SLAVE LIBERATION AND COLONIAL ECONOMIES

THE NEW PRODUCERS' DYNAMISM 
MAKES ESTABLISHING COLONIAL ECONOMIES IMPOSSIBLE

Their opposition is implacable
and European wares cannot compete 

• Textiles, motor of commerce, 

are unsaleable:
Why substitute flimsy manufactured cloth

° For this... 

Haussa weaving 

Cloths of hand-woven strips from the excellent cotton last a lifetime, and look spectacular on dark skins. (In fact, the colonial powers never do take over the African market, which goes to the Dutch with the dramatic prints that soldiers in Indonesia bring home).

° ...or this?

                                                                                                                             Internet

Embroidery, a royal craft

• So as soon as their military control is assured 

the conquerors free the slaves,
which provokes exodus and collapse.  

A melancholy report describes them: 

The 40-page narrative by the local administrator begins with the Ivory Coast governor announcing emancipation in two northern centers with large slave populations. He travels from the coast during the rainy season, which shows that the order comes from Paris.

At first slaves do not believe that they are free, but when a few slip away and nothing happens, the exodus snowballs. Almost all the captives leave, some to villages that often no longer exist, others with no idea where to go.

The administrator concludes by doubting that their lives will be better, and by sadly observing the immediate disintegration of societies that had flourished. 

-- Rapport du Capitaine Schiffer, October 1907, Dabakala archives

• The producers must work the fields themselves -- 

their descendants still do.

In all but the most remote of the conquered regions,
that change is complete by about 1907.

Then colonial economies can be imposed. 

End of this chapter.

*     *     *

Next chapter,
IV, 5.
Another narrative