Andrew F. Clark. From Frontier to Backwater: Economy and Society in the Upper Senegal Valley (West Africa), 1850-1920. Lanham, Md. and Oxford: University Press of America, 1999. xiv + 278 pp. $47.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7618-1438-2.

Reviewed by Leland Barrows (UNESCO)
Published on H-Africa (September, 2000)

This curious book is yet another example of a well-known genre, the revised and published PhD dissertation, in this case coming nine years after the author defended the original version at Michigan State University. It represents an "attempt to examine the interaction of politics, economy, society, and ecology in the upper Senegal valley, in West Africa, from the mid-Nineteenth Century until the end of the First World War" (p. ix). Or to put it more succinctly, Clark has attempted to capture a seventy-year period of change in an area that to him represents "a unified ecological region" (p. 31), for he believes that: "A regional framework, transcending narrow and shifting political borders, permits a greater understanding of the environment and its impact on socio-economic history. It also allows for more careful consideration of the economic and social structures and processes operative in the area..." during the period being studied. In short, Clark wishes to be the Fernand Braudel of the "Haut-Senegal-Niger".

According to what is almost a standard structure for a monograph in African history of this sort, a "Preface", in which the author states his purposes as given above, is followed by eight chapters, the first, serving to discuss the sources used; the eighth, serving as the Conclusion, and the ones in-between, consisting of micro-histories and other such topical discussions.

Thus, the first chapter describes and evaluates the different sources used in terms of the perceived dichotomy of French colonial, particularly archival, sources versus an elaborate array of African oral sources.[1] The pros and cons of both as well as the pitfalls to which they may give rise are analyzed. Summing up the debate, Clark writes that "The written and oral sources provide a prism, not a window, on the past" (p. 20).

The second chapter is essentially a geographic and ethnographic survey of the region that picks up and continues the arguments made in the "Preface", and that will be developed throughout, on the advantages of a "regional perspective". Chapter 3 covers "The "Regional Economy" in the Late Nineteenth Century" with short sections on "Production" including "Agriculture", "Animal Husbandry", "Mining", "Craft Production", and "Raiding" (the latter, according to the author, having "played a critical role in the regional economy during the nineteenth century" even near the end of the century when the French were more-or-less in control), and "Exchange", i.e., trade, both local and long-distance.

Chapter 4, describes the "Political Economy" of the region between 1850 and 1890. In particular, it gives brief aperus of the historical development of the local African polities, particularly Gadiaga [2], Bondu, Khasso, and the more decentralized (if not acephalous) regions of Guidimaka and Bambuk, as punctuated by El Hadj Omar's jihad (1854-1860), the rebellion of Mahmadou Lamine (1885-1887), and in the background, the increasing French presence in the area along the navigable portions of the Senegal and Falm Rivers, particularly after 1855. Indeed, the increasing French presence, particularly the growing political and economic weight of the French fortified posts at Bakel, Kayes, Medine, Senoudebou, and Bafoulabe along the Senegal and Faleme Rivers and French control of the river banks is what gave rise to an increasing distinction in the region between a "core", centered on the Senegal and Faleme River Valleys, and a "periphery", consisting of the inland areas.

Chapter 5, consequently, focuses on the River and the towns, particularly Bakel, Kayes, and Medine, the political and economic importance of which increased greatly between 1850 and 1890 as the French stepped up their presence in the region and passed through it on their way to the upper Niger valley, occupying Bamako in 1883. Chapter 6, again focusing on the Senegal river valley and the riverine towns of Bakel, Kayes, and Medine, traces the continued economic and political development of the region to an "Apoge" and then into "Decline", the 'decline' occurring primarily because the French colonial frontier moved East, with Bamako/Koulikoro becoming the termini of a completed Kayes-Niger Railway in 1904, and the gap in the railway between This and Kayes being filled in 1924, thus ending the role of Kayes even as a transshipment point. Some serious natural phenomena also contributed to economic decline: flooding in 1906 that destroyed much of Kayes, and famines, particularly that of 1913 and 1914. To these should be added the negative effects of World War I recruitment.

The theme of decline is again underscored in Chapter 7 on "The Political Economy of the Hinterland, 1820-1920" in which, the author argues that although economic decline came later in the hinterland than in the core colonial areas along the River, it had become so widespread by the end of the period that the distinction between center and periphery was obscured, "the entire region [being] peripheralized within the French colonial empire in Africa" (p. 195).

Finally, the "Conclusion" simply reiterates earlier statements about the eventual economic stagnation of the region through a combination of natural disasters, the declining world market for such commodities as gum arabic, French military recruitment during World War I, and above all, the fact that the colonial frontier completed its move to the East after completion of the Dakar-Niger Railway in 1924. Thus the region became a labour reserve for the peanut producing areas of western Senegal. The peripheralization of the region, indeed its disunity in the formal political sense, reached its apoge in 1960 when the independence of Senegal, Mauritania, and Mali distributed it among three independent countries, the capitals of which are quite distant. Given the author's unstated premise that economic prosperity rode the crest of the advancing French wave, he could well have used Robert W. Clower's well-known phrase about "growth without development" (referring to Liberia) [3] to describe the French-sponsored "development" of this part of Afrique Occidentale Francaise.

This book presents many problems to the reader, not the least of which is the author's basic premise of the unity of the region, most clearly stated in terms of its being a "unified ecological region", a transitional savanna zone between the desert on the North and the rain forest on the South, drained by the Upper Senegal and Faleme Rivers, but distinct from the Gambia and Niger catchment areas (that in fact closely intersect with the Senegal catchment areas). In short, the limits and even the unity of his "unified ecological region" are ambiguous.

Then, politically, the region was and remains anything but unified. The author presents a mosaic of distinct polities themselves undergoing processes of disaggregation at various points during the period under study: Gadiaga with its periodic bursts of civil war between its two components, Guoye and Kamra, and its dynastic struggles; Khasso, also in a state of chronic civil war, its leader, Diouka-Sambala (1854-1880) during the much of the period under study, facing many challengers; Bondou, whose ruler, Almamy Bokar Saada (1855-1885) also faced many challengers, the more or less acephalous Bambuk, and the right bank Soninke settlements of Guidimaka under the constant pressure of the Douach Moorish Confederation.

If one considers that Clark's mentor, David Robinson, could claim that the far more unified Almamate of Fouta-Toro "exhibit[ed] the traits of a 'plural society'",[4] how can Clark himself seriously argue that there was anything very unified about the Upper Senegal except, possibly, as the temporary result of outsiders who might attempt to unify it by force, the latter including El Hadj Omar, intensively but briefly, then the French, by degrees after 1855, and again, intensively but briefly, Mahmadou Lamine (1885-1887). Then, although the region acquired a sort of political unity as part of the French colonial empire, and more specifically, of French West Africa, that same empire completed the disunification of the region by attributing parts of it to three separate territorial divisions that crystallized into post-independence national boundaries.

A comment in the third paragraph of the Conclusion (p. 222) makes the matter even less clear: "The reconfiguration of the upper Senegal into an integrated economic and cultural region, rather than a group of isolated political and social formations, requires a new approach to and utilization of the available sources". Is the reader really expected to conclude that the basis of regional unity in this case is little more than the fruit of the author's historical imagination?

The book itself lacks unity in the sense that much of it consists of poorly integrated micro-histories of the local polities of the region, portions of which are narrated in different chapters. Clark gives the reader an aperu of, for instance, the fractioning of Gadiaga into Guoye and Kamra and of various civil wars resulting from rivalries among the lineages of the Bathily royal house caused in part by the pull of French-oriented trade. In the case of Khasso, he describes the ascendancy in 1854 of King Diouka-Sambala over his rivals and his acceptance and confirmation in 1855 by the French, but says almost nothing about the French explorer and trader, Ferdinand Duranton, whose romance with and marriage to Diouka-Sambala's sister, Sadioba, had contributed to setting the pre-conditions of a pro-French policy on the part of Sambala's father, Aoua Demba. Of course, it was the threat posed by El-Hadj Omar and Diouka-Sambala's brother, Khartoum-Sambala, that cemented the alliance with the French that lasted until Diouka-Sambala's death in 1880.

Clark also relates the history of Bondou in terms of its complicated dynastic history, stressing the emergence of Bokar Saada [5], as Almamy from 1855 to 1885, who, like Diouka-Sambala of Khasso, became a French-sponsored ruler in opposition to El Hadj Omar and his choice of almamy, Omar San. These and other micro-histories, that are interspersed with eleven tables giving mostly economic data, and thirteen figures consisting of charts and maps, simply do not add up to a coherent historical synthesis of the sort that the author claims to have written.

One of the most unsatisfactory accounts in the book is that of the so-called revolt of Mahmadou Lamine (pp. 115-122). In particular, it fails to make clear the extent to which Lamine's campaigns were truly of an anti-colonial nature directed against French overrule, even though Clark's discussion of this episode in the history of the region is the object of fourteen notes (nos. 41-52, pp. 131-134 and nos. 32-33, p. 157) listing almost every archival document and published source available on the subject in the National Archives of Senegal and in the French Colonial Archives. (Surprisingly Clark does not cite any oral sources in regard to this episode, despite the importance that he purports to attach to oral sources in the writing of African history.)

What is clear is that Mahmadou Lamine began his campaign of conquest by intervening in the succession crises in Bondou that began with the death, in December 1885, of Almamy Bokar Saada. His popularity, it seems, came as a reaction, not so much to the French presence itself, but to the autocratic behaviour of the French-protected rulers in the area and, of course, to the reforming Tijjani Islam that he propagated. Himself a Soninke, he was able to build a multi-ethnic coalition. But none of these activities really prove that he was opposed to French overrule in the region. Earlier, in 1880, he had had a falling out with a major religious figure, the Tijjani leader, Cheikh Ahamadou of Segou, having even been imprisoned for several years, in Segou, by order of the latter. Possibly, with a little more discernment and tact, the French authorities might have persuaded Mahmadou Lamine to become a pro-French Tijjani leader, centered at Bakel, as they would later be able to do with El Hadj Malik Sy at Tivaouane, in the conquered Wolof polity of Cayor. Indeed, Mahmadou Lamine continued to protest his pro-French sympathies as late as September 1886 (note 42, p. 132), that is, five months after the attack on and siege of Bakel by his forces in April 1885 that historians view as his definitive declaration of war against the French.

The fact is that the French may have provoked Mahmadou Lamine by their own preemptive strike against his forces at Conguel, six kilometers from Bakel, two weeks earlier. One must not forget that the first French commandant, Colonel Henri Frey, to have to deal with Mahmadou Lamine, was favourable to him and then changed his mind out of loyalty to (but owing to manipulation by) certain French allies. Frey being replaced because of his perceived softness to Mahmadou Lamine, the next commandant, the hard-liner, Colonel Joseph Simon Gallieni, came to the job determined to crush this leader, regardless of what his true feelings had been in regard to French overrule. Gallieni completed the job, first by having Mahmadou Lamine's adolescent son, Soybou, executed in May 1887, under doubtful circumstances (a detail not mentioned by Clark), and then by launching the raid that led to the death of Mahmadou Lamine himself near Lamen-Kotto in Gambia in December 1887. In short, Clark could have given a far more focused account of Mahmadou Lamine's intentions than he did, all while making clear (as he also did) that the effects of the rebellion on the local economy were not all that significant.[6]

Even the descriptions of the supposedly non-political economic and social evolution of the region seem, in places, to be truncated and incomplete. Nevertheless, a few of the themes evoked are handled well. The reader learns a great deal (pp. 160; 166-170; 181-182; 185-187, notes 8-13; 191-192, note 40; 211; and 225) about the pragmatic attitudes and practices in regard to slavery of the advancing French administration, particularly in the areas forming the unstable interfaces between direct-ruled French territories like Bakel, Medine, and Senoudebou, and most of the hinterland that retained de facto independence from France until the end of the 19th century. The French did very little to suppress slavery in pro-French and allied French polities like Bondou and Khasso, even in some cases permitting the operation of slave markets under the guns of French forts and making "no genuine efforts to halt friendly rulers from pillaging caravans and settlements" (p. 75) [7].

Clark's very good discussion of the founding and the role of the "villages de libert" [freedom villages] (pp. 166-170) in 1887 by Gallieni confirms the appropriateness of the sour comments about these villages made by such scholars as Denise Bouche and Jean Suret-Canale to the effect that they were "villages de captifs du commandant", and their residents, "captifs des blancs" [8]. As Clark explains the matter, these villages "provided an answer to the administration's labor shortage problem while simultaneously addressing the increasingly important issue of abolition" (p. 166), particularly after the founding of the French Antislavery Society in 1888 and its insistence that French rule lead to the total abolition of slavery in the French Empire.

Clark also makes some very interesting observations about the effects of World War I recruitment in the region. He perceives it as having had the incidental effect of stimulating emancipation. Chiefs and other freemen filled their recruitment quotas with slaves who, if they were not freed upon enlistment, were able to purchase their freedom with the enlistment bonus that they received. Returned veterans came back with a sense of their status as free men. They challenged chiefly authority, and some of them were able to fill reserved slots in the colonial administration. The reader cannot help but get the impression that Clark approves of the social consequences to the region of the war in Europe. But he says almost nothing about those recruits and draftees who were killed or maimed, or about their families. Only one comment, on p. 182 indicates that: "In 1915 a few jobs in the civil service were reserved for injured soldiers". Likewise, Clark has nothing to say about the appropriateness or the inappropriateness of the French use of Africans in a European war - strange for an author who, in other respects, for instance, in regard to questions of spelling, tends to be "politically correct".

The most valuable portion of this book is the discussion of sources and historiography that composes the first chapter. The author clearly knows how to question and to criticize both the panoply of French written sources, particularly the materials in the French archives, and the oral informants whom he identified and interviewed. Clark's listings in the "Bibliography" plus the notes that follow each chapter are very detailed; however, the actual results, so far as his narrative is concerned, are disappointing. Clark has certainly assembled sufficient material for a far more deft analysis of the events by the casting of oral sources against French written sources, than seems to be the case.

At one point in Chapter 1 (p. 7) Clark states that: "The same rigorous analysis that has, until recently, been given only to oral sources should be applied equally to written sources". How one wishes that he had followed his own advice with regard to specific events that are differently stated or can be differently interpreted depending upon whether one relies on written or oral sources. The usual case in this book is that a statement that needs to be footnoted, as in the case of a comment about slavery and slave-raiding by French allies (no. 31, p. 112) will give rise to a long note listing archival correspondence and oral informants with no indication as to what particular point was derived from or supported by what particular source. Most of the time, unfortunately, the impression that the reader gets is that the French archival sources were crucial; the oral sources, more an embellishment. As indicated above, none of the notes referring to the section on Mahmadou Lamine include references to any direct oral source (however, as Clark correctly points out, some of the French accounts were themselves based on oral informants).

Clark, moreover, is critical of the historical/anthropological writings of such early French scholar-administrators as Maurice Delafosse, Charles Monteil, and Paul Marty, accusing them of "hasty composition and a lack of critical method". But Clark seems to have forgotten that when these men were writing, mostly before 1920, narrative historical writing was in vogue as, for instance, in the case of The French Revolution (1910) [9] by Alphonse Aulard. These French authors simply applied the dominant model to African history in which, indeed, they were pioneers. Even later works, like, for instance, L'Empire peul de Macina by Amadou Hampat Ba and Jacques Daget (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1962), the place of which in the canon of the historiography of independent Africa Clark would surely not contest, is also written in this possibly archaic but eminently readable, entertaining, and informative style.

In one case (and probably others) Clark clearly did not check out the written works of a French authority as well as he should have before making the following remark about Louis Lon Csar Faidherbe, twice governor of Senegal between 1854 and 1865, and the executor of a firm French policy in the area. He writes that "Louis Faidherbe wrote extensively about French 'pacification' in Senegambia though he focuses on the jihad of al-Hajj Umar in the 1850's. He discusses other topics (Senegambian languages, Islam, local and ethnic history) but with considerably less skill and enthusiasm than his own exploits" (p. 11).

Clark here is obviously referring to Faidherbe's last and most well-known (to non-specialists) work, Le Senegal: la France dans l'Afrique Occidentale (Paris: Hachette, 1989) and has been impressed by the two pages (158-159) introducing the section in the book dealing with the French struggle against El Hadj Omar. Here Faidherbe, referring indirectly to El Hadj Omar, praises the civilizing capacity of empires in that they create unity out of chaos and permit "material and intellectual exchanges... to the greater advantage of progress". However, in his empire-building efforts, El Hadj Omar would have "as his adversary a governor of Senegal who would defeat him" the governor in question thus assuming for France the responsibilities and the glory of empire.

The reality is that this book, a hodgepodge of many things, 501 pages long, was published in 1889,[10] the year of Faidherbe's death. Much of its authorship is doubtful. Although it consists of bits and pieces of Faidherbe's private writings on a number of subjects, including observations that he made during his posting to Algeria between 1866 and 1870, much of it consists of several times published and republished military annals and the Governor's reports to the Ministry of the Navy. After 1884 or 1885, Faidherbe himself could probably not write because of the effects of arthritis on his hands, even if he could dictate. He was much helped, as he himself acknowledges (p. 10), by his son-in-law, Captain M. Brosselard-Faidherbe, and two aides-de-camp, Captains Bizard and J. Ancelle. In short, this book and the other publications that it assimilated were as much the work of the French Ministry of the Navy as of Faidherbe and his assistants and was intended to serve both as propaganda in favour of completing the conquest of the French Sudan as a fitting memorial to Faidherbe himself.

The account of the French struggle against the forces of El Hadj Omar (1854-1860) that Faidherbe led takes up seventy-eight pages (pp. 158-236) as compared to thirty-six (121-157) pages devoted to the struggle, also led by Faidherbe, between 1854 and 1858 to "free" the gum trade from control by the Trarza and Brakna Moors and to fix the Senegal River as the frontier between Mauritania and Senegal.

For Clark to claim that Faidherbe "discusses other topics (Senegambian languages, Islam, local and ethnic history)... with... less skill and enthusiasm than his own exploits" suggests that he has not read Le Senegal... and Faidherbe's anthropological and linguistic studies of Algeria and of Senegal very carefully. Had Clark been more discerning, he would have discovered a Faidherbe who was indeed very enthusiastic about the purely scholarly aspects of African studies. Developing an interest in linguistics, Faidherbe theorized (much ahead of his times) that the Basque and the Berber languages might be related.[11] By observing the linguistic similarities of Fulfulde (Poular), Wolof, and Serrer, he came close to the modern understanding of the relationships among the speakers of the West Atlantic African languages group.

Considering that Clark, prior to publishing the book under review, had chalked up a good publication record, seven of his articles, all of which are derived from the original dissertation, being listed in the "Bibliography", this reviewer cannot help but ask himself to what extent the faults that he has identified have resulted from the rigours involved in preparing the manuscript for publication - about which he can only surmise. The disjointed succession of micro-histories indicated above, despite a very ample discussion of sources and historiography and the very full set of notes and bibliography suggest that the University Press of America imposed a drastic shortening of the original thesis - something that economy-minded presses tend to do - a task that proved to be a bit beyond the capacity of or the time available to the author. As any author or editor knows, cutting is difficult, particularly when the subject is complex and the cutting must be done rapidly and under pressure. All too often, one will make the cuts without inserting proper 23.transitions - "bridges" over the gaps.

And this book completely lacks an index, an incredible omission for what purports to be a work of scholarship. And then to make matters worse, the Press accepted tables, maps, and figures that are very crudely constructed: maps that appear to be traced by hand, place names written onto these maps by hand in a less than felicitous script, and charts, like Figures 4 and 5 (pp. 64-65) that appear to have been prepared with an old typewriter. The author's determination to place the captions for figures below rather than above the given figure creates a messy situation in the cases of figures longer than one page, as, for instance, in Figure 1 (pp. 10-11) in which the caption, "Principal Explorers and Directors of Missions in the Upper Senegal Valley", appears half way into what is in fact a list of European explorers in the region.

In light of these infelicities, it seems almost superfluous to complain that the "Notes" have been placed at the back of each chapter rather than at the foot of each page. Given the availability and the ease of use of Adobe Page Maker, Microsoft Excel, CorelDRAW and many other very good word processors and desk top publication softwares, the presentation of this book is hardly excusable. Does the University Press of America not provide editorial assistance and advice to its authors in regard to formatting and presentation? Did the Department of History of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington fail to provide proper secretarial assistance to one of its academic staff members? One takes a look at the tables and maps appearing in the magnum opus of Clark's mentor, Professor David Robinson of Michigan State University, the contrast is saddening. In The Holy War of Umar Tal: The Western Sudan in the mid-Nineteenth Century (1985), tables, charts, and maps are exquisitely designed and printed; the publisher, however is Clarendon Press, Oxford. Need one say more?

So what is really valuable in this very uneven study? Certainly the chapter on sources and historiography and the truly comprehensive Bibliography are first rate. The only criticism that one can make is that Clark has failed to state where he has deposited his recordings of and notes on oral interviews.

Should Andrew Clark wish to redo and expand his book, he has certainly assembled the building blocks for a considerably more substantial study.

NOTES:

[1]. The "Bibliography" and the chapter endnotes reveal an exhaustive consultation of the archival resources, available for the region and the period, housed at the Archives Nationales de France, Section Outre-Mer (Aix-en-Provence), the Archives du Service Historique de l'Arme, Section Ancienne: Serie Outre-Mer (Chteau de Vincennes, Vincennes); the Archives Nationales du Senegal, Ancienne Serie (Dakar), and the Archives Nationales du Mali (Bamako). The "Bibliography" also reveals that Clark consulted ninety-nine oral informants, some of them more than once, at various locations in the region being studied and at other locations in Senegal and Mali. Clark differentiates among the types of oral testimony that can be obtained from different categories of transmitters: formal oral tradition by griots, informal oral traditions that can be recited by such persons as village elders, and finally, personal reminiscences; i.e., the accounts of eyewitness (who for purposes of this study were obviously elderly people).

[2]. The question of the spelling of the names of places and persons in francophone Africa, particularly Senegal and Mali, has always posed a problem for English speakers because the same ethnic groups existing in Senegal and in Gambia have given rise to separate ways of phoneticizing the same sounds. The name, "Diallo" in Senegal is "Jallow" in Gambia. The matter was complicated when the Senegalese government decided in 1971 to adopt a phonetic alphabet for Senegalese names (Journal Officiel de la Republique du Senegal 116, 28 June 1971: 623-628), and Philip Curtin decided to make extensive use of this system of orthography in writing his very influential two-volume study, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1975).

The system, however, never caught on in Senegal for the writing of contemporary names, for which the French spellings continue to be used, and has been used only selectively by most historians, or rejected outright as in the case of this reviewer, for the designation of the names of historical persons and places. As French continues to be the official language of Senegal and Mali and the second official language of Mauritania, this reviewer prefers to use the standard French spellings of names and terms specific to the region under study, including those derived from Arabic (thus "El Hadj Omar" rather than "al-Hajj 'Umar"; Gadiaga" rather than "Gajaaga", "Gumou" rather than "Gemu", and for names of more general interregional importance, what have become standard English spellings, hence "Bambuk" rather than "Bambouck" or "Bambuhu" - a spelling that even Clark, who uses the Senegalese orthography selectively, rejects. Thus one avoids the absurd situation of a name or a term that is spelled one way when it appears in a direct quotation derived from an old French document or to designate a contemporary person or place, and another way when it appears in the author's text to designate a historical personage or place, as on p. 139 where Clark refers in one context to "Njay Sur", a traitant employed by the Maurel and Prom Company, and in another, to the "Wolof founding N'Diaye lineage", "Njay" and "N'Diaye" being in fact the same name and the Maurel and Prom Papers (the Company archives housed in Bordeaux, France) referring sometimes to "N'Diaye-Sour" and sometimes to "Diaye-Sour".

[3]. in Robert W. Clower, et al., Growth Without Development: An Economic Survey of Liberia (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966).

[4]. It is only fair, however, to point out that although Robinson uses the term in the original and unpublished version of his PhD dissertation "Abdul Bokar Kan and the History of Futa Toro, 1853-1891" (New York, Columbia University, 1971) to designate Fouta Toro, he drops it in the published version, Chiefs and Clerics: Abdul Bokar Kan and Futo Toro (1853-1891) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) even though he cites in a footnote, on p. 26, the work by L. Kuper and M. G. Smith, Pluralism in Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1969) from which he originally derived the term.

[5]. Again on a matter of language, Clark should have made clear that in the cases of certain proper names, like that, for instance, of Bokar Saada, or of Abdoul Bokar Kan (a leader, a "grand elector", of Fouta Toro in the 1870's and 1880's), the French archives and most of the historical literature written through the 1960's will refer to Boubakar Saada and Abdoul Boubakar respectively, this because the original French transliterations reflected Wolof usage in which "Bokar" is "Boubakar" and the fact that the French through the 19th century tended to view the Senegalese hinterland through Wolof eyes.

[6]. In fact, Gallieni made a deliberate effort to conduct the campaign against Mahmadou Lamine in a way, called the tache d'huile that would spare the economy as much as possible (see Matthew, Virgil, "Joseph Simon Gallieni (1849-1916", in, Gann, L. H., and Duignan, Peter, African Proconsuls: European Governors in Africa (New York: The Free Press and Stanford: The Hoover Institution, 1978), pp. 85-88.

[7]. Regarding French assistance to escaped slaves, Clark has captured a significant 1855 quotation from the pen of Governor Louis Lon Csar Faidherbe: "Favorisez l'evasion et recueillez comme hommes libres, dans nos etablissements, les esclaves des pays avec lesquels nous serons en guerre. Rendez au contraire scrupuleusement ceux des pays avec lesquelles nous sommes en paix" (from ANS 3B 77, pice 9, Faidherbe to the Commandant of Bakel, 3 October 1855, in note 30, p. 129) - all the more interesting in that at the end of his life, Faidherbe dedicated his Le Senegal: la France dans l'Afrique Occidentale (Paris: Hachette, 1889) to the great French emancipator, Victor Schoelcher.

[8]. See, Suret-Canale, Jean, L'Afrique Noire: l're coloniale (1900-1945 (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1964), pp. 85, who quotes, Bouche, Denise, "Les Villages de liberte en A. O. F." Bulletin de l'Institut Francais d'Afrique Noire, Serie B 3-4 (1949): 491-550; (1950): 135-215. Clark himself has based much of his discussion on Bouche's published doctorat d'etat thesis, Les Villages de liberte en Afrique noire francaise, 1887-1910 (The Hague: Mouton, 1968)

[9]. first published as Histoire politique de la revolution francaise (Paris: Armand Colin, 1901).

[10]. For a thorough discussion of the origins of this book and in general of the problems that will be faced by anybody wishing to write a biography of General Faidherbe, see the following: Barrows, Leland Conley, "L'Oeuvre, la carriere du general Faidherbe et les debuts de l'Afrique Noire Francaise: une analyse critique contemporaine" Le Mois en Afrique: Etudes politiques, economiques, et sociologiques africaines 235-236 (August-September, 1985): 121-123, n. 5.

[11]. The suggestion is found in several pages of notes found in the Og-Lamoitier Papers, the small collection of what remains of Faidherbe's private papers as well as in Collection complete des inscriptions numidiques (lybiques) avec des apercus ethnographiques sur les Numides par le general Faidherbe (Lille: L. Danel, 1870). On the other hand, Faidherbe seems to deny the idea in a study that he wrote with the anthropologist, P. Topinard, Instructions sur L'Anthropologie de l'Algerie (Paris: Typographie A. Hennuyer, 1874), p. 4.

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Citation: Leland Barrows. Review of Clark, Andrew F., From Frontier to Backwater: Economy and Society in the Upper Senegal Valley (West Africa), 1850-1920. H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. September, 2000.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4562

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