Locality, Mobility and 'Nation': periurban colonialism in Togo's Eweland, 1900-1960 (review)

This is not a book on the capital of Togo, Lomé, and its 'Westernized elite' (p. 7), but rather a detailed account of how market women, farmers and local chiefs living in the periurban area engaged with the colonial authorities. According to the author, the term 'periurban zone' describes 'a region of nonurbanised land that lies within a manageable or knowable distance from either a main urban centre, a secondary market town or a village' (p. 2). The book is based on an impressive range of municipal and national archival sources from Lomé, Dakar, Accra, London, Paris and Aix-en-Provence. The most original sources, however, are the 150 interviews, conducted between 1999 and 2005 mainly in Togo and Ghana, and the archives of the Société des Nations based in Geneva.

Togo effectively became a French mandate under the League of Nations between 1920 and 1960. Most of the chapters can be read separately. Five out of six are case studies of localized conflicts or of larger political mobilizations: a chieftaincy dispute over the leadership of a town (Chapter 2), the famous 1933 'market women revolt' in Lomé (Chapter 3), the deployment of vodou in a village as a vehicle to reclaim political authority (Chapter 4), the mobilization of a protonationalist group, the German Togo-Bund, in the 1920s and 1930s (Chapter 5), and the development and circulation of print journalism in Togo from the 1930s to independence (Chapter 6). All these narratives allow the author to discuss at length very important issues – such as the local perception of colonial authority, the drawing of a misleadingly clear divide between the nationalist struggle before the Second World War and its post-war phase, and the political mobilization of women and 'periurban' people, most notably during the interwar period – which constitute the core of the book (chapters 2–5). The local perception of the taxation system introduced by the French (simply referred as l'impôt), the petitions sent to SDN, the flourishing Togolese press and the life story of Savi de Tové, a typical colonial intermediary, all provide topics for careful and often fascinating historical analysis based on new oral and written evidence. The focus on the 'periurban zone' also allows the author to reinsert the nationalist struggle within earlier forms of political mobilization as well as to reunite urban and rural experiences in presenting the political and social history of Togo.

What is less convincing, however, is the periurban obsession of the author. He claims that the periurban focus may help break down the dichotomy between rural and urban areas and aid the understanding of communities who were neither wholly urban nor simply rural. This is not a totally new idea and in a way underestimates works which have already moved beyond the rural–urban dichotomies (Justin Willis, William Beinart, Carolyn Brown – to mention just a few). It would also have been useful to see how the labour policy which reshaped urban–rural relationships in the French and British empires from the 1930s onward became implemented in the case of Togo. On this point Lawrance might have engaged with Frederick Cooper's seminal Decolonisation and African Societies: the labour question in French and British Africa (1995), a work that is strangely absent from his bibliography. More importantly, the periurban notion is in itself problematic: ignored until recently, it remains ill-defined and as such it obscures rather than clarifies our understanding of colonialism. The author's indefatigable search for the periurban in all policies and in African resistance to them is in the end misleading. The administrative organization of Togo after 1920 was very similar to the rest of French West Africa (chefs de villages, de subdivision, de canton and de cercle): to qualify this as a periurban colonial administration with French officers operating as 'periurban despots' and village chiefs considered as 'periurban chiefs' is of limited use...