0.1. ACADEMIC BACKGROUND AND CREDENTIALS

THE PAGES ON AFRICA COME FROM MY DOCTORAL THESIS FOR COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, 1975. 

"Growth and Violence in the Precolonial Sudanic Belt began with economic data in explorers' accounts of  West and Central Africa. I then consulted the archives of Paris, Abidjan, Dakar, Bamako, Ouagadougou and Accra, conducted interviews in those towns and in Segu (Mali) and did three months of field work in Djimini,  in the northeastern Ivory Coast, in 1973.

It was published as Croissance économique et violence dans la zone soudanienne in a collection of articles "Guerres de lignages et guerres d'état en Afrique" ("Wars of Lineage and Wars of State in Africa").* 

*Ed. by Jean Bazin and Emmanuel Terray, Paris, Éditions des Archives, 1982, pp. 423-500, translated by Emmanuel Terray. Both were Directors of Studies at the EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). Bazin became Director. Terray succeeded him.

The article, the last and longest, received a glowing review in a Canadian publication. But the book was ignored in France.

I had married a Frenchman and lived in Paris. University doors stayed closed. Terray wrote to the French consul in Washington when I needed his support for a guide's card...

In spite of the quality of her work, Catherine Aubin could not find a place in the French university system. That will not surprise those that know how deeply that system turns inward and is reserved to an "elite," pre-selected by the important schools ("Ecoles Normales Supérieurs") and administrative competition (the "Agrégation"). Even if Catherine Aubin had published her thesis in the United States, even if she had published numerous articles — beyond her contribution to the collective work Guerres de lignages et Guerres d'Etat en Afrique ) that I published with Jean Bazin in 1982 — the situation would not have changed and she would not have been able to obtain a university position in France; her case is far from unique: no matter what her qualities and value of her work — and they are considerable — it is practically impossible for a foreign man, and perhaps even more for a foreign woman, to integrate the French university network of which the access is, de facto, solidly locked off from the start.  

--Emmanuel Terray,  Director of the EHESS, January 8, 1991

So I became a Paris tour guide. 

That led me to French history

 and to the comparisons that follow.

     The Sheik of Bornu in Clapperton's narrative, 1824  / Louis XIV by M. Leloir in G. Toudouze, Le Roy Soleil, 1931

Railings emphasize and isolate kings in 19th-century Northern Nigeria and 17th-century France.

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Next:

Why choose Africa?  

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