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7: Separate Spheres? Colonialism in Practice
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161 7 w Separate Spheres? Colonialism in Practice Some important questions remain about the relationship between household-making, statecraft, and colonization. Did the household-state structure that the French tried to impose through their decrees and laws—which were supposed to flatten indigenous social hierarchies and treat men as active agents and women as domesticated dependents—translate into practice? Did policies that confined women to the domestic sphere and that charged men with assuming the burdens and responsibilities associated with the colonial political sphere create their intended outcomes? Analyzing the activities and conditions of different populations who lived in and around Kankan in the early colonial period reveals that the clear division that the French charted between the household and the colonial state did not necessarily take root in the Milo River Valley and that, moreover, the colonizers faced serious challenges in their efforts to impose laws and policies that promoted French notions about male autonomy and female domesticity. That limits acted on the colonial state’s capacity to direct and control its African colonial subjects is a point that has been made by a number of historians of colonialism. Frederick Cooper, for example, contends that the power of the colonial state was “arterial” and that it exerted force at its colonial headquarters and administrative centers, but that it was much less potent beyond those “nodal points.”1 Richard Roberts makes a similar argument by likening the colonial state to a fog flowing over “a highly variegated landscape.” That fog occupies the landscape unevenly: it is thick in parts, thin elsewhere and bypasses some areas altogether. The metaphor of the fog is meant to illuminate that the power of the colonial state was not “all pervasive.”2 The unevenness and pliability of colonial statecraft is a point made in a completely different 162 w Separate Spheres? way by the memoirs and fiction of Amadou Hampâté Bâ, a Malian who served in the French colonial service in the 1920s and 1930s. The vivid tales of administrative adventures and misdeeds that fill Hampâté Bâ’s narratives show that the effects of colonial rule on local populations depended most heavily on the proclivities and proximity of its French and African representatives. Assessing the early colonial period in the Milo River Valley largely confirms the arguments made by scholars who posit that the colonial state was constrained by shortages of resources, personnel, and its own internal contradictions .3 But analyzing the colonial state’s efforts to create a structural divide between the domestic sphere and the public, political sphere produces a more nuanced understanding of colonialism and its variegated effects. This approach does not simply contribute to ongoing debates about the relative strength or weakness of the colonial state. It instead shows quite precisely how the colonial occupation created new avenues of power and authority while it foreclosed others. This analysis specifically reveals how the colonial occupation changed—or did not change—the circumstances of different sectors of the population, including women, slaves, and African colonial employees. colonialism in prac ti c e One sign of the gulf that opened up between French colonial goals and ideologies and its local forms can be traced in the meanings that Kankan’s colonial quarter, or district, acquired among local populations. As has been discussed, the French built a colonial administrative quarter in Kankan, which operated as the local headquarters of the state and as a model of colonialism ’s “civilizing principles.” Although the French meant to convey a sense of colonial modernity through their neatly arranged buildings and tree-lined streets—and to sharply delineate between the private and public lives of colonial officials—the inhabitants of Kankan’s old town did not necessarily see the French quarter as a paragon of rationality or impersonal efficiency. Many local people instead considered the French quarter to be a dangerous and menacing place. In their policies and rhetoric, for example, French colonial officials frequently positioned themselves as the caretakers and protectors of African women. The women who lived in and around Kankan did not, however, necessarily share that understanding. Such was the case for the female inhabitants of the village of Dosorin, which is located on the outskirts of Kankan near the administrative quarter. Memories of colonial rule guarded there indicate that women who walked through the French administrative district to go to Kankan’s central marketplace risked spontaneous conscription by a colonial official and being forced to carry out some sort of task or duty...