THE PAGES ON AFRICA COME FROM MY DOCTORAL THESIS FOR NEW YORK'S COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN 1975
Its summary, Growth and Violence in the Precolonial Sudanic Belt, was published in this work in 1982.
Wars of Lineage and Wars of State in Africa, Éditions des Archives, Paris, 1982
Pp. 423-500
I maintained that far from being "in decline" due to the Atlantic slave trade's devastations as was widely believed, the sub-Saharan savannah underwent increasingly dynamic growth. Political, social and religious transformations followed. These came to an end when the colonial conquerors freed slave labor to establish their own economies.
The thesis's basic source was the economic data in explorers' accounts. Also useful were documents rom the archives of Paris, Abidjan, Dakar, Bamako, Ouagadougou and Accra, and interviews from those towns and in Ségou (Mali). The research involved as well three months of field work in Djimini, in the northeastern Ivory Coast, in 1973.
That study was published in a collection edited by Jean Bazin and Emmanuel Terray), successive directors of the l'EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) in Paris.
The article, the last and longest, upset the way in which African history is understood. It received an enthusiastic review in a French-Canadian publication but though its editors were some of Paris's leading Africanists, the book was ignored in France.
A well-known professor at my dissertation defense (Stuart Bruchey) had said with a smile that I was a "civilized Marxist" and proposed that Columbia publish the study.
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But I had married a Frenchman, had a small child, lived in Paris and had no way of returning to the States. Not knowing that the book would be ignored and thinking that eventually French university doors would open, instead of revising my thesis and sending it to Columbia, I knocked on doors that stayed closed.
So I became a tour guide. When I needed the support of the French consul in Washington to obtain a guide's card, Terray wrote...
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
Being a tour guide led to French history and 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.
Here is that study,
the French sequel added.
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