Révolution et sorcellerie: une ethnologue au Burkina Faso

Abstract

of Sansanding in return for his military and diplomatic services rendered in the conquest of the Western Sudan under Louis Archinard, who used Sèye to implement a protectorate. Chapter 3 shows how Sèye’s challenges of governance between 1891 and 1895 revealed indirect rule to be a costly and violent enterprise. Chapter 4 is a pivotal one in which broader imperial developments between 1895 and 1899, which saw a republican attack on military power in the French empire, conditioned Sèye’s turn toward a coercive patriarchal domination indexed by a growing entourage of women, children and slaves. Chapter 5 examines the broad crisis in 1898 and 1899 that saw the end of military rule in the colony as well as the circulation of lurid allegations about the faama worthy of the pen of a playwright. Chapter 6 returns to the period during which the investigation into Sèye’s alleged malfeasance deepens and the trial that never was produces the legal quandary at the heart of the book. A series of increasingly smaller investigations and bureaucratic maneuverings of Sèye’s allies effectively shield the colonial king in what was perhaps his biggest bargain of collaboration. Here, what had appeared to be a biography reveals itself to be a paradigmatic social history through legal cases. The meticulously detailed depositions on the Mademba affair collected by colonial officials show how the lives of hundreds of ordinary people in Sansanding were utterly transformed by the power wielded by a cunning, and perhaps sadistic, bureaucrat. Chapter 7 covers Mademba’s “redemption” through his careful exploitation of the promise of cotton production. Finally, Chapter 8 traces Sèye’s successful re-branding through a public relations campaign and the discourse of economic development. The source base is broad and effectively marshalled. Roberts deploys a diversity of official and personal correspondence from archives in Mali, Senegal and France as well as oral histories. He does not shy away from quarrels among the sources. Instead, he finds every opportunity to highlight how the differences among the reports offer more historical insight. He also modestly minds the gap between what he is certain about and what cannot be known about this particular past. To return to the paradox that the story of a changing colonialism might be told through a single person – indeed, a single case – it is worth noting Roberts’ own reluctance to write through a biographical frame. He did not want to write a history made by a hero, as he believes that history is made by ordinary people who struggle for justice and equity (309). All the better, as Sèye comes off as a paranoid villain with not-too-implicit comparisons to Donald Trump (xi). But Roberts writes a biography all the same. This reviewer wonders whether, in the context of recent African historiography, this might suggest a definitive turn toward the biographical, and if so, what that might mean for the field.