Our New Husbands Are Here

Conclusion: Making States in the Milo River Valley, 1650–1910

178 concl usion Making States in the Milo River Valley, 1650–1910 This book started with an anecdote about the women of Somangoi, who, in the early colonial period, welcomed the French colonizers as “new husbands.” The verses sung by those women expose a world where politics and intimate household relationships overlapped and reinforced one another. The French men whom the women of Somangoi addressed did not, however, share these same ideas or practices about statecraft and household-making. Unlike in the precolonial era, when local elites consistently combined the task of statecraft with household-making, French colonial officials did not consider their own personal lives as a resource that could be marshaled and directed to political ends; they attempted to manipulate and mobilize African households through edict and decree, not through direct interaction and integration. That the French colonizers put into place a new political paradigm when they conquered and occupied the Milo River Valley in the late nineteenth century is made clear by an anecdote told by Al Hajj Hawa Touré Karamo Kaba not about the onset of colonial rule, but about its demise. According to Karamo Kaba, after the capture of Samori Touré in 1900, the residents of Kankan became quite worried about the continued presence of the French in their town. Karamo Kaba shrugged as he launched into the story. “Perhaps you will not believe me,” he said, “but this is how it happened here in Kankan”: After the death of Samori [in 1900], the whites continued to stay here in Kankan, and the people were worried. They gathered together to talk about this problem. They asked all the marabouts [Muslim wise men] to look and see what they could tell them. The marabouts told them to find a mule and let him roam the town. That Making States in the Milo River Valley, 1650–1910 w 179 mule was not to be put in the service of anyone. The marabouts explained that that mule would live for as long as a man, for sixty to seventy years. “One day,” the marabouts said, “a French man will put that mule to work. When that happens you will know that the whites will no longer stay here.” After sixty years, there was a French commander who saw the mule in town and was impressed by its size and beauty. He said, “Whose mule is this?” They told him that it belonged to no one, that it lived like that in the town. He said, “I will use it, I will put it to work.” And everyone was happy because the elders’ prediction had come to pass. They knew that the whites would soon be leaving. People talk about politics, about Sékou Touré [Guinea’s first president] and others. But our elders knew that the French would leave before all of that.1 As with so many of the narratives about Baté’s past, the story about the mule is no doubt allegorical. But it nevertheless offers a commentary on the way that the French made their state and interacted with Baté’s population. In contrast to stories of the precolonial era, which typically feature a wide cast of human characters of different genders, origins, and status—husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, mothers and sons, masters and slaves—this narrative of colonial rule stars instead an animal, a beast of burden. The French commander’s identification of the mule as a laboring resource is emblematic of how the French treated male colonial subjects generally. In colonization, French officials did not seek to cultivate enduring relationships with local peoples or integrate themselves personally into preexisting ruling structures. What mattered, at least officially, was not the family status or connection of an individual colonial subject, but his gender and his capacity to pay taxes and labor for the French. The oral record is rife with the memories of African men who did indeed work like beasts of burden for the French by, for example, portaging head loads of goods until “your hair rubs off” or spending weeks and months building roads and bridges.2 The story of the mule signals that a fundamental political shift took place with colonization and that, specifically, statecraft could no longer be explained through dense stories about the conflicts and coalitions within and between families and households. Placing the story of the mule within this larger historical landscape furthermore serves as a warning against assuming the historical fixity of some of the categories...