Our New Husbands Are Here

6: Colonization: Households and the French Occupation

141 6 w Colonization Households and the French Occupation To illuminate the distinctive approach that the French took to householdmaking and state-making, it is useful to compare the governmental seat that the colonizers built in Kankan with that of jinkono, the family compound from which the Kaba family had historically ruled Baté. In the early 1900s, the French obtained a large tract of land on Kankan’s western edge, and transformed its fields and pastures into an administrative hub. The French arranged the quarter in a grid pattern and traced through its center a “very beautiful” avenue that was bordered by “an alley of magnificent mango trees.”1 Neatly constructed buildings, including a train station, courthouse, and residences for French and African colonial employees, lined the quarter’s map 6.1 Guinée Française. Map by Don Pirius. 142 w Colonization 142 streets in an orderly fashion. Like French districts elsewhere in the empire, Kankan’s colonial quarter, or quartier, exhibited the systematized, rationalized underpinnings of the colonial regime.2 As research on colonial architecture has established, districts such as that in Kankan served as a “laboratory” where the French experimented with urban design and modern and indigenous built forms.3 What has escaped scholarly attention, however, is the way that the colonizers used these administrative districts to express architecturally their particular understanding of the relationship of the household to the state. French colonial employees and their African support staff carried out the task of governance from stand-alone administrative buildings, and they conducted their personal lives in separate houses located elsewhere in the district (whether or not the private life of those French officials entailed a clandestine relationship with an African woman). In short, the colonizers divided the offices of rule from the residences of rulers. The separation of the personal from the political—and men from women— that organized the colonial quarter contrasts with the way in which Baté’s leaders lived and ruled. In precolonial Kankan, the chief’s compound, jinkono, functioned as both the home of the Kaba family and as the political headquarters of Baté. Elders from the Kaba family contend that jinkono, which still stands in the present day, took its form some time in the mid-nineteenth century, during the reign of Alfa Mahmud.4 The tall walls of the compound, map 6.2 French West Africa. Map by Don Pirius. Households and the French Occupation w 143 143 which is about the size of a football field, enclose houses of various sizes and styles where various Kaba family members live.5 A variety of other structures also fill the compound, including shelters devoted to cooking, washing, praying , and relaxing. There is also a Koranic school in the compound, as well as a number of tombs where some of Kankan’s most revered leaders are buried. Near the front of the compound sits a large round thatched room that serves sometimes as a meeting place. When not in use by the city’s “traditional” leaders, the room and its three doorways, each of which symbolizes a principle to being a good Muslim, operates as a passageway connecting one part of the compound to the next.6 The design and functions of the compound reveal that Baté’s elites treated state-making and household-making as an interrelated enterprise. In jinkono, Baté’s leaders grappled with the demands of rule from within the routines and rhythms of family life. Unlike the French, Baté’s male leaders did not create sharp distinctions between private and public spheres, between social processes and political ones. As the contrast between the colonial quarter and jinkono reveals, the French did not share with their African predecessors the same view of statecraft and household-making. The French did not use familial ties, real or fictive, to showcase their power, nor did they recognize local peoples as fudunyolu, or “marrying people,” with whom to develop permanent linkages. French officials instead constructed a bureaucratic apparatus of administration that was staffed by a hierarchy figure 6.1 Kankan’s colonial administrative district. From Albert Lorofi, La Guinée: Naissance d’une colonie française, 1880–1914 (Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire: Alan Sutton, 2005). Reproduced by permission of Éditions Alan Sutton. 144 w Colonization 144 of male French and African colonial employees. This process drove a deep and, from the perspective of West Africa’s populations, peculiar wedge between the...