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“Wives Wishing to Join Their Husbands”: Colonial Forgery, Gender Legibility, and Labor Migration in West Africa
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 October 2022
Abstract
European mobilizations of Africans for labor relied on the forgery that Africans can be harnessed into modern units of capitalist production only when organized into households led by wage-earning men supported by domesticated women. Between the 1930s and 1950s, Nigerian male labor migrants to Fernando Po and Gabon, as well as their wives, advanced diverse forgeries in response to the legibility protocols that European states used to control African migrants. Nigerian men used colonial documentation of their status as husbands to claim women’s bodies. Nigerian women used colonial documentation as wives and mothers to mask autonomy, illicit mobility, child trafficking, and sex work. This article develops a historical theory of forgery to explain how colonial legibility protocols and African manipulations of colonial documents constituted gendering practices. It focuses on the diverse documentary strategies women developed to evade colonial surveillance, including photographs to manufacture kinship and colonial court records to generate identities as temporary wives and fictive mothers. As European agents and African men strove to exploit women’s economic and sexual capacities, women used documentary and social forgeries to exploit fissures in colonial rule and create autonomous spaces of mobility and economic opportunity.
Résumé
Les Européens ont réussi à mobiliser le travail des Africains en s’appuyant sur l’idée fausse selon laquelle les Africains ne peuvent être exploités dans des unités modernes de production capitaliste que lorsqu’ils sont organisés en ménages dirigés par des hommes salariés soutenus par des femmes forcées à rester à la maison. Entre les années 1930 et les années 1950, les travailleurs migrants nigérians à Fernando Po et au Gabon, ainsi que leurs épouses, ont produit diverses contrefaçons en réponse aux protocoles de lisibilité que les États européens utilisaient pour contrôler les migrants africains. Les hommes nigérians ont utilisé la documentation coloniale et leur statut de mari pour s’emparer du corps des femmes. Les femmes nigérianes ont utilisé la documentation coloniale en tant qu’épouses et mères pour masquer l’autonomie, la mobilité illicite, la traite des enfants et le travail du sexe. Cet article développe une théorie historique de la falsification pour expliquer comment les protocoles de lisibilité coloniale et les manipulations africaines des documents coloniaux constituaient des pratiques genrées. Il se concentre sur les diverses stratégies documentaires que les femmes ont développées pour échapper à la surveillance coloniale, que ce soient les photographies pour fabriquer la parenté ou les archives judiciaires coloniales pour générer des identités en tant qu’épouses temporaires et mères fictives. Alors que les agents européens et les hommes africains s’efforçaient d’exploiter les capacités économiques et sexuelles des femmes, les femmes ont utilisé des contrefaçons documentaires et sociales pour exploiter les fissures de la domination coloniale et créer des espaces autonomes de mobilité et d’opportunités économiques.
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- © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the African Studies Association
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