Dakar

Humanities

Recently, the Senegalese people have learned to speak more openly of their history. But, as late as the 1980s—the years of my youth and early schooling—the wounds of colonialism were still fresh. I contend that slavery had been so powerful a blow to the Senegalese ethos that we—my family, friends, and schoolmates—did not speak about it. The collective trauma and shame of slavery was apparently so powerful that we sought to repress it, keeping it hidden from ourselves. We were surrounded by its evidence, but chose not to see it. Such was my childhood experience. As an adult, I understand that repression never heals wounds. The trauma remains as a haunting presence. But one can discover its “living presence,” should one choose to look. Just 5.2 km off the west African coast of Senegal lies Gorée Island, where millions of Africans were held captive while awaiting transport into slavery. Much of the four-century history of the African slave trade passed through Senegal, where I grew up....

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26:2

C o m p a r a t i v e S t u d i e s o f S o u t h A s i a , A f r i c a a n d t h e M i d d l e E a s t V o l . 2 6 , N o . 2 , 2 0 0 6 d o i 1 0 .1 2 1 5 / 1 0 8 9 2 0 1 x -2 0 0 6 -0 0 2 © 2 0 0 6 b y D u k e U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s 1 7 8

Name: Christopher Brown Student Number: 1033825 Module: HIST 2005 Lecturer: Doctor Jappie Subject: Southern Africa and Maritime Empire: Comparing Cape Town and Delagoa Bay, 17th-18th Centuries.

The Graduate History Review (formerly Preteritus), 2009

Founded in Senegal in 1857, the French West African capital of Dakar visually projected France's assimilationist vision of colonial power. This paper addresses the current scholarship on French African urban development by offering an introductory analysis of the interaction and convergence of assimilation and association in Dakar before 1914. It questions the impact this interplay had on the French understanding of assimilation as a category of colonial power. The impact of both cultural theories on African city-dwellers is also examined to highlight how this population responded to and transformed French colonial planning ideology.

Archaeology and Memory, 2011

This chapter examines how slavery was imprinted on material culture and settlement at Gorée Island. It evaluates the changing patterns of settlement, access to materials, and emerging novel tastes to gain insights into everyday life and cultural interactions on the island. By the eighteenth century, Gorée grew rapidly as an urban settlement with a heterogeneous population including free and enslaved Africans as well as different European identities. Interaction between these different identities was punctuated with intense negotiations resulting in the emergence of a truly transnational community. While these significant changes were noted in the settlement pattern and material culture recovered, the issue of slavery — critical to most oral and documentary narratives about the island — remains relatively opaque in the archaeological record. Despite this, the chapter attempts to tease out from available documentary and archaeological evidence some illumination on interaction between ...

This article proposes a new periodization of European colonial rule on the African Red Sea Littoral (ARSL). The ARSL is the arid and semi-arid region between the Red Sea and the Sudanese Nile and the Ethiopian/Eritrean highlands. The region is now divided between Sudan, Eritrea and Djibouti. However, historically the ARSL was claimed by numerous pastoralist tribes and clans, including the Hadendowa, Bisharin, Amarar, Beni Amer, Habab and Afar. This article demonstrates that the process of rendering these pastoralists into British, French or Italian colonial subjects – i.e., of establishing European colonial rule – took decades. Though colonial officials laid their claims to the region at the end of the nineteenth century, it was not until the 1920s and 1930s that they began to exert meaningful forms of colonial control over these pastoralist communities. This article argues that this period of early colonial rule should be treated as differently from the period of high colonial rule that follows. During the early period, the balance of power on the ground had not yet tipped in the favor of colonial officials. Though these officials were part of large imperial networks, they were not able to effectively mobilize these networks to get access to the resources they needed to establish effective administrations. At the same time, these officials did not command local resources, which, generally, remained in the hands of the local communities that continued to mobilize them to their advantage. Progressively, these communities lost access to the resources that allowed them to hold the colonial state at bay. In the case of the ARSL, this loss was only partially the result of actions taken by the emerging colonial state. Rather, the leading cause was the introduction of rinderpest, a disease that kills up to 90 percent of infected cattle in virgin herds. The initial epizootic impoverishment of the region. Over time, poverty robbed them of their ability to protect themselves from adverse environmental conditions, such as droughts. During the first third of the twentieth century, pastoralists were plagued by repeated famines that left them with no choice but to submit to the colonial state and gain access to the limited colonial food aid programs. This submission marks the end of early European colonial rule.

Scientia Militaria - South African Journal of Military Studies, 2012

The Cape Eastern Frontier of South Africa offers a fascinating insight into British military strategy as well as colonial development. The Eastern Frontier was for over 100 years a very turbulent frontier. It was the area where the four main population groups (the Dutch, the British, the Xhosa and the Khoikhoi) met, and in many respects, key decisions taken on this frontier were seminal in the shaping of South Africa. This article seeks to analyse this frontier in a spatial manner, to analyse how British settlement patterns on the ground were influenced by strategy and policy. The time frame of the study reflects the truly imperial colonial era, from the second British occupation of the Cape colony in 1806 until representative selfgovernance of the Cape colony in 1872.

Dutch and Portuguese in Western Africa, 2011