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Quantifying Conversion: A Note on the Colonial Census and Religious Change in Postwar Southern Mali

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Brian Peterson
Brian Peterson*
Affiliation:
Yale University, [email protected]
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Extract

The use of colonial census data on religious conversion in historical analysis is often fraught with methodological problems. What, at first glance, might appear to have been profound structural transformations of society may in part be illusions created by changes in the census apparatus, or data collection process, itself. In this paper I will discuss how a colonial census was conducted and how local rural peoples were active agents in enumerating their own (official) religious identities. Thus, how did changes in this central tool of bureaucratic knowledge and power distort history? As an overarching critique, I suggest that the problem of the census as an exercise of colonial bureaucratic power in Africa has hardly elicited comment. Thus I suggest that the census may be a potentially fruitful avenue of historical inquiry in examining in closer detail the primary “enumerative modality” of colonial forms of knowledge.

I will present examples from the history of French colonial southern Mali during the postwar period in arguing that the colonial census was a complex social and political process that must be ‘deconstructed’ if we are to make critical use of such state-generated numbers. Southern Mali occupied what was believed, in the French imagination, to be an active frontier of Islamization, separating the “Muslim” Sahel (and Sahara) from the “fetishist” forest regions to the south. This religious frontier status elicited mixed views. As Jean-Loup Amselle has argued, colonial officials in southern Mali adopted a highly ambiguous stance toward Islam, “going from one extreme to another, sometimes seeing Islam everywhere, sometimes nowhere.”

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 29 , 2002 , pp. 381 - 392
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2002

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References

1 For an incisive discussion of the census in colonial India see Bernard Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia” in idem., An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Chicago, 1987), 224-54. More recent incarnations of this sort of cultural approach to the census include Appadurai's, Arjun chapter, “Number in the Colonial Imagination” in his Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1998).Google Scholar See citations in his chapter for further studies in the colonial Indian context.

2 See his Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere (Stanford, 1998), 124–27.Google Scholar

3 See in particular Robinson, David, Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880-1920 (Athens, 2000)Google Scholar, and Harrison, Christopher, France and Islam in West Africa, 1860-1960 (Cambridge, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 See Kaba, Lansine, The Wahhabiyya: Islamic Reform and Politics in French West Africa (Evanston, 1974).Google Scholar

5 See Triaud, Jean-Louis, “Le crépuscule des affaires musulmanes en AOF, 1950-1956,” in Le temps des marabouts: Itinéraires et stratégies islamiques en Afrique occidental française, 1880-1960 (Paris, 1997), 493–519.Google Scholar

6 This heavy reliance on Muslim informants was a retention from the earlier years of exploration when Europeans employed Muslim Dyula traders as guides, who knew the lay of the land and could negotiate cross-cultural encounters more advantageously than an “animist” could. See Binger, Louis, Du Golfe de Guinée, par le pays de Kong et le Mossi, 1887-1889 (2 vols.: Paris, 1892).Google Scholar On the idea of “synoptic legibility,” see Scott, James, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998).Google Scholar On interpreters and informants in the colonial context there really is not much, but see David Robinson, Paths of Accommodation, which provides some coverage for the early colonial period in his sections on “Mediators of Knowledge.” For the later period, see Bâ, Amadou HampatéL'etrange destin de Wangrin (Paris, 1973)Google Scholar, which provides a unique insider's view.

7 Delafosse, Maurice, Haut-Sénégal-Niger (3 vols.: Paris, 1912), 3:162.Google Scholar Delafosse actually rejected the term “fetishism,” although most administrators and their reports continued using the category.

8 See the map, carte 21, “Répartition des religions” in ibid., 3:216.

9 In 1935 the Rapport Politique du Cercle de Bougouni indicated that there were only 18,000 Muslims, compared to 169,250 “fetishists.” Twenty years later the census reported in the 1956 “Rapport Politique” revealed a dramatic shift. Of the total population of 236,337 in Bougouni, the number of Muslims had increased to 140,583, while the number of “fetishists” dropped to 94,904.

10 See the “Rapports Politiques” for the cercles of Bougouni and Sikasso. Archives Nationales du Mali, Fond recent, I E 10 (1&2), 1855-1954, and I E 41, Sikasso, 1923-1958.

11 Launay, , Beyond the Stream: Islam and Society in a West African Town (Berkeley, 1992), 104–31.Google Scholar

12 I also found that whether or not someone is Muslim, he or she will normally declare themselves Muslim.

13 Excerpts from the “Compte rendu de tournée de Niene 1953,” ANM, I E 10

14 “Rapport Politique du cercle de Sikasso, 1955,” ANM, I E 41

15 Interview with Madja Traore, August 9, 2000, Bougouni

16 “Animist” was the term used by both Bisil Diakité and Madja Traore.

17 Interview with Bisil Diakité, 10 August 2000, Bougouni

18 “Rapport du recensement du canton du Tiemala 1954, 1955,” ANM, I E 10

19 See, in particular, Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1979)Google Scholar, and his “Afterword: The Subject and Power” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Rabinow, Paul (Chicago: 1982).Google Scholar

20 See Amselle, , Logiques métisses, 157.Google Scholar

21 Ibid.

22 Census tours before the postwar period would take advantage of the dry season's more amenable roads, but the tradeoff was that many peasants migrated during the dry season, both men and women, to work, trade, or perform other necessary travels. From the perspective of the state, the ideal would have been to make tours when people were sedentary, i.e., working in their fields. Better roads during the 1950s finally permitted this.

23 These “gathering centers” were normally centrally located villages that, as catchments were not very effective since they depended to a large extent on voluntary attendance.

24 “Rapport d'ensemble sur le recensement du canton de Gouanan (mars-décembre 1950),” ANM (Fonds recents), I E 10 (I) “Rapports Politiques du cercle du Bougouni, 1919-1953,” and (II), 1953-58.

25 See “Rapport de tournée de recensement dans le Gouanan 1951.” This form was generalized throughout the region, with local particularities of course.

26 “Rapport de tournee de recensement dans le Gouanan 1951,” ANM, I E 10

27 Bisli Diakité, Bougouni, August 2000. He also mentioned that it was the chiefs who had “real” power.

28 “Compte rendu du recensement du canton de Zana, 1954” ANM, Fond recent, Rapports Politiques, for the administrative cercle of Bougouni, I E 10

29 “Compte rendu du recensement du canton de Diban, 1955,” ANM, I E 10

30 Ibid.

31 Kaba, . Wahhabiyya, 224–26.Google Scholar

32 “Rapport de Tournee, de 28 Juin au 2 Juillet, 1951, Cercle de Sikasso, Soudan Francais” ANM, I E 41, Sikasso, 1923-1958

33 See Lovejoy, Paul, Transformations in Slavery (Cambridge: 1983)Google Scholar, Klein, Martin, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar, Amselle, Jean-Loup. Les négociants de la savanne: histoire et organisation sociale des Kooroko (Paris, 1977)Google Scholar, and Last, D.M. and Al-Hajj, M.A., “Attempts at Defining a Muslim in 19th Century Hausaland and Bornu,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 3/2(12 1965), 231–40.Google Scholar

34 René Caillie Journal d'un voyage à Tembocton et à Jenné (3 vols.: Paris, 1830), 1:447.

35 See the various “Rapports Politiques” for the cercles of Bougouni and Sikasso from the early colonial period. ANM, Répertoire 1855-1954, Fonds anciens, I E 27, Bougouni, 1893-1920 and I E 73, Sikasso, 1900-1920.

36 Appadurai, , “Number,” 116–17Google Scholar