Asking different questions about and adopting an alternative perspective for understanding what happened in the past are rightly highlighted by François Richard as crucial to our understanding of colonial situations like that in 16th- to 18th-century West Africa. He frames his discussion with a speech given in Dakar by Nicolas Sarkozy, who in mid-2007 had just assumed the office of French president, and uses the strong reactions to those words very effectively to make it clear why thinking about the colonial past continues to matter, both in Africa and elsewhere.
Richard's article is nevertheless not primarily about how France or other former colonial powers continue to wield influence in their ex-colonies or why the colonial past remains a key feature of modern-day relationships between those regions and Europe. His aim is to look beyond Sarkozy's words and, more pertinently, to deconstruct conventional historical accounts of West Africa in general and of Senegal in particular in the context of European colonization. Because the European presence and European activities in West Africa between the 16th century and the 20th A.D. are habitually equated with the Atlantic slave trade, he argues that the conventional historical representation of the region is one-dimensional and too narrowly focused on the slave trade. As a consequence, he argues, most research continues to foreground the colonialist dimensions of the colonial situations in West Africa and, by implication, to obscure indigenous African perspectives and experiences.
Other histories
Richard places his paper squarely in the anthropological tradition that explores and deconstructs European representations of other cultures, even if he limits his references to scholars like Bayart, the Comaroffs, Cooper and Mbembe, who actively work on African materials. In intellectual terms, his approach owes much to influential studies with a wider scope like Time and the other, Anthropology as cultural critique and Anthropology through the looking-glass (Fabian 1983; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Herzfeld 1987) that not only showed how Western scholars constructed their objects of study but also explored how the notion of the cultural Other served to construct Western self-identity (Schmidt and Patterson 1995). With regard to colonial situations in particular, Stocking's work (1991) on the colonialist roots of anthropology itself has been no less significant for exposing the role of colonialist representations in anthropology.
No doubt because of the colonial focus of Richard's paper, postcolonial studies are a notable second source of inspiration for exploring how (colonial) history has been written by colonial powers to the detriment of the colonized and their experiences of and views on colonial situations. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) and the so-called Subaltern Studies group lie at the root of this particular strand of postcolonial theories that critically explore colonial discourse and actively attempt to give a voice to the ‘subaltern’ and other groups and communities who had been airbrushed out of history by colonialist representations (Pels 1997; Van Dommelen 2006).
Eric Wolf's Europe and the people without history (1982), finally, defies easy categorization but should nonetheless be mentioned here, because it represents an early attempt to write an alternative history of European colonialism. Richard's paper can in many ways be seen as situated in this by now well-established field between history and anthropology. But rather than offering yet another postcolonial attempt to write an alternative history of colonial West Africa, Richard's paper stands out from the crowd, it seems to me, because of the breadth and depth of the material he draws on in this endeavour: while postcolonial studies have long been criticized for their narrow focus on literary accounts and concomitant ‘weakly contextualized analyses’ (Thomas 1994, 6; Turner 1995, 204), Richard draws on a wide and indeed interdisciplinary range of historical, ethnographic and archaeological evidence and, in a postcolonial spirit he undertakes to read ‘against the grain’ this often disparate mass of material.
He is mostly successful in doing so, as the archaeological material he has collected allows him to see the historical evidence in another light: the distinction between wine and gin bottles on 18th- and 19th-century sites nicely shows how these material remains do not just confirm what the company archives and travellers’ accounts tell us about the levels of alcohol consumption in colonial Senegal but also enable him to propose a meaningful interpretation of local cultural tradition and, crucially, the role of drinking in this context. This brings out the complexity of the colonial situation and begins to contextualize alcohol consumption.
Although Richard thus manages to sketch an ‘other history’ of colonial Senegal, his study overcomes the colonialist bias of conventional historical accounts only to some extent: because his focus is largely on Siin society and southern Senegal as a whole and because their experiences are contrasted with those of European colonizers and slave traders, he largely leaves intact the colonial divide between colonizers and colonized in West Africa. In this respect, therefore, this paper has only just begun to explore the complexities of the colonial situations in West Africa and Senegal – as Richard indeed recognizes when referring to the ‘diverse levels of social response’ (p. 71). The crucial point is that colonial situations were far more complex than the focus on interaction between just colonizers and colonized would suggest or allow. Neither group was culturally or socially homogeneous and just as the indigenous inhabitants of West Africa were divided into numerous ethnic communities that in turn were articulated by social standing, gender and age, colonizers themselves were also made up of distinct groups with their own ambitions and histories. The colonial settlements on the West African coast offer a fine example, as they were first founded in the 15th and 16th centuries A.D. by Portuguese and Dutch trading companies who were primarily interested in obtaining fresh supplies for their sailors, while under later British and French colonial rule these settlements became actively involved in the slave trade to the point that it became their primary function.
The implication is not only that colonial situations cannot be reduced to a contrast between colonizers and colonized, but also that local differences, specific backgrounds and, most of all, local developments over time are to be taken into account. A good example is the French colonial presence in North Africa, beginning in 1831 with the occupation of Algeria, which became a classic settler colony that drew large numbers of settlers from France and other Mediterranean regions. French Algeria developed along notably different lines than Morocco, however, which only became a French protectorate in 1912 and never saw the arrival of significant numbers of civilian settlers. The different historical trajectories and changing colonial ambitions are thus just one, albeit significant, variable in the complexity and variability of colonial situations (Stoler 1989; Thomas 1994; Van Dommelen 2002, 124–26; 2006, 108).
Local materialities
Notwithstanding the strong interdisciplinary character of Richard's arguments – or perhaps precisely because of it, as some would insist (Tilley 2006, 1–2; Miller 2010, 1–11) – material culture plays a pivotal role in the interpretations he proposes. In doing so, his approach to material culture is basically twofold. In the first place, he uses the material evidence in a straightforward way as an alternative source of historical information. This may be seen as a primarily archaeological approach, albeit in the strictest sense of the term. As best exemplified in the introductory discussion of the historical and archaeological contexts (pp. 8–12), this means that past material remains are simply used as markers of certain presences or absences. Imported items in particular are classified as colonial and taken to denote ‘colonial contact’ in a direct, but otherwise unspecified, sense. As Richard notes (p. 11), however, such observations concern archaeological distribution patterns and do not explain anything in themselves, even if they may usefully complement or indeed contradict documentary evidence. The presence and absence of imported beads in indigenous Siin contexts is a good case in point (p. 17), as the lack of archaeological finds would seem to contradict 16th- and 17th-century European sources.
While this is surely a common way of using (past) material remains that may often even be quite effective, it represents at the same time also a rather elementary approach to material culture, because it ignores how objects were perceived and used in the contexts concerned. It is probably no coincidence that the discussion of the archaeological evidence for indigenous Siin settlement sites (p. 11) remains for instance somewhat superficial. There is, after all, no need for a more detailed consideration of specific sites, as the purpose of noting absences and presences is sufficiently served by classifying sites as indigenous or colonial – a practice that incidentally reinforces the dualist tendency observed above.
Richard's study rises well above this basic level to adopt a more sophisticated approach to material culture. In the above-mentioned case study of alcohol consumption, which is the most substantial one developed in this paper, he is not content merely to note the presence of European glass bottles but explores how they may be understood in the 18th- and 19th-century colonial contexts. He does so through the notion of consumption and rightly discusses the imported gin and wine bottles in terms of the ‘appropriation and recontextualization of foreign objects’ (p. 16).
While this discussion goes some way towards taking into account the diverse communities and social groups involved in the colonial situation and their different attitudes towards these objects, Richard pays relatively little attention to the items themselves and to the practices they were used for. He generically refers to the occasions on which alcohol was consumed at ‘feasts’ but does not consider to what extent the elite events were comparable to those hosted by other social groups. Because of his focus on the content of the bottles (alcohol), it is not just the imported bottles that are overlooked (did the shape or colour of the bottles play any part?) but also, and more importantly, whether their adoption was accompanied by other changes in practice and material culture: were new drinking or pouring vessels introduced and, if so, were these also imported or locally made? In the ancient western Mediterranean (8th to 4th centuries B.C.), Greek and Phoenician amphorae mark an extensive trading network of wine but different local traditions of consuming the wine are signalled by the differential adoption of pouring and drinking vessels of both colonial and indigenous types (e.g. Dietler 2005; Hodos 2000; Sardà Seuma 2008; Vives-Ferrándiz Sánchez 2008). The question is therefore whether Siin (ritual) practices remained unchanged in the 18th century. In other words, while it is surely significant that imported alcoholic beverages were incorporated into local practices, it does not follow automatically that these practices remained unchanged. Equally interesting is the question how this appropriation process developed and whether it entailed further (unintended) consequences for indigenous traditions and practices.
A final point concerns the emphasis on imported objects and substances and the concomitant lack of attention to the variability and transformations of indigenous material culture as noted. While this is not uncommon in the archaeology of colonial situations in general, because imported colonial goods such as glass bottles and ceramic fine wares like ‘cream wares’ and ‘black gloss’ tend to be more readily identifiable and datable (‘diagnostic’), it only adds to the dualist tendency previously noted. The consequences of this emphasis become apparent in Richard's discussion of beads that have been found in far smaller numbers than documentary sources would suggest. Richard is able to break free from this dualist presentation by pointing to the local production of clay beads without which it is surely not possible to understand how imported beads were perceived and used (pp. 17–18). Locally produced storage, transport, pouring and drinking vessels that imitate imported bottles and colonial ceramics or adapt them more freely may likewise be expected to have played a significant role in the appropriation process of gin and wine as discussed above.
Overall, it is a measure of the richness and nuances of the evidence and arguments put forward by François Richard in this paper that he is able not just to rechart the ‘Atlantic encounters’ of colonial West Africa but rather to propose alternative histories of Senegal in the context of the Atlantic trade that bring out both the richness and the complexities of local and regional cultural traditions.
