The Making of a Working Class in Colonial Mauritania
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‘That man can work, he must have liberty…’:1 Mauritanian haratine and the Colonial Labour Discourse A new social hierarchy, founded uniquely on wealth, is being established [here]. Politically, it is difficult to predict the consequences of this evolution which consecrates the importance of work and which destroys the ancient seigneurs….Practically, this evolution has developed on the one hand poverty, materializing … in a number of prostitutes and poor…, on the other, [it has] created a new class: ‘the working class’.2 [1943] People worked both in pre-colonial and colonial Mauritania. If we are to believe French colonial records, what was distinctive about ‘colonial’ work and those who engaged in it was the emergence of a particular “class”, autonomous in its identity and independent of those who employed it – E.P Thompson’s proverbial ‘working class’.3 However, in our post-modern, post-colonial era, this avowedly Marxist concept has much less currency than it did a generation ago. And analysis of records – texts – of any kind occupies itself more with concerns of ‘discourse’, narrative ‘tropes’, deconstruction and contextual ‘rubric’ than of descriptive or ‘factual’ information. So clearly, to seek ‘a working class in the making’ in the colonial records is not only passé according to contemporary scholarship, it is impossible. No longer can one look to text for truth. The problem is those people who worked in pre-colonial and colonial Mauritania, still ‘work’ in post-colonial Mauritania – workers (and ‘working people) remain critical to contemporary Mauritania’s reality. And from my understanding of Mauritanian social 1 Marius Moutet, press conference, 1937. The quotation continues “…that is, that he can apply himself to his own cultivation…It is also necessary to free the worker from certain corvees [forced labour recruitment]”. Cited (and extensively footnoted) in Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: the labor question in French and British Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.74. 2 Archives, Atar (RIM – hereafter AATAR), Rapport politique annual, ‘Notes’, 1943. 3 Edward P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Penquin Books Ltd., 1968; first pub. Victor Gollancz, 1963). history to date, the ‘identity’ of those who work is central to explaining how other ‘groups’ (or classes) see themselves.4 Therefore, the claim that colonialism ‘created’ a working class in Mauritania deserves exploration. Perhaps there is still something to be drawn from Thompson’s perceptions of process that has relevance for a post-colonial questioning of reality. In Search of a Working Class At first glance, there would seem to be little question about who constituted this new ‘group’ of workers. French colonial rule of Mauritania resulted in rapidly expanding agriculture (flood-fed cultivation and irrigated oasis agriculture ), pastoralism (some transport animals but mostly meat-supplying sheep and cattle) and commerce (largely centered on the flourishing colony of Senegal, involving exports of foodstuffs and imports of French manufactured goods like cloth). Put another way, it necessitated that more work be accomplished. It also introduced a series of laws to eliminate slavery and the slave trade, and promoted French schooling. The combined effects of this ‘colonialism’ was a tendency on the part of Mauritanians to free slaves and to send the children of slaves and newly-freed slaves ( haratine), to school. Muslim masters, reluctant to enter the secular world of French work or to have their children do so, thereby ‘made’ a class of French speaking, wage-earning, haratine labourers that was sure to reproduce itself. This, then, was the ‘new working class’ claimed by French 4 E Ann McDougall, “Topsy-Turvy World: slaves and freed slaves in the Mauritanian Adrar, 1910-1950”, in R Roberts and S Miers, The Ending of Slavery in Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 362-88; Meskerem Brhane, “Narratives of the Pst, Politics of the Present: identity, subordination and the haratines of Mauritania”2 Vols., (PhD, Dept. Political Science, University of Chicago, 1997); Urs Peter Ruf, Ending Slavery. Hierarchy, Dependency and Gender in Central Mauritania (Bieflefeld Transcript Verlag, 1999 – from Dissertation, Bielefeld, 1998); E Ann McDougall, Neskerem Brhane and Urs Peter RUf, “Legacies of Slavery, Promises of Democracy: Mauritania in the 21st Century” in Malinda S. Smith(Ed), Globalizing Africa (Africa World Press, 2003), 67-88. administrators, as the direct product of their policies. But is the story so simple? If we return to the gist of Thompson’s ‘English working class’, he asserted that it was an historical phenomenon and very much a ‘cultural’ affair. Most famously he asserted that it ‘made itself’ as much as it ‘was made’: “[it] owes as much to agency as to conditioning … The working class was present at its own making”.5 The narrative description I provided above speaks only to what Thompson would term “the productive relations into which men are born – or enter involuntarily”; it does not address how these “experiences were handled in cultural terms”. Most problematic, however, is the fact that all agency is attributed to the actions of the French colonizers and the Mauritanian masters. To conclude with Thompson’s still seminal words, “class is defined by men as they live their own lives”. One element missing from our understanding of the Mauritanian phenomenon then, is the agency and the ‘lived experience’ of the haratine themselves.6 The narrative also raises a second issue. In an article on the ending of slavery in Mauritania some years ago, I identified the process of freeing male slaves as being key to understanding colonial social and economic change. I posed the unanswered question ‘why, under what circumstances, would a master decide to free a male slave – as opposed to not freeing him’.7 While I thought I knew why masters were not freeing female 5 Thompson, English Working Class, p.9. 6 Ibid., pp.10,11. In “Topsy-Turvy World”, I argued this in slightly different terms: that because the colonial economy was primarily about ‘work’ and that “all work was customarily performed by servile groups, colonial labour requirements had a social impact on Mauritanians which far outweighed its broader economic significance. The categories ‘master’, ‘slave’, and ‘hartani’ remained unchanged, but the experience of being a master, a slave or a hartani did not” (p. 365). I pick up this last point in the second half of this paper. 7 McDougall, “Topsy-Turvy World”, p.365, Ft.4 slaves8, was my logic that male slaves were being liberated specifically to form a wage- labour working force necessarily the logic of Mauritanian masters? Were masters consciously creating a class of workers?9 Finally, a third question, one belonging more properly to recent work on language and discourse than to Thompson’s social history analysis, namely: to whose ‘discourse’ did the concept of ‘working class’ actually belong? Was it something acknowledged by haratine themselves? Thompson’s ‘class consciousness’, that is how experience “embodied in traditions, value systems, ideas and traditional forms”10-- was it ever ‘bought into’ by masters or slaves? When the French spoke of la class ouvriere, it was often in the context of discussions of slavery – or more precisely, the ending of slavery. The terms ‘slave’ and ‘slavery’ were constantly evolving during the colonial period. Often, both concepts were subsumed to discussions of ‘respecting local customs’ – here meaning Islam and the perceived role of slavery and slaves within this religion11. But as has been demonstrated elsewhere, slavery emerged as a point of intersection between the overtly political agenda of the French in Paris, the colonial administrators on the ground, and the local Mauritanian elites. Each used the volatile and politically sensitive subject for their own purposes. Often issues ostensibly about ‘slaves’ or ‘slavery’ were not really 8 Ibid., p. 365 for general terms; stories of masters resisting freeing female slaves, pp.370-2. 376,7.Masters made it quite clear that female slaves were the source of children and hence, future slaves. I will return to this in the final section of the paper. 9 In this sense, Thompson would probably reject the question, arguing that no one class can create another, that classes are created through process. Nor do I believe that he would consider one ‘class’ recognizing the existence of another necessarily pertinent. That said, he was not writing of slaves in a colonial society. 10 Thompson, English Working Class, p.10. 11 Both the term and concept will be discussed further, below. about the institution or its victims at all12. Is it also possible that what we think we know about the creation of a haratine ‘working class’ and the process underlying that creation fall into that same category of analysis? Was la class ouvriere also more a part of French colonial discourse than Mauritanian experience? Most of what we have seen of both masters and slaves, we have seen through the lens of colonial administrators, through words intended primarily for superiors located in Dakar and Paris13. Moreover, the French were not alone in the world of colonialism and the audience for edited versions of local reports was, from at least the mid-1920s, an international one. With the intervention of the League of Nations, the International Labour Organization and finally, the United Nations into labour issues, global templates were created to make sense of systems of labour and categories of labourers; ‘language’ shoehorned varied and specific experiences into a largely universal discourse.14 Where in this larger discussion should we situate the haratine workers of Mauritania? 12 See for example my study of the infamous Dahomean exile, Louis Hundanrin: “Setting the story straight: Louis Hunkanrin and un forfait colonial, History in Africa 16 (1989):285-310. 13 While “Topsy-Turvy World” used some oral evidence, and “Legacies of Slavery” drew on contemporary interviews, most of the colonial analysis relies heavily on archival records.