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, appeared in this French publication of 1982.
Wars of Lineage and Wars of State in Africa, Éditions des Archives, Paris, 1982
The publication's final article, 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, bringing societies that made establishing colonial economies economies. That explains why the colonialists' first act their military hold secure was to free the slaves (toward 1907). Eliminating the labor forces destroyed those societies within weeks. Imposing colonial economies followed.
The thesis's basic source was the economic data in explorers' accounts, collected over the entire sub-Sarahan savannah from the earliest records to slave emancipation. Documents rom the archives of Paris, Abidjan, Dakar, Bamako, Ouagadougou and Accra supplemented those findings. Interviews there and in Ségou (Mali) an in Djimini, in the northeastern Ivory Coast, brought to light conflicts that were almost entirely absent from European accounts.
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, changed 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 publication was ignored in France.
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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.
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
Guiding led to French history and the comparisons that follow.
Here is that study,
the French sequel added.
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