leary, “Islam, Politics and Colonialism: A Political History of Islam in the Casamance Region of Senegal (1850–1914),” Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University, 1970; Linares, Olga, “Islamic ‘Conversion’ Reconsidered,” Cambridge Anthropology 11 (1986): 4–19Google Scholar; Mark, A Cultural, Economic and Religious History, ch. 6.

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74 For further details, see Nugent, “Cyclical History.”

75 ANS 13G/384, “Casamance Affaires Politiques,” Rapport sur la situation politique de la Casamance et programme de desarmement et de mise en main de la population (19 Aug. 1918).

76 For a study that examines the impact of Islam on the division of labor, see Linares, Power, Prayer and Production. Her calculations of yields in more recent times suggested that they compared favorably with much of East and Southeast Asia prior to the Green Revolution (p. 23).

77 In his attempt to isolate specifically Jola characteristics in the 1950s, Thomas noted: “The Diola knows nothing about commerce in the strict sense, that it is to say the business of exchange. It is an occupation which, in his natural pride, he believes to be disgraceful, precisely because it exempts the one who lives from it (ayasa, alanora) from working in the fields.” (“Le Diola ignore le commerce au sens strict, c'est- à-dire l'exploitation des échanges. C'est une occupation que, dans sa fierté naturelle, il croit indigne de lui, précisément parce qu'elle dispense celui qui en vit (ayasa, alanora) du travail des champs.”) Thomas, Les Diola, 283.

78 The centrality of migration to Igbo identity formation has been noted by Harneit-Sievers, Constructions of Belonging, ch. 5; and by Dmitri van den Bersselaar, “Imagining Home.”

79 A heightened sense of Jola sub-nationalism in the Casamance only surfaced in the period after Senegalese independence. But what is perhaps worth underlining about the Mouvement des Forces Démocratiques de la Casamance (MFDC) is that its target was never the Mandinka, who it endeavored to recruit into its guerrilla army, but the Wolof of the northern half of Senegal. In that sense, the positive interaction between Jola and Mandinka at the start of the century has had enduring consequences.

80 Nugent, Smugglers, 21–23. For a detailed treatment, see William Hudson Bryars, “The Evolution of British Imperial Policy on the Volta, 1857–1897: From Informal Opportunism to Formal Occupation,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1994.

81 Welch, Claude, Dream of Unity: Pan-Africanism and Political Unification in West Africa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 42Google Scholar.

82 Welch, Dream of Unity, 47–51. Most of the business of the church was conducted in Ewe, and the Bible was translated in 1912.

83 Meyer, Translating the Devil, 57–60. For a more general history of the Bremen mission, see Ustorf, Werner, Bremen Missionaries in Togo and Ghana, 1847–1900 (Legon: Christian Council of Ghana, 2002)Google Scholar.

84 Greene, Sacred Sites, 29.

85 Welch, Dream of Unity, 61; Lawrance, Benjamin, Locality, Mobility and “Nation”: Peri-Urban Colonialism in Togo's Eweland, 1900–1960 (Rochester, N.Y.: Rochester University Press, 2007), ch. 1Google Scholar.

86 Ibid., ch. 5; Nugent, Smugglers, ch. 5.

87 Ibid., 166–68.

88 Even in those minority communities that played an important role in the history of the Bremen mission, notably Avatime and Akpafu, Ewe took precedence.