L’objectif de cet article est d’éclairer certaines pistes de réflexion autour des pratiques et dynamiques de la violence de l’armée coloniale française dans l’empire, avec un regard particulier sur le continent africain entre 1830 et... more
L’objectif de cet article est d’éclairer certaines pistes de réflexion autour des pratiques et dynamiques de la violence de l’armée coloniale française dans l’empire, avec un regard particulier sur le continent africain entre 1830 et 1914. À partir des trois concepts suivants , soit le « commandement » d’Achille Mbembe, la « culture organisationnelle militaire » de Isabel Hull et le « maintien de l’ordre » tel que compris par Patrick Dramé, cet article propose d’explorer comment l’usage de la violence, ordinaire et extrême, devient l’un des modus operandi de l’armée afin de s’imposer sur le territoire et d’y maintenir la paix. La relation qui s’établit entre le conquérant, dans notre cas l’officier, et les populations colonisés se fonde alors sur des logiques de « commandement » qui s’institutionnalise dans la culture organisationnelle de l’armée coloniale en Afrique.
A highly political sequence of events took place at the end of World War I in the Sanwi Kingdom, an Ivorian society settled at the border with the Gold Coast. In 1917, the Sanwi population’s demands concerning reduction of forced labour... more
A highly political sequence of events took place at the end of World War I in the Sanwi Kingdom, an Ivorian society settled at the border with the Gold Coast. In 1917, the Sanwi population’s demands concerning reduction of forced labour and taxes, as well as local sovereignty, were officially rejected by the French colonial administration. Having exhausted their legal pleas and administrative recourses, massive exile into adjacent regions of the British ruled Gold Coast was resorted to as a new stage in their struggle. Twenty thousand people left, for two years.
The magnitude of this attempt, the variety of means employed by the actors and the specific stakes of this movement were never fully accounted for by historians.
Yet, it shows how "on the ground" relations of power in colonial situations were versatile and multi-layered constructions. This exile was designed at the crossroad of pre-colonial networks of African families and commerce but operating within a trans-imperial regional space invested with heavy political stakes. This chapter seeks to illuminate how African actors were able to create resistance strategies by diverting both imperial material and local devices. Exile shows itself, beyond colonial or “indigenous” categories, as an innovative political endeavour.
