Children on the Move in Africa: Past and Present Experiences of Migration 1847011381, 9781847011381

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Cover photograph: Young girl at work carrying washing to the fountain, Rufisque, Senegal, 2012 (© Babacar Traoré aka Doli)

JAMES CURREY an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com www.jamescurrey.com

ISBN 978-1-84701-138-1

9 781847 011381

Children on the Move in Africa

Elodie Razy is Associate Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Liege (FaSS). She is the co-founder and co-editor of the online journal AnthropoChildren: Ethnographic Perspectives in Children & Childhood. Marie Rodet is a Senior Lecturer in African History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London).

PAST & PRESENT EXPERIENCES OF MIGRATION

The widespread movement of children across African borders and beyond has been a defining characteristic of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries, yet we know too little about these children’s migratory trajectories and the opportunities or constraints that propel them to leave home. Drawing on the personal experiences of African children over more than a century, this book analyses the diversity and complexity of their experiences of mobility and how this shapes their identities. The authors examine patterns of fosterage and child circulation; the gendered aspects of child migratory trajectories and strategies; the role of education, child labour and conceptions of place and ‘home’. Comparing different methodological and theoretical approaches and setting the case studies – from Ghana, Madagascar, Mali, Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, Sudan, Togo and Zambia – within the broader context of family migration, transnational families, colonial and postcolonial migration politics, religious encounter and globalization in Africa, this book provides a muchneeded examination of this contentious and critical issue.

Edited by RAZY & RODET

‘a strongly original perspective on histories of childhood and migration in Africa, and more contemporary developments in child labour and educational migration. ... a good contribution to the fields of migration histories, African childhoods, and colonial and early postcolonial social history.’ – Dr Stacey Hynd, Senior Lecturer in African History and Director of Postgraduate Research, History, University of Exeter

Edited by Elodie Razy & Marie Rodet

Children on the Move in Africa

PAST & PRESENT EXPERIENCES OF MIGRATION

Children on the Move in Africa Past & Present Experiences of Migration

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Children on the Move in Africa Past & Present Experiences of Migration Edited by

Elodie Razy & Marie Rodet

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James Currey an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) www.jamescurrey.com and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue Rochester, NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com © Contributors 2016 First published 2016 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available on request ISBN 978-1-84701-138-1 James Currey (Cloth) This publication is printed on acid-free paper Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of the book.

Typeset in 11/12 Photina MT by Avocet Typeset, Somerton, Somerset

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Contents

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Preface by Benjamin N. Lawrance Acknowledgements Introduction  Child Migration in Africa: Key Issues & New Perspectives Marie Rodet & Elodie Razy

Part I

CHILD MIGRANTS IN AFRICA: BEYOND THE DILEMMA OF VULNERABILITY v. AGENCY

vii viii xi xiii

1

30

1

‘An Ardent Desire to be Useful’ Senegalese Students, Religious Sisters & Migration for Schooling in France, 1824–1842 Kelly Duke Bryant

2

Girl Pawns, Brides & Slaves Child Trafficking in Southeastern Nigeria, 1920s Robin P. Chapdelaine

31

51

Part II

BEING A CHILD & BECOMING A GENDERED ADULT: THE CHALLENGES OF MIGRATIONS IN CHILDHOOD 67

3

‘Bringing a Girl From the Village’ Gender, Child Migration & Domestic Service in Post-colonial Zambia Sacha Hepburn

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vi Contents

4

‘I Will Never Become a Crocodile but I am Happy if I Eat Enough’ A Psychological Analysis of Child Fosterage & Resilience in Contemporary Mali Paola Porcelli

5

Working as a ‘Boy’ Labour, Age & Masculinities in Togo, c. 1975–2005 Marco Gardini

Part III

 MOBILITY, IMAGINATION & MAKING NATIONS



85

104

123

6

Childhood, Space & Memory Migrations of the Métis in Madagascar’s Central Highlands (Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries) Violaine Tisseau

125

7

‘We Were Mixed with All Types’  Educational Migration in the Northern Territories of Colonial Ghana Lacy S. Ferrell

141

8

India–South Africa Mobilities in the First Half of the Twentieth Century  Minors, Immigration Encounters in Cape Town & Becoming South African Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie

159

9

Education, Migration & Nationalism  Mapping the School Days of the First Generation of Southern Sudanese Nationalist Leaders, c. 1948–1972 Hannah Whittaker with Harjyot Hayer

175

10

Child Narration as a Device for Negotiating Space & Identity Formation in Recent Nigerian Migrant Fiction Oluwole Coker

191

Bibliography Index

205 231

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Illustrations

Figures 1 Drawing by an unschooled boy, age 8 2 Drawing of a black car by Deaha, age 9 or 10

154 154

Maps 1 Europe and West Africa Inset. Ghana, Togo and Nigeria 2 East, Central and South Africa and the Indian Ocean World Inset 1. Zambia Inset 2. Sudan and South Sudan

26 27 28 29 29

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of the book.

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Notes on Contributors

Kelly Duke Bryant is an Associate Professor at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, USA, where she teaches African history. Her published work, which includes a monograph and several articles, has mostly focused on the history of education in colonial Senegal. She has also written about the francophone African diaspora during the nineteenth century. Her new research project examines the history of labour migration and other travel between French West Africa and Western Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Robin P. Chapdelaine is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and International Studies at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, USA. Trained as an African historian, her research focuses on child trafficking in Southeastern Nigeria during the colonial era. She is interested in the use of juvenile servile labour as it relates to child pawning, slavery and marriage practices. Her work is also informed by the history of League of Nations and the subsequent increase in attention paid to the livelihoods of women and children in Africa. Oluwole Coker holds a PhD in English specializing in African Fiction from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He is a Lecturer at the English Department, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria where his teaching and research interests span post-colonial African fiction, cultural and interdisciplinary studies. A 2014/2015 CODESRIA Child and Youth Institute Laureate, Oluwole is also a 2014 ACLS/AHP Postdoctoral Award Fellow. Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie is a Senior Professor in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape where she is also the Deputy Dean of Research in the Arts faculty. She has expert knowledge on forced removals and land restitution in Cape Town and has written specifically on marginalized people such as the Black River community. She is also recognized as a leading scholar in the field of India– South Africa connected histories. She is currently writing a book about Indians in Cape Town. Her most recent publications deal with immigration paper regimes.

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Notes on Contributors

ix

Lacy S. Ferrell is Assistant Professor of History at Central Washington University. She completed her dissertation ‘Fighting for the Future: A History of Education in Colonial Ghana, c. 1900–1940’ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. Her research interests include education, schooling, childhood and gender in colonial Ghana. Marco Gardini is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Milano-Bicocca where he is collaborating in the research project SWAB (Shadows of Slavery in West Africa and Beyond, ERC-GRANT 313737). His research interests include access to land, forms of labour exploitation in rural and urban contexts and witchcraft accusations. Sacha Hepburn is currently completing her doctoral research in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. Her primary research interests are the history of gender, age and labour in Africa. Her doctoral research explores the history of domestic service in post-colonial Zambia. She has completed degrees at the Universities of Warwick and Manchester. Benjamin N. Lawrance is the Hon. Barber B. Conable, Jr. Endowed Chair in International Studies and Professor of History and Anthropology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His research interests include comparative and contemporary slavery, human trafficking, cuisine and globalization, human rights, refugee issues and asylum policies. Among his ten books are Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling (Yale 2014), and Adjudicating Refugee and Asylum Status: The Role of Witness, Expertise, and Testimony (Cambridge 2015), with Galya Ruffer. Lawrance consults on contemporary West Africa issues and has served as expert witness in three hundred asylum claims. Paola Porcelli is a clinical psychologist and a researcher specialized in cross-cultural issues. After receiving her PhD at the University of Paris 8 in 2010, she had the opportunity to complete her academic training through a post-doctoral fellowship at the Resilience Research Centre, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. She is interested in the connections between child mobility and resilience and she aims at developing culturally sensitive and strength-based approaches within culturally diverse communities. She currently works as a researcher at IWK Health Centre, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Elodie Razy is Associate Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Liège (Faculty of Social Sciences). She is the co-founder and co-editor of the online journal AnthropoChildren: Ethnographic Perspectives in Children & Childhood. Her research and teaching

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Notes on Contributors

interests include the anthropology of children and childhood and the anthropology of migration. She has extensively published on those subjects. Marie Rodet is a Senior Lecturer in African History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her principal research interests lie in the field of migration history, gender studies and the history of slavery in West Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has written a number of articles on migration and post-slavery in Mali. She is currently working on her second monograph on slave resistance in Kayes, Mali. Violaine Tisseau completed her PhD in African History in 2011, entitled: ‘Le pain et le riz: Métis et métissage entre Européens et Malgaches, dans les Hautes Terres centrales de Madagascar, 19e-20e siècles’ (Paris 7 University – CESSMA) (to be published by Karthala in 2015). She is affiliated to the Institut des Mondes Africains (IMAf) in Paris. In her PhD dissertation, she studied the trajectories of some métis families in central Highland Madagascar during colonization, highlighting the importance of their Malagasy entourage in their lives. She is now studying domestic servants in Madagascar. Hannah Whittaker is a Lecturer in History at Brunel University. She has written a number of articles on insurgency and counterinsurgency in North East Africa. Her on-going research deals with ‘borderlands’ generally, and the Kenya–Somalia border specifically.

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Preface by Benjamin N. Lawrance

In this provocative and timely collection the contributors direct our attention to the difficulties encountered when categorizing, analysing and interpreting African children’s movements. How do we find child migrants? Where do we look for them? What does it mean to be a child migrant? How do we weigh vulnerability against agency? How do we conceptualize the migratory experience of the (un)accompanied minor? How is an African migrant child’s legal subjectivity constituted before moving from the origin country or region? And how is it reconfigured when s/he arrives in migrant-receiving countries? Drawing on the rich and deeply personal experiences of African children spanning more than a century to the present day, Children on the Move in Africa explores how national and supra-national contexts shape and reshape the subjectivity of child migrants in subtle ways, with important implications for understanding the historical processes of identity formation and contemporary child protection regimes and practices. The movement of African peoples across African borders is a defining feature of the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century experience. Today, advocates for greater mobility trumpet the upsurge as a logical outcome of increasing contemporary globalization; it operates as another story heralding the triumph of freedom in a neo-liberal epoch. But embedded in these dramatic changes are the lived experiences of thousands and millions of African children, many of whom relocate unaccompanied by parents or kin. Focusing on the complex experiences of children in contexts as diverse as forced migration, voluntary movement seeking wage-labour, education and various forms of bondage, slavery and trafficking – and drawing on documentation in colonial archives, personal letters, oral testimonies, published fiction, as well as in post-independence government and non-governmental agency reports – this anthology documents the shifting legal conceptualizations of African child migration from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. The way legal regimes afford greater or lesser protections to children – in various contexts as diverse as imperial France, colonial Ghana or contemporary Nigeria – is deeply tied to the framing language describing the processes and practices of migration. The phrase ‘child migrant’ is, in many popular connotations or

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Preface by Benjamin N. Lawrance

deployments, a conundrum, maybe even an oxymoron. On the one hand, the word ‘child’ infers minority and thus a diminished capacity or complete incapacity to convey consent. Children are almost always wards, guardians and, until the recent present, often even the property of adults. The migrant child is embedded with notions of liberty, mobility and choice; but very notion of child freedom is deeply contested. On the other hand, the word ‘migrant’ implies a voluntary process and an experience to which one subjects oneself by choice. Whereas many contexts of such decision making may appear to offer little volition or discretion (sexual assault, conflict, natural disaster all come to mind), from a narrowly physical standpoint migration constitutes a deliberate act. Drawing together the words ‘child’ and ‘migrant’ forces us to scrutinize the narrowness of many definitions of both. The phrase ‘child migrant’ suggests both a personhood challenging prevailing legal and social conventions about childhood, and also a mobile capacity operating at the interstices of coercion and liberty. In my own research on the lives and experience of six West African children embroiled in the mid-nineteenth century story of La Amistad, I have described how migrant children’s voices are silenced by historical and historiographical myths about transportation, geographical origin, and cultural and linguistic identities. Myths emerged around the lives of the adult males accompanying the children, and the tightly woven fabric, digestible for the American public, effectively erased the presence of children. Children enslaved in West Africa in the nineteenth century had a qualitatively different experience to adult Africans; their enslavement, migration and liberation, and their attempts to rebuild and reconstitute family thrust them into strange environments and unusual and fraught alliances as they struggled to survive their ordeal. Unravelling the myths concealing the lives of the child migrants of La Amistad provided a platform with which to better understand the qualitatively different experience of child migrants in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world more broadly. The stories in this collection demonstrate how the motivations of migrant children appear more expansive than those of many adult migrants seeking monetary gain, insofar as the opportunities sought to encompass education, camaraderie and friendship, sustenance and family reunification, as well as financial compensation. The contributors explore and expand upon this human drama by advancing historical, sociological, psychological, anthropological and other disciplinary perspectives to explore the many dimensions of the issues confronting African child migrants. Importantly, they also highlight how the migratory experience – ranging from deeply traumatic to positive and uplifting – shapes children’s identities as they become imbued with gender in the inexorable path through adolescence to adulthood. The collective narrative emerging from this book is that flexibility in status and fluidity in situation are defining characteristics of child migration.

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Acknowledgements

This edited collection grew out of a series of workshop and panels organized by the editors Elodie Razy and Marie Rodet since 2009. The editors first organized a double panel on ‘Children and migration in Africa’ at the European Conference on African Studies in Leipzig (Germany), 4–7 June 2009. Some of the papers presented there were then published in a special issue on ‘Migration dans l’enfance, migrations de l’enfance. Regards pluridisciplinaires’ of Journal des Africanistes (81–2) in 2011. A workshop at SOAS on the same topic was subsequently organized on 24–25 May 2012, as well as a panel at the European Social Science History Conference in Vienna (Austria), 24–26 April 2014. The editors would like to thank the original panellists and those who kindly agreed to join the project at a later stage. The editors further acknowledge with gratitude the support of the Faculty for Humanities and the Centre for African Studies at SOAS for the organization of the 2012 workshop. They are also very grateful to Jaqueline Mitchell and Lynn Taylor of James Currey for guiding this project to the end. To Caroline George, thanks are due for assistance with translation and final proofreading, as well as to Shantelle George for proofreading at an earlier stage of the project. Finally special thanks to Vincent Hiribarren and Fanny Challier for the maps.

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Introduction

Child Migration in Africa: Key Issues & New Perspectives Marie Rodet & Elodie Razy

In academic circles, national and international public policy and the media, three dominant contrasting visions of childhood dominate. In discourses produced by and about the global North, the dominant images are the spoiled child and the rebellious child. However, the North’s perception of the South – and particularly of Africa – is mostly characterized nowadays by variations on the theme of the child as victim.1 Childhood – a biological, age and social category, as well as a period of the life cycle which is historically, socially and culturally constructed – provokes ambivalence and concern: for example, do we speak of ‘disciplining’ children or of ‘saving’ them? These depictions combine to draw an artificial boundary between Europe and Africa. This boundary can be critically examined using the figure of the child migrant, revisiting its historical roots in order to better understand the contemporary challenges it poses. This may also help to document social changes in Africa and the complex relations between Africa and Europe, both past and present. Yet while adult migrations have received significant scholarly attention over a period of many years, child migration – whether intra- or extra-African – has long remained in the shadows.2 The analysis of children’s migratory experiences is at the crossroads between numerous academic disciplines and institutional or professional spheres, between which there is usually little dialogue. How can we define child migration across disciplines? Due to the liminality of childhood and the often-ambivalent position of children,3 a focus on children complexifies our approach to migration. It is crucial to delve deeply into children’s lives to understand their migratory worlds. However, the literature 1   See for example: Didier Fassin, La raison humanitaire. Une histoire morale du temps présent (Paris, 2010); Elise Guillermet, Constructions de l’orphelin au Niger. Anthropologie d’une enfance globalisée (Sarrebrück, 2010); Bernard Schlemmer, ed., L’enfant exploité. Oppression, mise au travail, prolétarisation (Paris, 1996). 2   Elodie Razy and Véronique Baby-Collin, ‘Introduction’, Special Issue ‘La famille transnationale dans tous ses états’, Autrepart 57 (2011), 7–22; Elodie Razy and Marie Rodet, ‘Les migrations africaines dans l’enfance, des parcours individuels entre institutions locales et institutions globales’, Journal des Africanistes 81(2) (2011), 5–48. 3   Elodie Razy, ‘La pratique de l’éthique: de l’anthropologie générale à l’anthropologie de l’enfance et retour’, AnthropoChildren 4 (2014) – available online: http://popups.ulg.ac.be/2034-8517/ index.php?id=2046 [accessed 10 August 2015].

1

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2 Introduction

rarely distinguishes between mobility, migration and circulation. Here, we use the term ‘migration’, as it seems to us that the generally-accepted meaning of this term is broader than that of ‘mobility’.4 The latter effectively excludes the possibility of periods of immobility or pause within the migratory pathway, and is often associated primarily with the concept of social mobility. It also leads to a scientific questioning of the success or failure of the migration, and whether it is emancipating or alienating – which are highly subjective and often essentializing factors. Likewise, the term ‘circulation’, referring to a particular form of migration constituted of successive displacements and ‘return trips’, cannot be used as a generic term as it excludes one-off, permanent migration. Consequently, in this work we adopt a ‘comprehensive’ definition of migration. This allows us to show the connections between the different forms of migration, which often have fluid boundaries, even more for children than for adults.5 In an African context, we therefore take migration to mean any change of residence (at a local, regional, national/international or intra/intercontinental level) that takes place outside of the space of a given community (such as a village or town), whether it is temporary or permanent. Seasonal migrations are therefore included, as well as more long-term migrations. But who are these child migrants? What kind of migrations are we talking about and how do they affect children’s trajectories in Africa? More generally, what roles do child migration play in a specific community or society? This volume aims to shed light on some of these issues by applying an interdisciplinary perspective to these thematics. We particularly wish to document the difficulty of manipulating such categories as ‘child’, ‘youth’, ‘adult’, ‘senior’ and ‘junior’ in diverse and contrasted contexts, but we will also consider how child migrants can play an intermediate and intermediary role between multiple individuals, groups and worlds. Furthermore, this volume goes beyond the usual debates over child migrants’ vulnerability and victim status – which have nonetheless become much more balanced in recent years,6 even in the field of development7 – and offers an original perspective over children’s agency, 4   Veale and Donà distinguish between migration and mobility, where migration stands for ‘large-scale, long-term movements’ while mobility encompasses ‘small-scale, short-term and dynamic movements of people as a practice of everyday life’. Yet for us, ‘migration’ generally includes ‘mobility’. See Andrea Veale and Giorgia Donà, ‘Complex Migrations, Migrant Child and Family Life Trajectories and Globalization’, in Andrea Veale and Giorgia Donà, eds, Child and Youth Migration: Mobility-in-Migration in an Era of Globalization, (Basingstoke, 2014), pp. 5–6. 5   Denis D. Cordell, Joel W. Gregory and Victor Piché, Hoe and Wage: A Social History of a Circular Migration System in West Africa (Boulder, CO 1996); Marie Rodet, Les migrantes ignorées du Haut-Sénégal, 1900–1946 (Paris, 2009). 6   See Lauren Heidbrink, Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State: Care and Contested Interests (Philadelphia, 2014); Sandra J. T. M. Evers, Catrien Notermans and Erik van Ommering, eds, Not Just a Victim: The Child as Catalyst and Witness of Contemporary Africa (Leiden, 2011); Veale and Donà, Child and Youth Migration. 7   Kristen E. Cheney, ‘Deconstructing Childhood Vulnerability: An Introduction’, Childhood in Africa 1(2) (2010), 4–7.

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Child Migration in Africa

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particularly examining its collective form and its gendered aspect. It also highlights the fluidity and flexibility of child migrants’ status across space and time. In addition, the book questions the relevance of a migratory model specific to the category of children, in contrast to the dominant, invisibilizing masculine model and with reference to the complexity of migratory situations in childhood. Finally, the chapters included here examine the methodological problems linked to the question of accessing children’s voices in the migratory experience, and show how child migrants find themselves at the heart of complex social, economic and political challenges, caught between local and global institutions.

Part I – Child Migrants in Africa: Beyond the Dilemma of Vulnerability v. Agency Most studies on child migrants in Africa have been produced as grey literature and from the angle of trafficking. They have tended to focus on the complex links between child trafficking, contemporary forms of slavery, child labour and circulation, with a clear concern for children’s rights and welfare. Meanwhile, important studies on the migratory experiences of children in Africa have been conducted over recent years in sociology and anthropology,8 as well as in history, shifting the focus onto children’s agency in their migratory trajectories.9 Questionning the dilemma of vulnerability v. agency in a new perspective In the contemporary literature on child migration in Africa, there are numerous variations on the trope of the child as victim, which some8  See among others: Erdmute Alber, Jeannett Martin and Catrien Notermans, eds, Child Fostering in West Africa: New Perspectives on Theories and Practices (Leiden, 2013); Cati Coe, ‘Growing Up and Going Abroad: How Ghanaian Children Imagine Transnational Migration’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 38(6) (2012), 913–31; Cati Coe, The Scattered Family: Parenting, African Migrants, and Global Inequality (Chicago & London, 2015); Iman Hashim, ‘Independent child migration and education in Ghana’, Development and Change 38(5) (2007), 911–31; Iman Hashim and Dorte Thorsen, Child Migration in Africa (London & Uppsala, 2011); Véronique Hertrich and Marie Lesclingand, ‘Transition to Adulthood and Gender: Changes in Rural Mali’, Documents de Travail 140 (Paris, 2007); Michael C. Lambert, Longing for Exile. Migration and the Making of a Translocal Community in Senegal, West Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 2002); Elodie Razy, ‘Ways of Being a Child in a Dispersed Family: Multi-parenthood and Migratory Debt Between France and Mali (Soninke Homeland)’, in Veale and Donà, Child and Youth Migration, pp. 186–212; Dorte Thorsen, ‘Child Migrants in Transit: Strategies to become Adult in Rural Burkina Faso’, in Catrine Christiansen, Mats Utas and Henrik E. Vigh, eds, Navigating Youth, Generating Adulthood: Social Becoming in an African Context (Uppsala, 2007), pp. 88–114. 9   See for example: William Beinart, ‘Transkeian Migrant Workers and Youth Labour on the Natal Sugar Estates 1918–1948’, The Journal of African History 32(1) (1991), 41–63; Benjamin J. Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, Smuggling (New Haven, CT, 2014); Jack Lord, ‘Child Labor in the Gold Coast: The Economics of Work, Education, and the Family in Late-Colonial African Childhoods, c. 1940–57’, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 4(1) (2011), 88–115; Jeremy Rich, ‘Searching for Success: Boys, Family Aspirations, and Opportunities in Gabon, ca. 1900–1940’, Journal of Family History 35(1) (2010), 7–24; Marie Rodet, ‘Notes sur la Captation de la Main d’Oeuvre Enfantine dans la Région de Kayes, Mali (1904–1955)’, Journal des Africanistes 81(2) (2011), 49–60.

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4 Introduction

times occur in combination – what Hepburn calls ‘the exploitation narrative’ (Chapter 3): the slave child, the malnourished child, the orphaned child, the exploited child, the refugee child, the child soldier, the street child, the witch child and so on. This is especially true of literature dealing with large-scale, forced or involuntary migration because of war and/or economic and ecological crises. This volume takes a different perspective by adopting a longue-durée and micro-level approach of child migration in order to examine the influence of various socio-cultural and local ‘models of childhoods’ over the figures of the child migrant in different regions of Africa beyond the sole trope of the child victim.10 Through detailed case studies, the chapters in this collection highlight the diversity of child migration experiences in Africa, by covering different time periods and diverse geographical spaces (West, East and Southern Africa, rural and urban spaces), as well as by using a large range of source material (archives, oral sources, drawings, personal memoires). More recent studies on child migration in Africa also attempt to go beyond the figure of the child as victim, trying instead to show the multiple forms taken by children’s agency and to go beyond the usual debate opposing structure and agency.11 But are children always active and independent in migration? Any attempt to show that they are at all costs actually continues to implicitly refer to the same dichotomy which has helped to make these migrations invisible, as it assumes that the level on which decisions are taken (by the children themselves or by adults) is the key criteria. In fact, the decision-making process is much 10   ‘Models of childhood’ have to be understood here as ‘model-type representations of the child’ (our translation) that contribute to the reproduction and the evolution of a particular society. See Doris Bonnet, Catherine Rollet and Charles-Edouard de Suremain, ‘Introduction. Des expressions et des valeurs des modèles d’enfances à l’épreuve du temps et des sociétés’, in Doris Bonnet, Catherine Rollet, Charles-Edouard de Suremain, eds, Modèles d’enfances: Successions, transformations, croisements (Paris, 2012), p. 11. For us, the diverse models of childhoods elaborated by historians, anthropologists and sociologists can serve as a general explanatory framework; models are generally more universal than figures: figures are inscribed in models that often overlap. To speak of and use models and figures helps to simplify the complexity of reality as a first step. Yet it does not exclude the (often necessary) reintroduction of more dynamic aspects to the analysis. Bonnet, Rollet and Suremain describe four models of childhood which have occurred in succession or combination: ‘the Child of the lineage’ characterizes rural societies whose reproduction relies on agriculture and the perpetuation of the lineage; ‘the Child of Christianity’ marked by the Church’s hold on the ritual and everyday family life, not only in the West but also in some colonized countries up to the twentieth century, notably in the field of filiation and alliances; ‘the Child of the Nation’ witnesses the development of state policies for moral and medical protection of childhood from the end of the nineteenth century onwards; and finally, ‘the Child as a Person’ (from psychoanalysis) which is characteristic of the twentieth century. The last two models are largely influenced by what André Turmel calls the ‘medico-hygienist model of childhood’ and the ‘developmental model’. See André Turmel, ‘Des sciences de l’enfant aux modèles de l’enfance: variations sur un modèle qui n’est pas mineur’, in Bonnet et al., Modèles d’enfances, p. 4. 11   See Cati Coe, Rachel R. Reynolds, Deborah A. Boehm, Julia Meredith Hess and Heather Rae-Espinoza, eds, Everyday Ruptures: Children, Youth, and Migration in Global Perspective (Nashville, TN, 2011); Evers et al., Not Just a Victim; Véronique Pache Huber and Laurence Ossipow, ‘Introduction’, Tsantsa: Revue de la Société Suisse d’Ethnologie, Special issue ‘Les enfants comme enjeux et comme acteurs: Appartenances, relations interindividuelles et logiques institutionnelles’ 17 (2012), 19–35.

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Child Migration in Africa

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more complex. When children migrate, with or without a relative, the decision to leave is often authorized by or known to someone in the family.12 This reality does not fit with the model sometimes imposed on child migrants, of the ‘young person’ in search of independence, splitting from – or even competing with – adults.13 Furthermore, children – far from forming a specific, homogenous group – experience a variety of migratory paths, just like adults; these are often combined and span a period of several years, and are best analysed as a process. Considering migration as a process14 avoids any confusion with travel, which may be undertaken entirely or partially alone, without automatically implying ‘independent’ migration. We must therefore be attentive to various forms of accompaniment and hosting, notably by institutions, parents, pseudo-parents or even peers. Finally, the criteria qualifying child migrants and their movements vary depending on whether we are talking about intra-African or extra-African migration. Child migration very often draws upon social and kinship networks with deep historical roots. The long history of migration in Africa inscribes child migrants within cultural contexts and social relations which are split over and between several geographical spaces, defying various kinds of borders.15 Children are thus at the heart of issues of translocality and multilocality, as they contribute to the continuity of the kinship and social links between different spaces through their migration; this is demonstrated by Hepburn’s chapter on young female domestic workers in Zambia (this volume).16 Many aspects must be taken into account: not just the identity of those in charge of the child, but also links of kinship, affinity and/or economic relations between all the concerned parties, gender, age, position in the birth order, the social status of the child in his or her family at the moment of departure, the length of the migration, the child’s overall migratory story, possible contact with the family members left behind, and various events and their effects over the course of the migration. When child migration is reintegrated into a broader context of historical translocality/multilocality, the image of the lone child migrant seeking work becomes practically obsolete; ultimately, this image refers back to the normative image of the child in apprenticeship for adulthood. In practice, this image is regularly used by adults, authorities or national and international institutions to constrain the 12   S. O. Kwankye, J. K. Anarfi, C. A. Tagoe and A. Castaldo, ‘Independent North–South Child Migration in Ghana: The Decision Making Process’, Sussex Centre for Migration Research Working Paper T-29 (2009). 13   See for example: Mahamet Timera, ‘Les migrations des jeunes en Afrique noire: Affirmation de soi et émancipation’, Autrepart 18 (2001), 37–59; Thorsen, ‘Child Migrants in Transit’; Christian Ungruhe, ‘Symbols of Success: Youth, Peer Pressure and the Role of Adulthood among Juvenile Male Return Migrants in Ghana’, Childhood 17 (2010), 259–71. 14   Abdelmalek Sayad, ‘Les trois âges de l’émigration algérienne en France’: Actes de la recherche en Sciences Sociales 15 (1977), 59–82. 15  Coe, The Scattered Family; Hashim and Thorsen, Child Migration. 16   See also Rodet, Les migrantes ignorées.

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agency of child and youth migrants, as highlighted in Gardini’s study on ‘boys’ and domestic servitude in Togo (Chapter 5). In spite of a few laudable efforts, the notion of agency is still too often either simplistically applied or entirely rejected in the treatment of child migration.17 Yet, in the existing literature, there does not seem to be any consensus around the notion of agency: most often it is assumed, and its nature and degree therefore remain undefined and unquestioned18 although its complexity and ambiguities may be analysed both in context and with regard to structure.19 The notion of agency is most often defined in general terms as an individual’s capacity to act according to his or her own free will, in an independent and autonomous manner. But when scholars apply it to child migration, they usually draw either on studies of young people or on theoretical frameworks developed for adults. The result is a problematic dual imprecision: between young people and children on one hand, and between adults and young people (and by extension children) on the other. Here we are reminded of Honwana, who invokes Giddens and de Certeau to formulate the agency of child soldiers as a ‘tactical agency’.20 Children are now systematically – but not unproblematically – given agency and are recognized as bearers of a voice which, according to some, has too long been neglected by researchers. The methodology for taking children’s voices into account varies: in its most participatory form, it can make children the agents of the study (in reality, this usually means the oldest children).21 In literary fiction, it can take the form of the child narrator who represents the voice of reason (Coker, Chapter 10). It should go without saying that precautions must be taken when using children’s testimonies, as it is difficult to speak for children and in their name.22 When children’s testimonies are cited, we should consider the selectivity of the representation, the problems of using citations without reflexivity, context or perspective, the plurality of voices, and the intentions of the authors of both the citation and the article. We must also wonder who is served by the citation, and avoid isolating these actors from the other actors given a  Coe et al., Everyday Ruptures.   Myra Bluebond-Langner and Jill E. Korbin, ‘Challenges and Opportunities in the Anthropology of Childhoods: An Introduction to “Children, Childhoods, and Childhood Studies”’, American Anthropologist 109(2) (2007), 241–46. 19  Coe et al., Everyday Ruptures. 20   See Alcinda Honwana, ‘Innocent & Guilty: Child-Soldiers as Interstitial & Tactical Agents’ in Alcinda Honwana and Filip De Boeck, eds, Makers & Breakers: Children & Youth in Postcolonial Africa, (Oxford, 2005), pp. 31–52. This approach has been heavily criticized by Lancy: see David F. Lancy, ‘Unmasking Children’s Agency’, AnthropoChildren 2 (2012). A – available online: http://popups.ulg.ac.be/2034-8517/index.php?id=1253 [accessed 10 August 2015]. However, some researchers now use the notion of agency much more carefully and critically. See Deborah A. Boehm, Julia Meredith Hess, Cati Coe, Heather Rae-Espinoza and Rachel R. Reynolds, ‘Children, Youth, and the Everyday Ruptures of Migration’, in Coe et al., Everyday Ruptures, pp. 1–19. 21   Kristen E. Cheney, ‘Children as Ethnographers: Reflections on the Importance of Participatory Research in Assessing Orphans’ Needs’, Childhood 18(2) (2011), 166–79. 22   Allison James, ‘Giving Voice to Children’s Voices: Practices and Problems, Pitfalls and Potentials’, American Anthropologist 109(2), 261–72. 17

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‘speaking role’ in society.23 In addition, the researcher cannot ignore the social and symbolic construction of childhood that shapes the child’s voice, nor the ways in which this construction shapes their own interaction with the child. Furthermore, some obstacles remain that can only be overcome through a very thorough knowledge of the society in which we hope to listen to children’s voices, and thus to give them space to speak. This approach does not emerge naturally from the evidence in all contexts – far from it. All societies, at all points in time, codify speech; this is even truer when it comes to intimate and affective topics, the practice and expression of feelings and emotions, and self-expression.24 This may be proscribed or prescribed by factors such as gender, generation and social status. Children are no exception, and their voice cannot be heard unless it is understood in context; this precaution allows us to better understand the extent to which their voices can be expressed, heard and in some cases even manipulated by adults.25 Moreover, access to language and speech is sometimes linked to religious prescription, and in such cases speech can turn out to be dangerous. Listening to children’s voices in societies with norms which usually prevent children from speaking poses some methodological problems already mentioned by Lallemand in relation to confiage,26 but it also raises ethical problems. Some of these ethical issues are summarized by Guillermet, who analyses the risk of an ‘unthinking application’ of the principle of ‘giving children space to speak’.27 Giving a voice to all children, as if by decree, rests on a universalist vision of childhood that shuns any analysis of contexts where childhood’s social and cultural construction does not correspond to Western ideals. Lancy considers this approach ethnocentric and hegemonic: he argues that it issues from a conformist dominant class, and shows how counter-productive it can be if used without reflexivity.28 It implicitly promotes the idea that providing a space for personal testimony is necessarily beneficial, or even liberating and redemptive, for the child – a belief stemming from psychology and psychoanalysis (aiming at ‘empowerment’ in the developmentalist sense). Once again, this belief is absolutely not universal and cannot be prescribed without political reflexivity, particularly regarding North–South relations. Ultimately – and this is a crucial point – once the researcher has obtained the child’s testimony, he or she leaves the field and returns home. So what will   Ibid.   Danièle Alexandre-Bidon, ‘Grandeur et renaissance du sentiment de l’enfance au Moyen Âge’, Histoire de l’Education 50 (1991), 39–63; Cheney, ‘Children as Ethnographers’; Michèle Guidetti, Suzanne Lallemand and Marie-Françoise Morel, eds, Enfances d’ailleurs, d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1997). 25   Doris Bonnet, ‘La construction sociale de l’enfance: Une variété de normes et de contextes’, Informations sociales 4(160) (2010), 12–18. 26   Suzanne Lallemand, Adoption et mariage: Les Kotokoli du Centre du Togo (Paris, 1994). 27  Guillermet, Constructions de l’orphelin. 28   David F. Lancy, ‘Unmasking’. 23 24

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result from this testimony and what will happen to this child who, in speaking, has gained access to a process of subjectivation – which may cause further difficulties that he/she will often have to face alone? In using their voices, children become transmitters of memory in their own right. Child memory is at the heart of several chapters in this collection: how can we retrieve the ‘lost’ memories of child migrants? How are those memories reconstituted by adults speaking of their childhood experiences of migration and displacement? Nostalgia can be here a key concept in understanding how to use oral sources, personal memoires or fiction when documenting child migration (Tisseau, Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Whittaker and Lober, Chapters 6, 8, 9 and 10). If we do not wish to participate in perpetuating children’s mute status, nor to prompt them to speak at all costs, nor to simply listen to them, we must consider how the problems discussed above are best solved: by precautions and methodological ‘innovations’, or by fixed codes of ethics.29 What are the benefits of the process by which children are made more visible – and who benefits most? How, why and in what conditions do children – particularly child migrants in Africa – appear in scientific studies and on national and international public stages? As is particularly demonstrated by the chapters by Duke Bryant, Chapdelaine and Tisseau (1, 2, and 6), children’s agency is often caught between two poles: on one hand, institutional frameworks (the family, and political, religious and social authorities), which create the spaces and the conditions within which this agency may be expressed, notably through laws, and on the other hand the children themselves who develop, construct and negotiate an agency in the margins and interstices available to them, bypassing pre-established frameworks of their place and role in society, and making their voice heard through certain innovative behaviours. Porcelli (Chapter 4) adds a third term to the binary of agency/ vulnerability: resilience, which, according to Ungar, corresponds to specific survival strategies developed by young people faced with difficult situations.30 This is practically synonymous with the notion of a ‘coping strategy’, but has more solid theoretical foundations, and is often employed without being truly defined. Moreover, in the literature, the form of agency studied is most often individual; its collective forms, which have been the subject of less interest, nevertheless deserve our full attention. Indeed, children’s individual agency is no longer a scholarly disputed fact, except perhaps in some of its nuances and deployment. However, the fact that children may share their own ideas and practices in a new context, despite being entrenched in their own environment with adults, remains little studied.31 The chapters by   Razy, ‘La pratique de l’éthique’.   Michael Ungar, ed., ‘Social Ecologies and Their Contribution to Resilience: A Handbook of Theory and Practice’, in The Social Ecology of Resilience, ed. Michael Ungar (New York, 2012), pp. 13–32. 31   To our knowledge, only Heidbrink has ventured into the topic so far: see Heidbrink, Migrant Youth. 29 30

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Duke Bryant, Ferrell, and Whittaker (1, 7 and 9) reveal the contours of collective agency through a study of educational institutions and their political implications, and the development of a ‘peer culture’ as suggested by Ferrell (Chapter 7). They convincingly demonstrate that children can bear their own aspirations, and in some cases clear collective revendications. This may lead them to play a political role; interestingly enough, many political regimes in Africa were aware of this early on, while the scholarly literature seems to be only just beginning to take an interest in the issue. The confusing telescoping of the categories of ‘youth’ and ‘childhood’ The vulnerability versus agency debate is often coupled with another point of confusion. In the literature, ‘youth’ is the dominant catch-all term for the non-adult migrant population, and so in fact groups together young people and children. The contours of these life stages are not always clearly defined, since local and universalizing criteria do not correspond. While the distinction often made in the North between childhood, youth and adulthood is too often systematically applied to the societies in the South,32 the categories of childhood and youth themselves also merit serious questioning.33 Although attempts to differentiate between these two categories occasionally make an appearance in the literature, it is rare to see definitions which are truly based on local representations and criteria, mentioning possible biological age sets to which they correspond or the roles and responsibilities with which they are associated. The category of childhood is often subsumed into that of youth. Children are thus lumped in with their elders, right down to the ways in which they express themselves or make demands. Their specificities are thus not even thought of, and so cannot be studied. What are the reasons for this? Could it be that the confusions and hesitations which perturb Western societies when it comes to their own children and young people serve as a prism through which the upheavals of African societies are still too often read? Certainly, globalization can be used to explain some convergent crises, due to the spread and re-appropriation of models by the media, international organizations and NGOs (non-government organizations) based on calendar age criteria: 0–18. However, it cannot be invoked to avoid reflecting on the local criteria of age and generation, nor on the actual motivations of migrants and those around them; otherwise, we risk perpetuating a form of neo-colonial violence under the guise of child protection. Closer examination shows migration to be a long-standing structural phenomenon, with positive connotations, in many African societies. In this framework, migration is clearly among the options envisaged 32   Jason Hart, ‘Saving Children: What role for anthropology?’ Anthropology Today 22(1) (2006), 5–8. 33  Coe et al., Everyday Ruptures.

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by parents for their offspring, particularly in order to increase children’s chances of success in life or to reduce specific burdens in difficult situations.34 Yet the literature on African child migration continues to focus on two usual media figures: on the one hand, the vulnerable child, such as ‘trafficked’ children or isolated minors who lack agency; on the other, in contrast to their migrating parents, the ‘rebellious’ or ‘empowered’ descendants of African immigrants in Europe and North America asserting their agency.35 Historicizing child migration in Africa Any consideration of child migrants’ place in contemporary societies requires that we adopt a perspective incorporating multiple disciplines, including history. Indeed, while migration and childhood studies are multidisciplinary in essence, edited volumes crossing historical and contemporary perspectives on those issues are rare.36 Too often, child migration is still described as a new phenomenon. In this volume, we favour the longue-durée perspective over the ‘presentist endeavour’ of most migration and childhood studies.37 This is particularly useful not only for increasing our understanding of the mutual influences between European and African societies and the long-term implications of their interactions, but also for shedding light on the complexity of social change in Africa. Analysing the relationships between different models of childhoods allows us to understand better the way in which the paradigm of the African child and its related figures has been constructed across space and time. Although it remains extremely difficult to obtain data on African constructions of childhood in the past, the discovery of some new sources and the re-evaluation of others which are familiar (such as Arabic manuscripts, oral histories and the accounts of travellers and early Christian missions) are increasingly offering opportunities to remedy the problem of fragmented data. We are therefore gaining a better understanding of the importance of 34   Isaie Dougnon, ‘Child Trafficking or Labor Migration? A Historical Perspective from Mali’s Dogon Country’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 2(2) (2011), 85–105. However, Lallemand shows that Goody’s hypothesis, which suggests that children’s contemporary circulation is necessarily linked to their parents’ desire for social improvement, is somewhat reductive: it is often concerned with a particular situation and historical moment – rural exodus – and more often with ‘pre-adolescents’ and ‘unmarried youth’ rather than ‘children’. See Esther N. Goody, Parenthood and Social Reproduction: Fostering and Occupational Roles in West Africa (Cambridge, 1982); Suzanne Lallemand, La circulation des enfants en société traditionnelle. Prêt, don échange (Paris, 1993). 35  Heidbrink, Migrant Youth; Mahamet Timera, ‘Righteous or Rebellious? Social trajectory of Sahelian youth in France’, in Deborah Bryceson and Ulla Vuorela, eds, The Transnational Family: New European Frontiers and Global Networks (Oxford & New York, 2002), pp. 147–54. More recently, internationally-adopted children have emerged at the crossroads between these two worlds, and research is placing greater emphasis on children who are ‘left behind’. See Solomon Getahun, ‘A History of Ethiopia’s Newest Immigrants to the United States: Orphans’, Journal des Africanistes 81(2) (2011), 185–200; Abdoulaye Kane, ‘Senegal’s Village Diaspora and the People Left Behind’, in Bryceson and Vuorela, eds, The Transnational Family, pp. 245–63. 36   Notable exceptions are: Coe, The Scattered Family; Heidbrink, Migrant Youth. 37  Heidbrink, Migrant Youth, p. 3.

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children in African history: many children were among the victims of the internal, trans-Saharan and transatlantic slave trades;38 they have long been, and continue to be, a crucial source of labour for the family and community economy;39 they have often played a central role in the introduction of new religious practices.40 They were also at the heart of numerous colonial and post-colonial power struggles, notably as mixed-race children (Tisseau, Chapter 6), orphans, Christian or Muslim pupils (Duke Bryant, and Whittaker and Hayer, Chapters 1 and 9), apprentices and young workers (Hepburn and Gardini, Chapters 3 and 5).41 In 2011, under-15s represented 40 per cent of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa, making it indisputably the youngest region in the world. But who are these children? Are we talking about girls or boys? About young children or ‘pre-adolescent’ children? Do the terms ‘child’, ‘adolescent’ and ‘young person’ refer to the same realities everywhere, in all eras and for all actors concerned? What was, and is, the role of kinship systems and of local understandings of the family’s social status in defining childhood and children’s place in society? Further 38   Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph Miller, eds., Children in Slavery (Athens, OH, 2009); Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph Miller, eds., Child Slaves in the Modern World (Athens, OH, 2011). 39   Audra Diptee and Martin Klein, ‘African Childhoods and the Colonial Project’, Journal of Family History 35(1), 3–6; Toyin Falola and Paul Lovejoy, eds., Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective (Boulder, CO, 1994); Trevor Getz, ‘British Magistrates and Unfree Children in Early Colonial Gold Coast, 1874–1899’, in Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph Miller, eds, Child Slaves in the Modern World (Athens, OH, 2011), pp. 157–72; Alma Gottlieb, The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa (Chicago, 2004); Beverly Grier, Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe (Portsmouth, NH, 2005); Jane I. Guyer and Samuel M. E. Belinga, ‘Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa’ Journal of African History 36(1) (1995), 91–120; Martin Klein, ‘Children and Slavery in the Western Sudan’, in Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph Miller, eds, Child slaves in the modern world (Athens, OH, 2011), pp. 124–139; Neil Price, ‘The Changing Value of Children among the Kikuyu of Central Province, Kenya’, Africa 66(3) (1996), 411–36. 40   Alex de Waal and Nicolas Argenti, eds., Young Africa: Realising the Rights of Children and Youth, (Trenton, NJ, 2002). 41   Saheed Aderinto, ed., Children and Childhood in Colonial Nigerian Histories (New York, 2015); Saheed Aderinto, ‘“O! Sir I Do Not Know Either to Kill Myself or to Stay”: Childhood Emotion, Poverty, and Literary Culture in Nigeria, 1900–1960’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 8(2) (2015), 273–94; Pascale Barthélémy, Africaines et diplômées à l’époque coloniale (1918– 1957) (Rennes, 2011); Joseph-Roger de Benoist, Église et pouvoir colonial au Soudan Français. Les relations entre les administrateurs et les missionnaires catholiques dans la Boucle du Niger, de 1885 à 1945 (Paris, 1987); Kelly Duke Bryant, Education as Politics: Colonial Schooling and Political Debate in Senegal, 1850s–1914 (Madison, WI, 2015); Mathias Gardet and David Niget, eds, Special Issue ‘Enfances (dé)placées. Migrations forcées et politiques de protection de la jeunesse, XIXe–XXe siècles’, Revue d’histoire de l’enfance ‘irrégulière’ 14:12 (2012); Hilary Jones, The Métis of Senegal: Urban Life and Politics in French West Africa (Bloomington, IN, 2013); Christopher J. Lee, ‘Children in the Archives: Epistolary Evidence, Youth Agency, and the Social Meanings of “Coming of Age” in Interwar Nyasaland’, Journal of Family History 35(1) (2009), 25–47; Mary H. Moran, ‘Civilized Servants: Child Fosterage and Training for Status among the Glebo of Liberia’, in Karen Tranberg Hansen, ed., African Encounters with Domesticity (New Brunswick, NJ, 1992), pp. 98–115; Rudolph T. Ware III, The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa (Chapel Hill, NC, 2014); Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895–1960 (Oxford, [1999] 2004).

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research is especially needed into issues of age, gender and generation in Africa from the child’s perspective, both today and in the past; this is demonstrated by all the chapters in this collection, highlighting the fact that migration has gendered implications for both boys and girls across all generations.42 Passages from the status of child to that of adult are not uniform across Africa, nor even within a single society in any given period.43 Furthermore, perceptions of these passages change over time.44 Contexts in which African societies mobilize biological age in order to differentiate children or juniors from adults or seniors are rather rare;45 instead, they use a combination of variables such as social status, levels of dependency, sex, and kinship ties,46 which together produce what some authors call ‘social age’.47 Like ‘childhood’, ‘adulthood’ is here understood more as a social age than as a biological fact, as highlighted by Gardini in Chapter 5. It is therefore the specific and contextualized status of an individual within society which defines age, rather than age defining social status.48 The latter also depends upon the acquisition of psychomotor and social skills and the consolidation of ties,49 as well as the individual physical capacity for work, the social and economic needs of the workforce and each person’s willingness to execute certain tasks required of those with adult and/or senior status.50 42   However, the literature on youth and generation in Africa has significantly increased in the past 10 years. See in particular: Andrew Burton and Hélène Charton-Bigot, eds, Generations Past: Youth in East African History (Athens, OH, 2010); Christiansen et al., Navigating Youth; Muriel Gomez-Perez and Marie Nathalie LeBlanc, eds, L’Afrique des générations. Entre tensions et négociations (Paris, 2012); Honwana and De Boeck, Makers & Breakers. 43  Guidetti et al., Enfances d’ailleurs. 44   Heather Montgomery, An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological Perspectives on Children’s Lives (Oxford, 2008). 45   Space here does not allow us to go into the (Marxist) anthropological discussion begun by Meillassoux in the 1960s about the complex relations between juniors (cadets) and seniors (aînés) in Africa. Yet we can still note that the poles between junior and senior continue to profoundly structure social relations in some African societies where seniority and generation are connected, as is demonstrated in the contributions to Marc Abélès and Chantal Collard’s edited volume Age, pouvoir et société en Afrique Noire (Paris, 1985). Furthermore, the progression towards ‘adulthood’ is often socially marked by the passage from social and economic dependence towards the ability to acquire one’s own dependents and thus organize the dependency of others. According to Iliffe, attaining the status of ‘Big Man’ would remain one of the obligatory objectives of adult masculinity in Africa throughout the twentieth century. See John Iliffe, Honour in African History (Cambridge, 2005), p. 111. 46   Mario I. Aguilar, ed., Rethinking Age in Africa (Trenton, NJ, 2007). 47   Beverly Grier, ‘Child Labor and Africanist Scholarship: A Critical Overview’, African Studies Review 47(2) (2004), 1–25. 48   Lisa McNee, ‘The Languages of Childhood: The Discursive Construction of Childhood and Colonial Policy in French West Africa’, African Studies Quarterly 7(4) (2004), 20–32. 49   See for example: Doris Bonnet, Corps biologique, corps social. Procréation et maladie de l’enfant en pays mossi, Burkina Faso (Paris, 1988); Blandine Bril and Henri Lehalle, Le développement psychologique est-il universel? (Paris, 1988); David F. Lancy, Playing on the Mother-Ground: Cultural Routines for Children’s Development (New York, 1996); Jacqueline Rabain, L’enfant du lignage: Du sevrage à la classe d’âge chez les Wolof du Sénégal (Paris, [1979] 1994); Elodie Razy, Naître et devenir. Anthropologie de la petite enfance en pays soninké (Mali) (Nanterre, 2007); Paul Riesman, First Find Your Child a Good Mother: The Construction of Self in Two African Communities (New Brunswick, NJ, 1992). 50   Hashim and Thorsen, Child Migration.

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However, although trajectories towards ‘adulthood’ can be multiple, vary from one person to another and remain highly gendered, the life stages which are common to a particular society or community nevertheless appear to act as points of reference from which particular cases, due to biographical or collective dynamics, may diverge. To a certain extent, the child of the lineage in African peasant societies and the child of the household in European peasant societies are comparable in their dual role as producer and reproducer.51 Furthermore, from the nineteenth century onwards, the implementation of the colonial project in Africa created a trend towards uniformity across societies whose differences were still little known or recognized, all the while ‘redistributing’ maps of ethnic differences and sometimes revolutionizing social models. Although anthropological studies now allow for a better understanding of the social and symbolic steps of childhood and their contextual variations in Africa, very little is yet known about the ways in which these social constructions may have been historically constituted. Some specific constructions, particularly from the twentieth century onwards, certainly seem identifiable,52 but the diversity of these constructions across the continent makes a comprehensive understanding impossible. It was from the twentieth century onwards that the place of children in African societies, as in Europe, began to change fundamentally; this was particularly due to the impacts of colonialism and religious changes (namely the advances of Islam and Christianity). Although constructions of African childhoods have been controlled, (re)defined, transformed and/or manipulated by colonial and post-colonial governments, the influence of pre-colonial slavery and of labour organization should not be neglected. Indeed, it was the end of slavery that rendered children’s labour and the circulation of the child workforce more visible, particularly as it was supported by a colonial economy that systematically resorted to using children on forced labour sites.53 However, it would seem that the colonial approach to children gradually shifted from one of repression (with, for example, emancipated slave children viewed as potential delinquents who need to be controlled) to one of assistance and ‘protection’ over the course of the twentieth century, as the administration and international organizations developed a growing interest in children’s welfare, as illustrated by Chapdelaine’s study on child trafficking in colonial Nigeria (Chapter 2). This perspective was motivated largely by a pro-birth colonial policy, which saw colonized children as a future source of   Martine Segalen, A qui appartiennent les enfants? (Paris, 2010).   See footnote 10 on models of childhoods. 53   Marie Rodet, ‘Forced Labor, Resistance and Masculinities in Kayes, French Sudan (1919– 1946)’, International Labor and Working-Class History 86, Special issue ‘African Labor Histories’ (2014), 107–23. 51

52

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manpower.54 This colonial preoccupation with children would later extend, particularly under metropolitan and international pressure, to the question of child labour.55 According to Hashim and Thorsen, between 1919 and 1998 10 conventions on child labour were passed by the International Labour Office.56 As the public authorities gradually realized the scale of child mobility in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly after the acceleration in urbanization, they understood it primarily in terms of ‘deviancy’ and the development of a ‘mob rule’ in towns linked to a growing rural exodus, to be combatted at any cost.57 As in Europe in the same period,58 there seems to have been a clear paradigm shift from the nineteenth-century view of children as a population to be channelled into ‘dangerous groups’, to the twentieth-century image of ‘rebellious’ adolescents (or young people)59 as a separate group, to be contained and even criminalized by many authoritarian post-colonial governments.60 It is probably no coincidence that this category of ‘African youth’ emerged at a time when the colonial powers themselves still viewed colonial subjects as ‘overgrown children’ who they were responsible for raising.61 It would also be at the heart of post-colonial political discourses on the construction of the Nation.62 Education was also central to many of the big questions about childhood in the colonial and post-colonial periods.63 In twentieth-century Europe, educational policy and the implementation of compulsory schooling ultimately contributed to the establishment of universalizing European canons. These were subsequently imposed upon certain categories of people in the colonies with a view to forming a new elite class; later, they were partially re-appropriated by African states in the early years after independence. These canons also formed the basis for the construction of a veritable ‘culture of development’ by international organizations and NGOs, and the foundation for their interventions and their programmes aimed at children.64   Barbara Rogers, The Domestication of Women: Discrimination in Developing Societies (London, 1980). See also Abosede A. George, Making Modern Girls (Athens, OH 2014). 55   Joséphine Wouango, ‘L’éternel retour du “travail des enfants” dans les politiques publiques au Burkina Faso: perspective historique’, in Bonnet et al., Modèles d’enfances, pp. 193–206. 56   Hashim and Thorsen, Child Migration. 57   Brandon County, ‘“The Real Gangrene of Our Youth”: Demographics and the Politicization of Urban Migration during Mali’s First Five Year Plan, 1960–1966’ (unpublished M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 2004). 58   Carla Nagels and Andrea Rea, Jeunes à perpète. Génération à problèmes ou problèmes de générations? (Louvain-La-Neuve, 2007). 59   Richard Waller, ‘Rebellious Youth in Colonial Africa’, Journal of African History 47 (2005), 77–92. 60   De Waal and Argenti, Young Africa. 61   William B. Cohen, ‘The Colonized as Child: British and French Colonial Rule’, African Historical Studies 3(2) (1970), 427–31. 62   Mamadou Diouf and René Collignon, ‘Les jeunes du Sud et le temps du monde: identités, conflits et adaptation, Autrepart 18 (2001), 5–15. 63   Marie-Françoise Lange, ‘Dynamiques scolaires contemporaines au Sud’, Autrepart 17 (2001), 5–12. 64   Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent, eds, Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood (Berkeley, CA, 1998). 54

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It is thus these educational policies, combined with the fight against child labour, which now primarily define the child’s place in the home and at school. It is often assumed that when children migrate, they are either following their parents or leaving them to pursue an education. However, paradoxically, these migrations are not well documented65 and moreover, any migration outside those parameters appears problematic.66 The growing number of studies concerned with so-called ‘independent’ migration (that is, undertaken without the adults who are considered the child’s parents, most often in order to seek paid work in towns or other employment areas) still focus primarily on the most negative instances of child labour migration: the exploitation of children and their labour. The vulnerability of child migrants is often central to these studies, as it is thought that their physical and psychological vulnerability – stemming from their assumed immaturity – renders them more easily manipulated by adults. However, it is important to question the notions of risk and vulnerability with direct reference to children’s choices about whether to migrate or not. Perhaps we should ask whether, from their own point of view and that of those close to them, children run risks when they do not migrate, as well as when they do. What would the risks be if they stayed ‘immobile’?67 It is essential to remain attentive to the fluidity and flexibility of the child migrant’s status. The historical perspective on these issues in particular helps us to better understand the (dis)continuities between past and present patterns; statuses were never fixed, but have constantly been (re)shaped across time and space. This is clear in all chapters of this volume, and can be seen from various perspectives: the often-blurred boundaries between pawning, fosterage, slavery, marriage and alliances as these categories are reshaped to adapt to new legal, economical, social and political environments (Chapdelaine and Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Chapters 2 and 8); the schoolchild who is or becomes a child worker, but whose status as child worker is only considered an issue in the contemporary debate over children’s rights and welfare (Hepburn and Gardini, Chapters 3 and 5).   Marie-Christine Deleigne and Marc Pilon, ‘Migrations dans l’enfance et scolarisation en Afrique subsaharienne: apports et limites des approaches quantitatives’, Journal des Africanistes 81(2) (2011), 87–117. 66   Caitríona Ní Laoire, Fina Carpena-Méndez, Tyrrell and Allen White, ‘Introduction: Childhood and Migration: Mobilities, Homes and Belongings’, Childhood 17(2) (2010), 155–62. 67   There is a growing body of literature on ‘involuntary immobility’, which is analysed by Carling as the outcomes of the discrepancies between the wish to migrate and the ability to do so in the age of restrictive immigration policies. See Jørgen Carling, ‘Migration in the age of Involuntary Immobility’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 28(1), 5–42. On ‘involuntary immobility’ in Africa, see Gunvor Jónsson, ‘Migration Aspirations and Immobility in a Malian Soninke Village’, International Migration Institute Working Paper 10 – available online: http://afrique-europe-interact.net/files/mali_junge_leute_studie_kayes_engl_01-07-08. pdf [accessed 10 August 2015]; Paolo Gaibazzi, ‘Home as Transit: Immobility and Migratory Imagination among Gambian Soninke Young Men’, in Jocelyne Streiff-Fénart and Aurelia Wa Kabwe-Segatti, eds, The Challenge of the Threshold: Border Closures and Migration Movements in Africa (Lexington, KY, 2012). 65

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Where both the scholarly and the grey literature discuss child migration,68 they still tend to be implicitly considered an (often invisible) part of the growing transnationalism of women and/or the family; the latter is linked to poverty (trafficking) or independant youth aspirations – all ‘colateral damages’ of globalization.69 Yet child migration in Africa is not a new phenomenon. Historically, it probably represents the norm in Africa, rather than the exception.70 What is new, however, is the reshaping of child migration as a global social issue (along the same lines as the idea of a globalized childhood) under the political pressures of the nation state.71 In failing to ‘adequately’ occupy the spaces allocated to them – particularly when it comes to borders and to accompaniment by adults – child migrants defy the close control on the movement of minors which characterizes our societies. Indeed, ‘young’ migrants – a fluid and difficult to ‘control’ population – actually make up the vast majority of illegal transnational migrants in the West.72 ‘Unaccompanied minors’ (under-18s without a legal guardian) became ‘isolated minors’ in the European legal framework in the 1990s. These ‘children’, who challenge nation states and their borders, have gradually been constructed as a social and political problem, due to their dual problematic status as minors and as foreigners.73 There is clear evidence that mobile, nomadic or homeless children, including child migrants, unleash ‘moral panics’.74 Historically, youth actions and mobility have also contributed to the ‘radical questioning of the nationalist discourse, of its imaginary and the totality of its texts’.75 Adults have therefore considered them revolutionary, leading in some cases to the emergence of a specific youth subculture. Duke Bryant focuses on a particular moment when these child migrants become visible in the archives (Chapter 1). From 1825, Anne-Marie Javouhey – founder and Mother Superior of the Sisters   Parreñas has been a pioneer in the field: see Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes (Stanford, CA, 2005). In the grey literature, see for example the ‘Child Migration Researcher Network’ at the University of Sussex. 69   Our intention here is not to deny the links between globalization and child migration, which remain understudied. See Veale and Donà, Child and Youth Migration; Coe, The Scattered Family. However, we want to highlight the historical dimension of those links and to encourage the study of child migration in its own right. See Paula S. Fass, ‘Children in Global Migrations’, Journal of Social History 38(4) (2005), 937–54. 70   Alber, Martin and Notermans, Child Fostering; Esther N. Goody, Parenthood and Social Reproduction: Fostering and Occupational Roles in West Africa (Cambridge, 1982); Coe, The Scattered Family; Marguerite Dupire, ‘L’ambiguïté structurale du fosterage dans une société matri-virilocale (Sereer Ndut, Sénégal)’, Anthropologie et Sociétés 12(2) (1988), 7–24; Lallemand, La circulation. 71  Heidbrink, Migrant Youth; Razy and Rodet, ‘Les migrations’. 72   Jean Schmitz, ‘Migrants ouest-africains vers l’Europe: Historicité et espace moraux’, Politique africaine 109 (2008), 5–15. 73   Angelina Etiemble, ‘Quelle protection pour les mineurs isolés en France’, Hommes et migrations 1251 (2004), 9–22; Heidbrink, Migrant Youth; Jacinthe Mazzocchetti, ‘Fermeture des frontières et liens transnationaux. Un terrain auprès de primo-migrants africains en Belgique’, Autrepart 57–58 (2011), 263–79. 74   Ní Laoire et al., ‘Introduction: Childhood and Migration’. 75   Mamadou Diouf, ‘Afterword’ in Honwana and De Boeck, Makers & Breakers, p. 229. 68

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of Saint-Joseph of Cluny – led a project transporting Senegalese children to France for training as priests, religious sisters and teachers.76 Although this project’s colonial and religious dynamic is clear, the individual and collective agency deployed by the children in their petition to stay in France and ‘make themselves useful’ shows how children themselves are capable, in certain cases, of adopting and adapting the system to their advantage in rather unexpected ways. While these reactions were deployed within a specific colonial and religious framework, this does not diminish their challenge to institutional plans for their future. The projects of parents, too, despite their insistence on retrieving their children, seem to run into refusals from their children more often than from institutions. Migration therefore proves central to any process of taking children’s voices into consideration, without hearing only those voices manipulated by religious and colonial authorities. However, their voices turn out to be complex to decipher, as they have their own logic which goes beyond the bounds of institutional frameworks. It is often institutional voices that we hear first and foremost in discourses on so-called ‘vulnerable’ children, as Chapdelaine’s chapter demonstrates. In the 1920s, major international efforts were instituted to end child trafficking, particularly in Africa. However, these efforts had limited success in colonial Nigeria, where they clashed with colonial institutions which were more concerned with the good functioning of their economy – which relied partly on juvenile labour – than with the well-being of these same populations. The international efforts also ran up against the fluidity of child migrants’ statuses in various societies within Nigeria. The complexity of situations clearly shows developments within these societies, particularly under the impact of colonialism and of North–South relationships more generally. The work of contemporary researchers appears to be more useful than that of international institutions from the period in recovering the agency and voices of children in this process; this once more shows that for these voices to exist, they must be heard by institutions that are able and willing to produce knowledges about these societies. The chapters of this section, and of this volume more broadly, thus invite us to go beyond the dominant structuralist model of childhood by critically questioning the notion of independent migration and its corollary, agency, without ever denying the role of structural constraints. To this end, these studies of particular cases attempt to understand child migration in context, and to convey their complexity and their multiple variations. 76   Here, the transposition of the ‘Child of Christianity’ model to colonial spaces can be understood as the substitution of Church in place of lineage (in this case the parents) with respect to children’s education and the family decision-making process.

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Part II – Being a Child and Becoming a Gendered Adult: The Challenges of Migrations in Childhood Children’s migrations often share structural reasons, although of course reasons for migration can be multiple, changing and interwoven. These structural motivations generally include work, survival and training in the broadest sense, which are often inseparable and can be linked to questions of alliance or pawning.77 Although children’s movements are part of a process that aims to turn them into gendered adults who will have to play various roles in society, it seems that the ‘near-immediate benefits’ are decisive in the choice to migrate.78 Migration in childhood: a learning process Education, in the broadest sense of the word, is thus often at the heart of child migration, whether this means acquiring a trade, learning more informal professional activities, domestic tasks and roles, or receiving education in the family or at school. All these forms of education often sustain ambiguous relationships, not just with one another but also with child labour, whose normative aspect forms part of the learning process. The framework is often fosterage. Education is subject to numerous hazards – structural as well as temporary, and often varying across several geographical spaces, whether over short- or long-distance and even transnational spaces. However, when education or learning is mentioned, it is often schools that immediately spring to mind, generally in the form of educational establishments offering teaching in the language of the former colonizer. In some countries, schooling also means education in medersas or Koranic schools (whether in the home of a Koranic teacher or in a larger, more formal institution).79 In many cultures, education also refers to the acquisition of various skills, including domestic tasks, and of cultural competencies, for example for children born abroad.80 In this context, child labour – which  Jónína Einarsdóttir, ‘Relocation of Children: Fosterage and Child Death in Biombo, Guinea-Bissau’, in Christiansen et al., Navigating Youth, pp. 183–200; Lallemand, La circulation. 78  Lallemand, La circulation. 79   Kae Amo, ‘Note de recherche – L’Anthropologue à l’école coranique. Faire face à la “bonne souffrance” des taalibés (Sénégal)’, AnthropoChildren 4 (2014) – available online: http://popups. ulg.ac.be/2034-8517/index.php?id=1971 [accessed 10 August 2015]; Joanne Chehami, ‘La monétisation de la mendicité infantile musulmane au Sénégal’, Journal des africanistes, 83(1) (2013), 256–94. 80   For example, migration from Europe to Africa may have educational aims, despite appearances to the contrary (due to a definitive or temporary removal from school, for example). See the growing scholarly literature on the topic: Caroline H. Bledsoe and Papa Sow, ‘Back to Africa: Second Chances for The Children of West African Immigrants’, in Laura Oso and Natalia Ribas Mateos, eds, The International Handbook on Gender, Migration and Transnationalism: Global and Development Perspectives (Cheltenham, 2013), pp. 185–207; Fedora Gasparetti, ‘Relying on Teranga: Senegalese Migrants to Italy and Their Children Left Behind’, Autrepart 57–58 (2011), 215–232; Elodie Razy, ‘Les “sens contraires” de la migration. La circulation des jeunes filles d’origine soninké entre la France et le Mali’, Journal des Africanistes 77(2) (2007), 19–43; Bruce Whitehouse, ‘Transnational Childrearing and the Preservation of Transnational Identity in Brazzaville, Congo’, Global Networks 9(1) (2009), 82–99. 77

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is often at the heart of migratory concerns – is generally a component of education and not just a source of revenue for the children themselves and/or those around them, as highlighted in Hepburn’s contribution (Chapter 3). Yet ignoring contemporary social and cultural contexts (especially local systems and relations of kinship, the status of the child, local components of education, etc.) in order to interpret child migration in Africa simply as a negative consequence of globalization serves only to reinforce or even further obscure the potentially hazardous situations of some children.81 For example, to consider fosterage in terms of whether it ‘corrupts’ or ‘misappropriates’ the ‘traditional’ educational institution presupposes the existence of a regulated earlier form, in contrast to current derivations with their negative consequences for children.82 Once again, without wishing to query the often-terrible situations experienced by children, especially in urban and monetarized contexts, should we not see the difference as one of degree rather than nature, and place it in a longer history? In other words, hasn’t this institution – like all institutions – throughout history had its ‘troublemakers’ and its ‘profiteers’ of all kinds who, far from ‘adulterating’ a ‘traditional’ institution, participated in its dynamic construction and continue to do so today as demonstrated in Porcelli’s chapter? Does Africa’s oral literature not bear witness to unhappy situations of fosterage, undermining the myth of a golden age when all children in confiage lived happy lives?83 It is therefore a question of degree, in which extremes are reached during crises and all sorts of upheavals, particularly at times of livelihood crises.84 Furthermore, we have too long neglected to consider the changes and adaptations undergone by the double entourage of any child migrant: those who fulfil parental duties change, but so does the peer group, which is not necessarily a source of support. It is crucial to research who fulfils various parental duties, however partially or sporadically – without forgetting that parental duties and entourage can be highly gendered (Chapdelaine, Chapter 2) – and how child migration simultaneously relies on and contributes to the maintenance of social and  Paola Porcelli, ‘Fosterage et résilience: discours collectifs et trajectoires individuelles de mobilité des enfants en milieu bambara’, Journal des Africanistes 81(2), 119–44. 82  Lallemand, La circulation; Alber et al., Child Fostering. 83   Nicolas Argenti, ‘Things that Don’t Come by the Road: Folktales, Fosterage, and Memories of Slavery in the Cameroon Grassfields’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 52 (2010), 224–254. 84  Lallemand, La circulation; Marie Rodet, ‘“Under the Guise of Guardianship and Marriage”: Mobilizing Juvenile and Female Labor in the Aftermath of Slavery in Kayes, French Soudan, 1900–1939’, in Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts, eds, Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children (Athens, OH, 2012), pp. 86–100. In its modern incarnation, it has two faces: to survive on the one hand, and to make a profit on the other. These crises have a notable effect on systems of kinship and alliance, and on intergenerational relations. See Erdmute Alber, ‘Grandparents as Foster-Parents: Transformations in Foster Relations between Grandparents and Grandchildren in Northern Benin’, Africa 74(1) Special issue ‘Grandparents and Grandchildren’ (2004), 28–46; Catrien Notermans, ‘Sharing Home, Food, and Bed: Paths of Grandmotherhood in East Cameroon’, Africa 74(1) Special issue ‘Grandparents and Grandchildren’ (2004), 6–27. 81

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kinship networks through the double entourage, as demonstrated by all the chapters in this collection. Again, as analysed by Porcelli (Chapter 4), children also display the ability to compose and sometimes mobilize this double entourage during migration – although not necessarily in a linear fashion – as well as to free themselves from it and to construct and negotiate their own agency by ‘playing’ on a number of registers, including gender. Gendering African child migration across generations While the gendered dimension of adult and youth migration tends nowadays to be systematically considered in migration studies,85 this does not seem to be the case for child migration. Children are still too often regarded as a ‘gender neutral’ population category covered by the overarching term of ‘family’.86 The gendered dimension appears to be taken as given when considering education and migration – highlighting in this case the negative relation between education and migration for girls87 – or when examining juvenile domestic work and child trafficking.88 A gendered approach to child migration allows for a historical and social deconstruction of the category of ‘childhood’ in Africa by questioning in particular the ‘double vulnerability’ of being both young and female. In Gardini’s chapter, the exploitative experiences of ‘boys’ in Togo – who, in reality, are no children – disrupt the usual lines of gendered vulnerability in child migration. Meanwhile, Hepburn’s chapter highlights the social and economical strength gained by young female domestic workers in Zambia in migration. Thus the chapters in this section once more demonstrate, each in its own way, the complexity of migratory situations in childhood, and particularly the gendered and generational aspect of these experiences.89 Indeed, migratory experiences fundamentally reshape relationships of gender and generation, while gender also profoundly shapes generational relations. Furthermore, we must note the unprecedented and unique position of the child migrant, as gendered intermediate and intermediary not only between local and global models of childhoods, but also between   Although still in a limited manner in historical migration studies. See Rodet, Les migrantes ignorées. 86  Giorgia Donà and Andrea Veale, ‘Mobility-in-Migration in an Era of Globalization: Key Themes and Future Directions’, in Veale and Donà, Child and Youth Migration, p. 239. 87   Deleigne and Pilon, ‘Migrations dans l’enfance’, 95. 88   The literature on those topics is very extensive, but for a comprehensive sociological study of the phenomenon of ‘young maids’ in Côte d’Ivoire, see Mélanie Jacquemin, ‘Petites bonnes’ d’Abidjan. Sociologie des filles en service domestique (Paris, 2012). For a critical historical perspective on trafficking, see Lawrance and Roberts, Trafficking. 89   For the generational dimension, see Jennifer Cole and Deborah Lynn Durham, ‘Introduction: Age, Regeneration, and The Intimate Politics of Globalization’, in Cole and Durham, eds, Generations and Globalization : Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy (Bloomington, IN, 2007), pp. 1–28; Heather Montgomery, An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological Perspectives on Children’s Lives (Malden, MA and Oxford, 2009). 85

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individuals, social groups, imaginaries and cultures. It is in particular because of the often-ambiguous status of children, originating in fears and idealization stemming from their liminality and the fact that they can constitute a source of power, that children and, by extension, young people can play a certain role or/and be used by individuals and institutions.90 As they appear to be able to manage diverse modes of communications and worlds of meanings, they can allow different social worlds to communicate with one another, thus acting as intermediate and intermediary in transmitting both material and immaterial items. This is underlined by different chapters across the volume: for example, by Tisseau’s contribution on the Malagasy métis, the archetype of the cultural broker (Chapter 6), but also by Duke Bryant’s contribution (Chapter 1), where the meeting of two different worlds creates agency for the child migrants. Furthermore, child migrants potentially play a key role in the reproduction and evolution of societies as transmitters of memory, as highlighted in Coker’s contribution (Chapter 10). In this section, Hepburn (Chapter 3) shows how the migration of young maids from rural spaces to towns in post-colonial Zambia has been strongly shaped by dynamics of gender and generation. By comparing the perspective of young migrants with that of their employers, Hepburn examines not only the capacity of all actors to respond to supply and demand, but also the young women’s awareness of their labour’s economic importance for their family, their employer and themselves. This almost makes these young girls into ‘entrepreneurs’, and allows them to use their own initiative in making decisions about their migratory trajectory and their labour. This case also demonstrates the capacity of different actors to shape what it means to be a young girl, particularly a young working migrant girl. There are models of societies which integrate all these dimensions together, and which socialize girls in this direction to some extent (education and work are clearly linked here). However, these migratory experiences can never strictly conform to these models in practice because each experience remains above all individual and unique, and is the result of aspirations and decisions specific to each child. Porcelli (Chapter 4) takes a qualitative psychological approach, offering a detailed snapshot of fosterage and pseudo-fosterage in Mali. She analyses the complex and various situations encompassed within the institution of confiage, and the multiple strategies of resilience employed by child migrants in their relationships with adults, as they construct an emotional balance which will be indispensable as they journey towards ‘adulthood’. The question of the journey towards ‘adulthood’ in a migratory context, and in particular the gendered journey, is at the heart of Gardini’s contribution (Chapter 5). Taking as an example the life stories of two young Togolese men who worked as ‘boys’ in relatively well-off 90

  Razy, ‘La pratique de l’éthique’.

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families during the 1980s and 1990s, Gardini shows the continuities and changes, not only in terms of old and new forms of exploitation, but also in terms of how gendered identities and masculinities are shaped by everyday economic, social and political struggles, in both childhood and adulthood. Here, migration reconfigures gender, seniority, childhood and human relations. In short, the aspirations of subordinate, dependent and junior members of the society to become ‘adults’ are often blocked by a dominant economic model which denies them any humanity. Furthermore, the migratory experience is here often paradoxical: on the one hand it may afford individuals a certain independence – notably through access to schooling and alternative resources – but, on the other hand, it may postpone the passage to ‘adulthood’ for ‘boys’, while reconfiguring the constructions of their masculinity.

Part III – Mobility, Imagination and Making Nations Child migrants are at the heart of political, economic, social, cultural, religious and national/international legal questions. These issues play out on an institutional level (via African and European states and political regimes, international organizations and NGOs) as well as at the level of local populations in both the sending country and the destination country. All children, child migrants most of all, are often the subject of disproportionate ideological investment, but this is no guarantee of protection – far from it. This aspect is rarely understood and/or taken into account, whether by those close to the child, by institutions or by researchers. We can only distinguish structural factors from those stemming from crisis – which may also become structural over time – if we untangle the complex historical and contemporary links between child migration and events, on a collective scale (at the level of both local and global institutions) as much as on individual biographical scale. To this end, transnational studies have played a clear role in gradually integrating the problematic of young people and children. Yet we still need to document and analyse issues raised by transnational childhoods, and the concrete and daily effects of a transnational life for children and young people.91 Coe proposes the study of what she calls the ‘repertoire’ of transnational families, which are the ‘beliefs, practices, and resources of family life’.92 According to her, ‘[s]ome of the newness of transnational migration stems from how it channels the flows of resources that are so crucial to the care and raising of children’.93 However, child migration relying on transnational social and family networks in order to mobilize educa Boehm et al., ‘Children, Youth, and the Everyday Ruptures of Migration’; Razy and Baby-Collin, ‘Introduction’. 92  Coe, The Scattered Family, p. 5. 93   Ibid., p. 29. 91

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tional resources are not a new phenomenon (Duke Bryant, Chapter 1; Tisseau, Chapter 6). Furthermore, the focus on the role of colonial and post-colonial states in the construction of transnational spaces, communities and identities often prevents recognition of the importance of other spaces (former empires, broader cultural and political systems, but also symbolic, religious, cosmological spaces and so on), which can often only be revealed by precise social and cultural anthropological and historical case studies.94 This is true, for example, in the case of the transnational Indian children moving to South Africa in Dhupelia-Mesthrie’s chapter (Chapter 8). The chapters by Tisseau, Ferrell, Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Whittaker and Hayer, and Coker in this section help to put into perspective the influence of colonial and political states in defining notions of belonging, by showing the connections and the superimpositions of different spaces that combine to forge plural identities, which are shaped or/and immediately re-appropriated by child migrants. To better understand these notions of belonging, constructed and forged by the migratory experience of children, it often proves indispensable to turn to oral history, but also to fiction (see Coker, Chapter 10) in order to fill in the gaps in the archives and institutional documentation. Intergenerational tales demonstrate the centrality of children to issues of politics and identity for adults and institutions, over several states, as well as across different models of gender and kinship. Tisseau (Chapter 6) shows how métis children in colonial Madgascar quickly became the subjects of state concerns about their identity. Educating them ‘as French’ was central to colonial educational policy. Yet, since French colonial schools were all located in the capital city of Antananarivo, mobility within Madagascar and with it the experience of the Malagasy territoriality, soon became an integral part of their path to become not only French, but also – perhaps most importantly – Malagasy. Furthermore, their transnational experience relied on extended kinship and social networks, demonstrating once again the importance of the entourage in migratory trajectories. Ferrell (Chapter 7) examines how some children educated in colonial schools in Northern Ghana became agents of social change from within this framework, through the construction of a common identity which ultimately called into question not only local but also colonial structures. This common identity cannot be reduced to a simple opposition of local versus colonial, nor to a regional opposition between northern and southern Ghana which, according to the colonial authorities, could lead only to ‘detribalization’. This new identity, and the links forged between peers within these schools, 94  Coe et al., Everyday Ruptures; Razy, ‘Ways of Being a Child’: Diptee and Klein, ‘African Childhoods’; Jack Lord, ‘Spatial Approaches to the History of Child Labour in Colonial Ghana’, Polyvocia – The SOAS Journal of Graduate Research 2 (2010), 31–45; Ware, The Walking Qur’an.

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would ultimately prove central to the political strategies deployed by a post-colonial elite to gain power. Dhupelia-Mesthrie (Chapter 8) documents migration from southern India to South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century through archives, oral testimonies and personal memoires. The chapter shows the importance of the political issues linked to child migration. For some of these children, migration would permit a certain social advancement linked to the construction of a new South African identity, which would later lead them to take an active part in the political transformations of South Africa. Was it their experience as young migrants, and the obligation to adapt to a difficult environment at a young age, that would later motivate them to commit themselves to a united South Africa against apartheid? It is tempting to draw such a link, although it is undoubtedly simplistic. Whittaker (Chapter 9) also draws on a series of oral testimonies to trace the educational trajectories of South Sudan’s first nationalist leaders, mapping their school days across space and time and examining the interaction between their experience of education and their future political consciousness, mobilization and imagination. At the centre of their education was Rumbek Secondary School, which moved from Rumbek in southern Sudan to Khartoum in the north when Sudan became independent in 1956. The children of the first Sudanese Civil War therefore experienced education in both the north and the south of the country, in the context of a process of Arabization. This was in strong contrast with their formative years at Christian schools either in southern Sudan, or across the border in northern Uganda. This experience of educational mobility certainly made them aware of their identity as ‘southerners’ and prompted them to challenge not only the authority of their school educators, but also the configuration of the post-colonial state. Finally, we can understand the complex consequences of child migration, particularly in terms of identity construction and belonging, through fiction. Coker (Chapter 10) analyses contemporary Nigerian novels which aim to reconstruct these migratory and diaspora experiences in a transnational and cosmopolitan dynamic. By using the child migrant as narrator, these novelists choose to move away from an essentialist vision of the child (authentic, innocent, without reason) towards a vision of the child as bearer of the voice of reason through the ‘Bildungsroman’ (‘socio-political experiences’). Children are therefore no longer used simply as narrative symbols to illustrate the problems of globalization, or even their capacity to be agents in their own migration. Rather, they are used far more for what they represent politically and socially, particularly within their increasingly transnational community. The chapters of Part III invite us to reflect further on the extent to which collective agency deployed in childhood and migration can

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be the foundation for future political engagement and participation, especially in the construction of nation states.95 More generally, the chapters of this book demonstrate that flexibility and fluidity in status and situation are particularly characteristic of the child migrants’ experiences of migration in Africa. Arguably, this feature (which probably most differentiates them from adult migrants and thus from the masculine migratory model of labour) is what makes it impossible or even useless to construct a distinct, complete migratory model for children. Finally, the chapters all to some extent question what the benefits are of processes whereby children and their migratory experience are made visible – and who benefits. How are child migrants (re)defined in this framework, and to what end? We hope, through this volume, to demonstrate the interest of studying child migrations both for their own sake and as a privileged means of accessing more global socio-cultural transformations which have affected and continue to affect African societies and North–South relations. We hope to provide some food for thought on these questions, but above all we aim to encourage a more lively research interest, and consequently an increase in studies and publications, within this field.   See Véronique Pache Huber and Spyros Spyrou, ‘Children’s interethnic relations in everyday life – beyond institutional contexts’, Childhood 19(3) (2012), 291–301; and the special issue of the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 31(9–10) (2011) edited by Martina McKnight, Madeleine Leonard and Spyros Spyrou. In the latter, see in particular the articles concerned with Africa: Lucille Gréty ‘Child Soldiers: Our Representation Challenged by their Reality’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 31 (9–10) (2011), 583–93; Kirrily Pells, ‘“Keep Going Despite Everything”: Legacies of Genocide for Rwanda’s Children and Youth’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 31 (9–10), 594–606.

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26 Introduction

Map 1  Europe and West Africa

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Inset.  Ghana, Togo and Nigeria

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28 Introduction

Map 2  East, Central and South Africa and the Indian Ocean World

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Inset 1.  Zambia

Inset 2.  Sudan and South Sudan

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Part I CHILD MIGRANTS IN AFRICA: BEYOND THE DILEMMA OF VULNERABILITY v. AGENCY

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1

‘An Ardent Desire to be Useful’

Senegalese Students, Religious Sisters & Migration for Schooling in France, 1824–1842 1

Kelly Duke Bryant

In April 1824, Mother Anne-Marie Javouhey, the founder and Mother Superior of the Catholic Sisters of Saint-Joseph of Cluny, wrote to France’s Minister of the Marine and Colonies, seeking his support for an idea that she had long entertained. She proposed to ‘raise’ and educate African boys and girls, aged eight to 10 years, at the Saint-Joseph house in Bailleul-sur-Thérain, France, teaching them academic subjects, manual or domestic skills and religion. She would choose her pupils from among those children in the care of the French government in Senegal. The boys, who would live separately and receive their education from the chaplain, she wrote, would become ‘priests or teachers, according to their dispositions; the girls could become nuns or secular teachers for Africa’. She asked the Minister to permit her to move forward with this programme, and to ask the Government to cover the costs of transportation.2 The Minister responded positively to Javouhey’s request and, though his response was more measured, the Governor of Senegal also supported it. Accordingly, 11 children travelled from Senegal to Bailleul-sur-Thérain in the spring of 1825. They were joined in May 1827 by 10 children, and by one more in the summer of 1828. Though Javouhey hoped eventually to have 35 young Africans in her school, she never reached her goal, in part because of the health problems the students encountered in France. Indeed, a quick succession of deaths from tuberculosis in the early 1830s raised serious questions about the programme and produced a controversy surrounding the future of the children already resident in France. This controversy – which involved the sisters, government officials, parents and the young people themselves – is the subject of this chapter. When they received word that Senegalese children had fallen sick and that several had died in France, frantic parents and relatives sought the immediate return of their young loved ones. Student opinions were split, with 1   I wish to thank my colleagues in the history department at Rowan University, the editors of this volume and the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions. 2   Soeur Javouhey to Clermont-Tonnerre, Ministre de la Marine et des Colonies, Paris, 21 April 1824, in Jean Hébert and Marie-Cécile de Segonzac, eds, Anne-Marie Javouhey: Lettres (Paris, 1994), letter 79; Soeur Javouhey to Ministre, Paris, 21 April 1824, SEN/X/2, Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France (hereafter ANOM).

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‘An Ardent Desire to be Useful’

some agreeing readily to return home and others professing a strong desire to remain, even if this went against the wishes of their families. The sisters helped organize the return of some students, but advocated for others who wanted to remain in France to complete their schooling. Relying on correspondence between the adults involved and on one extraordinary letter signed by several students, this chapter makes the case that by providing access to French patrons and a better understanding of French expectations, migration facilitated students’ ability to ‘speak’ for themselves. In recent years, scholars have begun to devote more attention to the history of African children and youth and they have explored a number of ways in which young people appear in the historical record as agents. They have shown how African children and youth contested unfavourable colonial policies and practices, used colonial institutions in unexpected ways, and challenged European plans for urban society. For example, young people shaped their experiences of colonial schooling in places ranging from Senegal to Southern Rhodesia by petitioning education personnel or colonial officials for improved conditions, by protesting poor treatment and school policies they opposed, or by rejecting schools that did not meet their needs.3 They sought opportunity by migrating to cities such as Lagos and Dar es Salaam, raising concerns among elite residents about youth ‘vagrancy’ and petty crime, and forcing colonial authorities to address ‘juvenile delinquency’.4 Scholars have also explored how young people used new resources made available by colonial rule, such as education and literacy, association with a Christian mission or cash wages, to challenge the authority of their elders.5 Despite these broader efforts to analyse the ability of African children and youth to shape their own histories, however, the subset of this scholarship that deals with the migration of African children has tended to emphasize their oppression, exploitation and victimization. This emphasis makes sense, since African children were often forced to migrate as slaves, both within Africa and outside the continent, or as pawns. Following the abolition of the slave trade and then of slavery itself, according to scholars such as Ibrahima Thioub, Marie Rodet and Cati Coe, forced migration continued, often taking the form of pawn3   Michael O. West, ‘Ndabaningi Sithole, Garfield Todd and the Dadaya School Strike of 1947’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 18(2) (1992), 297–304; Carol Summers, Colonial Lessons: Africans’ Education in Southern Rhodesia, 1918–1940 (Portsmouth, NH, 2002), chapter 1; Carol Summers, ‘“Subterranean Evil” and “Tumultuous Riot” in Buganda: Authority and Alienation at King’s College, Budo, 1942’, Journal of African History 47 (2006), 93–113; Kelly Duke Bryant, ‘Clothing and Community: Children’s Agency in Senegal’s School for Sons of Chiefs and Interpreters, 1892–1910’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 47 (2014), 239–58. 4  Andrew Burton, ‘Urchins, Loafers and the Cult of the Cowboy: Urbanization and Delinquency in Dar es Salaam, 1919–61’, Journal of African History 42(2) (2001), 199–216; Laurent Fourchard, ‘Lagos and the Invention of Juvenile Delinquency in Nigeria, 1920–60’, Journal of African History 47(1) (2006), 115–37. 5   See, for example, Derek R. Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH, 2004), chapters 2 and 3.

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ship or child fosterage.6 Pawnship and fosterage, which played significant roles in families’ child-rearing strategies both before and after the abolition of slavery, were not uniformly oppressive and could provide children with access to new knowledge and resources. But even those authors who focus on the more beneficial aspects of these social practices admit that they easily succumbed to abuse.7 Moreover, despite the efforts of scholars such as Sacha Hepburn and Marco Gardini (Chapters 3 and 5) to complicate our assumptions about exploitation, the migration of African children in recent decades has been most closely associated with low-paying domestic work, missed educational opportunities and sex trafficking.8 The historical episode that forms the core of this chapter – young African students’ efforts to shape the debate in the 1830s over whether or not they would be repatriated to Senegal from France – allows for a rather different assessment of the impact of migration on African children and youth. Indeed, for these students, travel to France empowered them by offering new sources of patronage, increasing French hopes for what they might accomplish in the future, and preventing families from simply showing up to reclaim them.9 Despite its small sample size, this episode suggests that although migration has often been a source of oppression for African children and young people, it could – under certain circumstances – also provide new opportunities for agency. 6   Marcia Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life Stories from East/Central Africa (New York, 1993); Ibrahima Thioub, ‘La gestion de la marginalité juvénile dans la colonie du Sénégal: de l’abolition de l’esclavage aux écoles pénitentiaires, 1848–1906’, Les Cahiers Histoire et Civilisations: Revue thématique et interdisciplinaire 1 (2003), 117–30; Pier Larson, ‘Horrid Journeying: Narratives of Enslavement and the Global African Diaspora’, Journal of World History 19(4) (2008), 431–64; Cati Coe, ‘Domestic Violence and Child Circulation in the Southeastern Gold Coast, 1905–28’, in Emily S. Burrill, Richard L. Roberts and Elizabeth Thornberry, eds, Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Athens, OH, 2010), pp. 54–73; Marie Rodet, ‘“Under the Guise of Guardianship and Marriage”: Mobilizing Juvenile and Female Labor in the Aftermath of Slavery in Kayes, French Soudan, 1900–1939’, in Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts, Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa (Athens, OH, 2012), pp. 86–100. 7  Bart Rwezaura, ‘Competing “Images” of Childhood in the Social and Legal Systems of Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa’, International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family 12 (1998), 253–78; Elisha P. Renne, ‘Childhood Memories and Contemporary Parenting in Ekiti, Nigeria’, Africa 75(1) (2005), 63–82. Rudolph T. Ware’s study of Qur’anic schooling in Senegal implies some parallels between fosterage and young people’s travels in pursuit of an ‘Islamic education’. While he stresses the positive outcomes of this education, he also describes some of the hardships faced by these students. Rudolph T. Ware III, The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa (Chapel Hill, 2014), chapter 1; Rudolph T. Ware  III, ‘Njàngaan: The Daily Regime of Qur’ânic Students in Twentieth-Century Senegal’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 37(3) (2004), 515–38. For a notable exception, see Lynne Brydon, ‘Women at Work: Some Changes in Family Structure in Amedzofe-Avatime, Ghana’, Africa 49(2) (1979), 97–111. 8  For example, Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts, eds., Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa (Athens, OH, 2012), part 2; Sacha Hepburn, Chapter 3, this volume; Marco Gardini, Chapter 5, this volume. 9   Scholars have paid some attention to the effects of travel to the metropole on colonial subjects in various contexts. Good examples include Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley, CA, 1998); Saloni Mathur, India By Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley, CA, 2007), chapter 2.

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‘An Ardent Desire to be Useful’

Although others have written about this incident and have relied on similar sources, my approach differs fundamentally, both in terms of the questions I ask and the way I read the documents. Previous scholarship has examined the efforts of the Sisters of Saint-Joseph of Cluny to educate African children in France as a milestone in the history of colonial education in Senegal, as evidence of Anne-Marie Javouhey’s commitment to Africa as a mission field or as significant because it provided Senegal with its first black and métis (mixed-race) priests.10 In contrast, I am interested primarily in what was at stake for the young Africans involved in this experiment and in how experiences of education abroad affected their capacity to act on their own behalf. To that end, I approach the correspondence between colonial officials, missionary sisters, parents and students with an eye to what it reveals about the young people’s goals and their abilities to achieve them. This correspondence suggests that by allowing these young people to manoeuver between the competing priorities of officials, missionaries and their own parents, migration to France contributed significantly to their role as historical agents.

The Creation of the African Seminary A confluence of interests, however temporary, between the Sisters of Saint-Joseph of Cluny, the colonial government, parents and guardians, and perhaps even children accounted for the arrival in France over 20 African children in the later 1820s. Anne-Marie Javouhey and her sisters saw these children as future missionaries, who would help bring Christianity to Africa and to Africans in the Americas. Colonial officials, including Governor Roger of Senegal, were more interested in the education that this project would provide and its potential to contribute to the civilizing work of French rule. While the interests of the Africans are less clear, they likely wanted to obtain access to French education or to demonstrate their loyalty to France or the Catholic Church. Despite the variation in these goals, they aligned quite nicely in support of Javouhey’s project, at least until the children began to fall sick and die in 1829. Anne-Marie Javouhey had been interested in Senegal since her first trip to West Africa in 1822, just a few years after she sent members of her order there to run the hospital and open a school for girls. Although   Denise Bouche, ‘L’Enseignement dans les territoires français de l’Afrique occidentale de 1817 à 1920’, (Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris I, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 185–95; 249–53; Sarah A. Curtis, Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire (Oxford, 2010), chapter 7; C. C. Martindale, The Life of Mère Anne-Marie Javouhey (London, 1953); Geneviève Lecuir-Nemo, Anne-Marie Javouhey: Fondatrice de la congrégation des soeurs de Saint-Joseph de Cluny (1779–1851) (Paris, 2001); Yvon Bouquillon and Robert Cornevin, David Boilat (1814–1901): Le précurseur (Dakar, 1981). See also Rebecca Rogers, From the Salon to the Schoolroom: Educating Bourgeois Girls in Nineteenth-Century France (University Park, PA, 2005), pp. 234–41.

10

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the mission faced numerous obstacles in its early years, Anne-Marie Javouhey threw herself into its activities until her departure in 1824. She successfully rejuvenated the hospital and, though the school she created for black girls never attracted many students, the broader effort to educate girls (especially métisses) did very well. Perhaps more importantly for the history of the African seminary in France, these early experiences in Senegal and elsewhere in West Africa inspired Anne-Marie Javouhey to work among Africans and people of African descent across the French empire. Her plan to train Africans to work as clergy and teachers emerged from this new commitment to an African ministry, and also from Javouhey’s knowledge of the problems the Senegal mission faced – disease, shortage of priests, and language and cultural barriers.11 When Anne-Marie Javouhey proposed her plan for an African seminary in April 1824, she quickly received support from the Minister of the Marine and Colonies, but the Governor of Senegal, Jacques-François Roger, expressed some reservations. Even though he was a friend and a staunch supporter of Javouhey’s ambitious plans for her order and for the French colonies, Roger worried about the risks of sending children from Senegal to France to obtain an education. In France, children might become disconnected from ‘the tastes, the habits of their country’, might forget their language, or might adopt an overly European lifestyle. Such changes would inhibit their ability to spread French civilization and influence by working as teachers or priests upon returning to Senegal. A school in Senegal, on the other hand, would be very expensive to establish and maintain, and children might not be as receptive to new ideas if they remained so close to home. Ultimately, Roger accepted Javouhey’s plan, agreeing to send only 10 students at first – five métis and five poor blacks.12 The first group of children left for France late in the spring of 1825 and they had arrived at the Saint-Joseph house in Bailleul-sur-Thérain by June of that year. Ranging from seven to 13 years of age, the group included three métis boys, four black boys (one of them a former slave), three black girls and one métisse girl. Mother Javouhey eagerly anticipated their arrival and she gushed over them to her sister, Mother Rosalie, who was head of the Saint-Joseph house in Bourbon, during the early weeks of their stay, writing, ‘My young black children are doing marvellously.’13 She remained enthusiastic about the project, 11  Curtis, Civilizing Habits, pp. 178, 189–203. On her trip to West Africa, she also travelled into British territory, visiting Bathurst (The Gambia) and Freetown (Sierra Leone). 12  Ministre to Commandant du Sénégal, 16 June 1824, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Commandant et Administrateur du Sénégal to Monseigneur, Saint-Louis, 24 August 1824, SEN/X/2, ANOM. 13  Gouverneur to Ministre, Saint-Louis, 26 April 1825, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Etat nominatif des Onze enfans africains envoyés du Sénégal en France en 1825 sur le navire le Sénégalais, Saint-Louis, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Note (by Ministre), Paris, 7 September 1825, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Soeur Javouhey to Soeur Madeleine Collonge, Supérieure intérimaire à Saint-Louis, Toulon, 23 February 1825, in Anne-Marie Javouhey: Lettres, letter 95; Soeur Javouhey to Mère Rosalie Javouhey, à Bourbon, 26 June 1825, in Anne-Marie Javouhey: Lettres, letter 103, emphasis in

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‘An Ardent Desire to be Useful’

writing in October or November of 1826 about her desire for 10 more students, with the aim of increasing the total number to 35. The Africans already under her care in France had ‘surpassed our hopes in their aptitude, their application, and especially their virtues’, she wrote. She won the approval of the Minister and of the Governor of Senegal, and 10 more children from Senegal, all boys and ranging in age from nine to 13 years, made their way to her school in May 1827. Another boy, a former slave, came to France during the summer months of 1828, accompanied by three nuns from Javouhey’s order who were returning home. Sure that she was doing God’s work, Javouhey thought her efforts would positively impact the ‘health of all the poor Africans’ through the services that her students would provide upon their return to Senegal.14 Although it is more difficult to discern the interests of the Africans involved, the early history of colonial education in Senegal provides some clues. A school for boys had operated in Saint-Louis, Senegal, since 1816 and in Gorée since around the same time, meaning that there was some precedent for French education. Indeed, Jean Dard, who founded the Saint-Louis school, claimed that over 300 ‘blacks’ had passed through the school in its first few years and that 150 were attending on a ‘daily’ basis when, in November 1820, poor health had forced him to return to France. Dard may have exaggerated these numbers, but others also observed that Africans seemed receptive to ‘civilization’ and education in the 1810s and 1820s. French schooling fell on hard times after Dard’s departure, however, suffering from rapid turnover, poorly trained personnel and a lack of investment until the Brothers of Christian Instruction (Ploërmel) took control in 1841.15 The girls’ schools were on surer footing, but the sisters found it difficult to recruit black African girls and had to close Javouhey’s school for these students in 1832 due to low enrolment.16 Continued attendance problems at both girls’ and boys’ schools reflected the predomthe original. There is some discrepancy with regard to the total number of African students in 1825. The official correspondence that I cite above refers to 11 students, and includes a list of 11 names. Javouhey herself wrote in June 1825 that she had 12 ‘black children’, eight boys and four girls. Citing a different letter from Senegal’s interim governor to the colonial minister (but written on the same 26 April 1825 date), Lecuir-Nemo states that 10 children – seven boys and three girls – travelled to France that month. To this number were added Florence, a young girl from Fouta who had returned to France with Anne-Marie Javouhey in 1824, and Vincent Joseph, a Galibi Indian brought from Guiana in 1824. 14   Soeur Javouhey to Ministre, Nd (October 1826), SEN/X/2, ANOM; Ministre to Mme Javouhey, 27 November 1826, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Liste des enfans qui doivent partir pour France, 16 May 1827,  SEN/X/2, ANOM; Javouhey to Ministre, Paris, 9 June 1828, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Soeur Javouhey to Dr Molinier, à Limoux, Paris, 30 July 1827, in Anne-Marie Javouhey: Lettres, letter 146; Soeur Javouhey to M Hyde de Neuville, Ministre de la Marine et des Colonies, Paris, 9 June 1828, in Anne-Marie Javouhey: Lettres, letter 172. 15   Dard to Ministre de la Marine, Auxey près Beaune, Côte d’Or, 20 April 1822, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Illegible to Ministre Secrétaire d’Etat et de la Marine et des Colonies, Paris, 25 January 1819, SEN/X/1, ANOM; Guidicelly to Ministre de la Marine, 5 January 1819, SEN/X/1, ANOM. 16   Abdoulaye Sadji, Education Africaine et civilisation (Dakar, 1964), pp. 67–75; Bouche, ‘L’Enseignement’, vol. 1, pp. 52–81; Curtis, Civilizing Habits, pp. 195–96. (contd)

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inance of Islam in the region and its impact on African perceptions of French schooling. Indeed, many Muslim families were leery of French schools and did not want to send their children for fear that they would face pressure to convert to Catholicism.17 Given the limited nature of French schooling in Senegal and its Catholic orientation, Mother Javouhey’s African seminary in Limoux would have appealed to Africans for particular reasons. On the one hand, it offered quality education that was unparalleled in Senegal at the time, and on the other, it allowed families to signal that they accepted, or at least did not oppose, a French and Catholic worldview. The little we know about the students and their families also sheds light on possible motivations. All of the children were extremely young, ages seven to 13 years, when they came to France, suggesting that their participation in the project reflected the priorities of their parents or guardians rather than themselves, though they certainly could have given their opinions on the matter. The list of students sent in 1825 provides very little information other than each student’s name, age, race, sex and status – free or former slave. Of the seven boys on this list, three were listed as free ‘mulattoes’, three as free ‘blacks’ and one as a former slave (affranchi). Of the four girls, one was the daughter of a former French military officer and must have been racially mixed, while three blacks ‘belong[ed] to the Government’, an ambiguous status that suggests that they were either slaves or orphans under the care of the administration. Lacking families to speak or to decide for them, the three black girls and the freed slave boy were the most vulnerable among these children, and therefore had the least agency in determining whether or not to go to France. The mixed-race boys came from families that were already, by virtue of ancestry, oriented towards France and formed part of the community that most wanted French education within the colony. The names of two of the three black boys suggest that their families had converted to Christianity, a religious decision that may have motivated them to take advantage of the offer of religious training for their children. Significantly, these young students depended on Catholic networks and benevolence in order to move between colony and metropole.18 The list of children who left Senegal for France in May 1827 offers more information than the earlier list. The fact that it includes parents’ names indicates that all 10 boys had some connection to their own families. Although the document does not specify the children’s race, their family names suggest that six were métis while the remaining four were black. Each child possessed a birth certificate, and two black boys along with four métis boys also had baptismal certificates, a clear 17   Christopher Harrison, France and Islam in West Africa, 1860–1960 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 11–15; Papa Ibrahima Seck, La stratégie culturelle de la France en Afrique: l’enseignement colonial (1817–1960) (Paris, 1993), pp. 32–37; Bouche, ‘L’Enseignement’, vol. 1, pp. 80–81, 139. 18   Etat nominatif des Onze enfans africains envoyés du Sénégal en France en 1825 sur le navire le Sénégalais, SEN/X/2, ANOM.

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‘An Ardent Desire to be Useful’

indication of the Christian status of their families. The families of these children likely undertook the decision to send them to France for school in an effort to assure them a quality education, to demonstrate the family’s commitment to Christianity, and/or to indicate an acceptance of French culture.19 Perhaps most interesting among the students sent in 1827 because so different from the others was Mamoudou Sy, a ‘prince’ from Bundu, a Muslim kingdom far in the interior of Senegambia. He had been sent to Saint-Louis as a ‘hostage’, marking an alliance between his aristocratic parents and French officials.20 His presence reflects the Government’s new initiative to educate in Saint-Louis several sons of important chiefs from outlying areas, in hopes that this would spur on close ties between African leaders and the French. In the 1820s, this initiative focused primarily on Galam, a kingdom that bordered Bundu and that had attracted French commercial interest for decades, and on Kayoor, a kingdom to the south of Saint-Louis that was also an important trading partner. The leaders of Bundu had recently signed a treaty with the French, and would have had an interest in demonstrating their good faith and the kingdom’s commercial potential by sending a relative to be educated in France.21 For a moment in the later 1820s, then, these different interests came together in support of Mother Javouhey’s education project. Even though their precise goals varied, everyone envisioned gaining something – future missionaries, proponents of civilization, advancement for their children, recognition of their status as educated people and/ or Christians, or continued trade. Though this confluence of interests allowed Mother Javouhey to begin carrying out her plan, the project soon foundered as the children’s health began to fail.

From Spiritual Health to Corporeal Decline Though the missionary sisters focused their efforts on the spiritual health of their African students, the children’s physical health soon began to pose problems. Twenty-two children had been sent from Senegal to France from 1825 to 1828, but by October 1829 only 18 students remained.22 One of the girls had gone to Cayenne (French 19   Liste des enfans qui doivent partir pour France, 16 May 1827, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Curtis, Civilizing Habits, p. 204. 20   Ibid. 21   Commandant et Administrateur du Sénégal to Monseigneur, Saint-Louis, 18 October 1823, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Yves Hazemann, ‘Un Outil de la conquête coloniale: L’école des Otages de Saint-Louis (1855–1871; 1892–1903)’, Cahiers du C.R.A. 5 (1987), 137–40; Seck, La stratégie culturelle, p. 73; Michael A. Gomez, Pragmatism in the Age of Jihad: The Precolonial State of Bundu (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 1–5, 17–22, 93–98; Andrew F. Clark, ‘The Fulbe of Bundu (Senegambia): From Theocracy to Secularization’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 29(1) (1996), 1–23. Note that Galam and Bundu were frequently at war during the early nineteenth century. 22   Soeur Javouhey to Soeur Xavier Lucarelle, Supérieure à St-Pierre-et-Miquelon, Paris, 18

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Guiana) with Anne-Marie Javouhey in 1828, another girl had been repatriated in 1829, and a boy, Pierre Blondin, had died in April 1829, most likely of tuberculosis. Others had been sick as well, and concerns for the students’ health and well-being prompted the school’s relocation from the chilly north of France where, the sisters realized, ‘the climate … does not suit their constitution’, to the south, with its rather warmer and purportedly healthier climate. By October 1829, the sisters had managed to purchase a building in Limoux, near one of their existing houses, and they had completed the move there by the end of the year.23 Despite these precautions, sickness and death continued to plague the young Africans, with 10 dying from 1830 to 1834, and four of these deaths occurring within seven months in late 1831 and 1832 alone. This alarming trend prompted the Minister of the Marine and Colonies to seek an explanation from the director of the school. Were these deaths, he asked, a result of anything other than ‘the ordinary risk of mortality’ that African children faced in France?24 Although no nationwide statistics are available for the nineteenth century, Parisian data dating back to 1816 and data for several other industrial cities in the late nineteenth century suggest that ‘ordinary’ mortality due to tuberculosis was in fact quite high in France at this time. According to historian David Barnes, Parisian death rates fell between 3.4 and 4.0 people per thousand from 1816 to 1848. These rates were doubtless higher in Paris and in other industrializing cities than in the provinces, but the impact of the disease extended across the country.25 Yet even so, the school’s physician, Dr Molinier, conceded that the students from Senegal were dying more quickly from tuberculosis than the general French population, and he sought to explain this in a July 1832 report. The four most recent deaths, which had occurred over only seven months, would only be ‘astonishing’, he wrote, ‘if we did not know that every black, big or small, young or old, who is brought to Europe is extremely susceptible to afflictions of the lymphatic system. Once a black has been coughing for a time, he is lost.’26 Molinier accepted (contd) April 1828, in Anne-Maire Javouhey: Lettres, letter 162; Etat nominatif des Onze enfans africains envoyés du Sénégal en France en 1825 sur le navire le Sénégalais, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Liste des enfans qui doivent partir pour France, 16 May 1827, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Report from Ministère de la Marine et des Colonies, Paris, 23 October 1829, SEN/X/2, ANOM. 23   Marie-Joseph Javouhey to Ministre, Bailleul Sur Thérain, 19 October 1829, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Soeur Javouhey to Mère Clotilde Javouhey, à Limoux, Mana, 9 January 1830, in Anne-Marie Javouhey: Lettres, letter 210; Soeur Javouhey to Baron Roger, à Paris, Mana, port Saint-Joseph, 9 January 1830, in Anne-Marie Javouhey: Lettres, letter 211; Lecuir-Nemo, Anne-Marie Javouhey, pp. 175–6; Curtis, Civilizing Habits, p. 205. Lecuir-Nemo suggests that the Bishop of Beauvais had also become uncomfortable with the school’s proximity to the novitiate. 24   Secrétaire Général to Ministre, Carcassonne, 20 January 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Préfet de l’Aude to Ministre, Carcassonne, 2 April 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Préfet de l’Aude to Ministre, Carcassonne, 27 April 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Préfet de l’Aude to Ministre, Carcassonne, 22 May 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Ministre to Mme Supérieure des Soeurs de St Joseph à Limoux, 30 June 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM. 25  David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, CA, 1995), pp. 5–7, 13. 26   Molinier, List of deaths of the Senegalese students, 20 July 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM.

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the widespread belief among French medical practitioners of the era that people inherited a particular propensity to tuberculosis infection, and that onset of the disease could then be triggered by a variety of circumstances or behaviours. In his report, he noted that the ‘general constitution’ of black people predisposed them to suffering from tuberculosis, ‘at least in our European climates. Black people’s skin is not stimulated enough by the sun of our climates’, he explained, to allow it ‘to adequately perform its functions in respiration and purification’. This required the lungs to work harder and weakened them, allowing tuberculosis to set in.27 This series of deaths and the ensuing debate about whether the surviving students should return to Senegal or remain in France brought to light the students’ ability to shape their own destinies, an ability that travel to France had enhanced rather than suppressed. By the early 1830s, the students had been away from their parents and in the care of their French benefactors for between four and seven years, and they were now older children and youths, ranging in age from 14 to 20 years. Furthermore, they had formed strong ties with the missionary sisters who wanted them to complete their educations in France and, as colonial subjects living in the metropole, they could also seek help from the Ministry of the Marine and of the Colonies. Thus, when alarmed parents began to request the repatriation of their children, the students did not necessarily comply with their parents’ wishes. In May 1832, the Governor of Senegal submitted a list of 11 students whose parents wanted them to return to Senegal and Clothilde Javouhey, the Superior of the house at Limoux and Mother Anne-Marie Javouhey’s niece, penned her response to the Minister about this issue in late August 1832. She indicated that four of the children on the May list had already died. She had spoken to the remainder about their health and had told them that their parents wished for them to come home. Three students on the list – Pierre Louis Noël, Louis Maréchal and John Davis – wanted to go back to Senegal, and two whose names did not appear – Jean-Baptiste Amadis and François Douga – had asked to join them, citing health concerns. The remaining four were not interested in returning to Senegal. Thus, the sisters’ ‘desire to carry out the request of these parents for these young people is counterbalanced by that of wanting to please these poor children who are so filled with good intentions, and for whom we have made big sacrifices for several years’. Mamoudou Sy, Charles Fridoil, Jean-Pierre Moussa and Charles Caty, Clothilde Javouhey explained, wished to remain with the sisters in Limoux in order to ‘finish their education, no matter the price’. The 27   Ibid.; Barnes, Social Disease, chapter 1. Barnes makes the case that by the 1830s, French doctors were beginning to consider other factors like social status or contagion in their efforts to explain tuberculosis infection. Even so, the notion that heredity played a determining role remained significant for several more decades.

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young Sy, whose health suffered some, went so far as to claim that he ‘would prefer to die in France if he must rather than return right away to his country’. Seven other students from Senegal, for whom no one had demanded repatriation, continued their studies.28 The fact that students came to different conclusions about whether or not to remain in France reminds us that they were individuals with their own perspectives. It also suggests that Clothilde Javouhey did in fact consult them and allow them to make the important decision for themselves. Although Javouhey did not explain why each student wanted to return to Senegal, other evidence offers hints. Four of the five who opted in favour of repatriation had come to France in 1825, at least two years before many of those who decided to stay. At age 18, two of them, Louis Maréchal and John Davis, were the oldest among the students. Perhaps they thought it time to take up a career in Senegal. Furthermore, all but François Douga came from métis families, some of them prominent, and thus likely had economic options thanks to their family connections in this era of métis dominance in Senegal. Finally, Jean-Baptiste Amadis was ill enough that in September 1832 Clothilde Javouhey stated that his poor health might prevent him from making the trip back to Senegal despite his desire to return.29 Thus age, time spent in France, economic opportunities in Senegal and genuine concerns about health may have figured into individual decisions to accept repatriation. In contrast, of the four students who lobbied in favour of staying in France – Mamoudou Sy, Charles Fridoil, Jean-Pierre Moussa and Charles Caty – all but one (Caty) had arrived in 1827, and their shorter experience in France helps to explain why they felt that their education was not yet complete. The day after Clothilde Javouhey wrote to the Minister of the Marine and Colonies, these students sent their own letter, expressing their appreciation for his support of their education thus far and begging him to allow them to stay in France. They acknowledged that four of their fellow students had died in France and that five others had embraced the opportunity to return home. Yet they praised the sisters for the hard work and ‘enormous expense’ devoted to their education thus far, claiming that the sisters had ‘done much more for us than our parents themselves would have ever been able to do’. They espoused their willingness to give up ‘the desire to see  Gouverneur to Ministre, Saint-Louis, 6 May 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Clothilde Javouhey to Ministre, Limoux, 21 August 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Ministre to Gouverneur du Sénégal, Paris, 21 September 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM. 29  Etat nominatif des Onze enfans africains envoyés du Sénégal en France en 1825 sur le navire le Sénégalais, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Liste des enfants qui doivent partir pour France, 16 May 1827, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Gouverneur to Ministre, Saint-Louis, 6 May 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Javouhey to Commissaire, Limoux, 8 September 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM. For more on Senegal’s métis community during this period, see Nathalie Reyss, ‘Saint-Louis du Sénégal à l’époque précoloniale: L’Émergence d’une société métisse originale, 1658–1854’ (Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris I, Sorbonne, 1982/3); Hilary Jones, The Métis of Senegal: Urban Life and Politics in French West Africa (Bloomington, IN, 2013), chapters 1–2. 28

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our families and our country sometime soon for the sake of the even more ardent desire to be able to be useful to them’ upon their eventual return, noting that because of the opportunities that France provided, they were ‘happier than we would ever be elsewhere’. Furthermore, they maintained that they were making great strides in their studies but needed more time to improve in languages and arts in particular; otherwise, the sisters’ ‘investment’ would not reach its potential.30 After receiving these letters from Clothilde Javouhey and the students, the Minister allowed them to stay at the school in Limoux on a provisional basis, pending communication with the Governor of Senegal. He instructed her to organize immediately the repatriation of the five students who had chosen to return home.31 Although we cannot know for sure, evidence suggests that one of the student signatories took responsibility for setting pen to paper. The writer of this barely three-page letter employed a formal cursive – slightly embellished but very readable – that remains consistent throughout. The letters are formed in the same way, the script slopes on the same angle, and there are no corrections or obvious mistakes. A comparison to letters signed by Clothilde Javouhey clearly indicates that she did not write this letter on behalf of the students, though she certainly may have provided guidance. While it is possible that the students paid a professional letter-writer to produce this copy, it seems more likely that one of the students served as scribe, making good use of handwriting improved in the over five years spent at school in France. The signatures vary enough to suggest that students signed their own names, yet Mamoudou Sy’s signature appears in a style very similar to the handwriting used in the body of the letter. Perhaps he wrote it on behalf of his classmates. Regardless of whose penmanship it represents, this letter is a striking and unique piece of evidence that allows historians to glimpse four students’ priorities and strategies. Indeed, as Corrie Decker and Lynn Thomas have argued for colonial Zanzibar and colonial Kenya, respectively, letter-writing provided a platform that schoolchildren could use in a process of self-crafting and as a means to exercise agency.32 This letter is so important precisely because its   Amand Mamoudoucy [Mamoudou Sy], Charles Fridoil, Jean Pierre Moussa, Charles Cathy [Caty] to Ministre, Limoux, 22 August 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM. 31  Ministre to Clotilde Javouhey, 4 September 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Préfet Maritime to Ministre, Toulon, 18 September 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM. Indeed, the debate over student illness in Limoux raised questions about the wisdom of the programme, and this led to a reconsideration of the focus of the education received. In a letter to the Governor of Senegal a few weeks later, the Minister asked whether it made sense to send more young people from Senegal to Limoux, given that the curriculum was so focused on arts and letters rather than practical skills. See Ministre to Gouverneur du Sénégal, Paris, 21 September 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM. 32   Lynn M. Thomas, ‘Schoolgirl Pregnancies, Letter-Writing, and “Modern” Persons in Late Colonial East Africa’, in Karin Barber, ed., Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington, IN, 2006), pp. 180–207; Corrie Decker, ‘Reading, Writing, and Respectability: How Schoolgirls Developed Modern Literacies in Colonial Zanzibar’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 43(1) (2010), 89–114. 30

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content reveals how these students chose to position themselves in the controversy about whether or not they should stay in France and therefore to make their own decisions about their futures. In composing it, they likely relied on letter-writing skills and conventions that they had learned in school, but it is not overly formulaic, suggesting that they did not simply copy a model. They struck an appropriately formal, respectful and grateful tone, referring to themselves as the ‘very humble and very obedient servants’ of ‘his Excellence’ in the letter’s closing, and expressing strong appreciation for the ‘consideration’ the Minister had given to their parents’ request and for his ‘interest’ in ‘young children who have not yet been able to do anything to deserve it’. At the same time, however, they also asserted themselves, clearly stating their desire to complete their education with the sisters and asking the Minister to ‘always maintain the interest that he has shown his young Africans in this circumstance’ by allowing them to remain in France.33 In this letter, the students made their desires known and also attempted to use the Minister’s patronage to their benefit.

To Stay or to Go: Debates about Repatriation Parents in Senegal, however, were not necessarily inclined to comply with the wishes of their children. In February 1833, the Governor of Senegal notified the Minister that of the four children who had stayed in France on a provisional basis, two would need to return home after all. While the families of Charles Fridoil and Mamoudou Sy had agreed to let their children complete their educations, the families of Jean-Pierre Moussa and Charles Caty stood by their demands that their children be repatriated. Despite the problems that the education programme had encountered, however, the Governor pledged his continued support for Anne-Marie Javouhey, promising to keep covering some of the costs and sending additional children. He had reached this decision in consultation with his Privy Council, though one official expressed strong reservations. In July, shortly after receiving the Governor’s letter, the Minister instructed Clothilde Javouhey to immediately begin readying Jean-Pierre Moussa and Charles Caty for their departure, noting that their parents wanted them at home.34 33   Amand Mamoudoucy [Mamoudou Sy], Charles Fridoil, Jean Pierre Moussa, Charles Cathy to Ministre, Limoux, 22 August 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM. Cécile Dauphin finds that epistolary manuals increased in popularity in France from the 1830s through the 1850s, and had become fairly widely used in French schools by the 1850s: Cécile Dauphin, ‘Letter-Writing Manuals in the Nineteenth Century’, in Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau and Cécile Dauphin, eds, Christopher Woodall, trans., Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 114–17. 34   Gouverneur to Ministre, Saint-Louis, 12 February 1833, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Sénégal et Dépendences, Conseil Privé, Procès-Verbal de la Séance du 11 Février 1833, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Ministre to Javouhey, Paris 23 July 1833, SEN/X/2, ANOM.

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Despite these clear instructions and the wishes of the parents, Clothilde Javouhey held firm in her commitment to helping these two young people achieve their goal of staying at her school. In an August letter to the Minister, she wrote that the sisters were ‘afflicted’ by the idea that they would return to Senegal without finishing their education and, suggesting that she was speaking for her students, she maintained that they had ‘the strongest desire to complete their studies before returning to their country, so that they will be able to be good for something’. She noted that the Government had ‘authorized’ the sisters’ project, and concluded that the Minister should, at the very least, allow the two boys to stay until the Mother Superior (Anne-Marie Javouhey) returned to France. In her campaign to prevent the students’ departure, Clothilde Javouhey also solicited help from the mayor of Limoux, who addressed a letter of support to the Minister. Basing his judgment on student performance during classes he had attended, the mayor believed that they had come a long way but still had much to learn. The parents’ requests were impulsive and lacked ‘reflection’, he argued and, in obeying their parents, the boys ‘would entirely miss their goal, and the society would lose their services which would be so important in their country’. The Minister notified the Governor of Senegal that the sisters had made the case that the boys should remain, and he put their departure for Senegal on hold pending the receipt of necessary documentation from Clothilde Javouhey.35 Following this correspondence, which seems to have communicated the desires of Jean-Pierre Moussa and Charles Caty, the Governor of Senegal took the issue back to their families. This time, Mr Pierre Moussa agreed that his son could complete his studies in France according to his wishes. The opinion of Charles Caty’s family did not change, and they noted that they found it ‘painful’ that their son wanted to ‘study to become a priest, and [that he] asked to extend his stay in France. You would do us a service by having him return to Senegal as soon as possible’, they continued, ‘and you will comfort an aged father and mother, who want to see their son before finishing their time on earth (avant de finir leur carrière).’36 In this correspondence, Caty’s parents appealed to a sense of filial duty and responsibility that they assumed would sway their son, his teachers and colonial officials. Yet this attempt was no more successful than previous ones. Less than a month later, Mr Moussa changed his mind and asked for his son’s immediate repatriation to Senegal. In a letter to the Governor, he explained that his entire family wanted Jean-Pierre Moussa to return 35   Javouhey to Ministre, Limoux, 16 August 1833, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Maire de la ville de Limoux to Ministre, Limoux, 16 August 1833, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Ministre to Préfet Maritime-Toulon, Paris, 6 September 1833, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Ministre to Gouverneur du Sénégal, Paris, 6 September 1833, SEN/X/2, ANOM. 36   Gouverneur to Ministre, Saint-Louis, 10 November 1833, SEN/X/2, ANOM. The Governor quoted from the parents’ statements of intent in his letter.

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and that he felt a lot of pressure as a result. He also noted his displeasure at several letters he had just received from his son and from his son’s tutor which outlined a plan for the younger Moussa to become a priest. His son was too young to make such a decision, Mr Moussa thought, and the letters suggested that he had not freely chosen this life path. He claimed that his son had only written at the insistence of his tutor, Mr Vidal. Furthermore, the letter from Vidal showed the tutor’s propensity to manipulate, and apparently suggested that in questioning his son’s decision to enter the priesthood, Mr Moussa was acting against God’s will. Yet Mr Moussa, who was Catholic and served as cantor at the church in Saint-Louis, was confident that he had fulfilled his ‘duties as a Christian’ and was not so easily swayed. Instead of silencing him, Vidal’s letter prompted forceful opposition from Mr Moussa, who now sought to protect his son: I will never believe that I am failing God by refusing to make my son a Priest: if they had let him be free I would have allowed two years in France; but I cannot help but see that they are taking advantage of his youth to put ideas into his head like those that he shared with me. Mr Governor, I repeat that I am truly thankful for the benefits that the Government has given him, but my whole family and I beg you to have our child returned to us.37

Although the Governor immediately forwarded Mr Moussa’s letter to the Minister, the student remained in France. Moreover, despite his father’s concerns, the younger Moussa ultimately became a priest, serving in Senegal and then in Haiti until his death in 1860, a career path that suggests that the decision to remain in France was in fact his own.38 Indeed, doubts and opposition of their families notwithstanding, Jean-Pierre Moussa and Charles Caty may have felt a calling to the priesthood. If this was the case, Clothilde Javouhey likely advocated on their behalf not only because they needed additional refinement and academic training, but also out of a desire to support them in pursuing a religious vocation. Though she focuses on girls and young women, Caroline Ford makes clear that young people went against their parents’ wishes in order to take religious vows with some frequency in nineteenth-century France.39 It is certainly possible that Moussa and Caty formed part of this trend, and that Moussa’s decisions to spend time in seminary, to seek and achieve ordination and to serve as a priest suggest genuine religious feeling and devotion. 37   Pierre Moussa to Gouverneur, ‘Copie de la Lettre de Pierre Moussa’, Saint-Louis, 2 December 1833, SEN/X/2, ANOM. On Pierre Moussa’s role in the church, see Lecuir-Nemo, Anne-Marie Javouhey, p. 172. 38   Bouquillon and Cornevin, David Boilat, p. 62. 39   Caroline Ford, ‘Private Lives and Public Order in Restoration France: The Seduction of Emily Loveday’, American Historical Review 99(1) (1994), 22, 41, 43.

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In this way, he may have been like his fellow students and compatriots, David Boilat and Charles-Arsène Fridoil, both of whom were featured in 1841 in the Revue des Colonies, a monthly journal published from 1834 to 1842 by and for ‘people of colour’ in France. Offering them to readers as examples of accomplished black people, the journal portrayed Boilat and Fridoil as erudite, pious and dedicated to the spread of Christianity in West Africa. Fridoil’s biography claimed that his ‘vacations were spent in the study of holy Scripture’ and that after his ordination, he had enrolled in ‘an Arabic course, in hopes of penetrating into the interior of Senegal and of preaching the Christian faith to all of his countrymen’. The article on Boilat noted that as he undertook academic study, he had experienced a ‘religious calling’ in an ‘absolutely decisive manner’ and that he had decided to enter the priesthood after a year of reflection.40 Given these later portrayals of Fridoil and Boilat and given Moussa’s long service to the Catholic Church, it is quite possible that the young Moussa and Caty freely chose to become priests and that they actively sought the support of their benefactors in order to be able to do so. Ultimately, the persistence of Jean-Pierre Moussa, Charles Caty and Clothilde Javouhey either convinced the families of the benefits of education in France or persuaded them to give up. Indeed, the distance was so great that parents could not simply go there to reclaim their sons. Furthermore, passing through Saint-Louis on her way back to France in January 1836, Mother Superior Anne-Marie Javouhey had the opportunity to meet with the parents of David Boilat and Jean-Pierre Moussa and to speak with them about their children. She must have made an impact, for in February 1836 the Governor of Senegal informed the Minister that they had come to a new agreement. The Mother Superior of the order had promised to ‘entirely take charge of their future’, the Governor wrote, so ‘with confidence and gratitude, the parents of these young Africans left their happy future up to her’. Despite this agreement, new questions emerged a month later when it became clear that Mr Pierre Moussa was in poor health. Given the changed circumstances, the Governor saw only two options: Jean-Pierre Moussa could come home to take care of his father in his old age, or the Government could, ‘if she persists in keeping him, insist that the St Joseph congregation provide aid to this poor old man who is worthy of interest’.41 The younger Moussa finally returned to Saint-Louis in April 1841, after having completed   Revue des Colonies, May 1841, 432–33; Revue des Colonies, July 1841, 45–6. For an extended discussion of the role of Africa and Africans – including these Senegalese priests – within this publication, see Kelly Duke Bryant, ‘Black but not African: Francophone Black Diaspora and the Revue des Colonies, 1834–1842’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 40(2) (2007), 251–82. 41   Gouverneur to Ministre, Saint-Louis, 1 February 1836, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Gouverneur to Ministre, Saint-Louis, 8 March 1836, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Lecuir-Nemo, Anne-Marie Javouhey, p. 181. 40

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several years of training at the Seminary of the Holy Spirit in Paris and having been ordained a priest in September 1840. His father, still alive, remained the cantor for the church and served under his son for a period of time. Boilat and Fridoil, also ordained in September 1840, returned to Senegal in late 1842. Charles Caty may have been among the six students who returned safely to Senegal.42

Agency and Patronage Accounts of this episode typically conclude with a description of the obstacles Moussa, Boilat and Fridoil faced as the first African priests, and of the vices (both real and imagined) that led them to leave the colony in disgrace in the early 1850s. The priests certainly represented an important milestone in Senegal’s colonial and religious history – they opened and ran the first colonial secondary school in Saint-Louis, they were Senegal’s first African clergymen, and they developed a vision of social mobility through education and religious change that made some French officials uncomfortable. Yet it seems to me that such an approach misses an important story that focuses, as I have done, on the experiences of the priests and their classmates as children, living in a colonial metropole and far away from their parents, and depending on the patronage of missionary sisters and, to a lesser extent, officials of the Ministry of the Marine and Colonies. This story reveals the potential for migration to provide African children with increased ability to exercise agency and suggests that they could benefit from both Catholic and secular patronage while in France. Indeed, as I have suggested above, students had a profound influence on the incredibly important decision as to whether or not they should be repatriated to Senegal to avoid potentially fatal illness in France. Clothilde Javouhey consulted them in 1832 following the deaths of several students, asking whether they preferred to remain in France or to return home, and she respected their decisions, facilitating departure for some and going to great lengths to allow others to stay in France. Pierre Moussa, Charles Caty, Charles Fridoil and Mamoudou Sy also spoke for themselves, writing to the Minister that their ‘ardent desire to be able to be useful’ to their families and country outweighed their desire to return home.43 Furthermore, subsequent correspondence from Mr Pierre Moussa implies that his son, Jean-Pierre Moussa, had made his wishes known to his father in a personal letter. Though this personal correspondence is not extant,  Lecuir-Nemo, Anne-Marie Javouhey, p. 181–5; Curtis, Civilizing Habits, p. 205.   Gouverneur to Ministre, Saint-Louis, 6 May 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Clothilde Javouhey to Ministre, Limoux, 21 August 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Amand Mamoudoucy [Mamoudou Sy], Charles Fridoil, Jean Pierre Moussa, Charles Cathy [Caty] to Ministre, Limoux, 22 August 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM. 42 43

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the fact that Jean-Pierre wrote to his father in this way offers additional evidence that young people actively worked to determine their futures.44 As they navigated the controversy over their ability to remain in France, these students relied on the patronage of the missionary sisters, especially Clothilde and Anne-Marie Javouhey, which stemmed at least in part from the rapport they had developed. Letters between Anne-Marie Javouhey and other sisters in her order suggest that Javouhey nurtured an affectionate, even loving, relationship with the students, even as she spent much of her time travelling through France and overseas to visit her order’s other establishments. In a February 1829 letter written from Martinique and Guadeloupe, for example, Javouhey made clear that she thought often of her ‘dear Africans’ and that she planned to raise funds for their schooling.45 The African students appreciated the sisters and their educational work as indicated by an 1838 letter in which David Boilat thanked Anne-Marie Javouhey for bringing him to France and allowing him to find God. Similarly, after his ordination in 1840, Arsène (Charles) Fridoil sent a thank-you letter to Clothilde Javouhey, recognizing all that she had done for him.46 African students could also benefit from the fact that they were central to Anne-Marie Javouhey’s hopes and plans for the future of her order in Africa. As the official provider of schools and hospitals in numerous French colonies, including Senegal, beginning in 1825, the Sisters of Saint-Joseph of Cluny had begun to envision education as a means of promoting French ‘civilization’ and Christian conversion in the empire. To disseminate French education and the Christian faith throughout Senegal and beyond, the sisters planned to rely heavily on African priests and teachers. Thus, they needed their African students to receive as much education as possible, but also to maintain strong ties to the sisters and to support their goals.47 As such, it was in the interest of the order for Clothilde and Anne-Marie Javouhey to advocate on behalf of those young Africans who wished to remain in France in the 1830s. Nor would they have wanted to alienate the students who desired to return to their families, as even they could help promote the sisters’ goals of education, civilization and Christian conversion. Thus in fostering a strong relationship between African students and the missionary sisters and in allowing 44   Pierre Moussa to Governor, ‘Copie de la Lettre de Pierre Moussa’, Saint-Louis, 2 December 1833, SEN/X/2, ANOM. 45   Soeur Javouhey to Mère Marie-Joseph Javouhey, à Bailleul, Martinique and Guadeloupe, 3 and 12 February 1829, in Anne-Marie Javouhey: Lettres, letter 188. See also Soeur Javouhey to Mère Clotilde Javouhey, à Limoux, Commencée le 20 avril et partie le 25 juin 1830, in Anne-Marie Javouhey: Lettres; Soeur Javouhey to Mère Marie-Joseph Javouhey, à Bailleul, Mana, 30 October 1831, in Anne-Marie Javouhey: Lettres, letter 246. 46   Soeur Javouhey to Mère Marie-Joseph Javouhey, à Bailleul, Martinique and Guadeloupe, 3 and 12 February 1829, in Anne-Marie Javouhey: Lettres, letter 188; Bouquillon and Cornevin, David Boilat, p. 38; Lecuir-Nemo, Anne-Marie Javouhey, pp. 182–3. 47  Rogers, From the Salon, pp. 228–41; Curtis, Civilizing Habits, pp. 13–17, 185.

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the African students to represent hope for the future of the mission, children’s migration to France provided them with an important source of patronage which they used strategically in the debate over repatriation. In addition, their migration to France gave these students increased access to the Ministry of the Marine and Colonies, and they used the Ministry’s support for African education to their advantage. Especially at its outset, the Minister expressed much more enthusiasm for Javouhey’s plan to educate Africans in France than did the Governor of Senegal, noting that the project would lead Africans towards a better future and would strengthen France’s authority in the region.48 As the controversy over the future of the African students played out in the early 1830s, the Governor of Senegal ended up speaking for the parents who sought the repatriation of their children. The Minister, on the other hand, sometimes played a more neutral role, forwarding letters between interested parties, and sometimes sided with the students who asked to stay against their parents’ wishes. It was thus fitting that when they sought help from someone outside the Saint-Joseph of Cluny order, Mamoudou Sy, Charles Fridoil, Jean-Pierre Moussa and Charles Caty turned to the Minister.49 The episode analysed in this chapter offers one example of how migration could contribute to the agency of African children. Indeed, in giving them access to different patrons and in removing them from the immediate influence of their parents, migration to France allowed at least some of these African students to undertake a major decision about their own education. Those students who sought to remain with the sisters accepted, or at least knew enough to use to their benefit, the vision that they would become ‘useful’ cultural and/ or religious intermediaries between their families and communities and the French. Through their presence in France, these young people had already mediated relations between the sisters, colonial officials and their own parents and communities, and they turned this role to their advantage at a moment of crisis in the early 1830s. Some complied with their parents by returning home, others asked the missionary sisters to support their desire to return home, and still others relied on the patronage of both the sisters and the Minister of the Marine and Colonies to enable them to remain in France against their parents’ wishes. Significantly, these students turned to adult allies to help them exercise agency and, in at least one case, they spoke – very persuasively – for themselves. Their migration to France helped to make this possible.   Ministre to Commandant of Senegal, 16 June 1824, SEN/X/2, ANOM.  Ministre to Javouhey, Paris, 23 July 1833, SEN/X/2, ANOM; Amand Mamoudoucy [Mamoudou Sy], Charles Fridoil, Jean Pierre Moussa, Charles Cathy [Caty] to Ministre, Limoux, 22 August 1832, SEN/X/2, ANOM.

48

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‘An Ardent Desire to be Useful’

Conclusion This chapter contributes to our knowledge and theorization of African child migrants by adding nuance to the concept of children’s agency. Rather than simply trying to demonstrate the agency of child migrants, it shows how children sometimes worked within and between the structures of Catholic schooling, family relationships and colonial rule to pursue their own goals. Their presence in the missionary sisters’ school in France resulted from a complex process of family strategizing and decision making about children’s migration. Children’s desires likely entered into this process at various points, but they had the most impact in the 1830s as parents concluded that the risk France posed to their children outweighed the benefits. In this instance, their position as child migrants facilitated their ability to exercise agency and allowed their voices to be heard by influential allies among the missionary sisters and in the Government. This line of analysis complements other chapters in this volume that portray children’s migration as a result of their awareness of their family’s needs and strategies and of their own goals. In exploring how these young Africans manoeuvred within the institutions of which they were a part, the chapter hints at some of their experiences as students, shows how they responded to parental worries, and describes the affectionate relationships that some of them developed with missionary sisters. It demonstrates that although they operated within colonial and Catholic systems that held Africans to be inferior, these children, like those discussed in several other chapters in this volume, were not simply ‘victims’. In its portrayal of these children as students, sons and daughters, this chapter challenges the widespread assumption that African children were and are totally outside the realm of global experiences of childhood, blurring, as the editors suggest in their Introduction to this volume, the distinction between childhood in Europe and in Africa.

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Girl Pawns, Brides & Slaves

Child Trafficking in Southeastern Nigeria, 1920s1

Robin P. Chapdelaine

 he commission has undertaken to get the facts about the traffic in women T and children as it exists to-day over the world.2 (William F. Snow, Chief of the Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, 1926) Child trafficking and migration often results from economic and resource insecurity. Sub-Saharan Africa is credited with the largest number of trafficking victims overall, with two-thirds of those trafficked identified as children.3 In particular, the movement of children under various forms of guardianship is on the rise and this phenomenon has become an urgent international concern. Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts suggest that child trafficking must be considered in relation to how colonization related to the global economy.4 It is nearly impossible to address contemporary concerns about the welfare of trafficked children without taking into consideration the historical context in which the transfer of children under 1  This project was funded by the American Historical Association’s Bernadotte E. Schmitt Research Grant, Rutgers University History Department and the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. This chapter is part of a larger project on child dealing in Southeastern Nigeria, which I began in 2007. Continuing research that I started in 2007 in British archives, I planned to conduct additional research in Nigeria during the latter part of 2011 and complete oral interviews in the early months of 2012. However, President Goodluck Jonathan decreased fuel subsidies on 1 January 2012 and gasoline prices increased by over 100 per cent. Nigerians, the majority of whom live on less than two dollars a day, became enraged. After the eruption of riots in several major cities and the threat of additional violence, I immediately returned to the United States with less than twenty-four hours to spare before the entire country essentially shut down. It seems a bit ironic that economic insecurity would be the reason that forced my premature departure. Nonetheless, with the help of local assistants who interviewed informants on my behalf, I was able to gather the information I needed for this study on the transfer of Southeastern Nigerian children during the colonial period. See Anene Ejikeme, ‘Nigeria Boils Over’, The New York Times (12 January 2012), available online: www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/ opinion/nigerian-anger-boils-over.html [accessed 1 May 2015]. 2   William F. Snow, ‘The Program of the League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and the Protection and Welfare of Children and Young People’, Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science in the City of New York 12(1) (1926), 414. 3   Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2014 (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Vienna), 82. 4   Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts, eds., ‘Introduction’, Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa (Athens, OH, 2012), p. 3.

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various forms of guardianship became normalized. Scholars and policy makers can best understand the contemporary problems of child trafficking in West Africa (and abroad) by tracing its historical development from the transatlantic slave trade to colonial forms of servitude and beyond. By piecing together colonial reports, oral interviews,5 antislavery archival materials, League of Nations documents and anthropologist and missionary memoirs, this chapter aims to show that the trafficking of women and children was complex and deeply embedded in Nigerian economic systems. With a specific focus on Igbo, Ibibio, Ijaw (Ijo) and Efik communities during the colonial period, I have encountered rich details about the transfer of children, mainly girls, from one form of guardianship to another. Yet, even with this diverse set of resources, child trafficking cases remain impossible to quantify. Moreover, independent accounts from child brides, pawns and slaves are also missing. These details would have enhanced the understanding of such exchanges. Similar to what Sacha Hepburn argues with regard to girls in post-colonial Zambia and Paola Porcelli’s analysis of child fosterage in rural Mali,6 Southeastern Nigerian children filled a variety of labour and economic needs by virtue of being transferable. Children often occupied one or more types of servile status during the colonial era. They were pawns, slaves, serfs, servants, subjects, clients and child brides.7 Pawnship, a form of legal dependency in which a pawn was held as security for a loan, became a widespread labour condition in Southeastern Nigeria in the twentieth century. The pawn’s labour paid the interest on debts until the debtor reimbursed the moneylender.8 Pawned children expected to be redeemed and returned to their natal village once the loan had been repaid.9 Slavery, another dependent category, robbed the slave of any legal rights, making him or her into a commercial property, a ‘capital investment’.10 Paul E. Lovejoy describes ‘panyarring’ as a form of foreclosure on the loan.11 The system of panyarring was different from slavery and pawning insofar as moneylenders or their debt collectors could ‘seize’ the debtor or his or her relatives.12 Clients, serfs and subjects were people who lacked wealth, and who usually offered to work in return for sustenance and 5   I owe a great deal of gratitude to our now-departed Dr Austin M. Ahanotu and to Mr Anayo Enechukwu for assistance organizing and conducting oral interviews. 6   Sacha Hepburn and Paola Porcelli, this volume, Chapters 3 and 4. 7   Robin P. Chapdelaine, ‘A History of Child Trafficking in Southeastern Nigeria, 1900–1930s’ (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 2014), 2. 8   Paul E. Lovejoy and Toyin Falola, ‘Pawnship in Historical Perspective’, in Paul E. Lovejoy and Toyin Falola, eds, Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa (Trenton, NJ, 2003), p. 3. 9   Ibid., p. 6. 10   Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York, 1975), pp. 118, 134. 11   Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘Pawnship, Debt and “Freedom” in Atlantic Africa during the Era of the Slave Trade: A Re-Assessment’, The Journal of African History 55(1) (2014), 9. 12   Lovejoy and Falola, Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa, p. 16.

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protection.13 I refer to child brides as girls under the age of 16 years, who were betrothed or married, but still dependent on her parents or guardians for support. Other forms of adoption or fostering that may not have been part of a payment–child exchange also existed.14 During the 1920s, social activists became increasingly involved with the League of Nations in its efforts to establish global working conditions of women and children as part of its overall effort to end human trafficking, slavery and other types of forced labour.15

The League of Nations’ Growing Concern about Child Trafficking The creation of the Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children resulted from the 1921 League of Nations International Conference on the Treatment of Women and Children in Geneva and the Convention drafted for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children.16 In January 1922 the Council of the League of Nations’ Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children operated under the League’s Social Section, which dealt with international social issues.17 The Committee was initially concerned with European women and children who had been trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation outside of their home country. Although the Committee lacked executive power, its representatives offered advice to the League about social policy and implementation. Their goals included raising the legal age of marriage in various countries, shutting down prostitution houses, securing homes for homeless children and providing services to disabled children. These goals expressed an evolving ideology that assumed children and women to be a protected class of individuals. In 1924, the League of Nations voted to accept the 1924 Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child and formed the Child Welfare Committee.18 An English school teacher, Eglantyne Jebb, social reformer and the founder of the Save the Children organization, drafted the Declaration.19 The Declaration advised that children should be provided 13   Felix K. Ekechi, ‘Pawnship in Igbo Society’, in Falola and Lovejoy, eds, Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa, p. 175. See also Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade: New Approaches to the Americas (Cambridge, 1999), p. 5. 14   J. S. Harris, ‘Some Aspects of Slavery in Southeastern Nigeria’, The Journal of Negro History 27(1) (1942), 37–38. 15   National Industrial Conference Board, The Work of the International Labor Organization: Studies of International Problems (New York, 1928), pp. 1–2, available online: http://dds.crl.edu/CRLdelivery.asp?tid=15989 [Accessed 1 May 2015]. 16   Ibid., p. 119. 17   Snow, ‘The Program of the League of Nations Advisory Committee’, 411. 18  ‘Health and Social Questions Section, 1919–1946 (Sub-Fonds)’, United Nations Office at Geneva, Administrative History, accessed 8 August 2014, http://biblio-archive.unog.ch/detail. aspx?ID=405. 19   Paul G. Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia, 2011), 110.

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with an environment in which they could live happy, prosperous lives; that they should be cared for in times of need; that they should receive relief services when needed; that they should be trained to work, but sheltered from exploitation; and taught to be compassionate towards others.20 The Declaration initially targeted European countries. However, it was Jebb’s desire that the protection of children’s welfare would extend to Africa and Asia as well.21 The League supported the mission and strongly urged governments to secure these inalienable rights for all children.22 In addition to the League’s work that focused specifically on women and children, various forms of slavery continued to be a main concern. In 1925 the League appointed the Temporary Slavery Commission for the purpose of putting an end to the traffic in African slaves, which included a focus on children, child marriage and pawning. Upon receipt of the Commission’s report, the Slavery Convention of 1926 mandated that all members work to end all forms of slavery, defined as ‘the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised’.23 In 1926, Eleanor Rathbone, feminist social reformer, an independent member of the British Parliament and an active member of women’s international organizations,24 served as an advisor to the Child Welfare Committee.25 Through much insistence by Rathbone and others like her, the League turned its attention to the welfare of children in Europe’s colonies.26 Prompted by the League’s increased concern about slavery and pawnship,27 Colonial authorities began to examine and critique ways in which Igbo, Efik and Ibibio-speaking people in Southeastern Nigeria set up systems to transfer children. Governor General Hugh Clifford ordered all district officers to respond to questionnaires detailing indigenous laws and customs, including pawning practices, throughout 20   ‘Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child’ (League of Nations, 26 September 1924), available online: www.un-documents.net/gdrc1924.htm [accessed 1 May 2015]. 21   Evelyn Sharp, The African Child: An Account of the International Conference on African Children, Geneva (Negro Universities Press, 1970), p. 4. 22  Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights, p. 120. 23   Suzanne Miers, ‘Contemporary Forms of Slavery’, Canadian Journal of African Studies 34(3) (2000), 716. 24   Organizations included the International Council of Women and the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance. 25   Paul Weindling, ed., International Health Organisations and Movements, 1918–1939 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 163; See also Susan Pedersen, ‘Metaphors of the Schoolroom: Women Working the Mandates System of the League of Nations’, History Workshop Journal 66(1) (2008), 190; Miers, ‘Contemporary Forms’, 716. By 1929, Rathbone, Duchess Katharine Marjory Stewart-Murray, a British noble woman who served as the Scottish Unionist Party member of Parliament, and humanitarian Josiah Wedgwood formed the Committee for the Protection of Coloured Women in the Crown Colonies. With eight additional members, this Committee focused on clitoridectomy and brideprice practices throughout the colonies. These individuals, and many others like them, persuaded the League members to take a more activist position in improving the livelihoods of women and children throughout the world. 26  ‘The Covenant of the League of Nations’, The American Journal of International Law 15(1) (1921), 12. 27   Kevin Shillington, Encyclopedia of African History (New York, 2013), p. 785.

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the Southeast.28 The Government sought information on the institution of pawnship with specific interest in the pawns’ gender, the age, the nature of the agreements, how young brides fit into the realm of debt bondage and how and if pawns gave consent. In addition, officials wanted to know what link pawning continued to have with slavery.29 The responses to the questionnaires on ‘Tribal Customs and Superstitions of the Southern Province of Nigeria: Practice of Pawning Children as Security for Debts’30 listed marriage customs, pawning, child stealing, prostitution and various forms of slavery as ways that Nigerians mobilized juvenile labour.31 Even though the responses resulted in contradictory assessments about the nature and conditions of child pawning, the reports did detail the ways in which girls moved under one form of guardianship to another. Marriage practices, in particular, had been a concern of colonial administrators. In particular, British officials initially set the age of consent at 12 years of age, and a girl of that age would be required to give her written consent to marry her future husband by signing a Certificate of Betrothal and then a Certificate of Marriage. Colonial authorities wanted the wife, husband and both sets of parents to sign the Certificate of Marriage to ensure that the marriage was legitimate.32 The entire scheme would become unenforceable. Many parents, brides and grooms were illiterate making it impossible to prove that any of the participants knew what they were signing. Even if the parents truly did understand what they signed, a mere signature did not prevent parents and other guardians from selling a girl outright. By 1927, the colonial administration defined any persons under the age of 16 years as a child.33 Because a child could be betrothed by her parents in infancy, and taken in lieu of repayment on a debt while still a young child, it is immediately apparent that colonial perceptions of acceptable marriage practices differed from local practices. Consequently, the specific focus on child marriages moved to that of child pawns and slaves, which in turn highlighted the porosity between various servile statuses.   Dimitri van den Bersselaar, In Search of Igbo Identity: Language, Culture and Politics in Nigeria, 1900–1966 (Leiden, 1998), p. 178. District Officer of Owerri Reginald Hargrove compiled and edited the responses. 29   ‘Files of the Egba Judicial Council, Tribal Customs and Superstitions of Southern Nigeria (Pawning)’, 1920s, CSO 26/1 #06827, ‘Pawning of Children’, Nigeria National Archive Ibadan. 30   I. Tribal Customs and Superstitions of the Southern Province II. Practice of Pawning Children as Security for Debts of Parents, CSO 26/1/074 Vol. I. Nigeria National Archive Ibadan. 31   For a full discussion of the term ‘mobilizing juvenile labour’ see Marie Rodet, ‘“Under the Guise of Guardianship and Marriage”: Mobilizing Juvenile and Female Labor in the Aftermath of Slavery in Kayes, French Soudan, 1900–1939’, in Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts, eds, Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa (Athens, OH, 2012), pp. 86–100. 32   I. Tribal Customs and Superstitions of the Southern Province II. 33   Judith Byfield, ‘Pawns and Politics: The Pawnship Debate in Western Nigeria’, in Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds, Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective (Boulder, CO, 1994), p. 199. By defining the legal age of consent of a pawn at the age of sixteen, the colonial government had codified the legal age of consent as it related to marriage. 28

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Four main patterns existed by which girls moved from one form of dependency to another, including marriage, pawning, sale and seizure. Marriage was perhaps the most complicated manner in which females left their natal homes. Marriage did not exist as an institution solely between a man and a woman, but developed as an arrangement between two households comprised of senior and junior men and women. The stories from Aba, Owerri, Onitsha and Calabar illustrate the prolonged and complex courtship and betrothal processes for most Southeast residents. Missionary George Basden described that a young man in Onitsha usually had his father serve as an intermediary, who approached the woman’s family. The intermediary presented palm wine or gin and kola nuts as initial gifts, but never discussed the potential marriage during the first few meetings. The intermediary continued to bring gifts to the future bride’s home and, after some time, the groom’s intentions were made public.34 After some negotiation, the future husband’s family offered a brideprice, in some form of wealth, to the bride-to-be’s family. This exchange represented a formal contract.35 In Owerri, an informant explains that during the 1920s, ‘[i]n most cases, the bride must consent to marry the groom before the bride’s family accepts the brideprice.’36 Even if a groom acquired a wife through pawning, an elder in Owerri remarked: ‘It is a belief that brides are never for sale. The payments attached to the bride are just to fulfil certain traditional obligations as no amount could buy a child.’37 Even when a girl child was pawned, when she was old enough she could marry the man of her choosing provided the debt was repaid before the marriage.38 Most societies in Southeastern Nigeria practiced exogamy and parents planned for their daughter’s departure even when she was quite young. As such, girls often served her family’s economic needs, as pawns, when her family experienced economic stress. In Enugu, one elder explains: The belief of our people is that a girl belongs to somewhere else, that is to say, she will be married outside of the place, [the] compound, [where] she is born. But for boys, people want somebody who will take over for them, when they die and who will remain in the compound.39

  G. T. Basden, Among the Ibos of Nigeria (Dublin, 2006), pp. 70–1.   Annual Reports of Bende Division, South Eastern Nigeria, 1905–1912: With a Commentary by G. I. Jones (Cambridge, 1986), p. 91. 36   Anthony Nwadinko, interview by Ezeji Grace on behalf of Robin P. Chapdelaine, 21 August 2012. 37   Nelson Anyanele Ezeji, interview by Ezeji Grace on behalf of Robin P. Chapdelaine, 21 August 2012. 38   I. Tribal Customs and Superstitions of the Southern Province II, pp. 92–3. 39   Chief Daniel E. N. Agbo, J.P., interview by Anayo Enechukwu on behalf of Robin P. Chapdelaine, 8 August 2012. 34 35

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In a culture that positioned women as family members who left the natal village, it was expected that families planned their future access to earnings based on having a daughter. Customarily, a groom in Owerri would begin the courtship process by bringing palm wine to the future bride’s home. One woman describes the process: When a man finds a girl he likes and proposes to her, and the girl agrees, he proceeds to the parents. The man goes for the first visit with a keg of palm wine tagged mmanya ajuju (meaning inquiry drink) where he makes his intensions known to the parents. On saying the purpose for the visit, the girl child would be called upon and asked if she knew the man. If she says yes, she will be told what the man’s mission were [was]. She is then asked if they should drink palm wine, and if she says yes, it translates that she has consented to the proposal.40

She goes on to describe the next stage of the proposal explaining: The man will be asked again to come on a market day… with another keg of pal wine titled, mmanya ezi-uka [meaning reality drink]. It is in this state that the groom will now be given the list of traditional items required for the marriage. And once these items [brideprice inclusive] are provided, he is said to have completed the marriage rites. They would be blessed by both families and asked to live peacefully amidst singing and dancing by family and friends.41

The process included extended negotiations that included senior members of the girl’s family. Most importantly, it required the future bride’s consent. The payment of a brideprice held varying significance dependent on location. In Aba, one senior woman recalls that as the father of the bride continued negotiations, over time the groom would present, ‘items like a keg of palm-wine, snuff, tubers of yam, hens and cocks’, and noted that by the 1920s and 1930s men also paid a sum of around £20.42 Another informant from Calabar claims that men often worked for the girl’s parents for an agreed term before they would let him marry their daughter, in addition to a payment of money and goods.43 Paying a brideprice was mandatory in almost every region in the Southeast.44 However, another informant claimed that among the Ibibio in Calabar, ‘people attach little to [the] brideprice. Once they find themselves in love, they get married with or without cause to tradition. They may have up to four children before thinking of going for traditional rights.’ However, if an   Mrs Anthonia Nkechinyere Ibeawuchi, interview by Augustine Onyemauchechukwu on behalf of Robin P. Chapdelaine, 25 August 2012. 41   Ibid. 42   Callista Okemmadu Ibgocheonwu, interview by Cynthia E. Uche on behalf of Robin P. Chapdelaine, 22 August 2012. 43   Kinsley Agu, interview by Ifeoma Obijiaku on behalf of Robin P. Chapdelaine, 21 August 2012. 44   Chief Daniel E.N. Agbo, J.P interview. 40

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Ibibio parent needed a loan they would pawn a girl child with the understanding that the girl would be taken as a bride if they failed to repay the debt.45 Oral testimonies provide intriguing details, which highlight similarities and differences among marriage norms during the 1920s in the Southeast. The payment of a brideprice signified the symbolic and real value of the woman offered in marriage and the utility of linking moneylending agreements with the exchange of a female pawn. The second way girls departed from their homes was when a father, uncle or older brother needed a loan and made the decision to pawn a child. The uses for a pawned child depended on his or her gender.46 Often pawned boys assisted with farm work, worked as apprentices or assisted with trade activities. Girl pawns also worked on farms, as domestic labourers, caretakers of young children and often ended up as the moneylenders’ wives. Upon maturation, pawned women contributed to the family economy through reproduction, adding to their master’s wealth, in addition to the domestic and agricultural work. Nze Azubuike Azuka from Calabar explains that when his maternal grandparents, who lived in current-day Anambra State, had pawned his mother, they sent her to a moneylender in Calabar. Having nine other children to provide for and his mother being the most beautiful girl, his grandparents pawned her knowing that she would attract the largest loan. Nze asserts that no parent ever wanted to pawn out a child.47 As such, pawning a child was generally a temporary contract, but the arrangement could last for years. In Amorji-Nike, Enugu, men pawned their daughters to rich men and repaid the loan when the girl decided to marry.48 The female pawn’s future groom paid the brideprice to the moneylender, not the father. However, Chief Anthony Chibueze Agubaram of Calabar claims that sometimes a child would be sold into slavery if not redeemed at the time specified by the original agreement during the 1920s. People of Calabar who suffered the loss of a child labelled the moneylenders ‘devil merchants’.49 Presumably due to the unpredictable and precarious nature of child pawning, Anthony Nwadinko, an elder born in Owerri in 1914, recalls that child pawning remained a private family affair.50 Nevertheless, in some cases families expected to redeem the girl before she married. A chief who lived in Awo Mbieri, Owerri, acquired one of his seven wives by accepting a female pawn. The chief’s son, Ahanotu Marcellenus recalls that the father of the woman (not his own mother), ‘owed my father [a debt] and subsequently decided to give out their daughter’s   Nze Azubuike Azuka, interview by Ifeoma Obijiaku on behalf of Robin P. Chapdelaine.   Lovejoy and Falola, Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa, p. 6. 47   Ibid. 48   Elder Abraham Oloko, interview by Anayo Enechukwu on behalf of Robin P. Chapdelaine, 2 August 2012. 49   Chief Anthony Chibueze Agubaram, interview by Ifeoma Obijiaku on behalf of Robin P. Chapdelaine, 22 August 2012. 50   Anthony Nwadinko interview. 45

46

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hand in marriage to my father to offset the debt. And the debt served as the dowry, which in a normal circumstance, my father was supposed to pay them.’51 Marcellenus’ personal account represents one of the many ways that wealthy men acquired girl pawns as wives. The Senior Resident of Onitsha reported that the practice of pawning female children was universal among some Onitsha villagers during the early 1920s. One Resident offered his observation: Among a very primitive people like these, among whom females are largely regarded as of such monetary value, where wives are merely bought and sold, where sexual intercourse both among the married and unmarried is to a large extent promiscuous from an early age, where ethical standards in the family affairs of family life do not exist, it can hardly be a matter of surprise that the practice of pawning still remains. They would have no special customs about pawning – the pawn being merely regarded as a chattel of varying value.52

It was difficult for colonial representatives to imagine a community where females existed as both an economic assets and valued family members. As Anglican missionary George T. Basden realized, Igbo parents expressed a ‘deep fondness’ for their children. Parents wanted as many children as they could have and considered them ‘priceless possessions’. Just as I have found in the oral interviews commissioned for this project, the parents’ – especially the mother’s – expression of love for a child seemed to always be apparent.53 It is also untrue that there were no special customs assigned to pawning in the Southeastern Provinces. As Nigeria’s economy became more embedded into the global economy, and local norms came under colonial scrutiny, it is clear pawning practices changed as the transatlantic slave trade died down and domestic slavery increased. Similar to the historical trajectory Lacy S. Farrell maps out in her treatment of child migration in colonial Ghana,54 Southeastern Nigeria’s long history of normalizing the movement of children, whether it be through pawnship or slavery, served an economic purpose. One Enugu resident claims that people practiced pawning in secret and that it ‘is a business system. You don’t advertise everything.’55 For example, it was normal for a father to pretend he was going to the market or to visit a friend. He would take the child for several days in a row to see the moneylender and then one day return without her. Upon his return, he told his family that the child chose to remain with his friend, but he would not reveal the location of the child.56 51   Ahanotu Marcellenus, interview by Augustine Onyemauchechukwu on behalf of Robin P. Chapdelaine, 23 August 2012. Marcellenus was born in Awo Mbieri, Owerri in 1935. 52   Letter from Sgd. H.T.B. Dew, District Officer, Enugu Province, National Archives, Onitsha, CSO 26/106827, (12 February 1923), 37–9. 53  Basden, Among the Ibos of Nigeria, p. 64. 54   Ferrell, this volume, Chapter 7. 55   Elder Abraham Oloko interview. 56   Ibid.

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Another Enugu elder from Nike explained that when a pawning exchange took place outside where both men wore no shoes and that, ‘no man will change what he said. He is afraid of the land. If you agree upon something and you disobey it, the land will kill you.’57 It seems that most Enugu parents did not marry off or pawn their children without thoughtful consideration of customary processes. However, there were instances when a family member, not the child’s parent, sold the child without her parents’ consent. The third manner in which female children left their home is when a father, older brother or uncle sold them, sometimes under the guise of receiving a brideprice payment.58 Mrs Anthonia Nkechinyere Ibeawuchi of Ikeduru, Owerri tells the story of one of her friends who married the son of a moneylender. She explains that even though the practice of giving a girl as a bride in return for a payment from creditor was frowned upon, ‘parents had no choice to engage in it since their deteriorated economic situation could not let them solve their [own financial] problem.’59 One informant from Amorji, Enugu explains that when a parent offered a female child in return for payment, they would say, ‘You have helped me, use this female child. Marry her for the good job you’ve done for us.’60 While pawning was an accepted practice, selling a child into a marriage was not. In patrilineal societies, fathers often sold their children in secrecy owing to the fact that if the mother’s people (father, uncle or brother) found out, they would ‘go to the man and make him produce the child or the man would be banished. Some people have been forced to go and retrieve the child because of [familial] pressure.’61 Another elder from Amorji-Nike, Enugu, Abraham Oloko, stressed that the people of Nike never sold their own children into slavery. He claims that, ‘Selling is an abomination’, but pawning was acceptable.62 However, the elder admitted that people bought children from outside of Nike. He explained that child dealers would kidnap children from other towns and sell them to the rich men. However, a Nike man would never ask whether or not a child had been stolen, but would accept the child when the child dealer claimed that he was offering his ‘own’ child. The children were most likely used for agricultural labour. Outright seizure is yet another way traffickers removed children from their homes. Chief Ugwuefi Reuben from Enugu attributes the child stealing that occurred during the 1920s and 1930s to the   Elder Abraham Oloko interview.   Annual Report of Owerri 1921, 42, CSO 26 No. 03928. Nigeria National Archive Ibadan. 59   Mrs Anthonia Nkechinyere Ibeawuchi interview. 60   HRH Igwe Dr Titus Okolo, interview by Anayo Enechukwu on behalf of Robin P. Chapdelaine, 2 August 2012. 61   Ibid. 62  Elder Oloko, interview by Anayo Enechukwu on behalf of Robin P. Chapdelaine. It is important to note that while many societies in Southeastern Nigerian pawned both sons and daughters, Abraham of Nike claims that the Nike people never pawned boys. 57

58

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colonial economy.63 The Owerri Province suffered from the steep drop in palm export prices during the Depression years.64 Kidnappers recouped costs by employing child labour on farms, in petty trade, domestic services or prostitution. They also stole girls in order to collect the brideprice upon marriage. Some dealers also acted as middlemen and eventually passed the child along to a willing buyer in a different region within or outside of Igboland. In 1920, a woman from Bende complained that her child had been stolen from her some years past. She had recently found the child in Aba, a major market centre, and the child testified that a family member took her and gave her to Abraham Hart, a trader at Bonny. Upon questioning, Hart produced a signed marriage certificate. The District Office of Aba believed this was either a case of child selling or pawning. In any case, the transaction was completed without the mother’s consent. Even so, Hart could not be easily prosecuted because one of the girl’s family members agreed to the marriage transaction.65 The District Officer of Owerri claimed that, ‘relatives of children stolen are often employed by agents to entice the children from their homes’.66 By virtue of at least one family member knowing the whereabouts of the child, the action could not be deemed kidnapping. There continued to be reports involving female child dealing. In 1921 and 1923 the District Officer of Okigwe reported: It is worthy of note that there are signs of Slave Dealing being on the wane. But there is an enormous amount of trade – in truth Slave Dealing – carried on in young girls, but convictions are practically impossible on account of Dowry being legal. These girls are bought – so called married and Dowry paid up country and then taken to the coast and passed on at an enormous profit. In so called Dowry.67   The main form this takes in Owerri – apart from stealing children in the Onicha country – is the traffic in young children or even young women under the guise of marriage. The New Calabars are fond of that trick. They promise large dowries and pay little or nothing. On getting the woman to Degema they are sold and married off.68

Evidence of this type of female child dealing existed at various levels across Igboland. In 1923, an Awka chief issued a £20 fine upon a man 63   Chief Ugwuefi Reuben, interview by Anayo Enechukwu on behalf of Robin P. Chapdelaine, 5 August 2012. 64   Ben Naanen, ‘Economy within an Economy: The Manilla Currency, Exchange Rate Instability and Social Conditions in South-Eastern Nigeria, 1900–48’, The Journal of African History 34(3) (1993), 442. 65   E. Falk, ‘Letter from E. Falk, District Officer at Aba to J. Ashley, Assistant District Officer at Bende “Cases of Slave Dealing”’, 7 November 1920, 107, OkiDist 4/2/1, Nigeria National Archive Enugu. It is unknown the exact relation that Hart had with the girl. 66  Major Stevenson, ‘Letter from District Officer at Owerri, Major Stevenson to the Senior Resident, Owerri Province’, 17 June 1933, NAE C136 Child Stealing Rivprof 2/1/24, Nigeria National Archive Enugu. 67   Owerri Provincial Annual Report for 1921, 1921, 42, CSO 26/03928, Nigeria National Archive Ibadan. 68   Ibid.

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and in return he pawned his seven-year-old daughter.69 The chief was expected to keep the child until she was old enough to marry, but instead sold her. Cases such as these continued to be a concern for the colonial officials.

Colonial Response to Child Dealing Owerri’s District Officer reported that the majority of child dealing was in young girls, but it was impossible to convict predators due to the nature of the exchange and its relationship to marriage contracts. The ability to seamlessly transform a moneylending contract into one of marriage became a point of contention for British officials. If the debt remained unpaid, the loan given to the debtor was then considered a brideprice payment, and the girl became a wife.70 One perspective of British officials: The case of pawning female children is somewhat different, as if the debtor does not redeem his daughter within a reasonable time, she would be liable to be married by her master to the man of his choice, but only with the consent of one of the child’s parents or guardians, and the marriage dowry received would be taken, or part of it, in settlement of the debt, the parents of the girl very seldom objected to the marriage, as they know that sooner or later his debt would have to be paid, and it was immaterial to him whom his daughter married, as long as he received what he considered a fair dowry fee. It must be remembered that women and female children have no say in these matters, and are only considered a man’s chattels, which he can do pretty well what he likes with.71

The quote misrepresents the realities of pawning practices and marriage customs. A pawned girl could decide whom she married, provided that her future husband paid a brideprice that covered the debt. Moreover, British officials did not understand the cultural and social implications of being a slave or being married to a slave.72 It was quite material to Igbo fathers ‘who’ their daughters married. Social anthropologist Miss M. M. Green noted that any person who had a slave ancestor who was sacrificed to a deity was considered an Osu (slave). A freeborn–   Agbala itinerant blacksmiths dealt in slaves and it is likely that the chief intended to sell the girl to a blacksmith. 70   Archival and primary sources and informants suggest that there were no fixed limits on the time a girl pawn would be held before she was taken as a wife. In each case, the prevailing personal situation of both the moneylender and debtor determined the outcome of the pawning transaction. 71   Frank Hive, Report on the Pawning of Children in the Southern Provinces, Nigeria, as Called for by His Honour Lieutenant-Governor, Southern Provinces, Vide Secretary Southern Provinces’ Confidential Memo No. C.2/23, 17 January 1923, CSO 26/1 #06827. Vol. I. ‘Pawning 1920s’, Nigeria National Archive Ibadan. 72   Carolyn A. Brown, ‘Testing the Boundaries of Marginality: Twentieth-Century Slavery and Emancipation Struggles in Nkanu, Northern Igboland, 1920–29’, The Journal of African History 37(1) (1996), 53. 69

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Osu marriage continued to be considered taboo in Owerri as late as the 1930s;73 freeborn parents did not want their daughters to marry an Osu. Nevertheless, officials continued to suggest that parents gave away girls without any consideration for their status or well-being. Colonial authorities had a difficult time intervening in many moneylending arrangements because other forms of authority existed over those matters. For those who chose not to use the warrant chiefs (indigenous rulers) and native court system, debtors sometimes chose to borrow under the direction of the Ekpe societies. Reverend Thomas John McKenzie, a Primitive Methodist minister, recounted his dealings between 1919 and 1921 with the Efik Ekpe secret society (also known as Egbo) that dealt with debt cases. The Ekpe secret societies provided systems of credit management and collection during the slave trade and then the palm oil trade period well into the 1920s. Under the Ekpe, if the debtor failed to repay on the agreed date, he would be fined and his family members, including children, could be taken as hostages; at times the Ekpe would seize his livestock.74 The League members agreed that the inherent problem with the indigenous marriage customs was that it camouflaged female child dealing. They found this to be the case in other colonies, such as Hong Kong and Liberia. However, when the British attempted to pass laws in Nigeria that codified Nigerian marriage customs, in effect, the process created a way for child dealers to traffic children and avoid prosecution by showing ‘legal’ documents.75 The creation of marriage certificates was established to assure that all parties involved in the union gave consent. The wives, husbands and their parents had to give written permission for the marriage to be considered legitimate. But in many cases, child dealers used false marriage certificates as ‘certificates of insurance’ that allowed them to travel with young girls and falsely claim that in fact their parents had given the child for the purpose of marriage.76 Having the certificates in hand demonstrated that the girl’s parents had given the child for the purpose of marriage. In cases where pawning directly overlapped with marriage arrangements, some colonial officials did not want to intervene. In fact, the District Officer of Warri advised: ‘It is difficult to say how the betrothal question should be dealt with and I feel inclined to recommend that no further steps be taken to make it illegal.’77 In 1923, British Residents contrasted a female pawn to a domestic in England ‘who is placed by her mother in service where there is no one to see   M. M. Green, Ibo Village Affairs (New York, 1964), p. 158.   Rev. T. McKenzie, ‘A Few Words of Interest Relating to Missionary Life in Southern Nigeria, West Africa 1919–1921’, June 1922, 126, MMS 1204, School of Oriental and African Studies. 75   Report by Mr O. W. Firth, District Officer in Charge of Okigwi Division, ‘Pawning of Children’, 31 January 1923, in I. Tribal Customs and Superstitions of the Southern Province II. 76   Ibid. 77  Mr Butler, District Officer of Warri, I. Tribal Customs and Superstitions of the Southern Province II. 73 74

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that the mistress does not overwork the girl and that she is properly and sufficiently fed and decently housed. This domestic is probably in a little more helpless position that the female pawn.’ Influenced by Britain’s rise of the middleclass where domestic servants were young girls entrusted to middle class households, it is not surprising that he used this analogy.78 The Resident goes on to compare pauper children in Great Britain to child pawns in Nigeria and assures the reader that the pawn is never very far from his or her family. Parents and relatives visited them, and benefactors allowed children to return home for customary festivals.79 Just as officials compared slaves to serfs during the transatlantic slave trade, colonial officials often painted a rosy picture of pawning.80 It is important to note that not all accounts were so complimentary of the institution as represented in the colonial officials responses, but even when officials received information regarding the abuses of pawnship they shared the information cautiously. One Owerri informant recalls that, ‘[i]n most cases, pawned children are treated with contempt and are looked upon as instruments to be used and discarded at will. Those parental affections emanating from a family does [sic] not extend to pawned children.’81 With an ambivalent approach to ending child pawnship or girl marriages, Southeastern Nigerians continued to find ways to use the institution of marriage to disguise forms of female child dealing with minimal intervention. It was only for the most obvious cases that colonial officials intervened. For instance, an Ijaw man named Bob Onana was caught with a 12-year-old Igbo girl Uche Abeaku in his canoe in Isu, Okigwe District. When questioned about the girl, Onana claimed that her father, Maduekwe, agreed to offer her in marriage for a £20 brideprice. When officials interrogated the father, Madueke said that Onana only paid him half of the requested brideprice and that he married his daughter off to ‘gain money’.82 Police did not believe that a real marriage had been contracted because Onana did not have a marriage certificate and because neither party spoke the other’s language. In this case, authorities did prosecute Onana because, according to the colonial perspective, the father had sold the child.

  ‘Letter from W.A. Ross, Senior Resident, Oyo Province to Secretary of Southern Provinces’, 14 March 1923, 26–7, CSO/26/1 #06827 Vol. I Pawning, Nigeria National Archive Ibadan. 79  Ibid. 80   Frank Wesley Pitman, ‘The Treatment of the British West Indian Slaves in Law and Custom’, The Journal of Negro History 11(4) (1926), 616. 81   Anthony Nwadinko interview. 82   ‘Letter from the Chief Inspector to the Commissioner of Police at Port Harcourt’, 3 February 1927, OkiDist 4/9/42 Slave Dealing, Nigeria National Archive Enugu. 78

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Conclusion International efforts that sought to highlight and end the traffic in women in children enjoyed limited success. However, the investigations into child pawning, stealing and dealing, in general, produced colonial documents that outlined the trade in children and women in intricate detail as colonial officials understood it. Oral testimonies provide location specific details about how parents, guardians, moneylenders and slave dealers went about transfering children. We also see how British concerns about the colonial economy often subordinated international concerns about child dealing, especially when palm oil product revenue declined dramatically.83 This ambivalent approach is identified in the views offered by colonial officials as they compared English pauper children to Nigerian child pawns, suggesting that the welfare of the indigenous child was always better sustained. Reading the colonial documents with a critical eye has allowed for an analysis that recognizes that some colonial officials were much more focused on buttressing the Nigeria’s economic output than they were in unpacking the complexities and conditions of child pawnship. Oral testimonies also highlight how child pawns suffered from abuse in the environments in which they lived, refuting any claim by authorities that it was an innocuous social status. Moreover, personal accounts, which illuminate the porosity between the statuses of slaves, pawns and child brides suggests that it was nearly impossible for the colonial government to identify and stop all instances of child trafficking. As I have shown in this chapter, Southeastern Nigerians enabled the movement of children under several auspices during the 1920s. While it is relatively easy to describe the number of ways a child might be transferred, it is not as easy to ascertain how or when one form of servile status transitioned into another. Understanding that these categories are not always mutually exclusive, one can imagine how parents, guardians, moneylenders, slave traders and others could work within the colonial system without much intervention. For the larger international community focused on ending modern-day slavery, child trafficking and child labour, it is imperative that the unique history of each geographical location is assessed. For Nigeria, its extensive history related to the transatlantic slave trade, integration into the global economy via palm oil exports, which necessitated an increase of domestic labour, contributed to the normalization of child trafficking. In addition, an analysis of the decades following the 1920s offers an explanation of how the global economic crash of the late 1920s influenced child trafficking as it related to the increased pressure Nigerians experienced with colonial taxation, the 83   I. Tribal Customs and Superstitions of the Southern Province II; see also S. P. George, Slave Dealing and Child Stealing Investigation (Bende, Owerri, 4 February 1935), C136 Child Stealing, Rivprof 2/1/24, Nigeria National Archive Enugu.

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increased need for personal loans and the eventual consequence of the integration of British currency. Understanding West Africa’s history will provide a cultural analysis that economic analyses may lack. In doing so, perhaps scholars and policy makers can shape a culturally specific approach to mediate the economic and social issues that cause child trafficking.

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Part II BEING A CHILD & BECOMING A GENDERED ADULT: THE CHALLENGES OF MIGRATIONS IN CHILDHOOD

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3

‘Bringing a Girl from the Village’

Gender, Child Migration & Domestic Service in Post-colonial Zambia

Sacha Hepburn

Domestic service has been one of the most significant sources of urban employment for men, women and children in post-colonial Zambia. There has been a marked shift in the gender and age demographic of the domestic labour force over the last 50 years. While in the 1960s, most domestic workers were adult men, by the 2010s estimates suggest that over 56 per cent of domestic workers were female, a large number of whom were children.1 This gendered and generational shift was the result of a combination of factors, including widespread economic decline, increased female labour-force participation and related demands for female labour for child care. Building on historical practices of rural– urban labour migration, many of the women and children who entered into domestic service in post-colonial Lusaka came from rural areas. Like other labour migrants, their migration strategies were influenced by rural poverty, intersecting hierarchies of gender and age, and participation in social networks that spanned rural–urban divides. Despite a rich historical tradition of research on migration in Zambia, the history of female labour migrants, including domestic workers, remains understudied.2 The existing literature focuses almost exclusively on male workers and industrial labour, despite the fact that in the colonial and post-colonial periods, Zambians have migrated for a variety of reasons and to enter many different forms of work. Female labour migrants, largely excluded from formal labour regimes, have pursued migration strategies that do not fit into existing narratives.3 1   According to the Department of Labour’s Annual Report for 1964, out of the 27,500 people employed in domestic service only 700, or less than 3 per cent, were female. By 2014 the International Labour Organization suggested that 56 per cent of the estimated 97,652 domestic workers in Zambia were female. See Central Statistical Office, Department of Labour Annual Report 1964 (Lusaka, 1964); International Labour Organization, Magnitude of Domestic Workers in Zambia: Highlights of Domestic Worker Survey (Lusaka, 2014). 2   Studies of labour migration in Zambia include Godfrey Wilson, An Essay on the Economics of Detribalization in Northern Rhodesia (Livingstone, 1941); J. Clyde Mitchell, African Urbanization in Ndola and Luanshya (Lusaka, 1954); James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley, CA, 1999). 3   There have been several important studies of female migration in the colonial period. See for example George Chauncey Jr., ‘The Locus of Reproduction: Women’s Labour in the Zambian Copperbelt, 1927–1953’, Journal of Southern African Studies 7(2) (1981), 135–64; Jane Parpart, ‘Sexuality and Power on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1926–1964’, in Sharon Stichter and Jane Parpart, eds, Patriarchy and Class: African Women at Home and the Workforce (Boulder, CO, 1988), pp. 115–138.

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The literature fails to acknowledge the significance and scale of female labour migration and it does not adequately address how gender and generation have intersected in the development of migration strategies. If female adult migrants remain understudied, female children are even more obscure figures in the literature on migration. Children have migrated to Lusaka within family units and as unaccompanied migrants since the 1930s.4 Yet the experiences of child migrants remain under-theorized and under-represented. For the colonial period, child migrants, like women, are mostly described in passive terms, as having been ‘sent for’ or ‘brought to’ Lusaka by husbands, relatives or urban employers.5 There are few studies of children’s migration in the post-colonial period. The literature that does exist is dominated by the publications of international development organizations and is clearly influenced by Western perceptions of childhood as a period of dependency and vulnerability.6 In these studies children’s movements are not studied from an historical perspective and are addressed primarily through the lens of exploitation and trafficking. This chapter challenges the historiographical neglect of female child migrants by examining the histories of female children who migrated to Lusaka and entered into domestic work. Throughout the post-colonial period, female children migrated between rural and urban areas and performed domestic labour for kin and strangers. Through their migration practices and labour, these young migrants made significant contributions to rural and urban households and helped to maintain social and economic connections across spatial boundaries. The chapter examines how female children’s migration strategies were shaped by rural household dynamics and the demands of the urban labour market, and how female migrants have used migration as a means to further their own aspirations for education, employment and independence. One of the most difficult aspects of studying the history of children and work is finding definitions that are both accurate and contextually sensitive.7 In Zambia this is complicated by the fact that domestic 4   Karen Tranberg Hansen, ‘Labour Migration and Urban Child Labour During the Colonial Period in Zambia’, in Bruce Fetter, ed., Demography from Scanty Evidence: Central Africa in the Colonial Era (Boulder, CO, 1990), p. 220. 5   This has been observed by various scholars working from a children’s history perspective. See Beverly C. Grier, Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe (Portsmouth, NH, 2006); Jack Lord, ‘Child Labor in the Gold Coast: The Economics of Work, Education and the Family in Late-colonial Africa, c.1940–57’, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 4(1) (2011), 88–115. 6   See for example Osita Agbu, ed., Children and Youth in the Labour Process in Africa (Dakar, 2009); International Labour Organization, Emerging Good Practices on Actions to Combat Child Domestic Labour in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia (Geneva, 2006). For a discussion of the nature and impact of the Western discourse on childhood see Marie Rodet and Elodie Razy, ‘Introduction’, this volume; Iman Hashim and Dorte Thorsen, Child Migration in Africa (London & Uppsala, 2011), pp. 2–6. 7   See Jane Humphries, ‘Child Labor: Lessons from the Historical Experience of Today’s Industrial Economies’, The World Bank Economic Review 17(2) (2003), 175–96.

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labour relations and related migration strategies were often organized within kinship and patron–client networks. Such labour relations challenge conventional definitions of ‘worker’ and ‘employer’ in many ways.8 This chapter recognizes the need to take such nuances and local specificities into account. But at the same time it heeds the call of feminist scholarship to recognize that those who perform domestic labour for pay (in cash and in kind) should be recognized as ‘workers’ in a productive sense.9 Though there is arguably no one ‘catch-all’ term that accurately encompasses the complexity of the labour relations many migrant children were involved in, the term ‘domestic workers’ is used as a working term to describe all those who engaged in domestic work for pay. This chapter draws primarily on oral history interviews conducted with women who migrated as children, adult relatives of child migrants and those who employed children in their homes. A life-history approach was taken in order to place childhood experiences of migration into a broader temporal context and to highlight the variety of migratory paths that individual children pursued.10 Interviews were conducted in Lusaka and in rural areas of Lusaka and Eastern provinces in 2013 and 2014, and interviewees were identified through informal conversations with local residents, personal recommendations and through interactions with church groups.11 It is important to consider the relationship between history and memory when working with oral history narratives. As various scholars have suggested, interviewees may recast their memories as they age as a result of later experiences and shifting public discourses.12 The ways in which domestic workers described and understood their experiences of migration as children, for example, were likely influenced by subsequent experiences of work and mobility. But that does not make these narratives unreliable or inaccurate. Through the interview process, domestic workers made sense of both their past migration experiences and their present situation as workers and urban residents. Various interviewees, for example, made direct comparisons between past and present employers and talked about the ways in which their relationships with kin in rural areas had changed over time. The life histories 8   For example, because of the lack of explicit contractual relations of employment in many kinship-based arrangements, and the propensity for payments for domestic work between kin to be made through the provision of room and board rather than a cash wage. 9   The feminist literature on paid domestic labour is extensive. Examples include: Jacklyn Cock, Maids and Madams: A Study in the Politics of Exploitation (Johannesburg, 1980); Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990); Bridget Anderson, Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (London, 2000). 10   On the value of a life history approach to feminist research, see Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds, Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (London, 1991). 11   The names of interviewees have been changed to protect their anonymity. 12   On the relationship between oral history and memory see for example Luisa Passerini, ‘Work Ideology and Consensus under Italian Fascism’, in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds, The Oral History Reader (London, 2006), pp. 53–62; Alessandro Portelli, ‘What Makes Oral History Different’, in Roberts and Thomson, The Oral History Reader, pp. 63–74.

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drawn upon thus provide both unique insights into individual experiences of migration and illuminate the ways in which understandings of work, kinship relations and migration practices have changed over time and continue to be constructed. The chapter also draws on a variety of quantitative sources including internal migration statistics and census reports. Although migration statistics provide some insights into the changing gender and age demographic of migrants over time, there are a number of issues to bear in mind. Given the often-informal nature of child migration and employment, it is likely that census data across the period has under-estimated the extent of child migration. In addition, though census data is suggestive of broad shifts in internal migration over time, it is less useful for examining the trajectories of individual migrants. This chapter does not, however, seek to present general trends in the history of child migration practices. As such, though the limits of the statistical data are important to bear in mind, these figures are used mainly for contextual purposes.

The Impact of Post-Colonial Economic Decline on Rural Households At independence in 1964 Zambia had a stable and growing economy. This early prosperity did not last. The Zambian colonial economy was founded on copper mining and, after independence, economic policy continued to depend overwhelmingly on the success of the mining industry. During the 1960s and early 1970s the Government failed to diversify the economy by adequately investing in rural development or alternative industries such as manufacturing. This was despite the fact that most Zambians were dependent upon subsistence farming. The oil shock of the early-1970s, and subsequent decreases in the price and export value of copper, had a devastating impact on the Zambian economy and led the country to enter into a prolonged and devastating process of economic decline.13 The pursuit of structural adjustment during the 1980s exacerbated existing socio-economic inequalities and led to severe economic hardship for many rural and urban residents. From the late 1980s these problems were compounded by the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS and related illnesses.14 The economic liberalization policies of the 1990s and 2000s further intensified hardships for rural and urban residents as public services were slashed, price controls on key commodities were removed and agricultural subsidies were 13   On the impact of structural adjustment and liberalization in Zambia see Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity; and Miles Larmer, ‘Reaction and Resistance to Neoliberalism in Zambia’, Review of African Political Economy 32(103) (2005), 29–45. 14   Jeremy Gould, Left Behind: Rural Zambia in the Third Republic (Lusaka, 2010), p. 2.

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stopped.15 By 2010 almost 78 per cent of rural Zambians were living below the poverty line.16 In this context of entrenched and intensifying economic hardship, many rural Zambians sought to improve their economic circumstances by migrating to the city. From the 1960s to 1980s, rural to urban migration rates were particularly high among female children and young women.17 By the 1990s female migrants outnumbered male migrants at a national scale in every age group apart from those aged 25 to 44 years. Female migrants also dominated net-migration to Lusaka Province for those aged 10 to 14 and 15 to 19 years.18 The high level of migration of young females to Lusaka continued during the 2000s and 2010s.19 The migration trends for young female migrants are particularly striking as they seem to contradict broader migration trends. For, while in general rural–urban migration rates either stabilized or declined from the 1980s onwards, female children continued to migrate from rural to urban areas in significant numbers. The increased migration of female children from rural to urban areas can be understood as a reaction to rural poverty. Interviews with migrant domestic workers support this argument. Queen, for example, was born in Serenje in Central Province in 1990. She was the youngest of three children. After losing both of her parents to AIDS before her thirteenth birthday, she was forced to leave school and migrate with her siblings to Lusaka to live with their maternal grandmother. Once in Lusaka, Queen became a domestic worker to help support herself and her grandmother and siblings.20 Janet Bujra has similarly illustrated that women and children in post-colonial Tanzania have migrated from rural areas to become domestic workers in the city in response to rural poverty.21 It must also be borne in mind that migration was not equally accessible to all rural residents. First, the poorest households in rural areas were often excluded from pursuing migration because of a lack of resources and contacts.22 Furthermore, the ‘push’ factor of rural poverty was affected by gendered and generational dynamics within the familial household. During the post-colonial period, relationships  Gould, Left Behind, p. 16.   Republic of Zambia, 2010 Census of Population and Housing National Analytical Report (Lusaka, 2012). 17   Republic of Zambia, 1980 Census of Population and Housing Analytical Report Volume 3 (Lusaka, 1985). 18   Republic of Zambia, 2000 Census of Population and Housing Migration and Urbanisation Report (Lusaka, 2003). 19   Republic of Zambia, 2010 Census of Population and Housing National Descriptive Tables (Lusaka, 2012). 20   Queen, interview by the author, Lusaka, 25 February 2014. 21   See Janet Bujra, Serving Class: Masculinity and the Feminisation of Domestic Service in Tanzania (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 89–90. 22   This has been commonly observed in migration studies. See for example Harri Englund, ‘The Village in the City, the City in the Village: Migrants in Lilongwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies 28 (2002), 139. 15 16

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between senior and junior household members continued to be shaped by intersecting hierarchies of age and gender. Female children’s entry into the labour market was influenced by their place in these complex household hierarchies and their responsibilities within the family economy. It is thus important to recognize that gendered and generational dynamics within rural households shaped decisions about which members would migrate and where their end destination would be.

Migrant Children’s Aspirations Female children’s migration trajectories were also shaped by children’s own decisions and aspirations. Many female migrants expressed that they had pursued migration to Lusaka in order to support their families. Esnart’s experience is illustrative. Esnart was born in Sinda in Eastern Province in 1970. Her parents were subsistence farmers and she was the eldest of their eight children. Esnart’s father drank heavily and so her mother was responsible for almost all household and agricultural labour. When Esnart was 11 years old, the wife of her former schoolteacher approached her parents with an offer of employment as a live-in domestic worker in Lusaka. Esnart recalled being aware of her family’s poverty and said that she had taken the job in order to help them.23 In her study of female migrants in twentieth-century Britain, Selina Todd has similarly illustrated that children have frequently been acutely aware of the economic difficulties their families faced.24 Shortages of food and resources, for example, would be strikingly clear to Zambian female children like Esnart who were heavily involved in food preparation and domestic work inside the house. Female children like Esnart made significant contributions to rural household economies through remittances. Esnart regularly sent all of her wages home to help her mother. This was her family’s only source of cash income. She explained, ‘even if I send everything I will still have something to eat, somewhere to sleep’.25 Esnart placed high value on her ability to work so that she could offer this support to her family. Interviews with the relatives of migrant domestic workers confirmed the value of such cash payments. Interviewed in Chimusanya, a village in Lusaka Province, Semu for example described how his daughter Margaret sent him regular cash payments of K200 Zambian Kwacha (approximately US$20). Semu used this money to buy groceries and fertilizer.26 The value of female domestic workers’ contributions to rural economies has similarly been observed in a variety of contexts. Luise White’s study of colonial Nairobi and Belinda Bozzoli’s work on   Esnart, interview by the author, Lusaka, 12 August 2013.   Selina Todd, Young Women, Work and Family in England 1918–1950 (Oxford, 2005), p. 73. 25   Esnart, interview by the author, Lusaka, 12 August 2013. 26   Semu, interview by the author, Chimusanya, Lusaka Province, 21 June 2014. 23 24

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female Bafokeng migrants in South Africa, for example, illustrated how female domestic workers offered vital support to rural households, helping their natal families to both improve their material wealth and engage in new forms of consumption.27 Though conclusive findings about the impact of remittances cannot be drawn from this small sample, it seems clear that female children could make a significant financial contribution to rural households. Children who did not send regular cash remittances to their families nevertheless still supported the family economy. This was particularly clear in cases of acute family poverty or bereavement. Queen’s experience, for example, illustrates how migration and domestic service provided orphaned children with a means to support themselves.28 In her case, Grace pursued migration as a response to family poverty. Grace was forced to leave school when she was 14 years old because her parents could no longer pay the fees. At 15, she decided to leave her parent’s home in Northern Province and migrate to live with her older sister in Lusaka. Grace quickly found employment as a live-in domestic worker.29 Through employment in domestic service, she found a way to support herself independently of her parents and to indirectly support the family economy. Though many female children sought to escape rural poverty, they were also motivated by aspirations for the future. Though Grace was acutely aware of her family’s difficult financial circumstances, her primary motivation for migrating to Lusaka was to complete her secondary education. Grace’s employer supported her ambition to study. For five years Grace worked in her employer’s home from 6am to midday and attended a nearby high school in the afternoon. She then continued with domestic work in the evenings and at weekends. After completing her studies, Grace found employment as a hostess in a local restaurant.30 The role that children have played in pursuing their education is frequently overlooked because it is assumed that only parents or guardians decide whether a child will go to school. But, as Grace’s experience shows, children too have played an active role in shaping their education.31 In international development discourse, it is often assumed that migration into paid domestic work is an inherently exploitative practice into which young women and children are forced or coerced.32 The diverse narratives discussed above nevertheless highlight that young 27   See White, The Comforts of Home, p. 2; Belinda Bozzoli, Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in South Africa, 1900–1983 (Portsmouth, NH, 1991). 28   Queen, interview by the author, Lusaka, 25 February 2014. 29   Grace, interview by the author, Lusaka, 13 February 2014. 30   Grace, interview by the author, Lusaka, 13 February 2014. 31   See Hashim and Thorsen, Child Migration in Africa, p. 35. 32   See for example ILO, Emerging Good Practices; International Labour Organization and Child Helpline International, Child Migrants in Child Labour: an Invisible Group in Need of Attention (Geneva, 2012); International Labour Organization, Rural–Urban Migrants Employed in Domestic Work: Issues and Challenges (Geneva, 2013).

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women and children have been involved in decision-making processes surrounding migration and work. Esnart, for example, migrated to Lusaka in order to support her family, while Grace sought to pursue her education. It is important to recognize that women’s experiences of financial difficulties as adults may have shaped their perceptions of the financial constraints their parents faced and, by extension, their own experiences of work and migration. But it is also important to note that none of these women recalled being forced into domestic work as children. These findings support the argument made by Iman Hashim and Dorte Thorsen that, ‘while migrant children may not have participated equally in such processes, to deny their capacity to behave autonomously is misleading’.33 By migrating to become live-in domestic workers, many female children secured accommodation, food, a level of financial security and supported their families.

The Urban Demand for Female Child Domestic Workers Interviews suggest that Lusaka’s urban householders generated a significant demand for female children to migrate to the city. As noted above, though adult men had dominated the domestic service sector during the colonial period and into the 1960s, women and children came to constitute a significant proportion of domestic workers in the decades after independence.34 This chapter does not seek to ignore the continued importance of adult and male workers to the post-colonial domestic labour sector. But it does seek to explore why many urban employers sought out the labour of female children when large numbers of adult men and women were available for employment. The association of femininity, youth and domestic work was a crucial factor in shaping urban employers’ demands for female children to migrate. This gendered discourse has a long history, rooted in pre-colonial sexual divisions of labour. In Zambia the socialization of male and female children into specific gender roles traditionally involved both groups engaging in domestic chores around the natal home. Female children were however likely to face a heavier burden of indoor work and child care.35 This gendered discourse continued to shape the socialization of children during the post-colonial period. Gendered constructions of domestic work as female labour and the impact of this on female migration are not unique to Zambia.36   Hashim and Thorsen, Child Migration in Africa, p. 1.   See Karen Tranberg Hansen, Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900– 1985 (Ithaca, NY, 1989), pp. 142, 221. 35  On the gendered division of labour in African societies see for example Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, African Women: A Modern History (Oxford, 1997). 36   The relationship between youth, femininity, migration and domestic work has been illustrated in various contexts. See for example, Janet Henshall Momsen, ed., Gender, Migration and Domestic Service (London, 1999); Perry Willson, Women in Twentieth-Century Italy (Basingstoke, 2010). 33

34

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This association of femininity and domestic work influenced employers’ ideas about the ‘natural’ characteristics and personalities of children. Priscilla, for example, employed several female children from rural areas during the 1980s and early 1990s. Priscilla explained that she thought that female children had an aptitude for domestic work because of their experience helping their mothers with child care, domestic work and cultivation.37 Like Priscilla, many employers similarly expressed the view that female children were ‘naturally’ more loyal and trustworthy than either adults or male children. But of course not all female children complied with moral norms about how they should behave. This often led to conflict between migrant child domestic workers, their employers and their parents, the result of which was often the loss of employment and/or ‘return’ migration to the natal home. Priscilla explained what happened when Esther, the female child she employed during the mid-1980s, became pregnant at the age of 14. Priscilla and her husband discovered that Esther had been having a relationship with a neighbour’s son. Esther’s mother demanded that she return to her village in Eastern Province because she had ‘spoiled her chance’ of living in Lusaka.38 Priscilla’s description of these events encapsulated the complex relations that could develop between employers and child domestic workers, for while she expressed anger and disappointment in Esther, she also displayed a maternal concern that verged on affection. Priscilla’s experience with Esther also suggests that the employment of a female child involved a degree of risk for urban employers. As female children reached sexual maturity, the likelihood of pre-marital sex and teenage pregnancy increased. Esther’s secret relationship with the neighbour’s son suggests that she exercised some control over her movements in the city. Esther’s capacity to shape her own life and mobility were further illustrated by her response to her un-chosen return migration to her parents’ home. In late 1985, several months after leaving Priscilla’s house, Esther returned to Lusaka, seemingly unaccompanied and in defiance of her parents’ wishes. She turned to Priscilla for help with finding another live-in domestic service position and remained in the city independently of her parents.39 The gendered demands of urban employers need also to be understood in relation to significant changes in women’s employment patterns during the post-colonial period. From the 1960s onwards increasing numbers of Zambian women entered into formal and informal employment. Between 1980 and 1990, for example, female labour force participation increased by 155 per cent.40 This rapid growth was the result of both increased female employment in various   Priscilla, interview by the author, Lusaka, 22 July 2013.   Priscilla, interview by the author, Lusaka, 22 July 2013. 39   Priscilla, interview by the author, Lusaka, 22 July 2013. 40   Republic of Zambia, 1990 Census of Population, Housing and Agriculture National Analytical Report (Lusaka, 1994). 37

38

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professional and white-collar roles and the growing participation of women in the informal sector and service industries. The demand for domestic workers increased alongside the expansion of female labour force participation and seems to be, in large part, the result of increased demand for child care. As in many contexts Zambian women’s ability to work outside of the home often depended upon them finding a replacement to care for children and complete other domestic work.41 For many employers female children made the ideal child carers. Priscilla’s story illustrates how professional women balanced work and motherhood by relying on the labour of female children. During the 1970s Priscilla had attended university and established a successful career as a librarian and archivist. She first employed a domestic worker after giving birth to her first child in 1981. Priscilla asked her older sister, who lived in rural Eastern Province, to ‘bring a girl from the village’ to help her with child care.42 Priscilla noted that it had not occurred to her to employ a male child to care for her baby, a sentiment that was echoed by many interviewees. In her case, Jane also first employed a domestic worker after giving birth to her first child in 1987. Jane wanted to employ a local girl to look after her son while she continued working as a primary school teacher. After failing to find a female child locally, Jane asked her husband’s sister to help her to find a female child from her village. Priscilla and Jane’s narratives suggest that employing a female child was perceived to be the ‘natural’ choice for working mothers. Despite the preference for female children expressed by many interviewees, migrant male children also continued to be employed as domestic workers throughout the period. Jane’s sister-in-law was unable to find a female child but instead ‘brought’ a male child, Joseph. Jane said that she decided to ‘try the boy out’ but ended up employing Joseph for four years.43 Jane’s experience seems to challenge the gender stereotypes surrounding children and domestic work. However in explaining her decision-making process, Jane stressed that she had only thought it acceptable to employ a male child because she had failed to find a young female worker. She also noted it was less inappropriate to employ a male child because her baby was also male. This gendering of domestic work, and particularly child care, as female seemed to be rigidly established in the minds of most male and female interviewees. Stereotypes grounded in the ‘traditional’ gendered division of labour clearly shaped the tasks performed by migrant male and female children and the conditions of their employment. Employers appear to have employed male children to engage in outdoor tasks, like collecting firewood and water. Female children, on the other hand, were more 41   The relationship between increased female labour force participation and the growth of the domestic service sector has been observed in many contexts. See for example Juliet Filet-Abreu De Souza, ‘Paid Domestic Service in Brazil’, Latin American Perspectives 7(1) (1980), 53; Anderson, Doing the Dirty Work? p. 162. 42   Priscilla, interview by the author, 22 July 2013. 43   Jane, interview by the author, Kitwe, 10 February 2014.

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likely to be employed inside the house and, particularly, to care for children. Female children were more restricted to the bounds of the household while male children had slightly more scope to work outside and interact with neighbours. This spatial gendered division of labour for child domestic workers was mirrored in a gradual shift towards the employment of male and female adult domestic workers in largely gender-segregated outdoor and indoor roles.44 The cost of labour was also a significant factor in generating urban demand for female migrants. The economic decline that Zambia experienced from the mid-1970s put significant pressures on urban households, intensifying the demand for cheap domestic labour. High- and middle-income employers were able to pursue a broad range of strategies to meet their domestic labour needs, employing adults and children in a variety of formal and informal arrangements. But, for the poorest urban households, migrant children often were the only source of domestic labour available. Female employers on low-incomes relied particularly on female kin for help with combining work and child care. For Dorothy, a widowed domestic worker, female kin provided the only source of child care that she could afford. During the early 1990s Dorothy’s niece Anna had migrated to Lusaka from her village in Northern Province to work in Dorothy’s home and care for her children. In exchange for this labour, Dorothy provided accommodation, food and paid her niece a small cash wage.45 For Dorothy, and for countless other poor urban residents, the labour of female kin was fundamental to household survival. Economic conditions thus intersected with the gendered stereotypes surrounding children and domestic labour outlined above, to generate a significant demand for female children to migrate to Lusaka.

Child Migrants and Female-Centred Social Networking The reliance of urban employers on migrant female children draws attention to the ways in which households in rural and urban areas were connected through relations of dependency. In the history of domestic service, these dependencies were often rooted in kinship relations between women and girls. Many female employers described ‘bringing a girl from the village’ to help them with domestic work. Female employers relied on connections with their female kin in rural areas to find female children and help them to make the journey to the city. Similarly when developing their migration strategies, female children in Zambian villages often looked to female kin and peers in urban areas for advice and support. 44   The gendered division of paid domestic labour among adult workers in Zambia was observed during fieldwork in Lusaka in 2013 and 2014. See also Hansen, Distant Companions, p. 232. 45   Dorothy, interview by the author, Lusaka, 10 August 2013.

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These female-centred social networks built on historical practices of sourcing domestic labour through kinship networks.46 In their study of the Bemba, Henrietta Moore and Megan Vaughan, for example, illustrated that links between women have long been fundamental to household strategies and access to labour, and that children were ‘circulated’ between households in arrangements rooted in kinship-based obligations of service and support.47 The ‘circulation’ of children had different potential benefits and drawbacks for the different parties involved. For poor households, sending a child to live with kin could provide economic relief in situations of financial hardship such as failed harvests, drought and bereavement. For the receiving household, a child could help with meeting domestic and other labour shortages.48 For the child involved, migrating to live with relatives could enable survival and, at best, may lead to better educational and employment opportunities. The migration of children within kinship networks can thus be understood historically as a livelihood strategy, a pragmatic response to economic hardship and a means of securing linkages between households that had a range of potential socio-economic benefits. After Zambian independence, kinship networks continued to act as sources of labour even as families became increasingly geographically dispersed across rural and urban areas.49 The central actors in the recruitment and management of domestic labour within kinship networks continued to be female, not least because domestic labour continued to be a female responsibility in the household division of labour. After giving birth to their first children, Priscilla and Jane both turned to female relatives in rural areas for help in finding a domestic worker. In each of these cases it was a female relative who ‘recruited’ the child and made the necessary arrangements for her to migrate to Lusaka and enter into employment. These rural women acted as ‘agents’ on behalf of their urban kinswomen, facilitating the recruitment and migration of female children. Female-centred social networks clearly shaped female children’s lived experiences of migration, as is suggested in Mildred and Niah’s life histories. Mildred was born in 1974 in a village near Petauke, Eastern Province. Her parents were farmers. Mildred was forced to leave school in grade four due to financial constraints at home. She was subsequently approached by her former schoolteacher and offered a live-in domestic service position in Lusaka.50 The schoolteacher was acting   The concept of ‘female-centred social networking’ is borrowed from Parvati Raghuram, ‘Interlinking Trajectories: Migration and domestic work in India’, in Janet Henshall Momsen (ed.) Gender, Migration and Domestic Service (London, 1999), p. 216. 47   Moore and Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees, pp. 193–197. 48   Moore and Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees, pp. 193–197. See also Lord, ‘Child Labor’, p. 103. 49   Lord has illustrated that similar processes took place in colonial Ghana. See Lord, ‘Child Labor’, 103. 50   Mildred, interview by the author, Lusaka, 25 February 2014. 46

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on behalf of her sister-in-law, a fellow teacher who lived and worked in Lusaka. To support her kinswoman, the schoolteacher drew on her local knowledge, identified Mildred as a potential employee, and accompanied Mildred to Lusaka. In contrast to Mildred, Niah’s experience challenges the rural– urban migration narrative. Niah was born in Lusaka in 1992 and grew up in Bauleni compound, a low-income settlement. Her mother was employed as a domestic worker in a nearby residential area and her father worked on a piece-work basis within Bauleni. Niah left school during grade five because she did not have financial support to continue with her studies. When she was 12 years old, Niah was approached by a family friend and offered a job as a live-in domestic worker. The woman had been asked by a teacher who ran a girls’ boarding school south of Lusaka to find a female child from Lusaka to work in her home.51 Given the urban demand for female child domestic workers, Niah could undoubtedly have searched for work in Lusaka. While Niah’s migration trajectory was the inverse of many children’s experiences, it still demonstrates the importance of gendered social networks in recruiting children into domestic service. Female kin were also an important resource for female children who sought to migrate and find employment in Lusaka. Martha was born in a village near Chipata in the late 1950s and left school around the age of 14 years. She described how her parents had often struggled to find enough food for the family. After Martha’s father fell ill during the early 1970s, her aunt asked if she would like to move to Lusaka and look for employment. Martha decided to migrate so that she could help her parents and expand her own opportunities. She lived with her aunt for three months in 1972 before finding work as a live-in domestic worker.52 Esnart, Queen and Grace’s experiences similarly suggested that female children could pursue their own aspirations by migrating within female-centred social networks. These experiences illustrate how urban women have provided their rural kin with the means and opportunity to migrate by offering information, accommodation and help with finding employment.53 Female-centred social networks also played an important role in facilitating the entry of female migrants into domestic service long after they had first arrived in the city. In 1984 Elizabeth moved from Chililabombwe in Copperbelt Province to Lusaka with her father and three siblings. Elizabeth had been living in Lusaka for around one year when her sister recommended she apply for a position as a live-in domestic worker. Elizabeth’s sister and brother-in-law liaised with the employer on Elizabeth’s behalf and escorted her to the interview.54 Mutinta’s   Niah, interview by the author, Lusaka, 16 February 2014.   Martha, interview by the author, Chipata, 18 July 2014. 53   See also Raghuram, ‘Interlinking Trajectories’, pp. 218–20. 54   Elizabeth, interview by the author, Lusaka, 16 February 2014. 51

52

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experience was similar. Born in a village in Rufunsa District, Lusaka Province in 2000, Mutinta migrated to Lusaka to live with her father in 2012 in the hope of continuing her education. In late 2013, Mutinta was approached by a female neighbour with an offer of employment on behalf of a female friend from church. Mutinta started work as a live-in domestic worker in December 2013.55 Elizabeth and Mutinta’s narratives highlight how diverse female-centred social networks have been, rooted in close family ties, professional contacts and church affiliation. It is important to consider how broader social and economic shifts have altered the nature of dependencies that connected rural and urban households and changed the functioning of female-centred social networks as agents of labour recruitment. The economic decline that Zambia experienced from the mid-1970s certainly increased pressures on rural and urban households, as outline above. Households in town and in the countryside continued to look to each other for support as they had long done. But the nature of these dependent relationships changed as a result of widening socio-economic disparities and the changes in employment and educational opportunities that resulted. As a result of increasing economic disparity, it has been suggested that the practice of children migrating within kinship networks became increasingly exploitative. Karen Tranberg Hansen has argued that although the recruitment of children for domestic work continued to be perceived in terms of the obligations and mutual dependencies of kin, these networks increasingly became a means for urban employers to source cheap and vulnerable labour.56 The emphasis on increased exploitation is suggested most fervently in the studies initiated by international development organizations. Both the International Labour Organization and the International Organization for Migration, for example, have characterized the practice of children moving within kinship networks as a form of child trafficking.57 The experiences of child migrants collected as part of this research project suggest a more complex picture. Certain urban employers did employ female children because they were a cheap source of labour. This argument is supported by the experiences of interviewees. For many child migrants, for example, domestic service involved long and irregular working hours and very low wages. However the level of exploitation that female children experienced varied widely between employment arrangements. For children like Grace, for example, domestic service involved both exploitation and opportunity. Grace described working long hours for many years, receiving only a small cash salary on top of her in-kind payments of accommodation and food. But Grace also described the affectionate relationship that she had with her employers and the pride she felt at having paid her own way   Mutinta, interview by the author, Lusaka, 1 March 2014.   Hansen, ‘Labour Migration’, pp. 230–31. 57   Hashim and Thorsen, Child Migration in Africa, p. 14. 55

56

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through secondary school by working. Viewing children’s experiences of migration solely through the lens of exploitation and trafficking risks ignoring the complex experiences of migrants such as Grace. The exploitation narrative not only obscures the complexity of children’s migration experiences, it perpetuates an image of African children as inherently passive and vulnerable. As has been illustrated in this chapter, children exercised a degree of agency in shaping migration practices. Many children chose to migrate to Lusaka and accepted offers of employment from kin and strangers either of their own accord or in consultation with their guardians. Life histories with former migrants thus suggest that although kinship-based labour relations could be exploitative and opportunistic, these relations were not unidirectional.

Conclusion Throughout the post-colonial period, female children have participated in migration strategies in large numbers and have made a significant contribution to both rural and urban households as a result. The histories of these female migrant workers must be recognized and integrated into the broader history of migration in Zambia. By entering into domestic service, migrant women and girls supported themselves and their families. The domestic labour performed by these female migrant workers should to be seen not as a ‘natural’ extension of female responsibilities from the natal home to the workplace but as a significant contribution to both the urban and rural economy and as a crucial factor in processes of post-colonial class formation and shifting gender relations. If migration can be seen as a key measure of the depths of economic crisis facing a household or community, then studying the migration trajectories of female children provides a unique way of understanding the full range of strategies that people have pursued to survive in a context of extreme economic pressure.58 The history of the migration of female children draws particular attention to the endurance of mutual dependencies between rural and urban households and to the changing obligations and expectations of kinship in the post-colonial context. Indeed as a result of the social and economic ills caused by structural adjustment and liberalization, such mutual dependencies have arguably only increased over time. The migration of children and young women within kinship networks can thus be understood as a pragmatic response to economic crisis as much as a long-standing means of sourcing labour. These findings also point to the significance of women and girls in the shifting dynamics of kinship relations and patronage networks.   Grier has illustrated this in colonial Zimbabwe. See Grier, Invisible Hands, p. 4.

58

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Female-centred social networks were a vital resource for both urban residents looking for domestic workers and for migrants seeking employment and a place in the city. Women helped their kin to find domestic workers from within Lusaka and from across the country. These networks shaped female migrants journeys to the city and experiences of migration. The support that female kin have offered to each other, in finding both labour and employment, draws attention to the capacity for both exploitative and affective relations to exist in domestic service arrangements. Overall by focusing on these social networks it becomes possible to understand how female children’s migration strategies have actually unfolded, taking into account the different stages in a migrant’s journey from ‘home’ to the city and the workplace. The narratives of female migrants also challenge the prevalence of trafficking and exploitation in international discourses on children and domestic work. While human trafficking and exploitation are clearly serious issues in need of international and local attention, focusing on children’s mobility solely through this lens obscures the complex nature of rural–urban connections and children’s own experiences. International development organizations that campaign on behalf of domestic worker rights in Africa and across the ‘global south’ should pay attention to the historical dimensions of domestic labour relations in order to understand the ways in which domestic labour is bound up with complex relations of affection, patronage and support that have connected rural and urban communities. Interviews with female migrants and employers suggest that the relations of dependency that have connected rural and urban communities have been a resource for both parties, even if not on equal terms. It is too often assumed that female children are incapable of shaping their migration trajectories or working lives.59 The experiences discussed in this chapter suggest that female domestic workers have both shaped their migration experiences and placed great value on their ability to work. For Grace and Esnart, and for countless others, migration to Lusaka was a strategy pursued to support themselves and their families and to improve their future prospects. These potential benefits of course need to be balanced against the exploitation and overwork that many domestic workers have experienced. But the value that individual migrants have placed on their ability to migrate and to work should not be ignored. 59

  Hashim and Thorsen, Child Migration in Africa, p. 17.

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4

‘I Will Never Become a Crocodile but I am Happy if I Eat Enough’ A Psychological Analysis of Child Fosterage & Resilience in Contemporary Mali

Paola Porcelli

Child migration, whether internal or international, constitutes a long-standing tradition in Sub-Saharan Africa.1 However, as Rodet and Razy highlight in the Introduction to this volume, the experiences of migrant African children still remain inadequately studied and the boundaries between the different forms and shapes of their experiences are quite unclear. This chapter aims to give an overview of what these authors define as the ‘fluidity and flexibility of the child migrant’s status’ through a psychological exploration of the phenomenon of fosterage, one of the most widespread pathways of child migration in Africa.2 In particular, while most of the chapters of this volume adopt a historical perspective on children’s migration by analysing sources from the past, this contribution describes contemporary patterns of child mobility as observed through the eyes of two fostered young people. Their living narratives show some common points with the collective values and historical roots of fosterage collected through the discourses of community leaders. Yet they also demonstrate the creative and idiosyncratic survival strategies adopted by these children to overcome the adversities related to their fosterage experience.   On this point, see also Élodie Razy and Marie Rodet, ‘Les migrations africaines dans l’enfance, des parcours individuels entre institutions locales et institutions globales’, Journal des Africanistes 81(2) (2011), 19. 2   In this chapter we chose to use the category of ‘child fosterage’ because of its double reference to Anglo-Saxon and Francophone literature, its positive value compared to other at-risk practices related to African child circulation, and its cultural sensitivity. This term highlights the affective, nurturing and educational function provided by foster parents and, simultaneously, the particular condition of being a foster child. On this point, see also Mireille Corbier, ed., Adoption et fosterage (Paris, 1999). More recently, Alber, Martins and Notermans proposed the use of the term ‘fostering’ to describe these practices due to its dynamic value. See Erdmute Alber, Jeannett Martin and Catrien Notermans, ‘Introduction’ in Alber, Martin and Notermans, eds, Child Fostering in West Africa. New Perspectives on Theory and Practices (Leiden, 2013), p. 7. Nevertheless, for the purposes of our analysis we prefer to use the term ‘fosterage’, as it has often been compared to the institution of ‘adoption’ within Western societies. See also Suzanne Lallemand, La circulation des enfants en société traditionnelle: Prêt, don, échange (Paris, 1993); Fiona Bowie, ed., Cross-Cultural Approaches to Adoption (London, 2004). This comparison allows us to treat fosterage as a relevant topic from a psychological perspective. See also Françoise-Romaine Ouellette, ‘Adopter c’est donner’, in Isabelle Leblic, ed., De l’adoption: des pratiques de filiation différentes (Clermont-Ferrand, 2004), pp. 269–96. 1

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The term ‘fosterage’ (or confiage) refers to a set of common practices in ‘shared management child care societies’,3 where child-rearing tasks are distributed between several community members, rather than being considered the exclusive responsibility of the biological parents. As a consequence, children are easily entrusted to external guardians to be nourished, educated or initiated into religious or professional training.4 Due to the widespread nature of these child-rearing strategies, African children are likely to develop multiple attachment ties as they can rely on a wide network of caregivers.5 As Silk highlights, ‘the normative pattern of fosterage transactions itself appears to reduce the probability that children will receive poor treatment in their foster households’.6 This hypothesis contrasts with dominant perceptions in the West, which cast children’s displacement or residential mobility as a risk factor or a source of psychological instability for young people.7 In addition to the influence of these psychological approaches, an ethnocentric bias seems to affect research on African child migration and fosterage. This situation is partly due to the twentieth-century shift in the colonial approach to children ‘from one of repression to one of assistance’.8 This paralleled a growing tendency in European societies to emphasize discipline and education. Historical changes in the way children were viewed gave rise to a rhetorical discourse on child welfare which relied on Euro-American normative ideas and the promotion of child immobility and dependence. The implementation of this paradigm generated what Cheney calls the ‘protectionist model’, adopted in rights-based approaches to development, which assumes vulnerability as a structural characteristic of childhood.9 In the same vein, a large amount of research into the living conditions of fostered children across Africa has demonstrated the risks related to these situations, which are said to include reduced educational achievement, deprivation of food or healthcare and excessive 3   Gillian Mann, Networks of Support: A Literature Review of Care Issues for Separated Children (Stockholm, 2001), p. 24. 4   Esther Goody, Parenthood and Social Reproduction: Fostering and Occupational Roles in West Africa (Cambridge, 1982); Uche C. Isiugo-Abanihe, ‘Child Fosterage in West Africa’, Population and Development Review 11(1) (1985), 53–73. 5   Edward Z. Tronick, Gilda A. Morelli and Paula K. Ivey, ‘The Efe Forager Infant and Toddler’s Pattern of Social Relationships: Multiple and Simultaneous’, Developmental Psychology 28(4) (1992), 568–77. 6   Joan B. Silk, ‘Adoption and Fosterage in Human Societies: Adaptations or Enigmas?’, Cultural Anthropology 2(1) (1987), 44. 7   Jack Pollari and Janis R. Bullock, ‘When Children Move: Some Stresses and Coping Strategies’, Early Child Development and Care 41(1) (1988), 113–21; Kathryn R. Puskar and Donna S. Martsou, ‘Adolescent Geographic Relocation: Theoretical Perspective’, Issues in Mental Health Nursing 15(5) (1994), 471–81; Eric M. Vernberg and Tiffany Field, ‘Transitional Stress in Children and Adolescents Moving to New Environments’, in Shirley Fisher and Cary L. Cooper, eds, On the Move: The Psychology of Change and Transition (Chichester, 1990), pp. 127–151. 8   Rodet and Razy, this volume, Introduction. 9   Kristen E. Cheney, ‘Killing Them Softly? Using Children’s Rights to Empower Africa’s Orphans and Vulnerable Children’, International Social Work 56(1) (2013), 92–102.

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workloads.10 Owing to the pressure of social change and transformations in family structures, these practices can indeed be a source of conflict, creating imbalance and generating suffering for children and their families.11 These negative issues are caused by several forms of discriminatory treatment meted out to fostered children, whose developmental chances seem reduced compared to biological offspring.12 For example, some foster children continue to be considered guests and to live in the permanent condition of being ‘someone else’s child’, without ever being completely incorporated in the foster household.13 In spite of these sources of vulnerability, African fosterage also seems to be associated with some protective factors deriving from community discourses. Bledsoe, building on her fieldwork in Sierra Leone, affirms that one of the key concepts underlying child mobility is ‘hardship ideology’, summarized by the Mende proverb ‘no success without struggle’.14 According to this concept, these practices are recognized as being potentially harmful, but are also viewed as opportunities for achieving knowledge, gaining a better social position and earning blessings from adults. In particular, in many countries of the global South, ‘the development of precocious mechanisms for survival is seen by many as integral to normal socialization’.15 Thus, as for other forms of child migration, research into fosterage has been affected by two main models.16 The first tends to describe fostered children as ‘unhappy victims’ of external circumstances, unable to fight against the social pressure that led them to grow up separately from their biological families or to experience difficult living conditions. The second, by contrast, portrays these children as ‘happy actors’, who are either spoiled by beloved relatives or act as protago  Caroline Bledsoe, ‘“No Success Without Struggle”: Social Mobility and Hardship for Foster Children in Sierra Leone’, Man 25(1) (1990), 70–88; Sarah E. Castle, ‘Child Fostering and Children’s Nutritional Outcomes in Rural Mali: The Role of Female Status in Directing Child Transfers’, Social Science and Medicine 40(5) (1995), 679–93; Cynthia B. Lloyd and Ann K. Blanc, ‘Children’s Schooling in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Role of Fathers, Mothers, and Others’, Population and Development Review 22(2) (1996), 265–98; Jacob Bamideli Oni, ‘Fostered Children’s Perception of Their Health Care and Illness Treatment in Ekiti Yoruba Households, Nigeria’, Health Transition Review 5(1) (1995), 21–34. 11   Erdmute Alber, ‘Denying Biological Parenthood: Fosterage in Northern Benin’, Ethnos 68(4) (2003), 487–506; Catrien Notermans, ‘The Emotional World of Kinship: Children’s Experiences of Fosterage in East Cameroon’, Childhood 15(3) (2008), 355–77; Heidi Verhoef, ‘“A Child has Many Mothers”: Views of Child Fostering in Northwestern Cameroon’, Childhood 12(3) (2005), 369–90; Heidi Verhoef and Gilda Morelli, ‘“A Child is a Child”: Fostering Experiences in Northwestern Cameroon’, Ethos 35(1) (2007), 33–64. 12   Caroline H. Bledsoe, Douglas C. Ewbank and Uche C. Isiugo-Abanihe, ‘The Effect of Child Fostering on Feeding Practices and Access to Health Services in Rural Sierra Leone’, Social Science and Medicine 27(6) (1988), 627–636. 13   Porcelli Paola, ‘Le fosterage entre enjeux psychologiques et culturels’, L’autre – Cliniques, Cultures et Sociétés 12(3) (2011), 278–88; Porcelli Paola, ‘Fosterage et résilience: discours collectifs et trajectoires individuelles de mobilité des enfants en milieu bambara’, Journal des Africanistes 81(2) (2011), 119–44. 14   Bledsoe, ‘“No Success Without Struggle”’. 15  Jo Boyden, ‘Childhood and the Policy Makers’, in Allison James and Alan Prout, eds, Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood (Brighton, 1997), p. 209. 16   Rodet and Razy, this volume, Introduction. 10

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nists of unexpected trajectories that they manage to build in even the most challenging of environments. Yet this literature does not seem to take into account the simultaneous presence of vulnerability and risk factors as an intrinsic feature of fosterage arrangements. The multiple outcomes of fosterage situations and their diverse impacts on children and young people can be explained by their dynamic nature and the historical roots of ‘translocality/multilocality’ that characterize those traditions.17 By considering African child migration as a process and recognizing the role of social relationships and kinship patterns underlying these practices, this chapter aims to emphasize the variability and complexity of such displacements, rather than analysing them as simple unidirectional movements giving rise to predictable outcomes. Until now, this form of child migration has been analysed from various interdisciplinary perspectives: by anthropologists, sociologists, demographers and geographers, as well as economists, educational science researchers and humanitarian workers.18 Moreover, some descriptions of these practices have been provided by development psychologists working in cross-cultural settings.19 Yet these psychologists were primarily interested in explaining the general rules of African child-rearing systems, so fosterage and its psychological impacts never became a core subject of their research. The French ethno-psychoanalyst Reveyrand-Coulon20 argues that the anthropological accounts are generally focused on broad collective dynamics, and do not leave space for describing individual lived experiences. Alber attributes this gap not only to the scarcity of research focusing on children’s direct accounts, but also to the difference between children’s and adult’s explanations of fosterage.21 As she observes, ‘[w] hereas adults often refer to the normative conception of fostering, for instance its value for kinship relations or the benefit it brings for the   Ibid.   Alayne Adams, ‘Food Insecurity in Mali: Exploring the Role of the Moral Economy’, IDS Bulletin 24(4) (1993), 41–50; Bledsoe, ‘“No Success Without Struggle”’; Jill Brown, ‘Child Fosterage and the Developmental Markers of Children in Namibia, Southern Africa: Implications of Gender and Kinship’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Nebraska Lincoln, 2007); Mélanie Y. Jacquemin, ‘Children’s Domestic Work in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire: The Petites Bonnes Have the Floor’, Childhood 11(3) (2004), 383–97; Mann, Networks of Support; Marc Pilon, Foster Care and schooling in West Africa: The State of Knowledge, Preparation of the UNESCO 2003 EFA monitoring report (Paris & Ouagadougou, 2003); Céline Vandermeersch, ‘Les enfants confiés âgés de moins de 6 ans au Sénégal en 1992–1993’, Population 57(4–5) (2002), 661–88. 19  Pierre Erny, L’enfant et son milieu en Afrique noire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987); Marcelle Geber, L’enfant africain dans un monde en changement: Étude ethno-psychologique dans huit pays sud-africains (Paris, 1998); Robert A. LeVine, Suzanne Dixon, Sarah LeVine, Amy Richman, Constance H. Keefer and Thomas Berry Brazelton, Child Care and Culture: Lessons from Africa (Cambridge, 1994); Jaqueline Rabain, L’enfant du lignage: Du sevrage la classe âge chez les Wolof du Sénégal (Paris, 1979). 20  Odile Reveyrand-Coulon, ‘Quelques bonnes raisons de donner son enfant, pratiques culturelles et élaborations subjectives: études de cas recueillis au Sénégal’, Psychiatrie de l’enfant 42(1) (1999), 278. 21   Fosterage studies that involve children directly are quite recent. See, for example, Notermans, ‘The Emotional World of Kinship’. 17

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children’s futures, the children themselves talk much more explicitly about hardship and suffering when living in the households of foster parents’.22 Alber also highlights the importance of distinguishing collective discourses from personal experiences. However, previous studies may have considered only the tip of the iceberg, neglecting personal feelings about child mobility. In order to improve our knowledge of such themes, the present contribution aims to provide a psychological perspective on African fosterage and to analyse the impacts of these practices on the mental health and well-being of children and young people. A psychological insight into fosterage could allow scholars to go beyond the dichotomic view of fostered children as ‘unhappy victims’ or ‘happy actors’, and to gain a better understanding of these forms of mobility ‘from the inside’. Such a perspective privileges a wider interdisciplinary reflection on the relationships between the cultural meaning of these practices, the community values they promote, and their impact on the construction of identity and the sense of belonging of fostered young people.

A Theoretical Framework Based on Social Ecological and Value-centred Perspectives Given not only the component of risk associated with child fosterage, but also its high cultural message, we chose to base our exploration of the psychological impacts of these practices on two main perspectives. The first is drawn from the social ecological approach to resilience, which stresses the importance of the individual-environment interaction in the construction of effective coping strategies in stressful situations. The second is a value-centred perspective, focused on the importance of collective values and cultural transmission in the structuration of individuals’ personalities and life choices. The social ecological approach to resilience was developed by Ungar to explore the survival strategies of vulnerable youth facing various challenges across different cultural contexts.23 This model considers the key concepts of navigation (conceptualized as a form of individual agency) and negotiation (given by a set of environmental resources 22  Erdmute Alber, ‘The Transfer of Belonging: Theories on Child Fostering in West Africa Reviewed’, in Alber et al., Child Fostering in West Africa, p. 96. 23  Michael Ungar, ‘Resilience across Cultures’, British Journal of Social Work 38(2) (2008), 218–35; Ungar, ‘The Social Ecology of Resilience: Addressing Contextual and Cultural Ambiguity of a Nascent Construct’ American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 81(1) (2011), 1–17; Ungar, ‘Social Ecologies and Their Contribution to Resilience’ in Ungar, ed., The Social Ecology of Resilience: A Handbook of Theory and Practice (New York: Springer, 2012), pp. 13–32. Ungar, ‘Introduction: Resilience across Cultures and Contexts’, in Ungar, ed., Handbook for Working with Children and Youth: Pathways to Resilience across Cultures and Contexts (Thousand Oaks, CA, 2005), pp. xv–xxxix; Michael Ungar, Marion Brown, Linda Liebenberg, Rasha Othman, Wai Man Kwong, Mary Armstrong and Jane Gilgun, ‘Unique Pathways to Resilience across Cultures’, Adolescence 42(166) (2007), 287–310.

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made available and accessible) as fundamental factors allowing young people to cope with adversity. To be effective, these sets of strengths must operate in ‘culturally meaningful ways’.24 According to the social ecological model, the simultaneous action of these variables as young people interact with their physical and social ecologies constitutes the core of resilience. Although Ungar conceptualizes resilience as a universal capacity, this model provides an argument for a cultural understanding of the concept, encouraging scholars to recognize that the thriving mechanisms allowing individuals to cope with stress and trauma are context-dependent. In this sense, the definition of well-being and good functioning varies across different cultures and must be considered within a collective framework. As Ungar emphasizes with reference to Phelps and his colleagues, unexpected protective processes can be identified by researching resilience in poor countries.25 These processes can be influenced by contextual factors (such as the fact of belonging to a given group or social category), cultural issues (customs and beliefs) and temporal dynamics (at a historical or individual level). Moreover, the cultural basis of resilience can be understood through a specific method of questioning participants, collecting their own view on the emotional status of particular events (e.g. ‘what can be called a positive or negative situation in the context where you live?’), their understanding of their social value (e.g. ‘how is this situation considered within your community?’) and their meaning to the individual (e.g. ‘what was your reaction to the situation?’). Thus, if resilience is defined as a ‘dynamic process encompassing positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity’,26 the social ecological model highlights the fundamental role of context in providing the resources that help the individual to overcome different kinds of psychological challenges.27 The application of this approach to the reality of fostered children involves, on one hand, an analysis of their living conditions including the risk factors they face and, on the other hand, an exploration of their personal strengths and their capacity to negotiate the positive resources provided by their social environment. In conducting a psychological analysis of fosterage inspired by the social ecological theory of resilience, we are attempting to overcome the dichotomous polarization of the supposed effects of these practices,   Ungar, ‘Resilience across Cultures’, 225.  Michael Ungar, Mehdi Ghazinour and Jörg Richter, ‘Annual Research Review: What is Resilience Within the Social Ecology of Human Development?’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 54(4) (2013), 350; Erin Phelps, Aida B. Balsano, Kristen Fay, Jack S. Peltz, Stacy M. Zimmerman, Richard M. Lerner and Jacqueline V. Lerner, ‘Nuances in Early Adolescent Developmental Trajectories of Positive and Problematic/Risk Behaviors: Findings from the 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development’, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Clinics 16(2) (2007), 473–96. 26   Suniya S. Luthar, Dante Cicchetti and Bronwyn Becker, ‘The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and Guidelines for Future Work’, Child Development 71(3) (2000), 543. 27   Ungar, ‘Social Ecologies’. 24

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which have been recognized by previous research as a source of hardship but also as a potential basis for improving one’s life. This framework offers flexibility, refusing any predictable and fixed relationship between a set of stressors, i.e. being entrusted to a foster family, and their consequences for an individual’s development, i.e. stress vs well-being. This contribution builds on this framework to explore the psychological impacts of child fosterage, considered in relation to both its positive and negative outcomes. Smith and Bond define cultural values as ‘universalistic statements about what we think [is] desirable or attractive’.28 Societies show different preferences for culturally-established solutions to basic human problems. Such solutions reflect specific attitudes about individual relational styles, person-nature relationships, human nature, motivations for behaviour and time-space orientation.29 These key ‘pieces of culture’ are transmitted through education and socialization, and represent important issues for the construction of identity and sense of belonging of new generations. Nevertheless, they are not static, as they are constantly shaped by the dynamics of social change.30 The relevance of a value-orientation perspective to a psychological analysis of child fosterage can be understood with reference to several cross-cultural theories. In particular, the literature on the cultural and symbolic function of child education in Africa highlights the importance of child-rearing and educational strategies, such as fostering arrangements, in transmitting values.31 Given the strong relationship between fosterage and education, which has been emphasized by previous research, this approach underlines the moral function of being raised outside one’s biological family. Moreover, the significance of cultural orientation in personality development has been stressed within the fields of cross-cultural and Afrocentric psychology.32 The first approach is well known for the identification of cross-cultural related values in world-wide cultural systems; the latter aims to build a theory of African people’s psychological experiences based on their specific cultural worldview. Within that framework, one of the pillars of the Afrocentric perspective is the role of the extended family in socializing of children through specific child-rearing practices.33 In this perspective, child fosterage can be considered the result of a strong  Peter B. Smith and Michael Harris Bond, Social Psychology across Cultures: Analysis and perspectives (Needham Heights, MA, 1994), p. 52. 29   Florence R. Kluckhohn and Fred L. Strodtbeck, Variations in Value Orientations (Evanston, IL, 1961). 30   Patricia M. Greenfield, ‘Linking Social Change and Developmental Change: Shifting Pathways of Human Development’, Developmental Psychology 45(2) (2009), 401–18. 31   Bledsoe, ‘“No Success Without Struggle”’. 32   Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related values (Beverly Hills, CA, 1980); Faye Z. Belgrave and Kevin W. Allison, African American Psychology: From Africa to America, 2nd edition (Thousand Oaks, CA, 2010). 33   Thomas A. Parham, Joseph L. White and Adisa Ajamu, The Psychology of Blacks: An African Centered Perspective, 3rd edition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1999). 28

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value adherence to collective nurturing systems based on the relatedness and interdependence of the members of a given community. The models introduced here provide a framework which can be used to develop a better understanding of the psychological impacts of fosterage. Indeed, African fosterage can be referred to as a ‘value-orientation tradition’, since it belongs to a set of practices dealing with socially-distributed nurturing and prosocial, shared management of caretaking arrangements.34 In this manner, the fact of being entrusted to different guardians provides the children with a sense of responsibility towards community members. Fosterage seems to be associated with powerful cultural markers, which may act as protective factors against the potential sources of danger to which fostered children might be exposed. The relationship between fosterage, resilience and value orientation derives from the processes of navigation and negotiation engaged by these youth with regard to their physical and social ecologies.

Data Collection The present research was carried out from 2005 to 2007 during fieldwork in south-west Mali (West Africa). The purpose of our work was to highlight both the social representations and the individual impacts of child fosterage arrangements. Data were collected in the region of Koulikoro, within the cercle (district) of Kati. We selected 15 Bambara villages within the rural community of Sanankoroba, which had about 37,294 inhabitants in 2009. The villages were chosen because they belonged to the Bambara ethnic group. The methodology adopted was based on narrative and visual qualitative methods: focus groups, semi-structured interviews and drawings of the family. The data collection was divided into two phases. The first phase aimed to explore collective views of fosterage in the communities. For this purpose, 16 focus groups were conducted with 184 community leaders35 across eight villages, with three main axes of discussion: the social representations of fosterage, fosterage and social change, and fosterage and individual experiences. The second phase of data collection consisted of extensive fieldwork in 32 ‘fostering compounds’ across eight villages. The compounds selected in the final phase included households where at least three fosterage situations were identified. These could be in the parents’, grandparents’ or children’s and young people’s generation, and could be characterized by both ‘foster-in’ movements (i.e. 34   Robert Serpell, ‘African Dimensions of Child Care and Nurturance’, in Michael E. Lamb, Kathleen J. Sternberg, Carl-Philip Hwand and Anders G. Broberg, eds, Child Care in Context: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Hillsdale, NJ, 1992), pp. 463–74. 35   Separate groups were organized for men and for women, in order to respect the community’s traditions. A total of 93 men and 91 women took part in the study. The mean age of the sample was 54.6 for the women’s groups and 65 for the men’s groups.

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children and young people entrusted outside the nuclear family) and ‘foster-out’ patterns (i.e. children and young people coming from an external nuclear family). The population participating in the study included 274 adults and 103 children, all of whom had experienced fosterage at some time in their lives. For each fostering compound, different members belonging to each generation were interviewed, according to their familiarity with fosterage and their degree of connection with ‘fostered-in’ and/or ‘fostered-out’ children. In addition to the narrative data, visual data were collected with children and young people who had experienced fosterage and with their siblings, in order to explore representations of the family for both of these categories of young people. For this purpose, a reviewed version of the Draw-A-Family Test was used with fostered children and young people and with their biological or fostered siblings living in the same household.36 Following the transcription of verbal protocols, a thematic content analysis was carried out. The data emerging from the drawings were analysed as children’s and young people’s subjective views of relationships and family dynamics, rather than according to a pre-established psychological theory.

Findings The data emerging from the two phases included both the community members’ views of social representations of fosterage and the lived experiences of fosterage collected through the accounts of main actors. After presenting both of these perspectives, we discuss their implications using a social ecological approach to resilience and value-orientation theory. Investigation of the community members’ discourses showed that the word fosterage can be translated into Bambara as denlamò, which means ‘to raise a child’ or ‘to make a fruit grow’. Adults must help children to grow up in order to become ‘good people’, just as nature helps fruits to become ripe in order to feed mankind. This process is made possible through a strict education whose final purpose is to shape the child ‘like soft clay’. Mamadou37 – Denlamò [fosterage] means education. Education is not limited to school but can be realized at different levels. Our ancestors said ‘a child is like soft clay, he/she takes the shape that one gives to him/her’. Thus, the shape that a   Adapted from Louis Corman, Le test du dessin de la famille (Paris, 1970); Colette Jourdan-Ionescu and Joan Lachance, Le dessin de la famille: présentation, grille de cotation et éléments d’interprétation (Trois-Rivières, 2000). 37   The testimonies of community leaders were collected through focus group discussions (see the section on data collection). All the participants’ names have been changed. The interviews were conducted in Bambara, and recorded and translated with the help of an interpreter. 36

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Moulding a child’s personality means putting him/her on the right path through a progressive confrontation of obstacles and difficulties. Children are encouraged to be ‘brave’ (denw kisèw) and to bear adversity without complaining; in other words, to become resilient. In this perspective, growing up far away from one’s biological parents is seen as a psychological trial which can help even the most stubborn or spoiled children to strengthen and improve their characters. Keriba – An uncle becomes responsible for one of his brother’s children as this latter [i.e. the biological father] is too indulgent towards his own child. Thus, if your child finds himself in a bad situation you will not be able to punish him, whereas his uncle can prevent him from taking bad pathways. (Man, village of Kabé)

Moreover, the participants recognize the high social value of fosterage in terms of its benefits for the whole community. In a context characterized by poverty and economic instability, children are considered gifts whose circulation can contribute to the development of the whole social system. To raise someone else’s child is considered a form of life insurance and the long-term reward will be priceless, in terms of both symbolic and material benefits. Kotente – Denlamò [fosterage] is a good thing as, if a child is well educated, when he/she becomes adult, he/she will never forget you [his/her foster parent]. The child will be grateful until the end of his/her life. Moreover, he/she will do for his/ her foster parents more than he/she will do for his/her biological parents. (Woman, village of Niafalan)

Nevertheless, most of the population who took part in the research showed ambivalence towards these practices, which are simultaneously considered both a precious heritage and a source of intra-community conflict. These conflicts seem to be due to the fact that child mobility is increasingly linked to material issues, so that traditional codes of solidarity appear to be less respected. Individualism is often mentioned as one of the main causes of the failure of fosterage. Dény – Denlamò [fosterage] has become difficult to practice because of the individualism and the selfishness of some people. (Woman, village of Tadiana)

This form of individualism derives from the attitude of those biological parents who are less disposed to give their children away. When they are willing to send them to external tutors, they are likely to do it only to get superficial benefits (i.e. support with school fees or other forms of financial help).

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Dominant attitudes towards child fosterage constantly balance between optimistic and pessimistic views. Indeed, for the community members, ‘good’ fosterage occurs when no distinction is made between biological and fostered children. Madou – There can be some differences in the privileges given to biological children compared to fostered ones. In the past, all the children of the family were treated in the same way, but today this is not the case. It is noticeable that individualism contributes to make things worse. (Man, village of Tamala)

The Bambara people interviewed in those communities believed that more and more ‘bad’ fosterage situations occur today, as foster children do not belong to their caregivers’ families. The ‘right to belong’ is symbolized by specific cultural codes and can be more or less strong depending on kinship dynamics and the reasons underlying fosterage. Sendian – There are different kinds of denlamò [fosterage]. A child can be fostered by his older sister, by his father’s younger sister or by his mother’s parents. Grandmothers can also foster their grandchildren. In my family, my mother fostered one of my children in order to have someone to take care of her. If the parents cooperate, the child’s education will be successful. (Woman, village of Niafalan)

As to the individual impacts of fosterage, according to the community members who participated to the focus groups, two opposite psychological situations may arise for children, depending on the degree of conformity to ideal or unwanted arrangements. The first is expressed by the proverb ‘no matter how long the tree trunk stays in the river, it will never turn into a crocodile’, emphasizing that some children experience a permanent condition of strangeness within the foster household. The second is embodied by the moral imperative of ‘being well-fed’, constituting a symbol of full integration into the host place. Kabelé – What makes denlamò [fosterage] complicated is the way it is practiced. For example, denlamò will not be successful if the fostered children do not receive the same treatment from their foster parent as the other children of the family receive, or if they are shown that they do not belong to the family as they are seen as someone else’s offspring. In this case we say that ‘no matter how long the tree trunk stays in the river, it will never turn into a crocodile’. This proverb means that a child can spend longtime at his/her foster parents’ place but he/she will never become as their own child. (Man, village of Digato) Hawa – [Good fosterage] consists of taking care of the children, providing them with food if they are hungry, paying attention to their nutritional needs and their health, and teaching them how to behave. (Woman, village of Tamala)

Happy fostered children are those who experience good living conditions. This group includes not only close relatives of the head of the

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family or small children entrusted to their grandparents, but also some young people who are cherished and beloved by their tutors for their character. By contrast, adolescents or children whose parents have distant relationships with the foster family or children who have a bad reputation are more likely to experience a sense of non-belonging and to endure psychological suffering. In order to better understand young people’s perspectives on their fosterage experience, we will present two case studies which will be discussed in further detail. Bintou:38 the pathway of memory Bintou is a 17-year-old young girl who was entrusted to her father’s older brother after her biological family encountered several difficulties. After her mother’s death, her father experienced serious financial problems. Although he married another woman, he chose to send some of his children to his brother in order to allow them to gain a better education. Moreover, Bintou’s parents lived in a conflict zone in Ivory Coast, whereas Bintou’s paternal uncles were all settled in Mali and appeared to have better living conditions. Bintou is quite critical of her fosterage experience, which presents several risk factors. Compared to her siblings, her position within the foster household is quite weak. She is mistreated by her tutor, her uncle’s second wife, who forces her to work hard and does not give her enough food. In spite of these challenges, she finds some support from one of her uncle’s sons, to whom she feels very close, and when she is in trouble she can seek protection from her biological sister who lives in the same neighbourhood. To describe her pathway to resilience, Bintou underlined the importance of memory in her life. Her purpose was to honour her mother in every circumstance and to demonstrate her own respectability within the community. For this reason, she learned to accept her fate without complaining. But the situation changed when Bintou’s uncle decided to stop paying the young girl’s school fees. This decision deeply upset Bintou and made her adopt a more active coping strategy. In particular, thanks to her intellectual aptitudes of diplomacy and to her good reputation within the community, the young girl managed to challenge the traditional rules about respecting her elders from the patrilineage. After going through a process of negotiation with the elders, she asked for help from her maternal uncles who lived in the same village. Their intervention allowed Bintou to go back to school; however, at the same time she decided to continue living with her foster family and to forgive her tutors, to whom she reports feeling close.

38  Young people’s testimonies were collected through semi-structured interviews (see the section on data collection). All the participants’ names have been changed.

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Yakouba: the pathway of courage Yakouba is a 13-year-old boy who was sent, together with one of his older brothers, to live with his mother’s younger brother. Yakouba’s father fostered-out all of his sons after the end of their first cycle of primary school, in order to have them study in a more developed village. However, almost all of the boys have had hard fosterage experiences, facing problems of food scarcity and excessive workloads, in spite of the provisions regularly sent by their father. Yakouba ‘withstood’ life in his foster family for less than a year. His difficulties were related to the hard work that his foster parents made him perform in the fields when he was not at school. Yakouba was battered and mistreated. Moreover, he did not receive enough food and he went often to school without eating. But the final straw for the boy was a fight with one of his tutor’s sons, who was aged 16 and who deeply offended Yakouba by his disrespectful behaviour. In contrast to his older brothers, who bore the burden of their fosterage experience without complaining, Yakouba decided to openly challenge his tutor and to return to his biological family against his father’s will. Yakouba’s behaviour was apparently in opposition with the cultural obligation of respect towards adults. Nevertheless, the young boy received strong support from the elders of the family, including his biological and classificatory grandparents, who allowed him to leave his tutor and follow his own path. Yakouba was seen as a rebel by some members of his community. However, he was able to change these representations thanks to his intellectual aptitudes. Since he was an excellent pupil and was determined to continue his studies, he began to go to school by bike after he had returned to live with his father. This situation obliged him to ride about 30 km per day, which completely transformed Yakouba’s reputation. He suddenly became a brave child who needed to be encouraged. In the worst moments of his fosterage experience, Yakouba thought about the future and, as he told us, he never stopped believing that it was possible to change his life.

Towards a Social Ecological and Value-centred Perspective In spite of cultural rules about safe arrangements, fosterage can lead to difficult situations even for those children and young people who are sent to close relatives. The frequency with which these young people are subjected to bad treatment seems quite high, as emerged from their narratives and drawings. Such bad treatment can be due to the complexity of family dynamics. As Notermans argues in her account of children’s experiences of fosterage in East Cameroon, ‘social tensions and crises are often at the heart of the everyday intimacy and practices

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of kinship’.39 These tensions can be amplified by the evolution of the institution of fosterage itself, as well as by increasing economic insecurity in West Africa.40 As reported by Alber, Martins and Notermans, in West African fosterage cases ‘emotions are often deeply intertwined with forms and processes of material exchange’.41 In terms of psychological processes, children are likely to experience a ‘bad fosterage’ when they receive treatment that excludes them from family life. These treatments may include depriving the child from basic needs such as access to food, clothes, health care and schooling. This can have major negative effects on their daily life, including lack of concentration and interest, negative thoughts and sadness. However, these symptoms of psychological suffering need to be understood in the wider framework of the values and ecologies that characterize the young person’s social landscape. In particular, as Bledsoe has argued regarding the Mende people, the rules of fosterage seem to be included in a collective script where each actor plays a specifically ascribed role.42 In this sense, the experience of fosterage assumes a kind of sacrificial value for maltreated children and youth, who cast themselves as the main characters of traditional tales, undergoing terrible trials before succeeding in life. Their voices reveal strong value-oriented attitudes, and their pathways to resilience rely on a combination of personal and collective beliefs. Reporting the findings collected by ‘actor-oriented foster studies’, Erdmute Alber highlights that the difficulties encountered by fostered children are mainly due to power imbalances within the foster household.43 At the same time, she emphasizes that the collective norms and traditions relating to these practices have positive impacts, creating kinship and relatedness. To underline the structurally ambivalent nature of fosterage as it emerged from the young people’s narratives, and to go beyond paradoxical, polarized characterizations of fosterage as an absolutely bad or good practice, I have chosen to refer in this work to some core values promoted by Bambara cultural representations. According to the Bambara worldview, the purpose of human life is to become a ‘full person’ (mògò dafalen). The full person is someone accomplished, who is able to affirm his/her personality without harming the others.44 To achieve this state, each individual must respect some fundamental values, which fall into three categories: relational attitudes, personal qualities and religious beliefs. Relational attitudes include respect for the elders and their decisions, known as bonya, and yàfa, which is  Notermans, ‘The Emotional World of Kinship’, 358.   Alber, ‘Denying Biological Parenthood’; Agnès Guillaume, Patrice Vimard, Raïmi Fassassi and Koffi N’Guessan, ‘La circulation des enfants en Côte-d’Ivoire: Solidarité familiale, scolarisation et redistribution de la main-d’œuvre’, in Bernard Contamin and Harris Memel-Fotê, eds, Le modèle ivoirien en questions: crises, ajustements, recompositions (Paris, 1997), pp. 573–590. 41  Alber et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 11; Alber, ‘Denying Biological Parenthood’. 42   Bledsoe, ‘“No Success Without Struggle”’. 43   Alber, ‘The Transfer of Belonging’, 97. 44   Gabriel Cuello and Loïc Robin, Les Malinké du Konkodugu (Paris, 2005), p. 151. 39

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associated with forgiveness and reconciliation after suffering harm. Personal qualities consist of hakili, combining the wisdom, memory and intellectual attitudes necessary to develop a sense of judgment, and kisèya, meaning courage, hardiness and the capacity to overcome difficulties without complaining. Finally, religious beliefs comprise nakan, the patient acceptance of one’s destiny, and jigi, hope or the ability to persevere and believe in the future. Those keywords, highlighted by scholars in reference to the Bambara worldview,45 were mentioned by the participants in this study to highlight their personal strategies of survival during their fosterage experiences. We explored the concept of ‘resilience’ through a cultural lens by asking the participants questions such as ‘what helped you to overcome this issue?’ or ‘what made you feel better in a similar situation?’ The most common answers were closely tied to the words mentioned above (bonya–respect, yàfa–forgiveness, hakili–wisdom, kisèya–courage, nakan–destiny, jigi–hope), concepts which the two youths seemed to have incorporated into their own experience of fosterage as a symbol of personal struggle. In particular, Bintou uses the memory of her mother (hakili) to fight against the present injustice she experiences in her bad fosterage. Following her education, she seems to passively accept her condition of maltreated fostered child (nakan). However, the lack of consideration shown by her uncle who forced her to stop her studies made her become more active. She broke the sacred rule of respect towards the patrilineal family (bonya) but, drawing on her personal skills and her strong alliances with the members of the maternal side, she found a wise compromise with tradition (hakili). At the same time, she continues to honour her mother’s will and she adopts a conciliatory attitude towards her bad tutors (yàfa). Bintou’s feelings towards her fosterage combine both active and passive attitudes. In spite of the hard treatment she endures in her foster family, she succeeds in navigating her own path and attaining better living conditions. In order to change her position within the foster family, she chooses to draw on both cultural values and personal attitudes, and to seek external help from supportive community members without renouncing her inner convictions and need for justice. With regard to Yakouba, he embodies a pathway of hardiness (kisèya) which is the result of his open opposition to his tutor combined with a strong motivation to succeed in life (jigi). In spite of the shocking termination of his fosterage experience, he is able to build solid connections with some influential elders (bonya). Under their protection and thanks to his intellectual capacities (hakili), he manages to continue his schooling and earn the blessings of his community. At the beginning of his fosterage experience, Yakouba tried to withstand it and conform to the pressure of the group. However, once he felt   Ibid., pp. 99–108, 271–82.

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dishonoured by a peer, he saw that he could no longer retain a passive attitude and he started to actively respond. Ultimately he succeeded in improving his position within the community. Like Bintou, he was able to navigate between paradoxical roles in order to affirm his personal convictions and gain recognition from the adults around him. Drawing on the hardship ideology encouraged by dominant representations and on an idiosyncratic combination of relational attitudes, personal qualities and religious beliefs, fostered young people like Bintou and Yakouba have been able to develop pathways to resilience which are both culturally rooted and idiosyncratic. These strategies have allowed them to carve out room for manoeuvre in spite of external constraints (such as family pressure or social obligations) and to overcome the difficulties related to their fosterage experience. In this context, the meaning of resilience for these young people has been closely related to the possibility that they could find their own path by drawing particularly heavily on some core values transmitted by their elders. However, such values cannot be taken for granted, as they are constantly adjusted and reinterpreted according to young people’s needs and challenges.

Between Individual Coping Strategies and Cultural Expectations For the children and young people who took part in our study, fosterage can be considered a structurally heterogeneous phenomenon: where vulnerability and protective factors are constantly involved, where traumatic experiences are interwoven with resilient processes, where families’ and communities’ perspectives need to be analysed with relation to children and young people’s views, and where individual trajectories are shaped by collective discourses. The cases discussed here offer an overview of how individual coping strategies meet collective cultural expectations to produce successful negotiations. This does not mean that such a balance is always achieved. Many fostered children suffer poor treatment due to the ‘cultural load’ associated with these practices and transformations of the social milieu where they take place. Such situations create complex patterns of hybrid practices where the educational and collective value of fosterage is often replaced by more materialistic interests. The resilience argument, which combines significant adversity with unexpected positive developments, seems particularly relevant here, as it allows us to show that individual trajectories and collective discourses about fosterage contain a positive as well as a negative pole, both of which need to be taken into account. In the same way, the value-oriented perspective offers us the possibility of deconstructing

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both idealized interpretations of these practices and wariness of their potential (negative) consequences. In order to prevent the negative impacts of fostering arrangements, scholars should continue analysing their cultural message and its constant evolution. This analysis must take into account both the lived experiences of fostered children and how these relate to the dynamics of kinship, belonging and wider mobility. As Alber suggests, an actor-oriented approach would be appropriate to highlight young people’s ‘ability to assert their own interests within the framework of the kinship system, and in some cases to manipulate the system’.46 A similar approach could be enriched by a psychological analysis based on culturally sensitive and context-dependent models, such as the social ecological theory of resilience and the value-oriented perspective. These theoretical frameworks could help scholars to highlight the protective factors that prevent or reduce long-term traumatic consequences for fostered children. Such factors can be simultaneously collective and subjective, ecological and idiosyncratic. In particular, the social ecological approach underlines the importance of three kinds of variables in building resilient trajectories: individual characteristics, like a strong temperament or a balance between external and internal coping strategies; contextual elements, such as allied people within the extended family or the community (teachers, peers, elders, family members, neighbours or friends); and material opportunities for well-being and development (school attendance, good living conditions, leisure time and adapted spaces for activities, as well as limitations on workload). The value-oriented perspective, meanwhile, focuses primarily on the cultural factors affecting the development of resilience. In the educational field in particular, the values promoted by a given society reflect specific worldviews to which adults and children must conform. Several aspects of life can be included in these ideas: indicators of moral development, which define the qualities required to become a ‘good’ member of the community; child-rearing strategies, indicating the caregiving rules essential to becoming ‘good’ parents; and encouraged behaviours, including social actions, relationships within the extended family, attitudes towards peers and elders, and reactions to different life events. Yet such characteristics are not fixed, as they are shaped by collective discourses, individual interpretations of the community’s norms and social change. All these factors are constantly evolving and can therefore hardly be generalized. However, psychological approaches can help scholars to highlight the individual and collective degree of value adherence (including dynamics of enculturation/‌acculturation/‌deculturation47),   Alber, ‘The Transfer of Belonging’, 98.  The concepts of enculturation, acculturation and deculturation are used within cross-cultural adaptation theory to describe the consequences of cultural change caused by 46 47

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the i‌mpact of physical and social ecological factors on individual development, and the culturally and individually oriented patterns of resilience developed by the actors within their communities.

Conclusion This chapter aimed to highlight the individual impacts of current fosterage configurations in rural Mali by adopting a psychological perspective. The data collected have shown that those practices cannot be understood without referring to the fundamental cultural and social values of the Bambara society. As the protagonists’ stories revealed, these values are constantly reconsidered and adapted in response to the opportunities offered by the context. For instance, in spite of the difficulties experienced by fostered youth, they manage to improve their condition and to develop creative negotiations with their environments. These negotiations include the possibility of breaking some rules of the household where the fosterage configurations are set. Bintou and Yakouba could only regain their status of ‘pupils’ after reconsidering their position as ‘fostered youth’. While Bintou managed to find a compromise with her tutors in order to preserve both roles, Yakouba had to renounce his fosterage in order to secure the opportunity to go back to school. In the same way, the men interviewed by Gardini in Chapter 5, in their attempt to abandon their position of ‘boys’ and to become ‘adults’, ‘tried to negotiate their adulthood and to reaffirm their gendered identity despite the condition of social minority they experienced’. However, the success of their strategies depended on two sets of factors: the external circumstances facilitating or hindering their choices, and the subjective meaning that they themselves attributed to their situation. Likewise, for Yakouba and Bintou, both their own internal personality and the external obstacles and sources of support contributed to shaping their pathway to resilience in their fosterage experience. From a psychological perspective, the processes of navigation and negotiation analysed by Ungar, which must be considered in relation contact between different groups. The term enculturation indicates the process of learning and socialization through which children incorporate the norms of their own cultural group. The process of acculturation, meanwhile, refers to the acquisition of behaviours, habits and ways of thinking from another culture to which individuals are exposed in various ways. Finally, the mechanism of deculturation is a progressive unlearning of the original home culture, provoked by contact with another culture. This model is employed to explain strategies of adaptation and communication within multi-cultural societies, and to understand the processes underlying the mental health of different groups. See John W. Berry, ‘Acculturation as varieties of adaptation’, in Amado M. Padilla, ed., Acculturation: Theory, Models and Findings (Boulder, CO, 1980), pp. 9–25; Rueyling Chuang, ‘Theoretical perspectives: Fluidity and complexity of cultural and ethnic identity’, in Mary Fong and Rueyling Chuang, eds, Communicating Ethnic and Cultural Identity, (Oxford, 2003), pp. 51–68; Young Yun Kim, Becoming intercultural: An integrative theory of communication and cross-cultural adaptation (Thousand Oaks, CA, 2001).

(contd)

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to the historical pathways and cultural roots of child migration, seem crucial in constructing identities and spaces that will become essential to the development of a meaningful migratory experience.48 In the same way, Coker’s analysis of the texts of two third-generation Nigerian writers (Chapter 10) portrays the movement towards negotiating for a suitable space as a metaphor of ‘identity formation’ for migrant children. In accordance with this model, the ability to negotiate appears to be an essential feature of the resilient patterns generated through the dialogue between the African migrant youth and the adults who are part of their migration experience. More generally, the migration patterns experienced by the boys and girls whose trajectories are presented in this volume are characterized by an extreme past and present fluidity that resists simple definitions and generalizations. In this chapter, approaching child migration from a psychological perspective has allowed us to capture this complexity. In particular, a psychological lens informed by the most contemporary and culturally sensitive theories of resilience has allowed us to go beyond the traditional dichotomy between risk and vulnerability, and to overcome the stereotyped labels of African migrant children as ‘unhappy victims’ or ‘happy actors’. Moreover, our research confirms the utility of a social ecological and value-centred perspective of fosterage. Both approaches include multiple actors and levels of participation, whose interaction is fundamental to building resilience against the individual and collective risks related to fosterage; according to Ungar, ‘resilient children need resilient families and communities’.49 Finally, we believe that cultural values and beliefs, understood in the historical context that generated them, should be included more often in psychological research as milestones which contribute the construction of personal identity. These aspects could shed light on the ordinary psychological processes of African populations, not only to show the challenges they have to face to survive in a hostile environment, but also to illustrate the assets and strengths deriving from their unique worldview.  Ungar, ‘Resilience across Cultures’, 225.   Ibid., 221.

48

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5

Working as a ‘Boy’

Labour, Age & Masculinities in Togo, c. 1975–20051

Marco Gardini

A large number of historical and anthropological studies have shown that in several African contexts being a ‘boy’, a ‘youth’ or a ‘child’ (or, conversely, being an ‘adult’, a ‘man’ or an ‘elder’) has less to do with age than with status and social hierarchies.2 Becoming an ‘adult man’ (and later an ‘elder’) is not a ‘natural’ process: it is a fluid, socially constructed and contested arena where a plurality of models of masculinity and adulthood are renegotiated by individuals in different power positions.3 The study of how African men have struggled in different historical contexts to embody, maintain or reshape different models of adulthood and masculinity is part of a more general, anti-essentialist perspective that analyses the cultural and historical constructions of gendered identities and social inequalities.4 Migration and work have often played key roles in the achievement of the social and cultural markers that have historically been attributed to adulthood in many African countries, and they have become crucial elements in local processes of growing up and in the social shaping of gendered identities.5 Yet transitions to adulthood during 1   This research has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC Grant agreement n° 313737. I thank Marie Rodet, Sandra Greene, Alice Bellagamba, Alessandra Brivio, Antonio De Lauri, the participants of the International Workshop ‘Shadows of Slavery in Africa and Beyond’ (5–6 May 2014, University of Milano-Bicocca) and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 2   Lisa McNee, ‘The Languages of Childhood: The Discursive Construction of Childhood and Colonial Policy in French West Africa’, African Studies Quarterly 7(4) (2004), 20–32; Stephan Miescher, Making Men in Ghana (Bloomington, IN, 2005); Lahoucine Ouzgane and Robert Morrell, eds, African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present (Basingstoke/ New York, 2005); Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph Miller, eds, Child Slaves in the Modern World (Athens, OH, 2011). 3   Stephan F. Miescher and Lisa Lindsay, eds, Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, (Portsmouth, NH, 2003); Egody Uchendu, ed., Masculinities in Contemporary Africa (Dakar, 2008); Emily L. Osborn, Our New Husbands are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule (Athens, OH, 2011). 4   Robert Morrell, ‘Of Boys and Men: Masculinity and Gender in Southern African Studies’, Journal of Southern African Studies 24(4) (1998), 605–30; Raewyn W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’, Gender and Society 19(6) (2005), 829–59; Alice Bellagamba, ‘My Elderly Friends of The Gambia: Masculinity and Social Presence in the Later Part of Life’, Cahiers d’Études africaines LIII 1–2 (209–210) (2013), 345–66. 5   See for example Véronique Hertrich and Marie Lesclingand, ‘Transition to Adulthood and Gender: Changes in Rural Mali’, Documents de travail 140 (Paris, 2007); Gerd Spittler and

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migratory trajectories are neither linear nor uncontested: often young male migrants must face processes of infantilization and emasculation, particularly when they are exposed to exploitative labour relations. For many of them, migration is often the context where not only employment situations and working conditions, but also the dominant markers of adulthood and masculinity must be renegotiated. The infantilization and emasculation of subordinates is indeed a recurrent theme in the literature, emerging historically as it did as one of the main forms of legitimization of the social, political and economic control that elders and masters struggled to maintain over young people and slaves.6 Despite the formal abolition of slavery, the infantilization of subordinates also characterized colonial administrators’ attitudes towards African men.7 As Rich has shown,8 ‘the English word boy … became part of the colonial African French lexicon … the term was often applied to adult African male servants’. During the colonial period, being a ‘boy’ meant being a servant, a social minor economically dependent on a master, someone unable to provide for himself: in a nutshell not a ‘real man’. Morrell has discussed the implications of this word in the processes of emasculation of African men in the colonial period:9 the word implied ‘a refusal to acknowledge the possibility of growth and the achievement of manhood amongst African men. Servitude was combined with the denial of adulthood and thus became a feature of black masculinity.’ The word ‘boy’ survived the end of colonialism and is still the word used for male domestic servants in many African countries. In order to analyse the importance of migratory experiences and working conditions in transition to adulthood, this chapter presents the life histories of two young Togolese migrants (Pierre and Yves)10 Michael Bourdillon, eds, African Children at Work: Working and Learning in Growing Up for Life (Berlin & Zurich, 2012); Iman Hashim, ‘Independent child migration and education in Ghana’, Development and Change 38(5) (2007), 911–31; Elodie Razy and Marie Rodet, ‘Les migrations africaines dans l’enfance, des parcours individuels entre institutions locales et institutions globales’, Journal des Africanistes 81(2) (2011), 5–48; Dorte Thorsen, ‘Child Migrants in Transit: Strategies to Become Adult in Rural Burkina Faso’, in Catrine Christiansen, Mats Utas and Henrik E. Vigh, eds, Navigating Youth, Generating Adulthood: Social Becoming in an African Context (Uppsala, 2007), pp. 88–114. 6  Claude Meillassoux, Anthropologie de l’esclavage: Le ventre de fer et d’argent (Paris, 1986); Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds, Slavery in Africa: Historical and anthropological perspectives (Madison, WI, 1977). 7   William Cohen, ‘The Colonized as Child: British and French Colonial Rule’, African Historical Studies 3(2) (1970), 427. 8   Jeremy Rich, ‘Searching for Success: Boys, Family Aspirations, and Opportunities in Gabon, ca.1900–1940’, Journal of Family History 35(1) (2010), 8. 9   Morrell, ‘Of Boys and Men’, 616. 10   I use pseudonyms to disguise the identities of my interlocutors. I met both of them during the periods of fieldwork I conducted in Togo (Agou and Lomé) for the preparation of my doctoral dissertation. Research in Togo was carried out from 2006 (when I met Pierre for the first time) to 2011 (when I met Yves). During the months I spent in Togo, I had many opportunities to discuss with them their experiences as ‘boys’. Pierre agreed to write his history in French (some of the quotations below are my translations of his 10-page hand-written account), while Yves preferred to be interviewed in a more informal way. (contd)

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who moved from rural to urban contexts when they were 17 and 14 years old respectively, and worked as unpaid domestic servants (‘boys’) for rich Togolese families throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Although Pierre’s and Yves’ biographical trajectories ended in very different ways and their views of their past experience of migration diverge on some points, their life histories are emblematic of the strategies that young migrants elaborate in order to be socially recognized as adult and independent men. The detailed analysis of their life trajectories will show, on the one hand, how relations of personal dependence are tactically activated by young migrants in order to face economic crises and to find a certain degree of autonomy and, on the other hand, how these same relations can become a trap that reproduces forms of exploitation which can prevent (or indefinitely postpone) young males achieving the socially and culturally constructed status of ‘adult men’. The great majority of my Togolese interlocutors shared the idea that to be ‘an adult man’ involves first of all being married, having children, being able to take care of them and, consequently, to exert authority and control over them. This means that one needs to accumulate enough social and economic resources to increase the number of dependants, to renegotiate a certain degree of economic and social autonomy vis-à-vis elders and lineage chiefs and, eventually, to assume an important position in the state apparatus (as an official), in the market (as a business man) or in the political life of the village (as a notable of the local chieftaincy): positions that are difficult to achieve while one is ‘working as a boy’. These attributes of adulthood have very little in common with those provided by international and domestic laws,11 for which age (often 18 years old) is the only criterion for distinguishing between childhood and adulthood. By drawing on the life trajectories of Pierre and Yves, this chapter explores how they actively tried to negotiate their adulthood and to reaffirm their gendered identity despite the condition of social minority they experienced.

Slavery, Emancipation and Male Models of Self-realization During my interviews and discussions with Pierre and Yves, one point became particularly relevant: both of them read their experience of servitude as a condition similar to slavery. Although they used the term ‘slavery’ in a metaphorical way, the process of infantilization and emasculation they experienced while working as domestic servants induced both of them to say that ‘working as a boy is like working as a slave 11   The first article of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a child as ‘every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier’. Under Togolese legislation majority is legally attained at 18 years old (Loi n. 2007-017 du 6 juillet 2007 portant code de l’enfant).

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and working as a slave prevents you from becoming a real man’. They noticed that, as with slavery, the exploitative working conditions that ‘boys’ must face preclude their access to marriage and parenthood, and oblige them to undertake domestic tasks generally regarded in Togo as children’s and women’s jobs. As Connell and Messerschmidt12 have outlined: ‘Gender is always relational, and patterns of masculinity are socially defined in contradistinction from some model (whether real or imaginary) of femininity’. Becoming a ‘real man’, for Pierre and Yves, was synonymous with economic and social emancipation from a condition of servitude that, in their opinion, would be ‘normal’ for women and children. In order to grasp this point (and before presenting Pierre’s and Yves’ histories), we need to consider briefly how local models of masculinity have been affected by changes over time in labour conditions in Togo. As Morrell has stressed,13 in any society subordinate or subversive masculinities coexist with dominant models: ‘The contours of these masculinities change over time, being affected by changes elsewhere in society and, at the same time, themselves affecting society itself’. Meillassoux14 has shown that in several African pre-colonial contexts male slaves were obliged to perform tasks normally assigned to women and were prevented from marrying and having offspring (or being recognized as legal parents of their children), particularly when the cost of the social reproduction of slaves was higher than the cost of the acquisition of new slaves by purchase or by capture. For these reasons, as Bellagamba15 has stressed, male slaves represented ‘the archetype of second-class masculinity’ and were unable to achieve the honourable status of elders.16 In African societies where wealth-in-people was the most important asset for production and reproduction, kinship was often the grammar through which slave/master relations were conceived. So while on the one hand slave descendants were sometimes slowly incorporated as ‘junior members’ of the lineages, on the other hand the labour of ‘junior members’ could be legitimately exploited by elders, who could choose when young males were allowed to marry. Work was not generally a matter of choice but depended strongly on gender, age, status and belonging. ‘Free’ (not-enslaved) people, being fully recognized as members of the lineage and being able to move in their network of plural dependencies (on the paternal and maternal side, for example) and thus more able to obtain land and to have children, could more readily create new segments of the lineage and become elders on their own. Conversely, the stigma associated with   Connell and Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity’, 848.   Morrell, ‘Of Boys and Men’, 607. 14  Meillassoux, Anthropologie de l’esclavage. 15   Bellagamba, ‘My Elderly Friends of The Gambia’, 354. 16  Martin Klein, ‘The Concept of Honour and the Persistence of Servility in the Western Soudan’, Cahiers d’Études africaines XLV 3–4 (2005), 831–51; John Iliffe, Honour in African History (Cambridge, 2005). 12 13

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slavery and the unique relationship of dependence between slaves and their masters put enslaved people in a long-term condition of social minority.17 Enslavement represented, for men, a form of emasculation. In 1884–85, when Germany started the conquest of the territory which would be known as Togoland, slavery was an integral part of the economies and the histories of the decentralized political entities that existed there. From North to South the strip of land that later became Togo had been the space where people of various origins settled in order to avoid the slave raids of the Akwamu and the Ashanti to the west and the Dahomey to the east.18 Despite the abolition of slavery, by the end of the nineteenth century Salaga, Kete-Krachi and Kpandu were still growing centres where the slave trade flourished: German explorers reported that thousands of slaves were sold every year.19 Local decentralized polities were deeply affected by the slave trade, but, far from being just victims, they often participated actively in raids at the expense of their neighbours. In the hinterlands, the sale of troublesome young members of lineage groups was common20 and female slaves were acquired for both their productive and their reproductive capacities and because the children of a female slave were totally dependent on the patrilineage, not having maternal kin.21 On the coast, Afro-Brazilians,22 installed in the trading centres of Agoué and Petit-Popo (now Aneho), profited greatly from the slave trade, reselling to Europeans people coming from the North. Given the widespread warfare engendered by the slave trade and the movements of groups of people trying to escape slave raids or in search of new land to cultivate, it is not surprizing that in the oral histories I collected in the Agou region (south-western Togo) the prominent pre-colonial figures that embodied all the features locally associated with masculinity were the warrior and the hunter. In Agoué the spirits of warriors who fought against the Ashanti troops are still worshipped and hunters appear in all the foundation myths as founders of the villages. Physical strength, audacity, control over many wives and chil17   Fabio Viti, Schiavi, Servi e Dipendenti. Antropologia delle Forme di Dipendenza Personale in Africa (Milan, 2007). 18   For a history of the region, see: Nicoué L. Gayibor, Histoire des Togolais, Volume I: des origines à 1884 (Lomé, 1997); Charles Piot, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Chicago, IL, 1999); Sandra E. Greene, Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast (Portsmouth, NH and London, 1996); Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh, 1999); Paul Nugent, Smugglers, Secessionists and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier (Athens, OH, 2002); Benjamin Lawrance, ed., The Ewe of Togo and Benin (Accra, 2005). 19   Donna J. E. Maier, ‘Slave Labor and Wage Labor in German Togo, 1885–1914’, in Arthur J Knoll and Lewis H. Gann, eds, Germans in the Tropics: Essays in German Colonial History (Westport, CN, 1987). 20   Charles Piot, ‘Of Slaves and the Gift: Kabre Sale of Kin during the Era of the Slave Trade’, The Journal of African History 37(1) (1996), 31–49. 21   See Claire C. Robertson and Martin Klein, Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison, WI, 1983). 22   See Alcione M. Amos, ‘Afro-Brazilians in Togo: The Case of the Olympio Family, 1882–1945 (Les Afro-Brésiliens du Togo: L’exemple de la famille Olympio, 1882–1945)’, Cahiers d’Études africaines, 41 (162) (2001), 293–314.

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dren and the capacity to found new settlements and to protect them (including by magical means) were the characteristics that oral histories attribute to these male models. Fearless hunters and warriors were able to confront the dangerous spirits of the forest or to repel, just by throwing stones, legions of Ashanti warriors armed with fire-weapons. Generally these accounts made no reference to the role played by women and, when they did, they mentioned them just to show that hunters and warriors had wives, thus proving they were ‘real men’. After the abolition of the slave trade, the coastal elites turned rapidly to the legitimate trade in palm oil, which was produced in their plantations by people they could no longer resell as slaves but whom they could exploit as workers. This process was widespread not only on the coast, but throughout the southern region: As Spieth23 witnessed at the end of the nineteenth century, the palm oil trade had facilitated the rise of ‘big men’ (in Ewe: amega) who profited from the earnings of their plantations to buy new lands and slaves, and extend their network of dependants. These ‘big men’ came to represent a new model of masculinity, probably less adventurous than the hunter and the warrior, but much more able to profit from the new economic context. The word amega is still used today to denote a rich man able to accumulate resources and redistribute them among his dependants. During the German colonial period, the means of emancipation included acquiring slaves from their owners and then using them for the Government’s purposes, as house-servants, soldiers or labourers. However, the District Law Code of 1896 permitted the seizure of a member of a debtor’s family as security for a loan.24 In other words, pawning was legalized and, as Klein and Roberts25 demonstrated for French colonial Africa, pawns were generally children and young people transferred by one kinship group to another in times of economic distress. Forced labour was quickly introduced for the construction of railways and roads, and for the cultivation of cotton and teak throughout the country. Due to the development of the cocoa economy and the investments undertaken by the colonial government in the southern part of the country, the southern populations were more able to pay taxes and thus avoid forced labour than the northern ones.26 Forced labour was often justified by the colonial authorities as a way ‘teaching’ the virtues of hard work to Africans, regarded as lazy and undisciplined children.27 Needless to say, forced labour led people to view work for the state as a continuation of slavery in another, more generalized, form. In order to avoid taxation and to find better economic opportunities many young people voted with their feet and started to migrate to the   Jakob Spieth, Die Ewe-Stämme (1906, French edn, Les Communautés Ewe, Lomé, 2009).   Maier, ‘Slave Labor and Wage Labor’. 25   Martin Klein and Richard Roberts, ‘The Resurgence of Pawning in French West Africa in the Depression of the 1930s’, African Economic History 16 (1987), 23–37. 26   Nicoué L. Gayibor, Le Togo sous domination coloniale (1884–1960) (Lomé, 1997), p.31 27   Cohen, ‘The Colonized as Child’. 23 24

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neighbouring Gold Coast. Migration was, for many of them, a strategy for escaping, partially, from the control of their elders and village chiefs, and for accumulating enough money to marry and to enhance their social status. Under German colonial rule the Togoland territory was a reserve of labour for the Gold Coast. This trend continued after the partition of Togoland between France and Great Britain. In the 1920s and 1930s many Kabyé and Losso from the northern regions were forcibly resettled by the French colonial power in the central and southern regions of Togo in order to ensure adequate numbers of labourers there for road maintenance and for agricultural work.28 Among them were Yves’ grandparents. However, while the internal slave trade was slowly ending and new economic opportunities were developing under the new colonial regime, new forms of labour relations overlapped with the previous ones. A number of avenues opened up by which many young people were able to acquire a certain degree of economic autonomy from their elders, to earn enough to pay brideprice and to go and settle somewhere else. These included attendance at missionary schools, enrolling in the army, working in the cash crop economies and working for the state. Successful experiences of migration to urban or other, richer, rural contexts were fundamental to the reproduction, adaptation or contestation of models of masculinity in a new political context where the forms of wealth accumulation were changing. The ‘hunter’ was transformed into the successful migrant, the ‘warrior’ became the soldier enrolled in the colonial army and the ‘strong farmer’ became the rich cocoa planter able to invest his earnings in the upward mobility of his children. Young people were both willing to profit from the colonial context in order to disengage themselves from the control of their elders and, once they had become ‘elders’ on their own, happy to reproduce patriarchal and gerontocratic models with their children and wives. Some of them, educated in missionary schools, adopted the missionaries’ gender ideals of family and masculinity, renounced polygyny and criticized their elders’ ‘paganism’ and ‘backwardness’.29 As Miescher30 has shown for the case of Ghana, individuals creatively combined old and new models of masculinity according to their needs. A major role in the opening up of new opportunities for young people was played by the introduction of cocoa in the south-western region,31 which was mainly populated by Ewe and was considered by colonial administrators the region most suited for developing cash crops. Ewe   Bernard Lucien-Brun and Anne-Marie Pillet-Schwartz, Les Migrations Rurales des Kabyè et des Losso (Togo) (Paris, 1987); Piot, Remotely Global; Nicoué L. Gayibor, Histoire des Togolais, Tome III: Le Togo sous domination coloniale (Lomé, 2011). 29   Hans W. Debrunner, A Church between Colonial Powers: a Study of the Church in Togo (London, 1965). 30  Miescher, Making Men in Ghana. 31   Benjamin N. Lawrance, ‘En proie à la fièvre du cacao: Land and Resource Conflict on an Ewe Frontier, 1922–1939’, African Economic History 31 (2003), 135–181. 28

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migrants coming back to Togo from the Gold Coast in the first decades of the twentieth century introduced cocoa in the south-western region and started establishing share-cropping agreements with migrants from the North (mainly young Kabyé and Losso), but also with Ewe of other lineages and regions.32 As scholars have demonstrated for the Gold Coast,33 the cocoa economy offered the possibility of emancipation for ex-slaves and for young people in search of new opportunities. Share-cropping agreements guaranteed the landowners unpaid labour for the six to seven years required for the establishment of plantations and enough earnings to send their sons to missionary schools, providing them with the opportunity of upward mobility. For migrants, the agreements allowed them to settle on the most fertile land of the country and the possibility of earning money in order to pay taxes and thus avoid forced labour. Many elders of the Agou region whom I met remembered that period as a sort of golden age: the image of male success was the rich Ewe cocoa planter, drinking beer under a tree, with young Kabyé labourers working his plantation, his wives selling fabrics in the market and his children going to missionary schools. At the end of the 1960s, with the fall in the international price of cocoa, the high costs of substituting old plantation with new ones and the emergence of cocoa tree diseases, the cocoa economy began to decline. Agricultural work became a trap that reproduced poverty. The solution was found in diversification: working as smugglers, traders or, for those who had attended school, as officials or teachers, was seen as the best way to avoid the difficult conditions that agriculture involved and as a way to improve their earnings. Enrolment in the army was always an option, particularly for young northern people. A military career meant secure wages and epitomized the male model for excellence, a model encouraged by the post-colonial military regime established by Eyadéma in 1967. Born during colonial period in a peasant family in a little Kabyé village in the north, Eyadéma fought for the French in Indochina and Algeria and, making use of his career in the army and his good relations with France, led coups d’état in 1963 and again in 1967, after which he became one of the longest ruling and richest dictators in African history. Eyadéma reversed the situation prevailing in colonial times in favour of his ethnic group. The army, the bureaucracy, the economic 32   Yema E. Gu-Konu, ‘Pratique Foncières dans le sud est Togo: Le Dibi-madibi et son Articulation au Régime Foncier Capitaliste’, in Pratiques Foncières Locales en Afrique Noire, Colloque International de Saint Riquier (France), 5–9 décembre 1983, Dossier des contributions reçues; Lucien-Brun and Pillet-Schwartz, Les Migrations Rurales. 33   Gareth Austin, ‘Cash Crops and Freedom: Export Agriculture and the Decline of Slavery in Colonial West Africa’, International Review of Social History 54(1) (2009), 1–37. See also: Polly Hill, The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana. A Study in Rural Capitalism (Cambridge, 1963); Inez Sutton, ‘Labour in Commercial Agriculture in Ghana in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, The Journal of African History 24(4) (1983), 461–83; Kojo Amanor, ‘Customary Land, Mobile Labor and Alienation in the Eastern Region of Ghana’, in Richard Kuba and Carola Lentz, eds, Land and the Politics of Belonging in West Africa (Leiden, 2006).

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and political elite of Togo were composed mainly of people from the north whose well-being and wages depended on their remaining loyal to, and dependent on, the regime.34 During the 38 years Eyadéma was in power, he came to embody and combine all the features associated by the Togolese people with masculinity: physically tough, immensely rich and sexually voracious (he had countless women and more than 100 children). He liked to present himself as a brave soldier, a strong warrior, a great hunter, a wise chief, an invincible man protected by the Christian God and by local spirits, the ‘father’ and protector of the nation. This inflated masculinity became a model for many, but it was also subject of mockery and jokes.35 Many farmers such as the parents of Pierre and of Yves struggled to send their sons to school, in the hope that it would improve their economic prospects, including possibly finding a good job in the public sector. Working for the state in the post-independence period meant for many what the cocoa economy had meant for their parents and grandparents: a way of enhancing emancipation and economic autonomy. That is, it represented for young people a new way of being able to negotiate their position vis-à-vis their elders and to become ‘adults’ or, eventually, ‘big men’. But secondary schools were often so far away from villages that it was necessary to migrate to urban centres. Young men’s models of self-realization changed accordingly. The image of the Christian, urban ‘modern man’ (the public servant, the trader, the teacher), with a European education and able to accumulate and redistribute the resources offered by the new economic context, replaced in the dreams of many the model of the rich cocoa planter, as agricultural activities were no longer offering them enough money to become ‘real independent adults’. Both Yves and Pierre, when they started work as domestic servants, shared this dream of emancipation. They thought that working as ‘boys’ was just a necessary step towards the realization of this dream. However, between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, their chances of becoming public servants were considerably reduced by the crises in the phosphate sector, on which the Togolese economy depended, and by the structural adjustments deemed necessary. The combination of crises in the agricultural and public sectors led to reductions in wages and high rates of unemployment. It was therefore much more difficult to negotiate good pay or working conditions and a growing number of ‘disposable’ people36 were exposed to forms of exploitation such as domestic servitude which had never disappeared completely and which from that point on became considerably more widespread. As Ferguson37 has recently discussed, the activation,   Comi M. Toulabor, Le Togo sous Eyadéma (Paris, 1986); Piot, Remotely Global.   Comi M. Toulabor, ‘Jeu de mots, jeu de vilains: Lexique de la dérision politique au Togo’, Politique Africaine 3 (1981), 55–71. 36   Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley & London, 1999). 37   James Ferguson, ‘Declarations of Dependence: Labour, Personhood, and Welfare in Southern Africa’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(2) (2013), 223–42. 34 35

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or reactivation, of relationships of personal and social dependence is often the main response to the uncertainties and the marginalization produced by economic crises. As Pierre and Yves soon discovered, relationships of personal dependence often involve subordination and exploitation.

Domestic Servants In Togo, as in many other African countries, the use of young people as unpaid domestic servants is perceived as another form of fosterage, the common practice of sending young boys and girls to live with childless or richer kin.38 Many scholars have stressed that the rhetoric of family work and fosterage is often employed as camouflage for the exploitation of labour. For example, Deshusses has stressed the ‘slave-like’ conditions that young girls from Ivory Coast experience when working as domestics for foster families in France.39 Jacquemin, discussing the changes in the institution of petit nieces in Ivory Coast after the 1980s and the new forms of exploitation they had to cope with after moving from rural to urban areas, remarked that the grammar of kinship is still used to describe the relations between domestic servants and employers.40 On this point, my Togolese interlocutors in the Agou region were quite clear: ‘boys’, unlike foster children, are non-kin, although (as the case of Yves will show) sometimes foster children can be exploited as domestic servants. ‘Boys’ are generally young men or children who, going voluntarily or sent by their parents, work for someone from another lineage as unpaid domestics servants in exchange for food, a place to sleep and sometimes the opportunity to continue their studies. Often they do not have free time, they are not allowed visits from friends and they are exposed to the arbitrary violence of their masters. Although ‘boys’ are generally not involved in the direct production of a surplus (unless they are asked to work in their masters’ fields or to help in other economic activities), they provide the opportunity for richer families to allow wives, sons and daughters of the household to emancipate themselves from domestic work, allowing them to dedicate more time and energy to market activities and/or to school. Yet the 38   Suzanne Lallemand, La circulation des enfants en société traditionnelle: Prêt, don, échange (Paris, 1993); Suzanne Lallemand, Adoption et mariage: Les Kotokoli du centre du Togo (Paris, 1994); Nicolas Argenti, ‘Things that Don’t Come by the Road: Folktales, Fosterage, and Memories of Slavery in the Cameroon Grassfields’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 52(2) (2010), 224–54; Erdmute Alber, ‘Grandparents as Foster-Parents: Transformations in Foster Relations between Grandparents and Grandchildren in Northern Benin’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 74(1) (2004), 28–46. 39   Mathias Deshusses, ‘Du confiage à l’esclavage: “petites bonnes” Ivoiriennes en France’ (‘The “Misfortunes” of Fosterage in France: The Case of “Little Maids” from the Ivory Coast’), Cahiers d’Études africaines, 45 (179–180) (2005), 731–50. 40   Mélanie Jacquemin, ‘Migrations Juvéniles Féminines de Travail en Côte-d’Ivoire’, Journal des Africanistes 81(1) (2011), 61–86.

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reasons given for sending young boys and girls to live with someone else strongly resemble those given for fostering. Living with, and being dependent on, a richer family whose position is economically stable is often considered more beneficial than remaining exposed to the uncertainties of the current economic climate. Young people from poor rural families agree to become servants in the expectation of upward social mobility. The paternalistic rhetoric employed by the master is the same as that used about fostering: the master acts as ‘a father’ for the young person, providing him or her with food, but he also demands devotion and obedience, and to be allowed to use verbal violence and to administer physical punishment. This rhetoric is useful in forging an ideological framework justifying the fact that young people’s work is unpaid and they are entirely subject to the master. Indeed the ‘boy’ is deemed to be in debt to his master for the food he receives from him. Quite soon the young domestic servants’ hopes of upward mobility are crushed on the anvil of hard reality. Yet, despite the various forms of exploitation they experience, young domestic servants are not passive victims but social actors who struggle to ameliorate their working conditions and who try to redefine in their own terms what it means to become an adult despite the condition of social minority in which they live.41 Sometimes, as the case of Pierre will demonstrate, after spending years in that situation without achieving their goals, some ‘boys’ leave and find a better position. More frequently, as with Yves, they spend their lives changing masters, finding themselves more and more unable to negotiate better conditions. Pierre Pierre was born in 1957 in a little village near mount Agou, in south-west Togo. His father was a member of the royal family of the village who worked for some years in the Gold Coast before coming back to Togo at the end of the 1950s. Once back home he worked with his wife in the fields that he had inherited from his father. They managed to send Pierre and his little brother to the local elementary school. In 1974 Pierre was sent to Kpalimé, the nearest big town, where he started secondary school. In Kpalimé Pierre found himself in economic difficulties, unable to pay the rent for his rooms. For this reason and so as to be able to continue his studies (he hoped to become a school teacher), he accepted a teacher’s suggestion that he become his ‘boy’: Since my parents were from Agou, I had to go to live in Kpalimé, 15 km from my village. That was the first time that I left my parents to live alone and I started taking my fate in my hands, clearly with the help of my parents. This proved rather difficult for me and my parents, whose poverty was remarkable. I spent the first year in three different houses because we had problems paying the rent. Some41  See Beverly Grier, ‘Child Labor and Africanist Scholarship: A Critical Overview’, African Studies Review 47(2) (2004), 1–25.

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times my father, walking 15 km., came to see me with the food or other things that I needed. I really had pity for him, but I could not help it. When I returned after the Christmas holidays, a teacher from Dapaong was assigned to our high school and I was one of those who were chosen to clean the room that he would rent. During the time I did this job, he developed a liking for me and wanted me to be his ‘boy’, while continuing to be a student. Thus began my life as a ‘boy’. I agreed, while hoping not to hurt my parents who at that time did not want me to be a student and a domestic servant at the same time. I was not paid. For me it was about finding a place to sleep rent-free, having something to eat and having everything my parents struggled to give me. I accepted the teacher’s proposal without asking my parents’ permission because I knew that they would oppose it, and I told them two months later.

Pierre regarded his migration to Kpalimé as his first step towards adulthood. For him, entering a state of servitude was the consequence of his poor economic situation and his desire to continue his studies in order to find better opportunities. He accepted the move because he thought that working as a boy would be the best way to ‘take his fate in his own hands’, to increase his autonomy from his parents and to become an independent adult. Quite soon Pierre was given all the domestic jobs, which he vividly describes: I became the cook, the clothes-washer, the gardener, the hairdresser. In short I was involved in everything about the house except that the master did not sleep with me, but I was sent to find girls for him. This is because his wife lived in Lomé and she came once every two months unless there were problems that required her to come more frequently … I had to wake up at four o’clock every morning to clean the house and prepare breakfast. … I had to do everything in such a way as to be at school at 6:45 … At noon I tried to be the first out of school to get home quickly and prepare a meal at the usual time so that my boss could take a nap … I cleaned the living room floor at night when my master was asleep and every morning I cleaned the furniture. I had been strictly forbidden to have friends, who might come and visit me and steal things from the living room, where I slept as if I were the warden even though I was given a room in the back. My master slept upstairs. I had to heat the water for my master’s shower and to put it in the shower before he woke up even when the weather was hot because he always felt cold. When washing the master’s handkerchiefs I had to leave them to soak for a long time because of the thick layer of snot all over them. Whether the weather was hot or cold, however, I had to always wash myself with cold water to conserve coal. This was not a problem for me, because even when I lived alone I had to wash myself with cold water.

Here we see one of the main themes of Pierre’s account: despite the shameful status of being obliged to perform ‘female tasks’ and of being a servant – evident from the initial opposition of his parents, who were quite proud of their status as members of the royal family of their village, Pierre emphasized his own physical and moral strength, compared with the laziness and weakness of his master. Drawing on the cultural repertoires that consider strength and resistance as

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‘natural’ attributes of masculinity, he was trying to reassert his male identity and his honour, ‘threatened’ by the status of servant. In 1978 Pierre’s master was transferred to the city of Atakpamé and Pierre followed him. They stayed there for three years, then they moved to Lomé. Pierre’s working conditions changed drastically when the master married another woman, who came to live with them and is described as particularly lazy. Pierre’s account emphasizes the implications of being obliged to serve her rather than work for his master, who is never described in grudging terms. He came from a background where it was considered normal that women serve their husbands, cook for them and take care of all domestic duties. Although he could agree to perform these domestic tasks for his master (as a ‘boy’), he could barely tolerate (as a ‘man’) receiving orders and insults from a woman and being treated as a child. He began to perceive his servile status as being irreconcilable with his masculine identity, particularly when she gave birth to a child and he was obliged to take care of him as if he were ‘his mother’. After the birth, Pierre’s work doubled, making it impossible for him to continue his studies. For these reasons, what Pierre had accepted when he began working as a boy started to become harder to bear: She [the teacher’s new wife] asked me to serve her more than the first wife, especially after she came to live with us. She was lazy and she studied medicine at the University. When I got home from the market sometimes she ordered me to go back to change the things I had bought because she thought the price was too high, accusing me of not being able to haggle over the price. I had to pay the price that she pointed out to me on the list of spending. It was only at the cost of insults and beating at the hands of the traders (and of the pity I was instilling in their hearts) that I could get them to take back the goods or change them. The days when I was not able to do it, after cooking I could not eat because I lost my appetite for the insults of my mistress. At least I was not obliged to wash her sanitary towels! … My mistress, who was a medical student and worked in a hospital, became pregnant. It was then that I left my studies. What pharmacy did I not go to in the night to buy things for her when she had some discomfort!? On how many days was I not forced to leave classes to go to cook at home!? This was the reason why I left school: sometimes I was so tired I fell asleep during class. The day she gave birth, I was asked to bring her food, but also to buy her a bouquet of lilies. From the house where I cooked to the florist and the hospital was eleven km., which as usual I walked. The next day she came home with the baby. Therefore I had to get up even earlier to warm water, wash the baby’s clothes, wash his bottle, get him food, in short do whatever needs to be done with a newborn whose mother has to go to the hospital. That was because she could not take the child into the hospital and, as her position in the hospital was not yet official, she was not entitled to maternity leave. Then I became a sort of ‘mother’ for the baby because his mother worked.

In the meantime Pierre was thinking of leaving, as he realized that working as a ‘boy’ gave him no possibility of improving his position in the future. He discovered that working as a boy was a trap that

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would not allow him to become ‘adult’. He was replaced by his younger brother. I decided to leave as a result of a lie that she [the mistress] told me about getting me a job at the BCAO (Central Bank of West Africa) in Lomé. While doing the cleaning I found my application letter under my master’s bed. As the former director of the bank was often our guest and he knew me, he would not have refused my request. My master asked me why I wanted to work. I told him that I was my parents’ eldest son and I had to support my younger brother. My brother! My master asked for my brother to come to stay with us and this was done. Then I decided to leave the house, leaving my brother with them … From that moment I found myself jobless and life became more difficult.

Some months later Pierre went to work as a ‘boy’ for another man who gave him a low salary. He stayed there for the next four years. Then he passed an entrance exam for the agricultural school in Notsé. In 1991 he came back to his village and started working as a farmer in the fields he inherited from his father (who died the same year). Meanwhile he married and had one son (who died at the age of seven) and two daughters. He managed to become informally employed as a secretary at a high school, where the principal chose to pay him out of his own salary until Pierre obtained a formal position in 2005. His wife left him with the children in 2001 and married another man, who was a rich trader in Lomé. Receiving a low salary and having to pay the school fees for his daughters, Pierre eats once a day. However in the last few years he has managed to obtain work with various NGOs, through which he became a good friend of several Europeans who sporadically help him financially. Thanks to his friendly relationship with the members of the local chieftaincy and his ability in mediating conflicts, he is emerging as an important figure in the village, although this is not reflected in an improved financial situation. When he looks back on his experience as a ‘boy’, he oscillates between the idea that he was exploited for 11 years and spent too long there (‘my little brother has indeed had a son before me!’) and the idea that the experience taught him ‘to work hard’, ‘to be strong’, to perform every kind of task (‘Now I can cook better than a woman!’), ‘to endure hunger’, to accept ‘life as it comes’ and ‘to be grateful to my benefactors, in one way or another’. He explicitly states that his status as a ‘boy’ had strong similarities with slavery, for he was obliged to work as a servant for a non-kin, he was not paid and he was obliged to perform female tasks, but he is also aware that, unlike a slave, he could choose both when to start and end that situation and to change his master. He thinks that his suffering helped to shape his own personality, making him ‘a strong and independent man’ (even if later than his younger brother) and taught him how to face the difficulties he encountered later. Clearly his ambiguous position regarding his experience as a

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‘boy’ is also related to the comparative security of his current position: on the one hand he thinks that ‘working as a boy’ has postponed his access to adulthood, on the other hand he is retrospectively convinced that being obliged to cope with that condition was an important step in becoming ‘a real man’. Even the fact of having learned to perform female tasks is incorporated in his idea of masculinity: for him, being a ‘real man’ means being able to perform every kind of task and now he criticizes those men who rely on their wives to prepare a meal. Yves I met Yves in 2011 in Lomé. At that time he was working as a zemidjan (a motorcycle taxi driver). He was unmarried and he lived in a rented room which he shared with a university student. Yves worked for many years as a domestic servant, but his status, at least at the beginning, was quite different from Pierre’s, as his first ‘master’ was a relative, a distant cousin of his father who accepted him as a foster child. His case is interesting as it shows how fosterage and domestic servitude could overlap. Yves was born in 1973 in a village built in the 1930s by the French colonial administration as part of the project of the forced resettlement of Kabyé along the road between Kpalimé and Atakpamé. His parents were both Kabyé farmers and they lacked the means to send him to secondary school. For this reason in 1987, they decided to send him to live in Lomé in the house of a distant patrilineal cousin who was a high-ranking officer in the Togolese army. Yves hoped that this would be his first step towards a glorious military career. Although the officer welcomed him on the first day as his own ‘son’ and he was sent to school, Yves soon realized that he was not a ‘son’ in the same way as the others were. He was asked to cook, to wash clothes and to clean the house for the all family. He was forbidden to go outside with the other ‘brothers’ in his free time or to meet girls, and he was never provided with the little money the father gave to the others. But as a ‘son’ he was punished with beatings for every little mistake. Yves found it impossible to continue his studies and after three years he left school. Partly from the shame of having quit school and partly because he did not want to go back to his village, Yves decided to continue living in the officer’s house. One evening in 1992 the officer was eating with some colleagues and Yves (who was 19 years old at the time) was, as usual, serving the food when the officer for the first time ridiculed Yves by calling him ‘his boy’. Yves was shocked to realize that the officer was exploiting him not as a ‘son’, but as stranger, a ‘slave’. Some days later, using the opportunity of being sent to draw water, Yves escaped and he went to his first demonstration against the Eyadéma regime. He came back late in the evening, only to find his ‘father’ waiting for him with his cane. After a severe beating, he confessed where he had been during the day. After hearing his confession the officer doubled the beatings. Yves remem-

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bers that moment quite well: ‘In that moment I didn’t understand if he was beating me as a father worried for his son, as a master angry for his slave’s strike, or as a soldier appointed by Eyadéma to punish the opposition … However he hit me as three men’. This statement reveals clearly how the violence that characterizes the coercive relationships between elders and young people, masters and servants, soldiers and civilians is often legitimized by the same paternalistic rhetoric. By comparing his experience of exploitation with slavery, even metaphorically, Yves was stressing the similarities between old and new forms of bondage: they both involve unpaid labour and some coercion and violence, they both use the father/son dichotomy to describe the master/slave relation, they both engender the infantilization of the exploited and they both prevent men achieving full social recognition as adult males. These resemblances must not be allowed to obscure the fact that, unlike previous forms of slavery, which guaranteed a certain degree of inclusion in the lineage groups, the new forms of bondage seem to be more precarious, more unstable and more insecure.42 Domestic servants are never included in the master’s lineage, not even as junior members, and Yves and Pierre were well aware of this, just as they were aware that the crises in the public and agriculture sectors, combined with population growth, have generated an increasing number of young people who ‘freely’ offer themselves as servants and who can be easily replaced. The events of those few days in 1992 were crucial for Yves because he started to think of his own experience in politicized terms and of himself as an indirect victim of the arbitrary and violent rule of Eyadéma and his national and international supporters. He left the officer’s home soon after that and returned to his village, where he stayed for a year, working the fields with his parents. In 1993 a friend offered him a job as a docker at the port of Lomé. He accepted enthusiastically for it was the first time he could earn some money and he worked there for four years. In the meantime both his parents died and, after the funeral, he was accused by a paternal uncle of using witchcraft to kill them. Yves was convinced that the uncle was trying to get his hands on the land Yves was supposed to inherit. As his uncle had good relations with the local chieftaincy, Yves decided to avoid a direct confrontation with him, left the village and returned to Lomé. In 1997 he was fired after being accused of theft by a colleague. Finding himself jobless and unable to re-establish positive relations in his village of origin, he went to work once again as an unpaid ‘boy’, this time for a rich trader with whom he stayed for another eight years (from 24 to 32 years old). When the rich trader died, he tried to negotiate better conditions with the master’s son, but to no avail. He left a few days after the death of Eyadéma in 2005. For three years he managed to survive in Lomé somehow (his accounts were not clear about this period), and then he 42

  See Bales, Disposable People.

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met someone who offered to lend him his motorbike and work for him as a zemidjan. Because there were already so many zemidjan in the city, and he had to pay a fixed rent for the motorbike, Yves was barely able to eat once a day and pay the rent for his room. He had many debts and he confesses that his condition was better when he was a ‘boy’, because then he could at least eat twice a day. When I asked him if he was considering becoming a ‘boy’ once again, he said that by now he was too old (he was 38 years old): ‘Masters prefer young people and they can find them with no problem. Togo is abundant of possible candidates’. He complained intensely of not yet having been able to marry and to have children: ‘I am not considered a real “adult” now, for I don’t have children, but, you see, it is not my fault. When I meet someone of my village in Lomé, they ask me why I am not married. What I could answer? What could I give to my wife?’ Yet, he did not think he was ‘young’ anymore and he remembered his ‘revolt’ against the officer as the pivotal moment in which he became ‘a man’: ‘He was beating me as if I was a child, but I was resisting as a man’. Yves thought, as did Pierre, that his migratory experience had had a deep influence in the construction of his own subjectivity, but not because it taught him the moral value of hard work. He saw the servile condition in which he had found himself as a metaphor for the abuse and the violence that the Eyadéma regime had exercised on Togo over the last few decades. His ideas of adulthood and masculinity criticized dominant models that prescribe marriage and parenthood as crucial markers of ‘being an adult’. Instead, he found these markers in his personal strength and in having been able to resist oppression.

Conclusion For many Togolese children, adolescents and young adults, migration has been, and still is, one of the most important contexts in which the transition to ‘adulthood’ takes place and in which the boundaries between ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ become fields of confrontation. The trope of the ‘child as a victim’, often used by international organizations that fight against child trafficking and child labour, appears somehow paradoxical and politically ambiguous when applied to young migrants, such as Pierre and Yves, who have struggled against processes of infantilization and emasculation, implementing a range of strategies to avoid being considered ‘children’ and making strenuous efforts, by migrating and working, to achieve the status of ‘real men’ as soon as possible. A comparative analysis of Pierre’s and Yves’ life trajectories shows which factors have enhanced, and which have reduced, their range of opportunities and the different meanings they attributed to their experience of migration. Both of them tried to emancipate themselves from unrewarding agricultural activities by going

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to school in the hope of finding a good position in the public sector, of marrying and having children, and both put themselves at the service of someone else in order to begin the process of achieving their aims. For Pierre, who was 17 years old, this act was certainly motivated by poor economic circumstances, but also by the desire to negotiate some autonomy from his parents and to become an ‘adult’, whereas Yves, who was 14 years old, was obliged to make the move by his parents. Both of them had to leave school because their work as a ‘boy’ made attendance impossible. Pierre was able to make a timely escape from the spiral of impoverishment and, partially, to achieve the conventional standards of adulthood and masculinity. This was thanks to the positive relationships he enjoyed in his village that guaranteed, first, his return to his father’s land and his social position as a member of the royal family and, later, new forms of dependence with the man who employed him at the school and with the European volunteers he met. His wife left him for a richer man, he still eats only once a day (as does Yves) and he struggles to make ends meet, but at least he was able to send both his daughters to school and to become an important man in his village. Pierre was able to achieve his goals because of the network of plural dependencies that he was able to maintain or establish. On the other hand, Yves found his access to social and economic resources more restricted although, paradoxically, his initial position as a ‘foster child’ was formally better than Pierre’s situation as a ‘boy’. Despite being obliged by his parents to move to Lomé, Yves thought he would be able to profit from the good position of his soldier kinsman, but found himself exploited and treated as a stranger. Yves’ relationships with his home village were too problematic to allow him to go back. The loss of his job in the port of Lomé exposed him to a progressive worsening of his condition. He feels the stigma of not having fully achieved the main attributes of ‘adulthood’ and he emphasizes models that stress individual strength, resistance, political activism as markers of ‘adulthood’ and ‘masculinity’, rather than marriage and parenthood.43 Migration to urban centres and the activation of relations of social and economic dependence, such as working as a ‘boy’, have been the solutions adopted by numerous young people from impoverished rural families when faced with social vulnerability and economic uncertainty, in the hope of enhancing their own economic circumstances and finding the means to gain access to ‘adulthood’. The relations of dependence they established with their masters, far from guaranteeing them social protection, exposed some of them to a spiral of restricted access to resources, to the risk of seeing their access to adulthood indefinitely postponed, and to the necessity of renegotiating their employment situation and their models of masculinity. By evoking the metaphor of slavery to describe their former condition, Pierre and Yves   See J. M. Silva, ‘Constructing Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty’, American Sociological Review 77(4) (2012), 505–22. 43

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were suggesting that current forms of servitude still involve processes of emasculation and infantilization of subordinates. Their histories demonstrate that dominant models of masculinity and adulthood cannot be achieved ‘naturally’, but become the arenas of a daily political struggle of emancipation from forms of exploitation historically legitimized by the rhetoric of kinship, age and gender. This struggle often takes place during migration and is more difficult to win for young people who work as ‘boys’.

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Part III MOBILITY, IMAGINATION & MAKING NATIONS

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6

Childhood, Space & Memory

Migrations of the Métis in Madagascar’s Central Highlands (Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries)1

Violaine Tisseau

This chapter offers an analysis of métis2 children’s migrations, highlighting the importance of family and entourage in their trajectories. This element is a significant contribution, offering a new perspective on métis’ history by jeopardizing the colonial description of the métis as isolated, vulnerable and without family. The mobility of the métis during the colonial period was obviously not peculiar to them. For example, Whittaker with Hayer, in Chapter 9, explore the strong link between mobility and education, highlighting that moving was a central part of the experience of schooling. The métis nonetheless offered one strong specificity: more than for any other Malagasy children, migration was part of their family story, since one of their parents was from Europe. Their genealogical link with Europe could remain a remote horizon when they had no more connection with their European parent, or could become real through actual mobility to Europe. Their family was crucial in that process. Madagascar became a French colony in 1896. Europeans settled on the island in large numbers when compared to the other French colonies in Africa (with the exception of Algeria). Their number rose from 9,773 in 1905 to around 25,000 in the 1930s and more than 57,000 in 1960.3 In 1951, almost 50 per cent of these Europeans4 were living in Madagascar’s Central Highlands5, which is the area I will focus on in this chapter. Métis were only a small fraction, less than 0.1 per cent, of the Malagasy population, which numbered over 2.5 million in 1905, more than 3.5 million in the 1930s and upwards of 5 million in 1960.6 1   I wish to thank the two reviewers, Jennifer Cole (University of Chicago) and Céline Flory (CERMA – CNRS) for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 2   People of mixed European and Malagasy descent. 3  Statistiques générales, Gouvernement général de Madagascar et Dépendances, 1905; Archives de la République de Madagascar (National Archives of Madagascar – hereafter ARM), Statistiques démographiques, n° 93, 1932 et Population de Madagascar au 1er janvier 1960, p. 7. 4   Noëlle Pasqualini, Etude démographique de la population française de Madagascar de 1915 à 1960 (Aix-en-Provence, 1990), table 33. 5   This region is commonly called Imerina and its main inhabitants are the Merina. 6   Statistiques générales, Gouvernement général de Madagascar et Dépendances, 1905; ARM, Statistiques démographiques, n° 93, 1932; Population de Madagascar au 1er janvier 1960, p. 7.

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The colonial order revolved around several antithetical pairs, expressed in legal7 (citizen/subject), racial (white/black) and cultural (European/Malagasy) terms. The existence of the métis blurred the lines between these poles. Unions between Malagasy and Europeans, whether regular marriages or temporary unions, were quite common. However, the great majority of métis were born from relations out of wedlock.8 In most cases, the father was European and the mother Malagasy. In 1938, a governmental mission carried out a survey of the ‘Métis problem’ in the French colonies: at the time, there were 1,330 métis in Madagascar’s Central Highlands, 693 of whom were under the age of 15 years.9 Half of them were unrecognized children, that is, they were born outside of marriage and their father did not take any action regarding a paternity suit.10 Imerina was the area of Madagascar where métis were most numerous. Merina society is composed of groups that were hierarchized and territorially organized by the pre-colonial monarchy11. The Merina define themselves according to their group and their ancestral village.12 Although territoriality was an essential element of Merina social organization, mobility – whether inside or out of the island – was a commonly shared process, as Deschamps has shown.13 Since migrations were common among the Malagasy, educational opportunities, rather than necessity, motivated the children of Merina elites to migrate as early as the nineteenth century. The métis shared the same reason to migrate. If studying childhood through vulnerability and schooling is a rather classical approach in the historiography of métissage,14 linking it to the question of mobility and space, as I suggest doing here, sheds 7   As a consequence, état civil, schools and the justice system, among other things, were separate for citizens and for subjects. In 1909, a decree would allow Malagasy individuals to be granted French citizenship under strict criteria. 8   This means that the union was not reported to état civil; however, some Europeans celebrated vodiondry, an equivalent of marriage in Merina society. 9   ARM, Affaires Politiques, D752, Enquête sur le problème des métis, 1938. These figures must be treated with caution because the category ‘métis’, although used in population statistics, had never been properly defined. 10   ARM, Affaires Politiques, D752, Enquête sur le problème des métis, 1938. 11   See Pier M. Larson, History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement. Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770–1822 (Oxford, 2000) and Françoise Raison-Jourde, Bible et pouvoir à Madagascar au xixe siècle: Invention d’une identité chrétienne et construction de l’Etat (Paris, 1991). 12   Maurice Bloch, Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages, and Kinship Organization in Madagascar (Prospect Heights, IL, 1994 [1971]). 13   Hubert Deschamps, Les migrations intérieures passées et présentes à Madagascar (Paris, 1959). 14   For example, see: Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895–1960 (Oxford, 1999); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, CA, 2002); Lissia Jeurissen, Quand le métis s’appelait ‘mulâtre’ (Louvain-La-Neuve, 2003); Emmanuelle Saada, Les enfants de la colonie: Les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté (Paris, 2007); David Pomfret, ‘Raising Eurasia: Race, Class, and Age in French and British Colonies’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 51(2) (2009), 314–43; Christina Firpo, ‘Crises of Whiteness and Empire in Colonial Indochina: The Removal of Eurasian Children from the Vietnamese Milieu, 1890–1956’, Journal of Social History 43 (2010), 587–613.

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a new light on this complex issue. Mobility was constructed as part of the solution to the ‘métis question’. It was, more or less implicitly, considered a process that would restore the coherence of the colonial order. The educational institutions for the métis in Madagascar were all located in Antananarivo, and at one time migration out of the island was elaborated as a way to give those métis opportunities for social mobility. However, while colonial authorities included mobility in their response to the ‘métis question’, targeting their action on the individuals perceived as the most vulnerable, these children were not actually the most mobile nor did they benefit most from migration. On the contrary, métis who could rely on their families were far more mobile. Both Europeans and the Malagasy challenged the métis’ identity. Educational migration is a moment when identity and otherness are experienced through the discovery of new environments, as Ferrel points out for Northern Ghana in this volume.15 It seems that this was particularly true for the métis who, in some cases, were perceived as and/or felt mixed-race (Malagasy and/or European) when they moved to Antananarivo or to France for schooling. The experience of difference in the school setting was brought out in the memories of the métis I interviewed.16 At the same time, the physical experience of mobility and of exploring the Malagasy territory, narrated by adults, nurtured a sentimental attachment to the island. This emphasizes the emotional aspect of every migration. This emotional side of migration is strengthened by the nature of the materials used to explore childhood migrations, which leads me to one fundamental question: how do we collect children’s voices in history? As highlighted in the Introduction to this volume, whereas for sociologists or anthropologists, the difficulty in studying children is to translate children’s thoughts and to make them subjects of research, for historians, children’s voices are difficult both to access and to retrieve.17 Indeed, direct testimonies dating from childhood itself are more than scarce. Most of the time, we have access to childhood only through interviews with adults. So we only have access to the recollection of their memories, and memory is a work-in-progress. Working on the métis doubled the difficulty, since details about their families are scarce in colonial archives. Using interviews and oral history is thus crucial. But there are limitations to be taken into account: first, only 15   Lacy S. Ferrell, ‘“We were mixed with all types”: Educational Migration in the Northern Territories of Colonial Ghana’, this volume, Chapter 7. 16   These interviews were conducted for my Ph.D. and were not specifically about migration. I met 39 persons of mixed descent to collect their family stories, in France and in Madagascar. For more information, see Violaine Tisseau, ‘Le pain et le riz: Métis et métissage entre Européens et Malgaches dans les Hautes Terres centrales de Madagascar, 19ème –20ème siècle’ (Ph.D. diss., Université Paris 7–Denis Diderot, 2011), to be published by Karthala. 17   Mona Gleason, ‘In Search of History’s Child’, Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 1(2) (2009), 125–135; Christopher J. Lee, ‘Children in the Archives: Epistolary Evidence, Youth Agency, and the Social Meanings of “Coming of Age” in Interwar Nyasaland’, Journal of Family History 35 (2010), 25–47.

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the métis willing to speak have been approached; and second, their memories are mediated because they are adults sharing their memories of childhood. The consequence is that their childhood memories are often shrouded in nostalgia; however, this also helps us to catch a glimpse of how emotional spatial trajectories can be.

The Two Sides of Being a Métis in Imerina The Construction of a category of vulnerable children by colonization in 1896, Gallieni was named gouverneur general of Madagascar. As early as 1898, he drew attention to the métis children, whose number was increasing with the arrival of French soldiers: there were about 60 such children between the ages of three and five in Antananarivo in 1899. Gallieni argued that taking care of them was of crucial importance, because they were half-French by descent. He also thought they could lead the Malagasy towards ‘progress’, because their European origin would give them skills and abilities, while their Malagasy origin would create an affinity with the Malagasy population.18 This is why he favoured the intervention of public authorities to offer them an honourable existence and a good situation in the future.19 He gave his approval for the creation of the Société d’Assistance et de Protection des Enfants métis (SAPE) in 1898, which went on to open the Ecole des Enfants Métis (métis children’s school) in 1902. So the education of métis children was a matter of concern for the public authorities. The gouverneurs who followed Gallieni were not so enthusiastic about the métis population. Augagneur, for example, firmly condemned interracial unions in 1913. His fear was that the colonizers would ‘go native’ under the influence of their Malagasy partners, giving up the habits and living standard that everybody expected from Europeans in a colonial context. He was also concerned that the métis might claim some rights and so destabilize the political order of the colony.20 The colonial literature, the press and administrative reports also reflected these fears. To prevent any future revolt by the métis, the public authorities decided to care for métis children in specialized institutions as they were thought to be vulnerable, isolated or orphaned. They chose three institutions to subsidize: the SAPE, which was non-religious, and two Catholic institutions – Les Paulins for boys, and an orphanage, founded in 1924 and run by Franciscan Sisters, for the girls. In 1934, a brochure was published to promote Les Paulins. It was very significantly titled ‘Les Sans Famille’ (without 18   Joseph Gallieni, Madagascar de 1896 à 1905: rapport du gouverneur général au ministre des colonies (1905), p. 636. 19   ‘Assemblée trimestrielle de la Société de Bienfaisance de Tananarive’, Journal Officiel de Madagascar (hereafter JOM), 252 (24 May 1898), p. 1896. 20  Victor Augagneur, ‘Notre devoir envers les enfants métis’, Le Progrès de Madagascar, 28 February 1913.

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family), and it depicted the métis as abandoned, orphaned, difficult and unhappy children in need of rescue.21 Meanwhile, the legislation concerning citizenship was adjusted in favour of the métis. Their legal status – subject or citizen – was crucial in determining their future. There were primarily two situations: métis born from legal marriages, who were citizens, and those who were illegitimate, whose legal status was problematic. The illegitimate métis who were not recognized22 remained mere subjects. Until 1931, those métis could get French citizenship like every other Malagasy, thanks to a decree announced in 1909. In 1931, a decree proclaimed that the illegitimate and unrecognized métis could acquire French citizenship by a court decision admitting their European origin, by virtue of which they could become citizens.23 The education the candidates had received was one of the elements examined by the authorities in order to decide whether or not they could be French citizens. Citizenship was correlated to the ideas of prestige and dignity associated with the social status of Europeans.24 So for Europeans, particularly the public authorities, their childhood was a turning-point in their lives because it was decisive in terms of their future legal status. Filiation and childhood in Merina society Things were perceived differently in Merina society. The issue with the métis here was not legal, but primarily social. The Merina divide themselves into three categories: fotsy (symbolically white) or mainty (symbolically black) for people of free descent and andevo for people of slave descent. Fotsy are divided into andriana and hova. As Bloch summarizes: Merina society was based on a system of association of territorial and kinship groupings. In the traditional Merina system of organisation the individual found his place in the wider political structure of the kingdom by membership to a series of ever wider territorial sections. The smallest of these sections comprised a number of villages and was inhabited by an exclusive kinship group, which I shall call a ‘deme’. The kinship exclusiveness of this group was maintained either by an explicit rule of endogamy or by de facto in-marriage resulting from preferential marriage rules … The deme was not only the smaller unit of the Merina political and administrative structure, it was also a group with a place in a ritual hierarchy formed by the ranking of the demes in terms of nearness to the royal family.25

  R. de Gosselin, Les Sans Famille (Bourges, 1934).   A child was recognized when his/her European father went to report to the état civil that he was the father despite the fact that he was not legally married to the mother. 23   ‘Décret réglementant dans la colonie de Madagascar et Dépendances les conditions d’accession des métis à la qualité de citoyen français’, JOM (19 September 1931), p. 901. 24   Emmanuelle Saada, ‘The Empire of Law. Dignity, Prestige and Domination in the “colonial situation”’, French Politics, Culture & Society 20(2) (2002), 98–120. 25   Maurice Bloch, ‘Tombs and Conservatism among the Merina of Madagascar’, Man, New Series, 3(1) (1968), 96. 21

22

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How can someone partly of foreign descent find a place in a society where endogamy is strong and genealogy is crucial for identification? Being involved with a European broke the rules of preferential marriages, so reactions varied depending on social group. Some families condemned such unions: the mother of A. P., for example, was rejected by her Protestant andriana family because of her relationship with a Frenchman.26 By contrast, some sought them out: some women saw a relationship with a European as an opportunity for social mobility. Goutalier and Knibiehler recorded the memory of a Malagasy woman who was the common-law wife of a French man during colonization: her relationship sparked disregard and condemnation from her Malagasy entourage, but she did not care because her union allowed her to have a little shop.27 Emile Ranarivelo, a rich businessman from Antananarivo, divorced his Malagasy first wife and went to France to marry a young schoolteacher in 1911: it was a clear decision in his mind. He was from a village where relations with foreigners were seen as a chance for social, economic and politic upward mobility.28 The acceptance or non-acceptance of interracial unions was naturally important in determining the possibilities for the children born from them. The place of burial is also a good indication of the métis’ insertion. Indeed, it is one of the elements that contributes to and embodies one’s social position. By choice or by constraint, none of the 39 interviewees I met had access to the ancestral tomb: either they or their parents were buried in the European cemetery, or they built a new tomb to start a new lineage. Nonetheless, although Malagasy women involved with Europeans were sometimes rejected by their families, this isolation did not prevent the children born from such unions to stay connected to their Malagasy families. Undifferentiated kinship ruled Merina society. A child can stay in the maternal family, which is a crucial point for the métis’ situation, and one can claim one’s rights to the ancestral tomb from the maternal or paternal side. This means that, even if the European father was absent, the child could be cared for by the Malagasy family. It allows any individual without a father to stay connected to the maternal side of the family and to be placed in a Malagasy genealogy. This is what happened for many métis: L. Rak. was born in 1901, to a father who was a high-ranking officer and could not recognize him because he was already married in France. His mother eventually married a Malagasy man and L. Rak. lived with them.29 Whereas for the colonial administration, individuals were considered children until the age of 15 years, in Imerina the most important   Interview with A. P., born in 1940 (Paris, 2001).   Yvonne Knibiehler and Régine Goutalier, La femme au temps des colonies (Paris, 1985), p. 75. 28   Christine Ranarivelo, Le Panama malgache (Paris, 2011) and interview with C. Rana., born in 1926 (Antananarivo, 2000 and 2003). 29   Archives Nationales d’Outre-mer (hereafter ANOM), Fonds Madagascar, 6(10)D29, 1925. Names are here abbreviated in order to protect anonymity. 26 27

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stages of the childhood are the first haircut for children of both sexes and then circumcision for the boys30. So for the Malagasy, the definition of childhood rests more on independence and the capacity to perform certain kinds of work. For example, when they were four years old, Merina children began to help their parents with small tasks, such as taking care of the drying rice. From that moment, they proceeded through a series of stages: at the age of six years, they had to look after the poultry; at around nine, boys led and guarded the zebu cattle at pasture, while girls fetched water from the fountain; and at 10 years, they worked in the fields.31 But at the end of the nineteenth century, when schooling started to expand, the Malagasy definition of childhood evolved to take into account the age of schooling: school was mandatory from the age of eight to 16 years from 1881 onwards.32 Malagasy elites had already understood the importance of European education in the process of social mobility33 and de facto, the métis I met were mainly members of the Malagasy elites or middle class. The influence of Christianization, then of colonization, inflected the place of the children in Merina society. Malagasy and Europeans both pointed out the importance of the education in the future of the métis. However, whereas Europeans saw them as isolated children who were potentially able to destabilize the colonial order in the future, Merina used educational opportunities as a way to assure the métis’ place in Malagasy society. Analysing the métis’ migrations initiated by schooling confronts both European and Merina conceptions of the métis’ place in society, and reveals the crucial role of the family in their destinies.

Antananarivo: A Central Place for Educational Opportunities Going to Antananarivo: a compulsory experience for the supposedly orphaned Métis children Antananarivo contained the greatest range of educational opportunities in a concentrated area: the three métis institutions were located in the city, as well as the highest schools for the Malagasy and the Europeans. For the colonial public authorities, the central question was how best to educate métis children; for the Malagasy, it was to select the best educational strategy.   Maurice Bloch, From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar (Cambridge, 1986). 31   Paul Camboué, ‘Les dix premiers ans d’enfance chez les Malgaches: circoncision, nom, éducation’, Anthropos, 4(2) (1909), 384–85; Raymond Decary, Mœurs et coutumes des Malgaches (Paris, 1951), 33–34. 32   Eugène Thébault, Code des 305 Articles (1881) (Antananarivo, 1960), pp. 146–47. 33   Faranirina V. Rajaonah, ‘Elites et notables malgaches à Antananarivo dans la première moitié du XXe siècle’ (Ph.D. diss., Université Lumière-Lyon 2, 1997). 30

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The authorities were confident in their projects of social engineering, and believed that they could influence the métis’ future by placing them in an adequate environment. According to them, child care for métis children was necessary to achieve two goals: to provide them with a decent material situation, and to educate them so that they would later become good auxiliaries of colonization. In the background was the question of the influence of environment versus heredity on the métis’ future. The education they would receive was therefore of paramount importance. Since Malagasy heredity was stigmatized, the authorities insisted that the Malagasy entourage had a negative influence on métis children. This rhetoric was expressed in similar terms across all colonies. The three institutions mentioned above shared more or less the same goals, the first of which was to provide a home to métis children. The Catholic institutions had a boarding school which the children would attend until their departure. The SAPE was slightly different because, until 1923, there was no boarding school: instead, the children were placed in Malagasy families.34 Dr Fontoynont, director of the SAPE, compared it to the way public welfare worked in France. One of the first measures taken by the SAPE was to keep métis children in a Malagasy environment. That is why they chose to put them in Malagasy families, recreating a kind of fosterage beyond family and kin relationships. The creation of the boarding school marks a shift: the aim was to make the acquisition of French habits easier. If the institutions were supposed to welcome métis from across the entire island, they rarely met that ideal in reality. In Madagascar, the institutions seem to have recruited their pupils mostly from the areas around Antananarivo. Only a few children came from the rest of the island; and if the archives happen to mention that they were, for example, from the coast, there is little information about the way they got to Antananarivo. Had they travelled with their Malagasy mothers or family members? In cases where they were orphans, had Europeans come along with them? Had they been taken by missionaries? Adult intervention was necessary for this migration, which was probably not chosen by the children themselves. For example, in 1919, Reverend Louis de Gonzague went from Maroantsetra (400 km north of Toamasina) to Antananarivo, taking with him two young métis girls.35 In 1922, three daughters travelled from the coast because their French father had died two years earlier.36 The public authorities supported the SAPE, Les Paulins and the Franciscaines Missionnaires de Marie (FMM) orphanage in compensating for the absence of a Euro34   ANOM, Fonds Madagascar, 3D225, Inspection des services financiers: Rapport sur la Société d’Assistance et de Protection de l’Enfance, 22 January 1937. 35   Archives of FMM (Franciscaines Missionnaires de Marie), Journal de la maison Saint-François, Ankadifotsy, 15 September 1919. 36   Archives of FMM, Correspondence from Sister Jean Vianney de Ste Hélène, Ankadifotsy, 17 September 1922.

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pean father and caring for orphans, but some métis’ parents integrated these institutions into their strategy to gain or manifest French citizenship. For example, Marie-Angéline was born of an unknown father and a Malagasy mother who died young. She was sent to the SAPE in 1936 by her grandmother, who later filed a complaint because she was not allowed to visit her.37 Almost a third of the 60 métis who were granted French citizenship between 1909 and 1931 were schooled in those institutions, while retaining links with their Malagasy family.38 Sending children to Antananarivo: a parental strategy children’s schooling was a real investment for their parents, who intended them to benefit from social mobility. Except for the school for métis children and the support given to institutions caring for them, the colonial power undertook no comprehensive action to promote the schooling of the métis. It therefore fell to the parents to take most of the initiatives for their children in this domain. For example, they would mobilize their Malagasy family to accommodate them, instead of paying for boarding schools; they would ask the authorities for scholarships; or they would make the choice to send them to one of the institutions for métis children. For example, in 1916, Razorinelina wrote to ask the gouverneur général to allow her daughter to go to a French school in Antananarivo. She received the response that this was impossible, since she was an illegitimate child with indigenous legal status. Instead, she was encouraged to contact the SAPE. However, at that time there was no boarding school and she was living in Antsirabe, about 180 km south of the capital. She then had no other option but to send her to an indigenous school.39 Obviously, the métis were not the only children who made this journey to the capital. However, the issue was stronger for them than for, say, European children, because integrating into the French school system was a way to acquire or strengthen their position as French citizens, which was a real issue in the colonial period. If they lived in the country, far from European schools, the métis – just like European children or Malagasy citizens – had no choice but to go to the capital: European schools were rare, and most of them were concentrated in Antananarivo. For example, in 1926 in the Itasy region (west of Antananarivo) there was no school for European children.40 Moreover, Europeans living in the bush or in isolated settlements did not necessarily have the financial capacity to send their children into town for education. Their schooling would therefore occur quite late in their lives and only at the cost of migration. Suzanne Razafindramady-Cereso’s autobiography exemplifies that point: she   ANOM, Fonds Madagascar, PT190, 1936.   ANOM, Fonds Madagascar, 6(10)D 12–48, 1909–1931. 39   ARM, Cabinet Civil, D207, 1916. 40   Guide-Annuaire de Madagascar, 1926, p. 189. 37

38

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was born in the 1930s in the region of Soavinandriana (around 300 km west of Antananarivo), to a Greek father and a Malagasy mother. She grew up there – playing in the countryside with her Malagasy friends, speaking Malagasy, living the life of every Malagasy child – until a European came by and convinced her parents to send her to school. So she went to Antananarivo, together with her sisters. Her mother travelled with them to the capital where they lived in her uncle’s house. Suzanne does not describe the journey, but it seems that moving from the countryside to a European religious school was quite hard and that this remains a difficult memory. In this example, mobility was a way of changing her life and experiencing new relationships: according to her memoirs, whereas she never had to face racism in the bush, at her new school she discovered the prevailing segregation between Europeans, creoles and métis.41 In their definition of ‘migration’, Levy and Lussault insist that the change of environment is one key dimension of migration.42 It appears that, on the level of the individual child, going to school to Antananarivo after spending childhood in the countryside constituted a major life change. As Ferrel writes regarding educational migration in colonial Ghana, ‘the physical journey to school, whatever the experience of it, began the transformation that educational migrants underwent’.43

Going Abroad to Study: Long-distance Mobility Migration abroad as a collective solution to discipline vulnerable children Faced with children who were perceived as vulnerable or dangerous, the public authorities chose, at some times and in some places, the solution of migration to Europe or, conversely, from the metropole to the colonies. In this volume, Duke Bryant narrates the experience of Senegalese young people sent to France in the 1820s. The history of British children sent to Canada or Australia is another example of this practice.44 Such migration never occurred in Madagascar but, in the colony of Tonkin (Indochina), the Société de Protection des Métis sent some children to France until 1931; the aim was for these children to stay and live there, or to acquire a good education and return to Indochina to serve French interests in the country.45 Later, in La Réunion, 41   Suzy Razafindramady-Cerezo, Madagascar mon pays (Paris, 1981). In this context the term ‘creole’ refers to the persons who were born in La Réunion or whose parents were native of this island. 42   Jacques Levy and Michel Lussault, eds, Dictionnaire de la géographie et de l’espace des sociétés (Paris, 2003), pp. 615–17, 623. 43   Ferrell, this volume, Chapter 7. 44   For example, Philip Bean and Joy Melville, Lost Children of the Empire: The Untold Story of Britain’s Child Migrants (London, 1989). 45   Emmanuelle Saada, ‘La “question des métis dans les colonies françaises: Socio-histoire d’une catégorie juridique (Indochine et autres territoires de l’Empire français; années 1890 – années 1950)’ (Ph.D. diss., EHESS, 2001), p. 166.

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some children were taken away from poor families and forcibly sent to France in order to repopulate the countryside.46 In 1938, the administrator of Toliara (Madagascar) suggested extracting the métis from their environment to place them in special homes or, more radically, to send them to France;47 however, nothing similar ever happened in Madagascar. Even if it was discussed, forced and collective migration was never imposed on métis children and, in most cases, mobility was a deliberate choice. This practice was integrated by the métis and their families into their strategies of social mobility. Studying abroad made easier for Métis because of their double origin temporary migrations abroad to study were part of the trajectories of social elites even before colonization. Malata and Zanamalata48 from the east coast were sending their children to the religious schools of La Réunion as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century. 49 As soon as English and French missionaries arrived in the Highlands in the nineteenth century, prior to colonization, the Merina monarchy began sending some of its young men abroad. The Merina monarchy was eager to have doctors, traders and civil servants who were able to master foreign languages and techniques. For example, Raombana and his twin brother Rahinirka travelled to England in 1819 and stayed in the country for eight years, between the ages of 10 and 18 years. Raombana wrote memoirs in which he reported that he could no longer speak Malagasy on his return. His narrative offers a detailed account of all his feelings during the voyage and his life in England. He was surprized to discover how the English lived and the fact that they were not cannibals.50 Most of these young people belonged to Imerina’s bourgeoisie or nobility, and their family quickly understood that studying abroad would constitute a real opportunity. Spatial mobility and social mobility went hand in hand: studying abroad constituted one route to upward social mobility. Colonization did not stop that process among the Malagasy elite. In 1931, Georges-Sully Chapus, wondering about the future of the Malagasy pupils of the High School of Antananarivo, remarked that many of them went to study in France.51 This habit was   Ivan Jablonka, Enfants en exil: Transfert de pupilles réunionnais en métropole (1963–1982) (Paris: Le Seuil, 2007). 47   ARM, Affaires Politiques, D752, Enquête n°4 sur le problème des métis, 1938. 48   Descendants of European pirates or traders and Malagasy women, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 49  Dominique Bois, ‘Vazaha et autochtones sur la côte est de Madagascar: Médiations et métissages entre 1854 et 1885’ (Ph.D. diss., Université Paris 7-Denis Diderot, 1996); Pier M Larson, ‘Fragments of an Indian Ocean Life: Aristide Corroller between Islands and Empires’, Journal of Social History 45(2) (2011), 366–89. 50   Simon Ayache, Raombana, L’historien (1809–1855): Introduction à l’édition critique de son œuvre (Fianarantsoa, 1976); Simon Ayache, ‘La découverte de l’Europe par les Malgaches au 19ème siècle’, Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 73(270) (1986), 7–25. 51   Georges-Sully Chapus, ‘Les élèves malgaches au lycée de Antananarivo’, Le Monde non chrétien 1(6) (1934), 66. 46

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also common among the French people settled in Madagascar: T. R., a French woman born in Madagascar in 1928, was sent to a boarding school in France by her parents when she was 10 years old. Some métis joined the same process of temporary migration towards Europe. It was even made easier for them by the family links resulting from their mixed ancestry. Family relationships were necessarily involved: it could have been the parents themselves or, more broadly, some of their acquaintances. Thus, in the 1910s, the author of a handwritten note noted that the fathers who recognized their métis children also took responsibility for their education and lived with them, sometimes even sending them to France in their family.52 C. Rana. was born in Antananarivo in 1926 to a Malagasy father and a French mother. Like his brothers and sisters, he attended French school, specifically the Saint-Michel middle school and then the Gallieni High School, both reputable schools in Madagascar. In 1947, he left Madagascar for France, where he attended a school of optics.53 His family had the financial means and the social relationships to offer their children such trajectories. For children of more modest backgrounds, scholarships were the solution. In 1935, the colonial Institute of Le Havre offered some year-long scholarships to the Ecole pratique: the second applicant selected by Antananarivo’s Chamber of Commerce, Agriculture and Industry was Raymond Savaron, the métis son of one of the first French settlers in the island.54 Even if, in these examples, the métis were no longer children, this type of migration demanded some kind of action from their parents: they had to look for scholarships or to arrange accommodation with their relatives. The métis’ time in France was made easier not only by scholarships, but also by the presence of their French families. One example is T. R., a French woman born in Madagascar in 1928. Her father-in-law arrived in Madagascar at the beginning of colonization: he had children with a Malagasy woman, and sent them to his family in Alsace as soon as they were three years old. His children ended up staying in France.55 This mobility towards France, more than migrations towards Antananarivo, offered an opportunity to experience a new social environment and learn new social skills. When she arrived in France in 1967, A. P. felt deeply Malagasy, whereas in Madagascar she felt and was perceived as European (vazaha). Her entire environment changed, and this is when she felt deeply Malagasy. She noted that habits and body language were not the same, and had to learn French manners. However, the change also involved some more sensory elements: for   ANOM, Fonds Madagascar, 6(10)D4, handwritten note (without any author or precise date, in the 1910s). 53   Interview with C. Rana., born in 1926 (Antananarivo, 2000 and 2003). 54   ARM, Chambre de commerce, n°36, séance du 30 août 1935. 55   Interview with T. R., born in 1928 (in Parisian suburbs, 2002). 52

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example, sunlight and smells seemed different to her.56 She was more a young adult than a child, but one can presume that children would have felt and experienced similar changes. Those migrations mobilized scholarships and assistance from adults, most of them family members. They constituted an opportunity for discovery and the acquisition of new social skills in order to gain social mobility.

Ties and Links: Exploring Territory and Family When mobility strengthens family ties family links were therefore useful and could support a range of opportunities. Going to France or Antananarivo to complete one’s education mobilized the family in one way or another. Alfred Robert Roy Podmore was born in Antananarivo, around 1903, to a Malagasy mother and an English father from Croydon in Surrey. His father made a recognition of paternity, but at that time the English law did not allow it. From 1910 to 1920, he sent his son to England for schooling. Alfred Robert Roy Podmore applied for French citizenship. His file mentioned a school certificate from St Saviour’s School at Ardingly, Haywards Heath. He was around seven years old when he left his island for another. When he returned to Madagascar, he worked in Nosy Varika for one of his father’s friends before settling in Marolambo (on the east coast) in a little shop of hardware and haberdashery. He could speak French, and probably Malagasy and English. He was a shopkeeper and his shop was supplied by his English uncle, who sent him merchandise.57 Alfred Robert Roy Podmore experienced the many facets of migration and mobility: both directly, by studying in England and moving from one region of Madagascar to another and, more indirectly, with his uncle supplying his store. One could also presume that letters and correspondence were another, more virtual, way to experience migration. As Sandra Evers wrote about the Chagossian children in Mauritius, ‘children embody and are connectors of kinship networks and notions of belonging’.58 Dhupelia-Mesthrie argues in Chapter 8 that, in order to undertake the migration from India to South Africa, some had to create fictive kinship ties;59 on the contrary, here it is the very reality of the family links that made migration possible.   Interview with A. P., born in 1940 (Paris, 2000 and 2001).   ANOM, Fonds Madagascar, 6(10) D35. 58   Sandra J. T. M. Evers, ‘Kinning the imagination: perceptions of kinship and family history among Chagossian Children in Mauritius’, in Sandra J. T. M. Evers, Catrien Notermans, Erik van Ommering, eds, Not Just a Victim: The Child as Catalyst and Witness of Contemporary Africa (Leiden, 2011), p. 121. 59   Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, ‘India–South Africa Mobilities in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: Minors, Immigration Encounters in Cape Town & Becoming South African’, this volume, Chapter 8. 56 57

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Examining child migration in contemporary times, Moss relates the experience of a young girl who had strong links to Italy because her mother was from that country:60 even if she was not the one who directly experienced migration, this migration shaped her memories. Her analysis is relevant to reading the métis’ situation. Because of their origins, the métis – both as children and as adults – were tied not only to Madagascar but also to another country, even if that link remained purely imaginary. As a young woman, D. Rand. was eager to go to France. This country was part of her possible horizons because its press and magazines were available in her everyday life, but also because some people in her entourage had already travelled out of the island: for example, her aunt had an incredible life in Egypt. She found an advertisement for a hairdressing school in Paris, and her parents’ friends had family who hosted her in Paris. So she went to France in 1960, at the age of 17 years, to achieve her goal. When her professional training was over, she returned to Madagascar and even married the son of the family she had contact with while in Paris. In the end, migration acted to strengthen her ties to Madagascar. Experiencing the Malagasy territory through space and time prior to her travel to France, D. Rand. experienced another form of mobility. She lived with her Malagasy grandmother in Antananarivo during the school term, and she spent the holidays at her parents’ farm in Itasy (west of Antananarivo). In Antananarivo, her grandmother would carefully select her playmates, whereas in the country, she was free to go and play with the workers’ children; she found so much joy in this freedom that to this day these experiences stand out as some of her best memories.61 In this example, the migration was in both ways: from the countryside to the capital, where she lived with her Malagasy family and went to European schools; and from the capital back to the countryside. Only there could she experience the freedom of exploring her surroundings at will. The circulation from one space to another was thus determinant in her life story. At the same time, her mobility acted to strengthen her links to her Malagasy family, and led her to acquire both a French education and a sentimental attachment to her country. She also recollected memories of her journeys to her ancestral villages: in Madagascar’s Highlands, the tanindrazana (village of ancestors) is a central concept in identity. While many Malagasy live outside this village, they maintain a deep connection with it: the idea of a place where they belong, but do not live, structures their link to the land.62 Something similar can be observed in the experiences of the métis, whether in reference 60   Dorothy Moss, Children and Social Change: Memories of Diverse Childhoods (London and New York, 2011). 61   Interview with D. Rand., born in 1943 (Antananarivo, 2004). 62   Bloch, ‘Tombs and Conservatism’, p. 96; Chantal Crenn, ‘L’espace migratoire franco-malgache: D’une migration temporaire à une migration definitive’, Les Cahiers du CERIEM 3 (1998), 17–30.

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to their tanindrazana or to a more or less imaginary France (or Europe) to which they are linked by their origins. Migration activates the very same dialectic. The family could thus constitute a crucial element in achieving migration. However, the physical process itself, particularly through experiences of the Malagasy territory, was also an important element feeding migrants’ memories and thus their identity. Relying on the example of land surveys, Benedict Anderson emphasizes the importance of the spatial experience in building an ‘imagined community’.63 Anderson evokes a political link, but also envisions a sentimental attachment. In French West Africa, orphanages for métis children were located in Ségou and Kayes, and later Bamako, all in French Sudan (present-day Mali); these were supposed to host métis from all over the federation. Most of the children would later become teachers, midwives or civil servants. They would leave the place of their birth to live in the orphanage, then in colonial state schools and, finally, in the cities where they worked. The métis’ particularly vulnerable situation in French West Africa allowed for that mobility, and may also have favoured the formation of Eurafrican movements.64 There was no such defined pathway for métis children in Madagascar, but mobility across the island might have shaped a sentimental link to the country even if it was experienced in a more personal and free way than in French West Africa. Travelling across the country as a child often builds memories and a sentimental link to the explored land.65 Recounting his childhood in the late 1930s, A. L. describes how, at every holiday, he would leave his school in Antananarivo and go to his father’s home in Ankazobe. His French father’s farm was even further away than the large village of Ankazobe: from there, two additional days were needed to reach it, and the final part of the journey was possible only on a cart.66 The bumpy roads, the slow pace of rickshaws, the walks, the long weeks of navigation or the scenery scrolling through the windows of the taxi-bush; all this left prints on the child’s body and experience, feeding imagination and, later, memories. These are some of the elements shared when they are interviewed as adults, and are often reformulated as an expression of their attachment to Madagascar. Spatial mobility during childhood is intertwined with the notion of time – the time of the voyage, but also the time that flew by between the moment of the experience and its later recollection.

63   Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991). 64  White, Children of the French Empire. 65   For an analysis of the links between memory and space, see Anne Muxel, Individu et mémoire familiale (Paris, 1996), pp. 43–62. 66   Interview with A. L., born in 1922 (in Parisian suburbs, 2002).

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Conclusion In conclusion, the historiography of métissage in the French colonies – just like many contemporary works on African children – depicts these children as vulnerable and as victims. On the contrary, however, an analysis of their migrations in Madagascar highlights the force of familial links and kinship relationships. Mobility, whether moving a short distance to Antananarivo or undertaking long-distance migration to Europe, was a vivid part of métis children’s experience in many respects. However, their mixed descent raised questions. They were born from a migratory flow: did the fact that one of their parents was from abroad make mobility easier for them, and/or did it reinforce their presumed vulnerability? Moreover, the colonial authorities wanted to offer a home to the métis who were thought to be without any family; most of the time, this involved mobility. Their everyday lives were marked by mobility, whether real or imaginary, at various scales of distance. Their European origins tied the métis to Europe, not only through the reality of family relations but also as an imaginary horizon. As highlighted in the Introduction to this volume, migration, mobility and circulation are different types of moving; however, they all have in common the fact that they induce a change of environment. Moreover, Madagascar offers a strong specificity because, although territoriality is a determinant notion of the social organization, mobility (whether inside or out of the island) is a commonly shared process. Throughout the colonial period, the mobility of the métis took place in surroundings which were not peculiar to the métis, but which had a stronger meaning for them. By experiencing mobility, they also experienced the spatiality of their country. Thus migration placed métis children at the heart of connections between Europe, Madagascar and the Malagasy ancestral village. This chapter explores these spatial connections and how they defied various kinds of borders, as raised in the Introduction to this volume. Far from making these children vulnerable, mobility seems to have strengthened kinship ties and reinforced family relationships. So the spatial analysis of métis mobility adds insights to the broader history of métissage and childhood: it enlightens the place of family in the trajectories of métis children. Migration was chosen to achieve educational goals, but this was not its only effect. For the métis, it also strengthened a sentimental attachment to Madagascar, via family links and peregrination across the island. This also highlights the sentimental aspect which is part of every migration, something that still remains to be explored regarding child migrations.67 67   For a brief presentation of this field, see Loïs Bastide, ‘“Migrer, être affecté”: Émotions et expériences spatiales entre Java, Kuala Lumpur et Singapour’, Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, 29(4) (2013), 7.

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7

‘We Were Mixed with All Types’

Educational Migration in the Northern Territories of Colonial Ghana

Lacy S. Ferrell

The recent attention to children as subjects in studies of migration in Africa is a welcome addition to the growing literature that takes childhood and children’s agency seriously. These fields have come together in important areas such as labour and the slave trade; however, other than work on students who travelled abroad to pursue their educations, including Duke Bryant in Chapter 1, there are few historical studies of educational migration within individual colonies. Yet like Hannah Whittaker with Harjyot Hayer in Chapter 9, I explore how colonies often contained a great deal of internal migration for schooling, especially within less-developed regions.1 In much of colonial Africa, European Christian mission societies and, later, colonial governments opened Western-style schools both as ‘civilizing’ institutions and as training grounds for future teachers, clerks and administrators. These schools served only a fraction of the child population, and tensions over curricula, discipline, religious instruction and employment opportunities plagued relations between schools and the populations they served. Restrictive policies and low funding limited the availability of schools, particularly those offering classes beyond the primary curriculum, meaning that some children ended up migrating during some part of their schooling. Focusing on students within the Northern Territories of colonial Ghana, this chapter highlights the value of understanding educational migration and the experiences of educational migrants to histories of childhood, schooling and migration in Africa. In the Northern Territories, where the British administration aggressively restricted the number of schools, few enrolled students actually lived adjacent to educational facilities until the very last years of colonial rule. Thus, for most children who attended school in the region, migration was integral to the educational experience. Even those who were not migrants could expect to learn alongside a significant number of non-local children. Furthermore, the restricted number of 1   Hannah Whittaker with Harjyot Hayer, ‘Education, Migration & Nationalism: Mapping the School Days of the First Generation of Southern Sudanese Nationalist Leaders, c. 1948–1972’, Chapter 9. South Sudan is somewhat similar in terms of educational underdevelopment to the Northern Territories of Ghana.

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schools meant that very few northern children ever attended school at all before the 1950s. Because of these conditions – few schools serving small numbers of students from across the broader region – many scholars have recognized the impact of schooling in the creation of nationalist movements in the north.2 In this chapter, I draw on interviews, visual evidence and administrative documents to explore what moments and experiences defined the educational migrant identity for the children themselves. The interviews, which I conducted in Walewale in Northern Ghana in 2010, are interpretations of the past, coloured by the roles these men and women went on to fill as teachers, community development officers and political leaders.3 As such, these interviews reflect at times highly politicized views of childhood experience. Nonetheless, they offer insights into what these adults saw and felt as children. Studying children always presents a unique set of challenges in terms of sources, yet by piecing together evidence and reading into recollected memories, a useful picture of childhood experience emerges. Whatever their later political, social and ethnic identities and roles in the context of northern nationalism, these future leaders began as children, usually far from home, among many other children from many other areas speaking many other languages. In schools, I argue, the developing colonial identities of ‘migrant’ and ‘educated’ intersected, creating a new sense of community among the schoolchildren that impacted their own sense of self as well as how they related to their peers and to the world of adults. In this chapter, I explore how this community developed and was fostered by the children themselves, often confounding official policies that insisted on ‘local’ education. By examining children in their own right, I hope to destabilize the idea of the inevitability of their futures as educated adults. I also highlight how one institution of colonial rule – the school – was experienced and understood by its students from the earliest years of colonial rule in the north through the 1950s.

Contextualizing Migration and Education in Northern Ghana The Northern Territories of colonial Ghana encompassed nearly half the entire territory of the colony, yet its ‘hinterland’ position consigned it, in administrative circles, to the status of a backwater.4 In part this 2   Paul André Ladouceur, Chiefs and Politicians: The Politics of Regionalism in Northern Ghana (New York, 1979), pp. 52–53, 90. 3   I conducted these interviews in English. I thank Robert Kwame Boateng and Alice Wiemers for providing introductions. 4   Governor Frederick Hodgson urged against spending more money in the ‘hinterland of the Colony’ than necessary for administration and migrant labour. Ladouceur, Chiefs and Politicians, p. 45.

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perspective arose from an official view that the north tended towards ‘stateless’ societies.5 Yet far more relevant to the decisions that restricted investment in the north was its role as a labour pool for the cocoa farms and, to a lesser degree, gold mines of Ashanti and the Gold Coast Colony.6 From the early years of the twentieth century, administrators toured the Northern Territories to recruit labourers as well as soldiers, whom they expected to return seasonally to their homes in the north.7 Many of these labour networks were not new: a history of pawning and slave trade linked northerners to the south for much longer, and had intensified by the 1890s.8 Thus migration – both voluntary, often among young men seeking wealth, and involuntary – did not start with colonial rule, yet its pace, numbers and impact grew significantly during the twentieth century.9 Some of these migrants were children. Dating back to the pre-colonial slave trade, male and female children pawned or sold into slavery travelled south, often as porters.10 During the colonial era, children’s migration south intensified with increased opportunities for earning money and participating in the colonial cash economy.11 Some children ran away, and many others travelled with their families. Sometimes, they ended up in schools at their destinations.12 Migration, by both children and youth, impacted not only migrants themselves, but also their home communities, as interest in travelling south spread. Men, in particular, interviewed during the 1990s recalled their excitement when, as children or youth, they heard stories about the south from returning migrants who brought with them new wealth and new 5   Carola Lentz, ‘Contested Identities: The History of Ethnicity in Northwestern Ghana’, in Paul Nugent and Carola Lentz, eds, Ethnicity in Ghana: The Limits of Invention (New York, 2000), p. 138. 6   The Gold Coast encompassed the Gold Coast Colony, which included the Western, Central and Eastern Regions; Ashanti, a smaller territorial version of the Asante Empire conquered in 1901; and the Northern Territories, integrated as a Protectorate in 1902. The Volta Region, to the East, joined the colony after the First World War. Current President John Dramani Mahama’s autobiography contrasts the educational opportunities of southerners with northerners ‘toiling in the gold mines and cocoa farms and fighting on the battlefields during the world wars’. John Dramani Mahama, My First Coup d’Etat: And Other True Stories from the Lost Decades of Africa (New York, 2013), p. 28. 7   Roger G. Thomas, ‘Forced Labour in British West Africa: The Case of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast 1906–1927’, Journal of African History 14(1) (1973), 79–103. 8   Gareth Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana: From Slavery to Free Labour in Asante, 1807– 1956 (Rochester, NY, 2005), p. 123. 9   Nor was all the migration from the north to the south: many southerners travelled north on religious pilgrimages, such as to the Tongnaab shrine in Taleland. Jean Allman and John Parker, Tongnaab: The History of a West African God (Bloomington, IN, 2005). 10   Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry, ‘“The Loads are Heavier than Usual”: Forced Labor by Women and Children in the Central Province, Gold Coast (Colonial Ghana), ca. 1900–1940’, African Economic History 30 (2002), 32–33. 11   As adults, many migrants cited ‘poverty and hunger’ as their motivations for travelling south. Jack Lord, ‘The History of Childhood in Colonial Ghana, c. 1900–1957’ (Ph.D. diss., SOAS, 2013), 257–8. 12   For example, Muslim Wala enrolled their children in Muslim schools in Asante and in Accra. Ivor Wilks, Wa and the Wala: Islam and Polity in Northwestern Ghana (New York, 1989), p. 179.

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ideas, including the promise of opportunities open to others.13 Though labour opportunities dictated the vast majority of the migration both within the north and between the north and south, for children, another social force overlapped with migration: schooling. Schooling and labour did not exist independently; in fact, a few of the enslaved children who found themselves in Ashanti and the Gold Coast ended up at mission stations.14 Indeed, this was the fate of Victor Aboya, who famously worked with anthropologist R. S. Rattray to record the customs of northern peoples in Rattray’s 1931 ethnography, Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland. Aboya’s story as a cultural interlocutor is well known, but few have focused on his childhood experiences. Born around 1888, Aboya’s uncle pawned him for several baskets of grain during a serious drought during the 1890s, and around 1900 he ended up in Kumasi, the capital of Asante.15 There, he and other children were freed into the hands of the Basel Mission. These involuntary labour migrants thereby also became educational migrants. A few young men continued to travel south for schooling, especially secondary education, through much of the colonial era. However, my interest in this chapter is with the younger children who, though they may have travelled south later, attended their primary and in some cases middle schools in the north. A high proportion of children in northern schools migrated within the region, due to the particularly limited expansion of educational facilities in the Northern Territories. In contrast to the Gold Coast Colony and Ashanti, where the British Government had actively encouraged the expansion of Christian mission schools from the late nineteenth century, government policy prohibited nearly all mission work in the north.16 The White Fathers Catholic Mission, a small exception, opened a school in Navrongo in 1907. The Government assumed control over all other schooling, and the first government primary school opened in Tamale in 1909.17   Allman and Parker, Tongnaab, pp. 90–96.   Some child slaves in Asante ran away from their masters and others were liberated; in both cases, the British usually transferred them to the missions. See Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana, p. 221. 15   R. S. Rattray, The Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland (New York, 1967 [1932]), p. 130; also Allman and Parker, Tongnaab, p. 108. 16   The White Fathers, who only worked in the Northern Territories, were limited in part by British insistence that they avoid building facilities near purportedly Islamic areas. Roger G. Thomas, ‘Education in Northern Ghana, 1906–1940: A Study in Colonial Paradox’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 7(3) (1974), 428–9. See also Ladouceur, Chiefs and Politicians, p. 50. 17   There were many Muslim schools, including ZongKarim, Qur’anic Schools and Makaranta. The colonial state did nothing to support these schools. Abduali Iddrisu argues that the limit on Christian mission activity and the policy of disconnecting Muslim areas from state apparatus impeded the long-term viability and appeal of Muslim schooling. Abdulai Iddrisu, ‘The Growth of Islamic Learning in Northern Ghana and Its Interaction with Western Secular Education’, Africa Development XXX(1–2) (2005), 56–8. In addition to concerns about Islam, David Kimble suggests a strong anti-mission bias of the northern administration, influenced by Lugard’s work in Northern Nigeria and a concern that mission schools competed with those run by the Chief Commissioners. David Kimble, A Political History of Ghana: The Rise of Gold Coast Nationalism 1850–1928 (Oxford, 1963), pp. 79–84. 13 14

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The single government school in Tamale and an early administrative interest in educating sons of chiefs created strains between the Government and chiefs from the outset. An unwillingness to send their own children led many chiefs to send slave children or children of lesser wives, based in part on the long distances the children would have to travel before living so far from their communities.18 The limited availability of schools compounded this challenge; an official’s request for a primary school in Wa preceded the construction of the North’s second primary school, in Gambaga, in 1912, and Wa did not get its own until 1916.19 With still only 10 schools (nine of which were primary) in 1935, less than a fraction of a per cent of the children in the Northern Territories enrolled in school before the 1950s, making the overall population of educational migrants in the north strikingly small.20 The underdevelopment of the north and administrative concerns over the ‘detribalizing’ effects on northerners who travelled to the south for schooling or labour are well documented.21 Yet, while scholars have tended to focus on the transformative effects of labour migration, educational migrants, however few, likewise exerted transformative influences on their home communities and on the future of the region. Moreover, they tended to draw on similar networks: District Commissioners in particular viewed the education of chiefs’ sons as an investment in on-going cooperation with the administration, particularly for organizing labour. By the 1930s and onward, some families encouraged these connections. The value of the ‘schoolboy’, as Bruce Grindal found among the Sisala, was his capacity to act as a liaison between his elders and the colonial government.22 This suggests that even among children, as their identities shifted and expanded to include new perceptions of themselves as ‘educated’ in relation to their families, ties to home continued to resonate. These networks also informed the social relationships they shared with fellow educational migrants.23   Many Muslim parents also associated school with becoming Christian, though British policy forbade religious instruction in Government schools. Iddrisu, ‘The Growth of Islamic Learning’, 58. Ladouceur lists multiple other concerns, including the content of the education, distance, safety and cost. Ladouceur, Chiefs and Politicians, p. 51. 19  Thomas, ‘Education in Northern Ghana’, 430. By 1919 there was a fourth Government school. 20   Gold Coast Government, Report of the Education Department for the Year 1935–36, and Thomas, ‘Education in Northern Ghana’, 457. There were fewer than 1,000 students in the Northern Territories in 1935. 21   On underdevelopment, see Kimble, A Political History, pp. 533–4; on ‘detribalizing’ education, see, for example, Letter from Director of Education to Colonial Secretary, January 11, 1934, PRAAD-Accra CSO 18/4/1. 22   Bruce Grindal, Growing Up in Two Worlds: Education and Transition among the Sisala of Northern Ghana (New York, 1972), p. 74. 23   I am influenced by Filip de Boeck and Alcinda Honwana’s discussion of children’s ‘spaces of collective imagination’ (Espaces d’imagination collective) and ‘social imagination’ (imaginaire sociale). Filip de Boeck and Alcinda Honwana, ‘Faire et défaire la société: Enfants, jeunes et politique en Afrique’, Politique Africaine 40 (2000), 6. 18

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Being Chosen For children, the first exposure to the idea of going to school came in two ways. First, a boy or girl’s father or chief chose a particular child to attend a school, usually at the behest of a District Commissioner.24 Second, nearly all of those selected remember the official asking them to lift their hand over their head to touch their opposite ear, a physically-marked sign of being at least six or seven years old.25 The process of being chosen could occasion fear and upset; Nabila Sulimana, who worked as a teacher before entering politics, remembers a general sense among children that going to school was a punishment, sending them away from their friends and family. Mothers in particular appear to have reinforced this sense of victimhood, since they, in Sulimana’s recollections, most strongly resisted losing their children to the ‘white men’.26 Tampouri Mahama remembers that British officials ‘snatched me’ and sent him to school, after ordering people in his community to ‘come forth with children’.27 A chief’s or a community’s recalcitrance clearly affected the children’s perception of the experience. Salifu Assani recalls chiefs trying to avoid sending their own sons or the sons of their favourite wife, because they ‘would not like [their] most beloved wife’s child to be beaten’. With this sort of concern, it is not surprizing that, when he was chosen despite being the son of one of the chief’s favourite wives, Assani told them that he did not want to go.28 This fear and reluctance reflects children’s own sense of their belonging within their communities and families. They appear to have thought little of the Government official pulling them away from their families, but rather interpreted their experience as one in which various adults in their communities singled them out for some reason, which was not always terribly clear. This initial contact, whether a source of pride or disappointment, marked a child as different from his or her peers, evidenced by how the Sisala called schoolchildren ‘white man’s child’.29 Leaving home and travelling to a boarding school,   President John Mahama wrote of how his great-grandfather faced direct pressure from the District Commissioner to send a boy to school, or he would be removed from power. Mahama, My First Coup d’Etat, p. 29. For more on being chosen, see Thomas, ‘Education in Northern Ghana’, 429–30. 25   Several of the men and women I interviewed in Walewale recalled the manoeuver of reaching the hand over the head, and generally performed it in response to my question of when they began school. Nabila Sulimana, interview by the author, Walewale, October 24, 2010; Poura Barijesira, interview by the author, Walewale, 28 October 2010; Salifu Assani, interview by the author, Walewale, 25 October 2010. Rahinatu Braimah recalled that the first time her father tried to send her to school, her hand did not reach over her head, but her father insisted on sending her because her brothers were too old. Rahinatu Braimah, interview by the author, Walewale, 28 October 2010. 26   Nabila Sulimana interview. 27   Tampouri Mahama, interview by the author, Walewale, 24 October 2010. 28   Salifu Assani interview. 29  Grindal, Growing Up in Two Worlds, p. 74. 24

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whether for primary or middle school, both literally and metaphorically increased separation. Fear and hardship often accompanied the journey to school, though the characterizations of these travails vary in adults’ recollections. Gorillas and monkeys frightened children as they travelled, as did various ‘evil spirits’ who tried to lure unsuspecting children off the path.30 In his autobiography, current President of Ghana John Mahama describes his father’s description of walking the 200 kilometres (125 miles) from his home in Bole to the school in Salaga. Because Mahama’s father and the other children on the journey were so young and the distance so far, officers from the Gold Coast constabulary accompanied them, an experience, Mahama suggests, that elicited great fear because of the officers’ seemingly absolute power. Demonstrating the dangers of the road, his father also related an incident when they encountered several lions and had to hide in a tree overnight to wait for the lions to disperse.31 Whether these memories reflect the childhood experience is difficult, given the passage of time as well as a common tendency for adults to view their childhood experiences as sources of strength and character. Yet the physical journey to school, whatever the experience of it, began the transformation that educational migrants underwent. Joining up with others who, likewise, were distant from their own people, children found a common ground that helped to trigger the new community identity schools fostered.

Mixing In schools, children from across the Northern Territories encountered others who spoke different languages and had different cultures. In addition, many teachers in northern schools came from Ashanti and the coast.32 Other than interactions with returning migrant labourers, these teachers may have given children their first experience as ‘northerners’, distinct from those from other areas of the colony, particularly as these southern teachers spoke no northern languages.33 For children who travelled into Ashanti or the Colony, the contrast between home and school was even more pronounced, but even in northern   Tampouri Mahama remembers an evil spirit who was said to take the form of a hand holding out a container, trying to get cakes and other food from passers-by. Tampouri Mahama interview. Even local schools dealt with students’ fears, as children ‘easily have visions of ghosts and wild animals when using narrow paths when the grass is high’. Report on Fumbisi NA Day School, December 28, 1948, PRAAD-Tamale NRG 3/17/6. 31  Mahama, My First Coup d’Etat, pp. 30–32. 32  This was a constant source of frustration and anxiety for colonial officials who feared ‘contamination’ by teachers from outside the Northern Territories. Director of Education Gerald Power, ‘Suggestions Regarding Educational Policy in the Northern Territories,’ May 1933, PRAAD-Accra CSO 18/1/102; also Thomas, ‘Education in Northern Ghana’, 429. 33   Starting in the 1920s, Governor Guggisberg mandated training of northern teachers in part because they could speak local languages. Thomas, ‘Education in Northern Ghana’, 446. 30

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schools, children encountered peers who spoke other languages and in some cases came from very different communities. This context of intermixing with others far from home in the culturally unique environment of the school defines the educational migrant experience. This context is also what made the educational migrant such a challenge for colonial officials, especially those concerned that schooling would ‘detribalize’ Africans in general and northerners in particular.34 Educational policies in the Northern Territories consistently reflected a colonial desire to keep northerners in the north for their education and after graduation, where they could and, according to officials, should find employment either in the administration or as teachers. It appears that relatively few children under the age of 16 years travelled south for school. Most of the ‘boys’ whom the colonial administration sent south to training colleges, and after 1927, to Achimota, were at least teenagers, probably over the age of 16 years.35 Younger children, between the ages of about six and 12, stayed in the north. And until the early 1930s and the creation of Native Authorities, few students travelled extremely long distances by contemporary standards, simply because the administrative structure did not exist to compel it and chiefs remained resistant. Nonetheless, early evidence suggests that even in the first few decades of northern schooling, educational migration did impact students. In the Tamale school, for example, the roll in 1913 included 43 Dagombas, five Gonjas and 10 children of southerners working for the Government. These statistics give insight into a diverse and significantly migrant student body. The Dagomba live in the area around Tamale, but given the emphasis on educating sons of chiefs, many students would not have originated in the city itself. Likewise, the Gonja live in the region just south of the Dagomba, and would have travelled to Tamale. These, added to 10 southerners and the other 13 students from, presumably, other northern groups, created a schooling environment in which at least well over one-third of the student body was not local. Since the Tamale school did not have boarding facilities until 1924, students without families local to the school had to find employment as houseboys and render services to 34   Many colonial schemes tried to keep rural youth out of cities where they could ‘fall under the sway of political agitators’. One such programme was the Boy Scouts; troops were supposed to make rural life seem ‘more appealing and exciting’. Timothy Parsons, Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa (Athens, OH, 2004), pp. 33–4, 68. Despite these efforts, school became for some a vehicle for moving beyond clan and ethnic identity; see Sandra Greene, ‘In the Mix: Women and Ethnicity among the Anlo-Ewe’, in Nugent and Lentz, Ethnicity in Ghana, pp. 43–44. 35  Ladouceur, Chiefs and Politicians, pp. 50, 52. The colonial use of the word ‘boy’ to refer to African males in general blurs the age distinction the word otherwise suggests, but the attendance of these youth at training and technical colleges leads to this conclusion. Achimota, which began as a Government-run teacher and technical training college in 1924, officially opened in 1927 as the premier training college and secondary school in the colony. See Cati Coe, ‘Educating an African Leadership: Achimota and the Teaching of African Culture in the Gold Coast’, Africa Today 49(3) (2002), 23–44.

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hosts in return for housing and food.36 This domestic service may have given them common ground with their fellow migrants. The diversity of the student body would have also meant that while in school, students would have needed to find a shared language, probably English and perhaps Hausa, and would have played with and heard stories from other children with very different backgrounds. The presence of southern children particularly concerned administrators, suggesting that they recognized the interactions taking place in schools even if these observations overemphasized ‘detribalization’. In 1929, for example, a group of District Commissioners in the north determined that the boys who travelled from primary schools in Wa and Gambaga to the senior primary (middle) school in Tamale were ‘detribalized and thrown among strange people just at the time when they ought to be learning their own native customs’.37 Nevertheless, Tamale remained the only middle school in the region.38 By the 1930s, fears of the destabilizing effects of young men going south for teacher training, or of southern parents sending their children to Tamale for a ‘cheap education’, led the Government to transfer management of many of their schools to the newly established Native Authorities. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Native Authorities opened many more schools in local districts.39 Yet the Government still wanted to maintain a standard benchmark and control post-primary education, and continued to run the school in Tamale, where ‘boys could come from every district to be trained for service in the Native Administration’.40 New boarding departments in schools during the 1920s facilitated further diversification of the student body.41 Many of the adults I interviewed lived at boarding schools for primary and/or middle school, and their recollections reveal how the diversity among students affected learning, work and play. Administrators designed schools that reflected an odd mix of British boarding   R. Bagulo Bening, A History of Education in Northern Ghana 1907–1976 (Accra, 1990), p. 14.   Report on a Northern Province Political Conference, 1929, cited in Thomas, ‘Education in Northern Ghana’, 451. 38  The Tamale Senior Primary School opened in 1927. It was the only such school in the Northern Territories until 1947, when the first Native Authority Middle School opened in Kete Krachi ‘to appease the people who were agitating for succession from the Northern Territories to join either Ashanti or the Southern Section of Togoland because of neglect’. Bening, A History of Education in Northern Ghana, p. 52. 39   Thomas, ‘Education in Northern Ghana’, 456–57. The Native Authority Ordinance of 1932, which formally introduced indirect rule into the region, empowered chiefs or ruling groups to issue rules, try cases, collect taxes and administer schools, all under the aegis of the Colonial state. Martin Staniland, The Lions of Dagbon: Political Change in Northern Ghana (New York, 1975), pp. 86–101. 40   Letter from Chief Commissioner of the Northern Territories (Duncan-Johnstone) to Colonial Secretary, October 14, 1932, PRAAD-Accra CSO 18/2/6. Duncan-Johnstone reported that of the 128 pupils at Tamale, 85 were from the Northern Territories, 69 of whom were Dagombas and Gonjas, meaning that 16 travelled from other parts of the North and a further 43 came from elsewhere. 41   Thomas, ‘Education in Northern Ghana’, 440. The first boarding department opened in 1923 at the primary school in Wa. Bening, A History of Education in Northern Ghana, pp. 14–15. 36 37

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school traditions – such as prefects and dormitories – as well as colonial modifications of local traditional practices, such as the use of housing compounds and attempts to reinforce local political hierarchies.42 Prefects in each compound enforced discipline and directed the younger children in chores.43 In many districts, compound names reflected political subdivisions of the local Native Authority.44 Despite attempts to reinforce their ‘local’ identity in diverse schools, children played together regularly. Rahinatu Braimah, one of the few girls in school during the 1940s and 1950s, attended her local primary school in Wungu until she gained acceptance into Tamale Middle Boarding school, over 100 kilometres (60 miles) away. At Tamale, she remembers that ‘we were mixed with all types of tribes’, including children from the south. This mixing even existed in individual compounds, where she shared living space with Frafras, Kusasis, Walas, Dagartis and Mamprusis. With such a diverse population, students spoke English or Hausa with one another and worked together to clean their compound and dining hall, and attend classes.45 She enjoyed being with the girls in school, a recollection that suggests bonds of friendship that formed across ethnic and regional identities even while it may also reflect a post-colonial regional nationalism.46 Even the smaller, local schools hosted diverse student bodies. A report on the Gambaga Native Authority School from 1938, for example, identified nine different ethnic affiliations among 82 students, including one child from Accra.47 Poura Barijesira, who also attended the Girls’ Middle School in Tamale, adds to this diverse picture with her recollection of special entertainment in school, mostly dancing, in which students performed songs and ‘tribal dances’ from their particular regions.48 Her class of girls admitted to the Middle School for January 1953 included children from nine different regional schools, relatively evenly dispersed, and she remembers playing with them all.49 Schools also sought to reinforce local histories, incorporating even the migrant students into re-enactments, such as the performance at the Wala Native Authority 42   Schools were supposed to foster respect for ‘native rulers, institutions, etc.’ Ladouceur, Chiefs and Politicians, p. 59. 43   Alhaji Tia Adjei, interview by the author, Walewale, 25 October 2010. 44   Thomas, ‘Education in Northern Ghana’, 448, 459. See also F. M. Bourret, Ghana: The Road to Independence, 1919–1957 (Stanford, CA, 1960), pp. 99–100. 45   This is a similar observation to that which Jean Rouche found in his 1956 study of migration. Hausa was common, as well as pidgin English, which migrants learned within a few months. One may assume that children picked it up a new language more quickly. Jean Rouch, ‘Migrations au Ghana’, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 26(1–2) (1956), 162. 46   Rahinatu Braimah interview. 47  Mostly Mamprusi, large populations of Frafras, Bimobas and Kusasi also populated the school. Report on the Gambaga NA school, inspected November 10, 1938, PRAAD-Tamale NRG 3/17/6. 48   Poura Barijesira interview. 49  Letter from Assistant Director of Education, Northern Territories, November 1952, PRAAD-Tamale NRG 3/17/9.

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School in 1938 of a popular story about Baderi, the local trickster figure.50 Thus even as schools reinforced distinctions, such as through these performances that highlighted distinct traditions, proximity and shared living spaces meant that children regularly transcended ethnic and linguistic divisions in everyday activities.

School Life In other ways, schools encouraged broader regional affiliations, distinguishing northerners from other Ghanaians and northern students from those in the south. Clothing particularly marked this distinction.51 Whereas in the south, school uniforms of shirts and shorts or long trousers differentiated schoolchildren from their peers, in the north, the colonial administration forbade students from wearing ‘white’ clothing. Boarding schools provided free uniforms (usually via Native Authorities), which consisted of cloths, smocks and undershorts, so that students would dress ‘like our fathers and brothers … in the North, you had no right to wear shorts or khaki shorts and white shirts’.52 As a visible manifestation of regional discrimination in education policy, northern nationalists in the post-colonial era emphasized clothes as a powerful indicator of the British Government’s efforts to hold back northern development. Alhaji Tia Adjei, who took an active role in political movements as an adult, suggested that school clothes reflected the tension between students’ own perceptions of themselves as different and school policies limiting their choices and mobility. When I asked him if the students wanted to wear khakis, he responded that ‘we wanted it but we could not; we were deprived from it. If we do that we would look like the whites.’ He even connected these clothes to the influence of southern urban areas, where northern students were discouraged from travelling: ‘We were not even allowed to cross Yeji to Kumasi or Accra … if we went there and we saw how our black friends were dressing, when we come back, we would change and also dress like the whites.’53 This regionalism probably developed after his school days, though on-going north–south migration would have given students the opportunity to learn of distinctions as children. In 1948, for example, a group of older students in the Tamale Training College refused to wear the smock  Wilks, Wa and the Wala, p. 30.   Patrick Harries argues that dress, food and other forms of consumption, as well as songs, beliefs and so on, are central to tracing the creation of identities, particularly among migrants. See Patrick Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1680–1910 (Portsmouth, NH, 1994), p. xvii. 52   Alhaji Tia Adjei interview. Clothing, in fact, became a central complaint of the Northern People’s Party, of which Tia Adjei was an active member and organizer. See also Ladouceur, Chiefs and Politicians, p. 59. 53   Alhaji Tia Adjei interview. 50 51

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and came to school in Western-style trousers and shirts to announce their self-fashioned identities as students.54 Despite these cases, it is unclear how younger students thought of their clothes; for some, the free clothing may have felt like ‘an honour’, especially when they could show off their new outfits at home.55 Food also marked schoolchildren, for, even though many of the dishes they ate were ‘traditional’ meals, both the regimented nature of mealtime and the shared experience of pilfering from neighbouring farms created bonds. Even as adults, those who attended school during the colonial era remembered the exact time of meals and the rituals associated with washing, saying grace, eating, and the classes, nap-time and play-time that meals helped to mark during the day.56 Mealtimes often did not satisfy the children’s hunger, and stealing from farms was common. Tampouri Mahama remembers neighbouring adults viewing schoolchildren ‘like animals’ for the way they scavenged food from farms, especially groundnuts, but even animals such as goats and sheep.57 Schools had their own farms, where students grew yams, corn, groundnuts and assorted vegetables for the school.58 Though children at home farmed as well, in schools students learned new methods and used extra produce as a source of income for new equipment. Farming was work, but also a chance to play, where boys and girls mingled and could find a bit of freedom beyond the watchful eyes of teachers and prefects.59 The watchful eyes of teachers and prefects saw a lot, and discipline remains a defining memory for nearly everyone in Ghana over a certain age about their own days in school. Yet even the sometimes heavy hands of prefects, and the many chores students performed every day, helped to instil a sense of community. Children performed many chores as part of a group, and like the experience on the school farms, could turn it into a game. Time has also healed some of the wounds: one interviewee told me that ‘even though [the discipline] bothered me at the time, now I see it helped me’.60 Certainly, children’s lessons learned at school all contributed to their emerging identity as educated, migrant youth, an association that occasional trips home heightened.   Teachers also organized a group protest of the smock, and had to issue a formal apology in order to retain their jobs. See PRAAD-Tamale NRG 8/9/19. 55   Nabila Sulimana interview. 56   Tampouri Mahama interview. 57   Ibid. Poura Barijesira also recalled that school meals were insufficient and not very good, leading to theft from farms. She remembers several occasions when she and her friends were chased away by the farmer. Poura Barijesira interview. 58   Views of this farm work vary. One man even said that the children’s familiarity with farming from their own homes, along with the knowledge that what they grew provided their meals, meant that it ‘did not disturb us at all’, whereas another called outside work ‘a standing block for some of us; we wanted to be in the classroom to learn’. Alhaji Tia Adjei interview and Salifu Assani interview. 59   Rahinatu Braimah interview. 60   Salifu Assani interview. 54

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Going Home Vacation periods often reinforced educational migrants’ identity as distinct from their peers, both for those too far from home to return regularly, and for those who found different treatment at home relative to their unschooled friends and siblings. Some boarding schools kept children from distant communities at the school during breaks, where they ‘were just to hang around in the school compounds’, presumably playing games and performing regular chores together.61 For others, returning home could be An Event, when others ‘looked at you – as what? – as God’, especially when ‘you started speaking languages they couldn’t understand, like English’.62 Language was only one marker of difference; after all the school lessons in hygiene, one interviewee remembered that ‘physically they would see that you were cleaner than the house people’.63 Like other memories, this sense of cleanliness may spring from later experiences, particularly since many community development programmes after the 1950s emphasized hygiene and even provided classes in soap making.64 Some returning students found that they received special treatment from parents, but for most, adults treated them ‘like any other child’, requiring household chores and responsibilities commensurate with age, gender and ability.65 Meyer Fortes’ work among the Talensi contributes to this picture of the dual position that returning schoolchildren occupied. An anthropologist working in the upper north-east of colonial Ghana in the mid-1930s, Fortes wrote extensively about Talensi children’s development and education. During his fieldwork, he introduced paper and crayons to the children in the village, and encouraged them to draw, though most had never done so before. Around six children from the village were home from the boarding school in Gambaga, and Fortes observed them closely alongside their peers. Though he remarked on a few distinct differences between school children and non-school children, he nonetheless concluded that returning students ‘reverted completely to traditional habits’ and saw the world ‘in no way differently from their “bush” brothers and cousins’.66 The Talensi children’s drawings, however, belie this notion of ‘complete reversion’, and speak to a fundamental transformation in how the students related to authority figures (particularly   Tampouri Mahama interview. Another interviewee remembered that while it was nice to go home and see her family, she also enjoyed staying at school during breaks because ‘it was fun’. Rahinatu Braimah interview. 62   Alhaji Tia Adjei interview. 63   Salifu Assani interview. 64   Poura Barijesira interview. 65   Salifu Assani interview. 66   Meyer Fortes, ‘Tallensi children’s drawings’, in Barbara Lloyd and John Gay, eds, Universals of Human Thought: Some African Evidence (New York, 1981), pp. 63–64. 61

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of the book.

Figure 1  Drawing by an unschooled boy, age 8 years Meyer Fortes’ papers, Cambridge University Library, GBR/0012/MS Add.8405, Box 15

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of the book.

Figure 2  Drawing of a black car by Deaha, age 9 or 10 years Meyer Fortes’ papers, Cambridge University Library, GBR/0012/MS Add.8405, Box 15

the white-skinned Fortes), assigned tasks and drawing – an activity included in schools. The drawings in Figures 1 and 2 below illustrate this distinction. By children of roughly the same age, the images reflect fundamental differences. In the first, by an unschooled eight year-old, what Fortes

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labelled ‘haphazard squiggles’ fill the page, with a seemingly random subject choice, orientation to the viewer and application of colour. The long line along the top bears the label ‘palm tree’, and along the right-hand side there appear to be stick-figure humans. Fortes’ observations of unschooled children remarked on their eager application to the task, for which their culture had no precedent, and their relative inattention to their peers or to his suggestions of subject matter.67 The drawing in Figure 2 offers a stark contrast to that of Figure 1. One of about a half-dozen boys at home from the boarding school in Gambaga, this 9 or 10-year-old boy, Deaha, drew an easily-recognizable image of a driver in a car with a flag on its hood, a spare tyre on its rear bumper and a running board along the bottom of its frame. Deaha’s image is clearly framed within the paper, appearing against a blank background. Fortes himself called students’ drawings ‘conventional classroom drawings’, comparing them to those found in British primary schools ‘fifty years ago’. Moreover, schoolchildren approached the task itself with ‘strenuous application’, as if ‘they had not fully mastered the skill required for the task’.68 Schoolchildren also proved far more receptive to Fortes’ suggestions, drawing whatever he proposed. He concluded that schoolchildren had learned different ways of relating ‘concepts to a flat surface’, though he insisted that they saw the world the same way as their unschooled peers.69 These drawings, along with Fortes’ own observations, strongly suggest that even though many of these educational migrants remained closely attached to their home communities, and perhaps while at home behaved and were treated no different from other children, they also shared key distinguishing characteristics that marked them as different. This difference extended from how they engaged with the pencil and paper to their ideas of images they wanted to or could draw. However, their identification with ‘home’ could remain strong, as studies of ethnic identity in Northern Ghana demonstrate, despite these distinctions and despite many migrants not returning. Likewise, the formation of communities in urban areas along ethnic lines, which simultaneously linked migrants to their regional origins and gave them a sense of shared identity in new areas, demonstrate how identities based on shared difference developed within broader categories of belonging.70

  Ibid., pp. 48, 52.   Ibid., 64. 69   Meyer Fortes, ‘Children’s Drawings among the Tallensi’, Africa, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1940), 294. 70  Deborah Pellow, Landlords and Lodgers: Socio-Spatial Organization in an Accra Community (Chicago, 2002); Deborah Pellow, ‘Internal Transmigrants: A Dagomba Diaspora’, American Ethnologist 38(1) (2011), 132–47. Rouch found migrants from the same communities living together and even reproducing social hierarchies and inter-group rivalries. Rouch, ‘Migrations au Ghana’, 152, 158–9. 67

68

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The Educational Migrant Experience The educational migrant experience started with selection and travel, developed in boarding schools where children lived, worked, played and learned alongside others from diverse backgrounds, and culminated when they returned home. As the earlier examples indicate, the return home met with varying degrees of acceptance and differentiation, as literacy increased schoolchildren’s responsibilities but did not necessarily excuse them from regular chores or exclude them from play with other children. The official view, however, emphasized the differences: the District Commissioner of Kusasi wrote that communities he worked with viewed a child who had attended school in Tamale as ‘merely “another parasite from the hill [!]”’, whose ‘destiny seems to be bound up with the whims of strangers’.71 The adults whom I interviewed all recalled their parents’ pride in their schooling – quite possibly a construction based on their later successes and an endorsement of education as representative of progress. Their stories of their schools and the lessons they shared may have indeed been welcomed and encouraged by their friends and families, but for government officials, concerns about ‘detribalization’ painted all returning migrants as potential disruptors. Responding to the ‘problem’ of educational migrants, government administrators placed pressure on Native Authorities to open more local schools, and in the early 1950s they actively supported new primary day schools across the region in an effort to address the volume of educational migration. The number of schools across the Northern Territories jumped from 83 in 1950 (out of 2,999 across the entire colony) to 219 (out of 4,702) at independence in 1957.72 Demand remained inconsistent, however, and, with no sense of irony, in 1951 one official suggested that if some Native Authorities could not fill their schools, they should admit students from other areas that would then reimburse this ‘host’ school.73 The expansion of Native Authority schools came at the primary level, meaning that students who wished to progress further continued to migrate. Many middle schools thus remained highly diverse and student pursuing higher education continued to travel south. In an evaluation of the ethnic representation in schools drawn from a survey of secondary education taken in 1961, the State School in Tamale boasted the most ethnic groups found in any secondary school across newly independent Ghana. Fifty-one students in the fifth form included no fewer than 16 different ethnicities, the largest of which, Dagarti, was 71   Letter from the DC of Kusasi to the DCs of the Northern Territories, November 6, 1940, PRAAD-Tamale NRG 3/17/9. 72   Philip Foster, Education and Social Change in Ghana (Chicago, IL, 1965), pp. 117, 187. Only 5 per cent of school-aged children attended school in 1950, up to almost 12 per cent in 1960. 73   Letter from Acting District Commissioner to SDC, Gambaga, June 4, 1951, PRAAD-Tamale NRG 3/17/1.

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not even local to the school.74 Only 13 per cent of students came from the local district, though nearly 90 per cent came from the Northern Territories.75 The experience of educational migration, which heightened during the 1930s and took off in the 1940s, clearly continued even as educational facilities expanded during the 1950s.

Conclusion The children who passed through schools in the Northern Territories went on to become their region’s first political leaders under self-government and then national independence.76 United by a shared sense of bitterness occasioned by the lack of colonial investment in the region and common perceptions of the north as a backwater, these leaders drew on their experiences in the schools as they articulated claims and demands on infrastructural growth and development, and continued to use educational connections to unite diasporic communities across the country.77 Yet these adult experiences, central to the social and political history of the North, should not lead us to see childhood experiences only as part of a developmental process leading towards adult action and behaviour.78 Children in schools came largely from the families of chiefs, but could not have envisioned their future roles as nationalists. Even their self-identified sense of leadership is unclear. What does clearly emerge from the historical record is how these children’s experiences as educational migrants informed their relationships with language, ethnic differences, unschooled peers and family members and their own self-presentation. Furthermore, we can see a clear sense of community among these children, who, together away from home and in a setting unfamiliar to their families, found common bonds through the routine work, classes and games that constituted the school. 74   The Native Authority school and the schools in Tamale explicitly promoted cohesion of the Lawra Confederacy, a political creation uniting the 10 ‘native states’ of the Lawra District in the North Western Province. Lentz, ‘Contested Identities’, 144, 148. 75  Foster, Education and Social Change in Ghana, p. 237. 76   Schools ‘thoroughly socialized’ the future political elite of Northwestern Ghana ‘into the new political geography’, connecting school experiences to future roles as teachers, clerks, and, eventually, divisional chiefs. Lentz, ‘Contested Identities’, 148. See also Paul Ladouceur, Chiefs and Politicians, p. 52, and Staniland, The Lions of Dagbon, p. 106. 77   For example, Mumuni Bawumia, an NPP organizer from Mampurugu, worked between the House of Chiefs and the government. Mumuni Bawumia, A Life in the Political History of Ghana (Accra, 2004). 78   I differ in approach from Hélène Charton-Bigot, and Whittaker and Hayer, who focus on the formation of communal identity among children in elite secondary schools in Kenya and South Sudan respectively to argue that these children became politically-motivated adults based on their experiences of diversity within the student body. Hélène Charton-Bigot, ‘Colonial Youth at the Crossroads: Fifteen Alliance “Boys”’, in Andrew Burton and Hélène Charton-Bigot, eds, Generations Past: Youth in East African History (Athens, OH, 2010), pp. 86, 88; Whittaker with Hayer, this volume, Chapter 9.

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Recalling his years as a student, one man fondly noted how school ‘brought us together as a family’, creating new bonds and relationships among children from different places who shared this unique experience of education and migration.79 As much as they represented learning and discipline, schools provided a space for fun, where children played with peers from many different places, finding common ground in their shared experience of the school. Organized games put children together on teams to play netball, hockey and football.80 Illicit trips to neighbouring farms united children as petty thieves. Unpleasant chores, such as the nightly emptying of the chamber pot, created a shared sense of hardship.81 Speaking English or Hausa, dressing in school-provided outfits, helping each other with lessons: these activities bridged ethnic divisions and facilitated the creation of a new identity for these children, who were marked not only as migrants but as educated migrants. Educational migrants shared much in common with labour migrants and with other schoolchildren. However, this particular intersection of identities offers an alternative insight into childhood experiences of the colonial institution of the school, highlighting how distance from home impacted identity formation among a select group of children.   Alhaji Tia Adjei interview.   Ibid. Football in particular was ‘very popular’, and, according to one report, ‘our small boys are now excellent players’. Report on Mamprusi NA School, Gambaga, Jan–Dec 1939, PRAAD-Tamale NRG 3/17/9. 81   Tampouri Mahama interview. 79

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8

India–South Africa Mobilities in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

Minors, Immigration Encounters in Cape Town & Becoming South African

Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie

In 2012, a retired Professor of History who has done much to document the movement of indentured and free Indian immigrants from India to South Africa,1 completed a short memoir for his friends and family. In it, Surendra Bhana provides an account of the first eight years of his life in the small village of Sisodra (in contemporary Gujarat), before he set sail with his mother, father and young sister to South Africa in 1948.2 Bhana presents a carefree experience of village life, of encounters with cobras, playful games with mates, journeys to weddings by bullock carts and of being indulged as the only son in the family. He recalls walks to his mother’s nearby village, Moldera, where there was an extensive family of uncles. A bullock-operated oil presser dominated the centre of the house for the uncles were door to door oil sellers. Bhana knew his father was in Johannesburg, South Africa running a tailoring business. He writes: ‘The folks around me talked a lot about South Africa. I don’t remember much except that my father was there, and that one day he would come to take me to that country.’3 His father eventually came to attend his elder daughter’s wedding and to take his wife and two younger children to South Africa. ‘My father was determined to take me along. You had no future in India, he used to say to me.’ 4 The boy was excited about this journey by ship from Bombay to Delagoa Bay (now Maputo, in Mozambique). From there, they crossed the Komatipoort border into South Africa and boarded the train to Pretoria. The subsequent narrative is devoted to his experiences of learning English and Afrikaans, going to school, finding friends among the Gujarati caste group to which the family belonged, part-time work collecting customers’ laundry for an uncle’s business in Johannesburg, normal adolescent escapades, and the start of a career after completing a degree at the University of the Witwatersrand. We are also provided with a vivid sense of the roughness of life in the poorer districts of Johannesburg. 1   See for example, Surendra Bhana and Joy. B. Brain, Setting Down Roots: Indian Migrants in South Africa, 1860–1911 (Johannesburg, 1990) and Surendra Bhana, Indentured Indian Emigrants to Natal 1860–1902: A Study Based on Ships’ Lists (New Delhi, 1991). 2   Surendra Bhana, ‘Klap Hom Someone Should: It’s Me Suryo’ (unpublished, privately held, 2012). 3   Ibid., chapter 2. 4   Ibid.

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The literature on the Indian diaspora has tended to focus primarily on the movements of various classes of migrants (merchants and workers), their trade and work conditions, political and labour struggles to improve their condition in the new society, relations with the homeland and religious and cultural activities.5 South African historians have covered similar themes6 and the experiences of child immigrants, as recounted in Bhana’s memoir, have largely been ignored. We know just a little about children who came under the indentured system from India to the colony of Natal between 1860 and 1911 when the system ended. Of the 152,184 Indians recorded on the shipping lists of the indentured, 13 per cent were children travelling with parents. We know that children accompanied their indentured mothers to the fields on the sugar estates and often lay unprotected from the elements until a law compelled employers to put up shelters.7 Many also remained in the barracks being cared for by other women and those off shift. Once children turned 10 years, they joined weeding gangs and did other small work. The Natal Government Railways employed children to help with mail, deliver messages and collect tickets.8 Apart from indentured immigration, Indians also paid their own passage to South Africa. To deal with this category of immigrants, legislation, both in the independent colonies of Natal, Transvaal and the Cape and later in the Union of South Africa (formed in 1910), driven by the anti-Indian sentiments of white settlers, effectively prevented new immigration from the Indian sub-continent.9 However, Indians already settled in the country could bring in their wives and minor children (those under 16 years). Historians have not been interested in these arrivals. This chapter focuses on minors (children and adolescents) who came to Cape Town. It firstly, draws on the immigration archives for the port of Cape Town and highlights encounters with officialdom which 5   For the most comprehensive account of work on the Indian diaspora see Brij V. Lal, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora (Singapore, 2006). 6  See for instance, Bhana and Brain, Setting Down Roots; Bridglal Pachai, The International Aspects of the South African Indian Question, 1860–1971 (Cape Town, 1971); Bridglal Pachai, ed., South Africa’s Indians: The Evolution of a Minority (Washington, DC, 1979); Anthony J. Arkin, Karl P. Magyar and Gerald J. Pillay, eds, The Indian South Africans: A Contemporary Profile (Pinetown, 1989); Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, From Cane Fields to Freedom: A Chronicle of Indian South African Life (Cape Town, 2000); Surendra Bhana and Goolam Vahed, The Making of a Political Reformer: Gandhi in South Africa, 1893–1914 (New Delhi, 2005). 7   Jo Beall, ‘Women Under Indenture in Natal’, in Surendra Bhana, ed., Essays on Indentured Indians in Natal (Leeds,1991), p. 105. 8   See Dhupelia-Mesthrie, From Cane Fields to Freedom, p. 10; Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie and Candy Malherbe, Not Slave, Not Free (Pietermaritzburg, 1992), pp. 52–55. 9   In Natal this was in 1897 and in the Cape Colony 1902. In the Transvaal after the South African War (1899–1902) permits were issued to those whose rights could be proved. The Immigrants Regulation Act of 1913 was the key Union of South Africa law whose regulations prohibited new Indian immigration. See Bhana and Brain, Setting Down Roots, pp. 131, 139 and 142; Sally Perbedy, Selecting Immigrants; National Identity and South Africa’s Immigration Policies, 1910–2008 (Johannesburg, 2009), pp. 47–48.

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were aimed at establishing their rights to enter. It thus contributes to a growing new literature which focuses on immigration encounters and bureaucratic procedures.10 The archival sources cover the first two decades of the twentieth century and are focused on bureaucratic concerns about young boys and girls from India. The chapter additionally draws on oral histories of six individuals (four male, two female) who came to Cape Town as minors in subsequent decades. Five other interviewees also discussed their fathers’ arrival as minors.11 These oral histories provide a different angle on immigration by pointing to experiences of departures and the making of new lives. Adrian Hadland has reflected on the importance of childhood in the making of identity and its almost ‘magical’ qualities yet simultaneously he points to its ‘elusive’ nature. He highlights author John Coetzee’s reflections on his first memory of childhood: ‘It is a magnificent first memory … but is it true?’12 The oral histories recounted here took the shape of full life histories, of which childhood formed a portion of interview time. They represent adult reflections on childhood experiences and are thus memories mediated by time. However, they provide insights which the archives cannot. The oral history methodology is informed by Alessandro Portelli who argues the case for making subjectivities a subject matter of history and understanding why stories are told in the way they are told.13 These accounts are valuable and under-represented in the literature. Immigrants to Cape Town came from small towns and villages in what is today Gujarat and Maharashtra, and some came from the Punjab. They sought to escape a basic agricultural subsistence economy, growing rice or fishing. Some were artisans, such as shoemakers, in small towns. While in Natal and the Transvaal early merchants had had extensive branches and transcontinental interests, in Cape Town, businesses were modest – general dealers, butchers, shoe-repair shops. Many started off as hawkers or worked as shop assistants and there were many more who worked in factories, for the city council and in menial jobs. Most left their wives and children in India and only when, after decades, they were more established economically did they send for their children.14 Unlike Natal, where there was a large Indian popu  See Adam M. McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York, 2008); Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Document (Oxford, 2010); Andrew MacDonald, ‘Colonial Trespassers in the Making of South Africa’s International Borders, 1900 to c. 1950’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2012); Jonathan.E. Klaaren, ‘Migrating to Citizenship: Mobility, Law, and Nationality in South Africa, 1897–1937’ (Ph.D diss., Yale University, 2004). 11   This work is part of a bigger project on a history of Indians in Cape Town for which I conducted 78 oral history interviews. All interviewees granted permission for the use of their names. For archival sources I have used first names only to protect the identity of the subjects. 12   Adrian Hadland, Childhood: South Africans Recall their Past (Johannesburg, 2005), pp. 1–5. 13   Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (New York, 1991), pp. 50–53. 14   See Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, ‘The Passenger Indian as Worker: Indian Immigrants in Cape Town in the Early Twentieth Century’, African Studies 68(1) (2009), 111–34. 10

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lation, Indians in the Cape constituted a significant minority,15 in 1904 making up just 0.3 per cent of the colony’s population.16 In the first half of the twentieth century in Cape Town, instead of forming ethnic conclaves, they were dispersed through neighbourhoods that were inter-racially mixed. This chapter will show that in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the arrival of ‘bogus sons’, mainly teenagers, constituted a significant issue for immigration authorities. Immigration encounters could be bruising. Younger children, from the 1920s onwards, were accompanied by their mothers and new processes lightened interrogations at the port. The experiences of teenagers, who almost always went into the world of work, differs from the younger children, who went to school. Schooling, as shown in Chapter 7 by Ferrell and Chapter 9 by Whittaker with Hayer, had an important role in identity formation. The younger children, discussed in this chapter, became more quickly South Africanized, than the older ones. Neighbourhoods also played a significant role in the making of new identities.

‘Bogus Sons’ and Child Brides Prior to the Immigration Act of 1902 of the Cape Colony, few immigration controls existed. This changed when the Immigration Act introduced categories of prohibited persons – those unable to support themselves, the morally reprehensible (prostitutes, pimps and criminals), lunatics, those unable to write in a European language and those not possessing £20 on entry. The effect of the latter two provisions was to exclude not only new immigrants from India but also the European poor without job prospects.17 Although their numbers were small, the fear of settler society was that, unless steps were taken to exclude Indians, their numbers would grow. Indians had already been excluded from Natal by a writing test in 1897, and the expectation was that immigrants denied entry there would enter the Cape ports.18 The Immigration Department, established in 1904 and taking charge of controlling entry into the Cape ports, oversaw exclusions. After 1902, minor children and the wives of Indian men already permitted to live and work in the Cape could enter but few wives came in the early 1900s. The preferred pattern of migration from the Indian sub-continent was male (the Indian population of Cape Town was, for instance, 97 per cent male in 1904).19 In addition, migration was circular – there were 15   In 1911 there were only 6,606 Indians in the Cape compared to 133,031 in Natal (see Bhana, Setting Down Roots, p. 194). 16   G19-1905, Results of a Census of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope as on the Night of Sunday the 17 April 1904 (Cape Town: Government Printers), pp. xxi, xxvii. 17   Dhupelia-Mesthrie, ‘The Passenger Indian as Worker’, 118. 18   Ibid., 117. 19   G19-1905, Results of a Census of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope 1904, pp. 68–69.

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cycles of outward migration and returns to India to the family village.20 Young boys from India were the main new entrants. The diary entries of the Chief Immigration Officer in Cape Town, Clarence Wilfred Cousins, point to the arrivals of young boys from India as presenting difficulties: 20 February 1912: Very busy day taking statements from Indians as to their ‘minor sons’. Exposed 4 pretty bad cases and hope to be rid of them. 13 March 1912: Busy all day till late in evening with cases of Indian boys – most intricate.21

His work involved establishing the rights of these boys to enter, verifying relationships and ensuring the boys were aged under 16 years.22 Similar problems were experienced in Durban in Natal, as well as at the borders of the Transvaal. Cousins, who, later that year, was temporarily on duty in Durban, provides a more detailed account of his work experiences. Twice yesterday morning I have had a most strenuous time of it. The monthly British Indian boat arrived with about fifty Indians claiming to land here. The enquiry into each claim … requires patience and persistence … So far I seem to have ‘bowled out’ about 10 of them. One is a youth of about 20 years bringing a Magistrate’s certificate from India that he is 12 years! … A so-called father produced a boy of 10 years – but as his wife had never been here, and as he lived here for 14 years continuously and only went back to India 4 years ago, he found me unbelieving. Can you wonder? And so the thing goes on in intricate and bewildering falsehoods, making it almost impossible to get at the truth. 23

The extent of trouble was out of proportion to the actual small numbers involved. In 1908, for instance, there were only 115 new Asian (this includes Indians) immigrants landed at the Cape Colony’s ports, and the total number of minors of all races was 957.24 In 1912 out of a total of 11,990 new passengers landing in the Cape, 103 were British Asians (mostly Indian).25 Between 1904 and 1912, 369 Indians 20   See Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 3, 6. The idea was to earn money and return to the village and not to leave permanently. According to Markovits, as many as 90 per cent of departures from India between 1830 and 1950 fell in this category. 21   Diary for 1912, Clarence Wilfred Cousins Papers BC 1154 A4.2.1, University of Cape Town Libraries, Manuscript Division (hereafter UCT). 22   In 1906 the age was reduced from 21 to 16 years. 23   Diary for 1912, entry 7 August, Cousins Papers, BC 1154, A4.1.2, UCT. 24   G.6-1909, Report of the Chief Immigration Officer of the Cape Colony for the year ending 31st December 1908, 2. Reports are sometimes inconsistent in the use of categories for quantitative purposes. The term Asian included Chinese and Indian; British Asian would have referred mainly to Indians from India. 25   Report of the Chief Immigration Officer for Cape of Good Hope for 1912, Department of Interior (hereafter, BNS), 1/1/595, 1/129 vol. 1. National Archives of South Africa (Pretoria).

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were prohibited and deported.26 The following section seeks to explain why the entry of young boys became an issue and the nature of immigration encounters for a young boy from India on arrival at Cape Town. The extended family was of significance to Indians. While the law allowed only children of Indians with rights in the colony to enter, Indians wished to bring in cousins, nephews and younger brothers. The Immigration Department displayed little sympathy for the stories that resident Indians told about destitute brothers and relatives. For instance, Haroon wanted to bring his 12-year-old brother Adam after both parents had died. Although the Immigration Officer, Cousins, recognized that ‘the request is reasonable; the boy is young and his brother here is his nearest surviving relative’, yet he did not recommend to the colonial secretary the application of some discretionary concession, preferring to stick to the letter of the law.27 Cousins confessed: ‘I have consistently refused applications from Indians to bring their brothers to this country’.28 Consequently, Indians, as will be seen, resorted to creating fictive father and son relationships. Resident Indian shop-owners also preferred shop assistants who spoke their own language and came from the same villages back home. Their pleas to have shop assistants enter the country under temporary contracts were turned down.29 Shop-owners then resorted to gaining entry for fictive minor sons. As one Indian politician publicly confessed ‘90 percent [of sons] are bogus … if you allow people to come in as servants … nobody will try to bring in bogus children’.30 The 1902 Immigration Act specified the age of minors as under 21 years, but in 1906 when the specified age of a minor was reduced to 16 years, with the express purpose of reducing the number of incoming shop assistants,31 this resulted in very young boys arriving to work for shop-owners under the pretext of being someone’s son. Exclusionary legislation was, arguably, therefore part of the problem of illegal entries faced by the Immigration Department. The life of a shop assistant was a tough one – young boys worked to pay back the shop-owner for their fare and, as the immigration officer noted, they were literally under ‘indenture’.32 Thus the law itself placed these children in an even more vulnerable position. The Immigration Department sought to establish the truth about relationships and ages when minors arrived. Rodet and Razy (see Intro26   Ibid., Annual Reports of the Chief Immigration Officer of the Cape of Good Hope, 1910 to 1912. 27   Cousins to Under Colonial Secretary, 21 January 1909, Interior Regional Director (hereafter IRC) 1/1/185 4360a, Western Cape Archives and Records Services, Cape Town (hereafter, WCA). 28   Cousins to Acting Secretary of Interior, 5 January 1911, IRC 1/1/105 2584a, WCA. 29   SC16-1908, Report of the Select Committee on Asiatic Grievances (Cape Town, Government Printers), petition of the South African Indian Association, p. iii. 30   C1-09, Cape of Good Hope: Report of the Select Committees on the Immigration Department, 1907–09 (Cape Town, Government Printers), pp. 126–8. 31  See SC 16-1908, Report of the Select Committee on Asiatic Grievances, p. 110. 32   Ibid.

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duction) raise the question of ‘the moral panics’ that could ensue from the uncontrolled presence of homeless children in colonial societies. One might argue that Cape officials may have been concerned with preventing the entry of young boys who, unsupervised in the colony, might create social problems. There were, indeed, a few such examples. Ebrahim initially joined his father at the age of 14 years but he was soon left to his own devices after his father returned to India. Ebrahim took to a life of petty crime. The officer of the Criminal Investigation Department noted: ‘he has no fixed abode but is in the habit of residing with various Indians for two or three days at a time. He usually commits some petty offence at the places he stays at and then promptly moves to another place.’33 Despite these occasionally documented reports, the central reasons governing the attitude to young boys were to prevent the entry of shop assistants and to enforce an Act which discouraged immigration from India. In the early years, the Immigration Department utilized relatively unsophisticated methods to verify details. In the absence of birth certificates, which were not customary in India,34 officials relied on sworn statements from the father and fellow villagers in Cape Town.35 Narratives of family histories were also taken independently from the son and father. Any inconsistencies could lead to a refusal to land the minor.36 Questions included details about siblings, uncles and aunts and grandparents. Cousins also acknowledged the importance of an immigration officer’s ‘instinct’.37 The checking of narratives had drawbacks, as individuals came prepared. Allie, a general dealer in Cape Town seeking to bring the young boy Shaik Dawood as his son in 1906, sent him a preparatory letter to assist with the questioning.38 My dear brother Shaik Dawood, I have been interrogated here in the office and you are to repeat what I have written to you in this letter when asked by any body on the steamer or in port. If any body were to ask you if you have any relation in your native place you are to reply to him in the negative. When he asks you with whom you are staying you should reply to him with your aunt by name Latifa. When he asks you to the name of your father you are to reply to him that he is called Allie. If he were to tell you to identify your father you are to point a finger towards me, and I will tell him that you are my son. When he asks you when your father came to Cape Town you are to reply ‘seven years ago’. What is the calling of your father? You are to say that he owns a shop here. You are to answer these questions boldly not to fear anything.   F. Prescott to Inspector-in-Charge, 26 October 1909, IRC 1/1/216 4991a, WCA.   See Ravindran Gopinath, ‘Identity Registration in India during and after the Raj’, in Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter, eds, Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History (Oxford, 2012), pp. 299–322. 35   See application of Jamal, 8 April 1907, IRC 1/1/109 2689a, WCA. 36   Fakir was denied entry in 1905 because he said he had no brothers while his father indicated he had two sons. See file of Fakir, IRC 1/1/35 791a, WCA. 37   Lecture given at St Andrew’s Guild, 1917, Cousins Papers BC 1154 E5.2, UCT. 38   The following account is drawn from file of Shaik Dawood, IRC 1/1/32 741a, WCA. 33

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At the end of the letter, he provided, in tabulated form, the questions and answers. This letter was found by the Protector of Emigrants at Bombay – perhaps the boy dropped it? A translation was sent on to the South African immigration officials and officers were on the alert for the boy’s arrival. Shaik Dawood first recited his prepared history but, after being ‘cautioned’, he confessed that Allie was not his father. A fellow Indian came forward to assist Allie and the boy by testifying that Allie and the boy’s father, Ahmed, a blind widower, were brothers and Allie was responsible for the family’s welfare. This held no sway and Shaik Dawood was deported on 22 December 1906. When the ship docked at the next port, Port Elizabeth, en route to India, Shaik Dawood, taking advantage of several lapses in security, escaped and disappeared into the world of the undocumented migrant. From 1908 onwards, the Department insisted that Indians seeking to bring in their children should have a magistrate in India complete a form certifying the relationship between father and child and the age of the child. In addition, thumbprints of the child were to be affixed.39 This certificate did not necessarily ease an arrival. With some justification, officials distrusted the document from India, especially if signed by an Indian junior magistrate.40 Oral histories and confessions of interrogated minors point to the relative ease with which these certificates were acquired.41 Ferrell (Chapter 7) has pointed to the methods colonial officials used to ascertain whether children were six or seven in Ghana in order to select them for schooling. Cape immigration officials, distrusting the age provided on the certificate from India, relied on doctors to establish that the child was under 16 years of age. Yet the medical evidence was inconclusive. As Cousins remarked, officials ‘could get opinions in plenty, but it is extremely difficult to get any definite disproof’.42 The records do not provide us with the details of the examination of the young boys by doctors behind the closed doors or the emotional distress of the boys. Doctors looked at the extent of facial hair and ascertained the attaining of puberty. Two cases out of hundreds of immigration files, reveal that x-rays were taken to ascertain ages. The skeletal growth and bone age revealed on these x-rays were used to calculate age with key markers being the closing of the ephiphysis (bone ends) and elbow joints. In the one case in 1910, the x-ray disproved claims while the other in 1938 went in the boy’s favour.43 One oral interviewee explained how her   See form of certificate of Mahomed, 1910, IRC 1/1/22 516a, UCT. A later requirement was for photographs to be attached. 40   SC 16-1908, Report of Select Committee on Asiatic Grievances, 112, 115. 41   Dr Allie Hoosain Mahate, interview by author, Cape Town, 17 December 2009; see also confession of Ibrahim in 1913, IRC 1/1/274 6043a, WCA. 42   SC 16-1908, Report of Select Committee on Asiatic Grievances, pp. 108,114. 43  See file of Hoosain Baba, Report of government bacteriologist, 7 July 1910, IRC 1/1/22 516a, WCA, and file of Isham Shaboodien, Report of government pathologist, 6 June 1938, IRC 1/1/112 2763a, WCA. 39

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father sent in her younger brother for an x-ray in place of the boy who needed to be screened.44 After the formation of the Union of South Africa, the Immigration Regulation Act of 1913 rendered all Indians as prohibited immigrants but like the previous legislation of the Cape, also allowed for the entry of wives and minor children. Processes however became more rigorous: a Department of Interior (D.I.) 91 certificate, with a photograph and thumbprints affixed, was issued prior to the departure from India of a minor or a wife. South African and Indian officials communicated directly with each other to ensure the completion of the form, thus ending the process whereby individuals chose their own officials. The new processes led to some fictive relationships being uncovered and prevented these minors from setting sail.45 Between the 1920s and 1940s, the Indian Government also co-operated to verify identities and ages. A village enquiry was held where villagers and the applicants were summoned to answer questions.46 In 1927 the South African Government also required that minors had to be accompanied by their mothers thus hoping to pre-empt the arrival of so-called sons. This had the effect of influencing the Indian household in South Africa and led to a more settled population as mothers and their sons and daughters entered in greater numbers.47 In the 1920s and 1930s, extracts from birth registers in India were supplied,48 pointing to greater compliance with registration in India. Yet as Dr Allie Mahate, a knowledgeable community historian in Cape Town, points out, systems could be defeated. Men with rights in South Africa registered new-born relatives in India as their children.49 The D.I.91 process, however, did remove some of the tensions at the port, and many of the older systems, such as getting fellow villagers resident in Cape Town to testify, and the inquisition about family histories, fell away. Minors who entered under fictive identities remained at the mercy of those who knew their true identities. In 1911 12-year-old Adam successfully entered as the son of Shaboodien, after passing the family history test. He was fingerprinted since from that year the Department had begun taking 10-finger impressions of Indians arriving at South African ports. His new life in Cape Town was suddenly disrupted as a fellow Indian reported him to the authorities for being Shaboodien’s nephew and disclosed his true name as Ismail now living with his   Damyanti Chagan, interview by the author, 9 April 2010.   See file of Suliman Rawhwood, District Magistrate at Alibag to Principal Immigration Officer, 7 July 1926, IRC 1/1/102 2519a, WCA. 46  See Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, ‘The Form, the Permit and the Photograph: An Archive of Mobility between India and South Africa’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 46(6) (2011), 657–8. 47   See U. Dhupelia-Mesthrie, ‘Split-Households: Indian Wives, Cape Town Husbands and Immigration Laws, 1900s to 1940s’, South African Historical Journal 66,4 (2014) for a fuller explanation of this. 48   See extract from the birth register of Bodali village, 1913, IRC 1/1/36 806a, WCA. 49   Mahate, interview with author, 17 December 2009. 44 45

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brother in Cape Town. Adam alias Ismail and his brother were both deported. On departure, Adam’s fingerprints were once more taken, the Department ensuring that Adam/Ismail could not come in under another alias.50 Systems were now much tighter than when Shaik Dawood was deported. Over a decade after his deportation, Adam alias Ismail hankered, unsuccessfully, for a return to Cape Town.51 Fourteen-year-old Cassim also passed the immigration officer’s questioning with a correct recitation of family history in 1912. He also had a certificate (with his thumbprints) from the District Magistrate of Janjira certifying his relationship to his father, Hassan. Cousins deemed this to be a ‘perfectly straightforward case’. Yet, three years later, Abdurahman, came forward to testify. ‘I knew this person in India. He is a youth and his real name is Gaffoor. His father is Omar. Omar is now in India and has never been to South Africa’. ‘Cassim’ was deported within a month of this disclosure.52 Business quarrels or jealousies motivated individuals to act on the spur of the moment and turn against fellow Indians. Some regretted their disclosures but the damage was done. Goolam, for example, was deported after an individual reported him. Attempts by the individual to later retract his testimony did not work. The 12-year-old was held in a detention centre before boarding a ship back to India.53 The archives do not reveal what emotions Goolam felt but one can guess the trauma involved. It is easy to portray these young boys, who essentially came to work, as victims of shop-owners, immigration officers and informers. Many, however, beat the system,54 established working lives in Cape Town, and escaped poverty in the village back home. It took some bravado to lie in immigration encounters and to leave the village with an invented biography. Young girls aged under 16 years, also came under scrutiny as revealed in the Immigration Officer, Cousins’ diary entry of 26 March 1913: We have had great scenes of tears and great lamentations in the Office this week over an Indian bringing along his ‘wife’. She was shrouded from head to foot and I suspected this man of bringing in a boy. I asked Dr Jane Waterstone … to see her – and found that the wife was a girl child and Dr Waterstone’s indignation was great.55   File of Adam, IRC 1/1/289 6243a, WCA.   Ismail to Commissioner of Immigration and Asiatic Affairs, 20 August 1928, IRC 1/1/289 6243a, WCA. He wrongly believed that a condonation scheme offered to illegals in the country would also apply to him. 52   See file of Cassim, IRC 1/1/237 5375a, WCA. 53   File of Goolam, IRC 1/1/203 4754a, WCA. 54   These are revealed in the condonation schemes of 1915–1916 and 1928. Officials pardoned entries on condition of full disclosure of illegal entry. See Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, ‘Cat and Mouse Games: The State, Indians in the Cape and the Permit System, 1900s–1920s’, in Ilsen About, James Brown and Gayle Lonergan, eds, Identification and Registration Practices in Transnational Perspective: People, Papers and Practices (London, 2013 ), p. 191. 55   Diary for 1913, Cousins Papers, BC 1154 A4.1.3, UCT. 50 51

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He was not overly paranoid in imagining a boy behind the robes; in Durban there had been such cases.56 Cousins observed that, according to Cape law, no child marriage could be recognized. There was also more to this case: the man was suspected of polygamy with another wife in India and also in Cape Town. On those grounds alone, he would not have been allowed to introduce another wife. ‘I bundled the girl home again and the howlings and cryings of the man – who is an unmitigated humbug was something remarkable’. We know little about how the young girl felt for this was the least of the officer’s concern. Just 10 months previously she had become a bride, now she was fingerprinted, questioned and subjected to a medical examination. Waterstone recorded she was ‘scarcely of the age of puberty – quite a child – if anything less than fifteen years’. The girl returned to India with her husband’s cousin and seven months later gave birth to a baby boy. Eight years later, no longer a minor, she returned to Cape Town, her husband having sorted out his accounts of his previous marriages.57 Many Muslims and Hindus were pledged to marry as young as eight with marriages consummated on attaining puberty. Several teenage girls entered the country with manipulated documents indicating they were over 16 years. An interview with Lakshmi Gihwala, who came to Cape Town as a bride in 1941 reveals that she was in fact 15 years old but her documents had been altered to reflect her older sister’s birth details.58 Magan Lalloo, who had spent most of his childhood in South Africa and returned to India to marry, also casually informed me that he had had his wife’s details altered in Navsari after paying 200 rupees to an agent.59 Oral histories while confirming official suspicions about Indian documents, also point to Indian disregard for the law and its age prescriptions. Oral histories, as the next section reveals, also provide additional insights into child immigration that the official archive cannot and one enters the realm of feeling, emotion and experience.

Becoming South Africans Archival sources do not tell us of what lives the children left behind in India or their journeys to South Africa, for officials were not interested in this. If there is a voice it is the translated voice in the interrogation room about specific details pertaining to immigration rights or confessions of fraud. If there is a haunting image it is that of the deported minor. My interviewees included Moosa Kaprey who was born in 1943 in Sangameshwar in the Konkan area of the current state of Maha56   Andrew MacDonald, ‘Strangers in a Strange Land: Undesirables and Border Controls in Colonial Durban, 1897–c.1910’ (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, 2007), 141. 57   File of Ahmed, IRC 1/1/282 6134a, WCA. 58   Lakshmi Gihwala, interview by the author, 13 September 2007. 59   Magan Lalloo, interview by the author, 23 November 1996.

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rashtra and who came to Cape Town when he was aged seven years; 60 Rauf Khan who was born in 1937 in Kalusta, Maharashtra and who came to Cape Town at the age of 12 years; 61 Natver Patel who was born in 1933 in Haldharu, a small village near Surat in Gujarat, who came when he was six years old; 62 Lakshmi Gihwala who came from Surat in 1941 when she was 15 years; 63Rukshmani Lalloo who was born in 1930 in a small village, Athan, near Navsari in Gujarat and who came when she was 15 years; 64 and Magan Lalloo who was born in 1920 in Nadod in Navsari District, Gujarat and came to Cape Town when he was three years of age.65 These interviews are supplemented by other interviewees who spoke about their father’s arrival as children. From these histories, we gain a peek into village life, the journey across the sea and adaptation to the new environment in Africa. As with the memoir of Bhana, there is a common narrative of absent fathers and being brought up by mothers, uncles and aunts. Moosa recalls that rice was the main crop in his village. The river also provided fish for their daily need. Rauf remembers mango trees surrounding his house and that rice was planted for subsistence. He points to the importance of remittances from Cape Town where his father had a general dealer’s shop. Their home was much bigger than that of fellow villagers. Unlike the young boys who travelled in the early 1900s, Moosa travelled with both parents as did Natver. The brides, Lakshmi and Ruskhmani, travelled with their husbands. Rauf’s story is a little different – he travelled alone as his father had died and he came to live with an uncle and aunt. He could not recall any difficulties about his paperwork, nor a difficult entry.66 Natver provides a vivid account of travelling as a deck passenger during war time for they left in 1939. At nightfall mattresses were rolled out on the deck and tarpaulins were pulled over them. There was no talking and no smoking – the dangers of being sunk by the enemy were ever present. Lakshmi also travelled in the war period and remembers the journey taking 40 days, almost twice the normal time. She had become used to her husband and in-laws as they had stayed in Surat for three years. She expressed no anxiety about leaving Surat for Cape Town – she knew that was what daughters had to do once they married. Another sister had also travelled far afield. On the boat, she found companionship with other young girls also bound for the Cape ports. Their mobility was curtailed because of cultural conventions – young girls could not explore the ship given the presence of male crew.   Moosa Kaprey, interview by the author, 13 January 2010.   Rauf Khan, interview by the author, 21 December 2009. 62   Natver Patel, interview by the author, 16 January 2010. 63   Lakshmi Gihwala , interview by the author, 13 September 2007. 64   Rukshmani Lalloo, interview by the author, 23 November 1996. 65   Magan Lalloo, interview by the author, 23 November 1996. 66   He most likely came in as his uncle’s son. 60 61

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From the interview with both Rukshmani and her husband, Magan, we get an idea of what it must have meant to leave from a very remote village. She wore shoes for the first time, travelled to the city of Bombay for the first time from whence the ship set sail. On arrival in Durban, Magan purchased a dress for her to wear. Then came the train journey to Cape Town. Unlike the earlier years, most passengers for Cape Town disembarked at Durban and then took the train to Cape Town. The hardest part of leaving for Rukshmani was saying goodbye to a large family of 11 siblings. Her husband, who had spent most of his life in Cape Town, assisted in her adjustment to Cape Town. For most of these India-born children and teenagers, language was the first big hurdle. They spoke Konkani, Gujarati or Urdu and had to adapt to a society where English and Afrikaans were spoken. As Ferrell shows in Chapter 7, in such situations children felt their difference keenly. Those who went to school like Rauf and Moosa recollect that it was an ‘embarrassment’ and a ‘big challenge’. It was not only a cultural difference, Rauf had to encounter but he found himself in a standard one class where his school peers were younger by at least four years. This difference was aggravated by his towering height. While he was promoted on the first day to standard two, for the next three years of schooling he had an uncomfortable existence. He recalls the teacher asking him to clean the duster but he understood nothing ‘and the whole class started laughing’. Yet his mathematics was good and he won annual prizes. Even this provoked discomfort. ‘I never went there to pick up my prizes … because I felt embarrassment … I next day would get the books’. Moosa recalls many mishaps as a child stemming from his lack of the local language: There was a cold-drink factory just behind our shop and this person in charge of the factory said something to me and I shook my head and I think what he asked me was if I wanted a job. I never understood him and he took me. And my father they started looking for me. My father found me standing on a box with a baby bottle cleaner you know the baby bottle brush washing the drink bottles … A very primitive sort of operation with the cold-drink factory. They didn’t have a machine in those days … at the time also we had the Jewish church on the opposite side of us and the bus was about to leave the church with all the children and they put me also on the bus thinking that I am also a Jewish child that came to pray. Fortunately my grandmother saw from the shop and she came running out to come and get me.

Rauf’s history provides a glimpse into what may have also been the lives of the young boys of the earlier period who came as shop assistants. He went to live with his uncle and aunt in the town of Kimberley. He had known his aunt in India and she had been very loving and he expected the same when he joined her in South Africa. Instead life was hard: ‘If you haven’t got parents that time you get exploited unfortu-

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nately’. After school, Rauf served in the shop and once he completed standard four, he worked full-time. ‘It was Sunday to Sunday … six to eleven … sometime paid sometime not paid’. He then decided to run away. He took £75 from the till and left a note for his uncle in Urdu. On arrival in Cape Town, he obtained a job as a shop assistant. Much later he opened his own business and paid back the stolen money. His memory of his teenage years are about hardship and struggle. There is little doubt that children who came without mothers, which was customary before 1927, had a harder life than others. One interviewee recalled leaving his mother behind when he was aged only nine years. He remembers the ‘sign’ his mother made to him as the boat left and recalls that she gave him two cushions one for his head and one to put his leg on. The second cushion was taken by the elder with whom he travelled.67 This might seem like a small point but it was important enough for him to relate in his older years. Fatima Allie’s father came to Cape Town, aged eight, soon after his mother died in India. He helped in his father’s general dealer’s store. He later related stories to his children of how he had to wash his own clothing and sleep on the shop-counter since they could not afford beds. Sleep was disturbed as bread was delivered to the store by horse-cart late at night.68 Moosa’s adjustment was much easier. He had a loving home with both parents and there was also his father’s eldest brother’s family. The children of the two households grew up as siblings. Given that Indians did not live in ethnic enclaves, he had a diverse upbringing and drew on the traditions and customs of surrounding neighbours. He remembers being inducted into Christian ways. At Easter he entered the nearby church ‘and opened and closed my mouth as the people sang hymns’. The reward was a chocolate at the end. He and others like him, developed friends among the local coloured69 children and their identities became crucially linked to these neighbourhoods. Magan Lalloo, for instance, pointed out to me that his life was linked with the suburb of Claremont, where he went to school, assisted his dad with shoe deliveries after school and opened up his own shoe shop. Thus while school may be regarded as important to identity formation, this chapter also suggests that neighbourhoods played an important role for young Indian children and these localities became important identity markers. Moosa points to many new experiences that contrasted with village life. In India he was not accustomed to electricity nor had he access to any mirrors. He explains ‘we lived in very primitive surroundings’. He tells a story of how his father once told him in Cape Town to put off the light. 67  From Zohra Dawood, ‘Making a Community: Indians in Cape Town, circa 1900–1980s’ (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Cape Town, 1993), 13 (interviewed by Dawood in 1989). 68   Fatima Allie, interview by the author, 21 December 2009. 69   Coloured refers here to those descendants of slaves of various mixed descent and also others who were the product of inter-racial marriages. It also refers to state classification of such people as Coloured.

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Minors, Immigration in Cape Town & Becoming South African 173 And we had no electricity in India so how do we put off the light. So in India we used to, of course, blow the lamp when we want to put off the light. I stood at the bottom and I started blowing at the bulb. Obviously the light wouldn’t go off. So I got a chair and I stood on the chair and I started blowing and the light still wouldn’t get off. I got off again and I went to fetch a towel and I tried to wave the towel shaking the towel in front of the bulb so that the light could go off and that’s how my father found me. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘No, I’m putting off the light’.

Moosa left school after standard four and became a street photographer. In the 1980s and 1990s, both he and Khan played a significant part in the township protests that ripped through South Africa and secured leading roles in the civic and anti-apartheid organizations. From a boy from Sangemeshwar, who lacked knowledge of basics, he became an astute fighter in the liberation struggle. The memory of not knowing how to put off a light has acquired significance in his telling of his life, and has to be read alongside his recounting of his life as an activist. Several interviewees who spoke about their father’s arrivals as minors from India point to how those who were teenagers tended not to go to school and went directly into the family businesses. Baber Chavda left his village Gadat in 1920 when he was 13 years old and worked in his father’s shoe-repair store. He returned to India after about six years and was reunited with his wife to whom he was betrothed when he was 10 and she eight years. He returned in 1927 with Ganga and his infant son and thereafter five children were born in Cape Town.70 Chiba Jeram came to Cape Town in 1940 aged 14 years with his mother and two brothers. He assisted in his father’s fruit store. In just over a decade, Chiba owned a cinema and extensive property, reflecting the success of a young boy who came from a poor village called Bodali.71 Kassen Jaga who joined his father in Cape Town when he was six years old, only went to school for four years before going full-time in his father’s shoe-repair shop. Over the years he too became a major landowner while continuing a successful shoe business.72 Immigration was a means to upward mobility for many of these young arrivals. From oral histories, unlike the official archive, it is far easier to discern acts of agency, adaptation and socio-economic mobility. The stories of Moosa Kaprey and Rauf Khan, two village boys from India, who went on to be part of the major transformation of the South African political landscape in their adult life are stories of commitment to the new land to which they had come as boys.

  Damyanti Chagan, interview by the author, 9 April 2010.   Kanti Patel, interview by the author, 13 January 2010. 72   Bhadra Jaga and Gunwant Jaga, interview by the author, 17 April 2010. 70

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Conclusion This chapter has drawn on the private papers of an immigration officer, the official archives of the Immigration Department, an unpublished memoir, and interviews. The archives reveal immigration encounters and show how, despite their small numbers, Indian minors arriving at the port presented a challenge to authorities. Immigration records point to difficult entries. There were young teenagers who went through some trauma because of shop-keepers’ demand for shop assistants, yet they sought to escape village life in India. Those deemed over 16 years or with an uncovered fictive relationship had the gates shut to them. Interrogations, medical examinations, detentions, prohibitions and deportations are the subject of the archives. The oral histories of a later period do not reflect difficult immigration entries. They do, however, point to a crucial difference in understandings about age from the society they entered and the law which regulated their entry. Regarded as children in South African law, young girls were ready to be wives and parents adjusted their ages on forms. Oral histories bear similarity to Bhana’s memoir. Children went to school or to work in the family business, made friends, developed new local identities linked to their neighbourhoods and became South Africans in their outlook with India receding – but not altogether. Bhana’s father’s comment, ‘you had no future in India’,73 resonates in these stories of upward mobility, which was only made possible by an Indian Ocean crossing.   Bhana, ‘Klap Hom’, chapter 2.

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9

Education, Migration & Nationalism

Mapping the School Days of the First Generation of Southern Sudanese Nationalist Leaders, c. 1948–1972

Hannah Whittaker with Harjyot Hayer

On 9 July 2011, South Sudan became the world’s newest country, the culmination of a long campaign for self-determination, which drew a line under nearly half a century of civil wars between an Arab and African developed North and a predominantly African and underdeveloped South. From a structural perspective, the conflicts between northern and southern Sudan were predictable. When Sudan gained independence on 1 January 1956, the southern portion of the country lacked social and economic development, and the Sudanese state was largely absent from the region. The size and geography of the territory also favoured irregular warfare, and neighbouring countries were able to provide sanctuary for the rebels.1 This set the stage for the beginnings of the southern insurgency, which was led by a school-educated southern elite.2 Among those who first joined the southern resistance was Joseph Lagu, alumnus of Rumbek Secondary School (RSS), southern Sudan’s premier educational institution.3 This chapter tells the story of RSS, which moulded the first generation of southern Sudanese nationalist leaders, individuals like Joseph Lagu, who joined the southern resistance during the first civil war.4 The connections between education and elite formation in colonial Africa are well established.5 As with elsewhere in Africa, missionaries first introduced Western-style education to the Sudan, mainly to boys 1   Øystein H. Rolandsen, ‘The Making of the Anya-Nya Insurgency in the Southern Sudan, 1961–64’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 5 (2011), 212. 2   Douglas Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars (Oxford, 2003), pp. 30–31. 3   H. L. Stevens, ‘Rumbek Secondary School’, August 1989, 779/2/1–6, Sudan Archive (SAD), Durham. 4   Cherry Leonardi, ‘Liberation or Capture: Youth in between “Hakuma” and “Home” during the Civil War and Its Aftermath in Southern Sudan’, African Affairs 106(424) (2007), 237. 5   See Carol Summers, Colonial Lessons: Africans’ education in Southern Rhodesia, 1918–1940 (Oxford, 2002); Heather Sharkey, Living With Colonialism: Nationalism and Education in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (Berkeley, CA, 2003); David Sandgren, Mau Mau’s Children: The Making of Kenya’s Postcolonial Elite (Madison, WI, 2012); Grace Bunyi, ‘Constructing Elites in Kenya: Implications for Classroom Language Practices in Africa’, in Marylin Martin-Jones, Anne-Marie De Mejia and Nancy Hornberger, eds, Discourse and Education: Encyclopedia of Language and Education, vol. 3 (New York, 2008), pp. 899–909; Magnus Bassey, ‘Higher Education and the Rise of Early Political Elites in Africa’, Review of Higher Education in Africa 1(1) (2009), 30–38.

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in order to secure conversion.6 This type of education provision dovetailed with colonial administrations’ needs for a small group of indigenous administrative officials, and was therefore promoted by colonial states.7 More often than not, those who went to school were taught in English (or in another European vernacular), the language of the white colonial officials, and they were recognized by other Africans as powerful.8 As Carol Summers reminds us, schools created and reinforced an African elite of middlemen within colonial African societies.9 These educated African middlemen got to know colonial institutions as well as African ones, and were therefore able to make demands in a European dominated world.10 It was this group of educated Africans that eventually negotiated the end of colonial rule, or influenced armed liberation struggles.11 In the Sudanese context, Heather Sharkey has already studied the connections between formal education and political and nationalist elites in northern Sudan. Sharkey demonstrates the ways in which Gordon College, the institution that offered the most-advanced secondary education in colonial Sudan, socialized its students, producing a shared culture and a common worldview. Geography lessons helped students imagine place and space; they developed a sense of Sudan as a territorial whole with Khartoum at its centre and, on the playing fields, self-sufficiency and group spirit were promoted.12 By mapping Rumbek’s students’ school days across time and space, this chapter, along with Lacy Ferrell’s contribution in this volume on schooling in northern Ghana,13 likewise demonstrates how the experience of RSS – including the admission system, the curriculum, after-school activities and the movement of its schoolboys across the north/south divide when Rumbek was twice relocated to Khartoum in 1956 and 1961 – contributed to the shaping of ‘southern’ political consciousness. The chapter draws on transcripts of a set of interviews that were conducted with alumni of RSS, all of whom attended at some point between the school’s founding in 1948, and the end of the First Sudanese Civil War in 1972. The interviews were conducted in English by Harjyot Hayer in Rumbek, London and Bradford during 2007. Although the interviews are the reflections of adults on their childhood experiences, which Ferrell has already noted the tendency to be 6  Lilian Passmore Sanderson, ‘Education in the Southern Sudan: the Impact of Government-Missionary-Southern Sudanese Relationships upon the Development of Education during the Condominium Period, 1898–1956’, African Affairs 79(315) (1980), 157. 7  Sandgren, Mau Mau’s Children, pp. xviii–xix. 8   Bunyi, ‘Constructing elites’, 147. 9  Summers, Colonial Lessons, pp. i–ii. 10   Ibid., p. 45. 11  Sandgren, Mau Mau’s Children, p. xix. 12  Sharkey, Living, pp. 8, 42–4. 13   Lacy Ferrell, ‘We Were Mixed with All Types’: Educational Migration in the Northern Territories of Colonial Ghana’, this volume, Chapter 7.

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viewed as sources of strength and character, these transcripts clearly document the transformative impact of education migration. Among those interviewed was Joseph Lagu. Lagu began at Rumbek in 1953, and after graduating in 1958 went on to co-found the Anya-Nya, the military wing of the southern resistance. Other notable classmates of Lagu were Joseph Oduho and William Deng, who together established the Sudan African National Union (SANU), the political wing of the Anya-Nya, in 1962. John Garang, a junior member of the Anya-Nya, and leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) during the Second Sudanese Civil War also attended RSS, as did Abel Alier, who served as the Vice-President of the Sudan between 1971 and 1982, and who played a crucial role in bringing northern and southern representatives together to end the first civil war.14 In 1989, H. L. Stevens, the first science master at Rumbek, described the first generation of boys to pass through RSS as ‘the golden youth of the southern tribes’.15 This chapter shows how the ‘golden youth’ contributed to the establishment of a peer culture at Rumbek that cut across potentially exclusive ethnic, linguistic and religious identities. Southern Sudan is populated by a number of different ethnic, linguistic and religious groups; these include the Dinka, Nuer, Bari, Azande and Shilluk, who embraced a number of traditional religions as well as Catholicism and Protestantism.16 Between 1948 and 1972, RSS produced confident and articulate graduates who were united by a set of common beliefs and experiences, and a sense of being ‘southern’. What is significant about the peer culture that was created by the first cohort of pupils at Rumbek was that, despite attempts by the Sudanese administration to promote national integration, it endured and was passed on to successive generations of schoolboys.

Education in the Southern Sudan and the Establishment of Rumbek Secondary School For the first half of the twentieth century, the provision of education in the southern Sudan was almost entirely the preserve of three missions, the British Church Missionary Society, the American Presbyterian Mission and the Roman Catholic Verona Fathers Mission.17 Missionary schools were required by the colonial administration to teach young boys and girls ‘useful accomplishments’, which did not necessarily include reading and writing.18 Until the establishment of RSS in 1948, there were only primary and intermediate level schools   List of all Pupils of Rumbek, 1949–1954, 779/2/1-6, SAD; Johnson, Root Causes, p. 36.   H. L. Stevens, ‘Rumbek Secondary School’, August 1989, 779/2/1-6, SAD. 16  Johnson, Root Causes. 17   Sanderson, ‘Education in the Southern Sudan’, p. 157. 18   Ibid. 14

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in southern Sudan. If boys wished to progress to secondary school they had to travel to Uganda. Protestant boys went to Nabumali High School in Eastern Uganda, while Catholic boys went to Nyapea College in West Nile District.19 The situation in southern Sudan contrasted sharply with conditions in the North, where elite northern boys attended secondary school at Gordon College, established in 1902 in Khartoum.20 Indeed, the Anglo-Egyptian condominium, which governed Sudan between 1899 and 1955, followed distinct patterns in the North and in the South. As a general rule the South remained on the periphery of central government thinking.21 This is just one of many of the legacies of colonial rule that post-colonial Sudanese governments struggled to overcome. Government attitudes towards education in the southern Sudan began to change in the 1930s. As in other colonies at this time, there was an increasing need for a small cadre of trained junior administrative assistants for government service.22 As such, in close collaboration with the colonial administration, a school run by the Verona Fathers Mission was opened at Wau in 1932, and an academic programme was established there that aimed to prepare the sons of colonial chiefs for jobs as clerks.23 However, when southern and northern representatives met at Juba to discuss the question of the future of the southern Sudan after independence in 1956, it became clear that there was no educated southern political class that was able to take over the southern administration.24 For instance, in 1940, there were 422 ‘out schools’ – the colonial administration described these as ‘little more than centres for religious instruction’, 43 elementary boys’ schools and 19 girls’ schools, and five intermediate schools for boys, including the Verona Fathers’ mission school at Wau. However, at each institution, progress in English-language tuition was reported as ‘slow’.25 It was against this background that the British government decided to open a government-run secondary school for the southern Sudan. Rumbek Secondary School was officially opened in 1949, though it took its first entry of pupils a year earlier, before the construction of the school site was finished.26 As the only secondary school in the southern Sudan, demand for places at Rumbek immediately exceeded those available, and the school introduced an admissions system. Initially, boys were selected on the basis of an interview at Rumbek, and on the recommendation of their previous headmaster. However after a couple   Joseph Lagu, interview by Harjyot Hayer, London, 10 August 2007.  Sharkey, Living, p. 7. 21  Johnson, Root Causes, p. 9. 22   Khartoum to Cairo, 4 June 1932, FO 141/544, National Archives (NA), London, UK; Sanderson, ‘Education in the Southern Sudan’, 163. 23   Khartoum to Cairo, 5 April 1931, FO 141/692/18, NA; Sharkey, Living, p. 22. 24   John Howell, ‘Politics in the Southern Sudan’, African Affairs 72 (1973), pp. 163–4. 25  8th Statistical Report on Education and Administration Policy in Southern Sudan, 1940, FO 371/24634, NA. 26   H. L. Stevens, ‘Rumbek Secondary School’, August 1989, 779/2/1-6, SAD. 19

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of years, an entrance examination was also introduced. Instruction at the school was in English, and the boys were prepared for the Overseas Cambridge School Certificate.27 Because the school took the top boys from every intermediate school, which could be either Catholic or Protestant run, both Catholic and Protestant Chaplains were appointed for the boys’ religious instruction.28 Between 1948 and 1954, RSS was under British administration, and was staffed by a mix of British and Sudanese teachers. The first headmaster was Keith Williams, who was followed by William Critcheon in late 1950 or early 1951.29 On 12 February 1953, the Sudan was granted sovereign status, as part of the Cairo Agreement between the British Ambassador to Egypt, Sir Ralph Stevenson, and the Egyptian Prime Minister, General Muhammed Neguib. This led to the Sudan Self-Government Statute of 1953, and elections to the first Sudanese parliament in Khartoum at the end of the year.30 However, the South was only allotted 22 of 97 seats within the new parliament, and the political elite that was elected for office was overwhelmingly drawn from the northern-dominated National Union Party.31 The new Prime Minister, Ismail el-Azhavi, quickly embarked on a process of Sudanization.32 Northerners were subsequently appointed to all of the senior positions in the southern administration, including at RSS.33 Southern resistance to alien administration was evident throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.34 The gradual increase of northern influence within the southern administration, army, police and schools after 1953, appeared to many southerners as northern domination, and a new form of colonization.35 Widespread discontent in the south resulted in a mutiny of southern soldiers at a garrison in Torit in the summer of 1955. During the mutiny, which quickly spread to other garrisons of southern soldiers, numerous northern administrators were murdered.36 In the aftermath of the mutiny, RSS, along with all the other schools in the southern Sudan, were closed. Rumbek Secondary School remained closed until the new Sudanese administration relocated it to Khartoum in 1956.37 When Sudan gained independence on 1 January 1956, the political   Ibid.   Joseph Lagu interview; H. L. Stevens, ‘Rumbek Secondary School’, August 1989, 779/2/1-6, SAD. 29   H. L. Stevens, ‘Rumbek Secondary School’, August 1989, 779/2/1-6, SAD; Richard Owen, Governor, Wau, to Father, 29 November 1950, 647/2/1-51, SAD. 30   Scopas S. Poggo, The First Sudanese Civil War: Africans, Arabs, and Israelis in the Southern Sudan, 1955–1972 (New York, 2009), p. 34. 31   Ibid. 32   Ibid., p. 35. 33  Johnson, Root Causes, pp. 26–7. 34   Howell, ‘Politics’, 167. 35  Sharkey, Living, pp. 12, 92. 36  Johnson, Root Causes, p. 28. 37   Howell, ‘Politics’, 167–8; H. L. Stevens, ‘Rumbek Secondary School’, August 1989, 779/2/1-6, SAD. 27

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elite that took power were drawn from a privileged group of Arabic-speaking northern Muslims, most of whom were graduates of Gordon College, the institution that offered the most-advanced colonial education in the Sudan.38 According to Sharkey, this preference resulted in the creation of an ethnically specific nationalist elite. At Gordon College, lessons in Arabic literature provided a space for pupils to debate the meaning of Sudanese identity, and Arabic and Islam were both confirmed as pillars of the nation – though it was not clear which brand of Islam would define the state.39 In order to overcome political, religious and ethnic differences in both northern and southern society, Arabization and Islamization were therefore seen by northern politicians as joint vehicles for national integration.40 The low-level insurgency that developed in the south after 1956, and led to the outbreak civil war in 1963, represented an early rejection of the Sudanese national project by southern Sudanese people.41 However, as Douglas Johnson reminds us, given the diversity of the southern region, and the fact that the North was also divided along sectarian and ethnic lines, it is not enough ‘to explain the north–south conflict in simple cultural, ethnic or racial terms’.42 Instead, a ‘southern national’ consciousness had to be made, cultivated and propagated, a process that began in the classrooms of RSS.

Rumbek’s School Days: Acculturation, Peer Culture and Political Activism The opening of RSS in 1949 coincided with the creation of a new Sudanese Legislative Assembly.43 Thirteen southerners, including Siricio Iro, Phileman Majok and Buth Dio were selected by the British to represent the South, and entered into the Legislative Assembly.44 They did not, however, develop any significant political backing from southern regions beyond a few members of their own community, and by participating in national politics, the very first southern political representatives implicitly endorsed a united Sudan.45 In November 1950, the Legislative Assembly passed the first Five-Year Plan for Southern Education (1951–56), which aimed to unify the education systems in northern and southern Sudan.46 It proposed the  Sharkey, Living, p. 9.  Sharkey, Living, pp. 10–11; Johnson, Root Causes, p. 128. 40   Lilian Passmore Sanderson and Neville Sanderson, Education, Religion and Politics in Southern Sudan, 1899–1964 (London, 1981), p. 297. 41  See Øystein H. Rolandsen, ‘A False Start: Between War and Peace in the Southern Sudan, 1956–62’, Journal of African History 52 (2011), 105–23 for a discussion of the outbreak of the war. 42  Johnson, Root Causes, p. 1. 43   Howell, ‘Politics’, p. 164. 44   Ibid. 45   Ibid. 46   Sanderson and Sanderson, Education, Religion and Politics, p. 299. 38 39

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assimilation of methods of teacher training, use of common text books, common syllabuses and the introduction of Arabic to the South, first as a subject and then as the language of instruction.47 However, there were very few trained southern teachers to take up positions at RSS, and northern teachers were reluctant to serve in the South. Rumbek therefore remained predominantly staffed by expatriate teachers.48 Instruction remained in English, and in History lessons, the students learned general European History. By the time that Sudan gained independence, limited progress had been made towards unifying Sudan’s education systems, and the socialization of students at RSS had already begun to make those that attended aware of their being from the South, as well as their elite status within ‘southern’ society. The first way that Rumbek Secondary School socialized its students and contributed to the production of a shared southern identity was through its admissions system. Unlike primary and intermediate level schools in the southern Sudan, which were mission led and took children from immediate vicinity, RSS took students from all over southern Sudan, regardless of religion or ethnicity. Pupils at the school were necessarily migrants – a point that reinforces the centrality of education to childhood migration. Moving between places was a central part of the experience of schooling for all of the graduates of Rumbek. Through such movements, social groups define and redefine themselves, and their relations to others.49 In the northern Ghanaian context Ferrell also describes how education migration helped to forge a new sense of community by ‘joining up’ children from diverse backgrounds.50 Likewise, southern Sudanese boys began their education at primary schools, which were normally located very close to their homes. As there were only five intermediate schools in the southern Sudan, at Loka, Bussere, Atar, Tonj and Okaro, most boys who progressed to this level had to move away from home. They then moved again if they went on to RSS. Of the alumni of Rumbek who were interviewed for this research, all moved away from home to go to their intermediate school. The detail for their intermediate schooling shows that two attended Loka intermediate school, two attended Bussere and five attended Tonj. When the boys moved from home to these schools, they took with them an identity, which was redefined in relation to the other boys that they met there. However, because all of the boys attending a particular school were of the same Christian denomination, this reinforced an already established religious identity. For Joseph Lagu, an Anglican who was brought up in Nimule, a predominantly Catholic area, his father sent him ‘deep into Dinka land’ (an Anglican area) so   Ibid., p. 300.   Joseph Lagu interview. 49  Sharkey, Living, p. 3. 50   Ferrell, this volume, Chapter 7. 47

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that he would retain his Anglican faith.51 When the boys converged on Rumbek, they again redefined themselves and their relations with others. Although there were differences in religion, ethnicity and language, their participation in collective school activities as the ‘students of Rumbek’, meant that this new redefined identity was an inclusive one. Whatever their religion or ethnicity, they were all students of Rumbek, and most importantly, all from southern Sudan. Attending Rumbek was, therefore, the first time that young boys of the south were brought together.52 Classes were mixed, as were school dormitories, and the House system that the school operated (a reflection of the influence of the British public school system on Rumbek) was also open.53 It was only on a Sunday, when the boys went to church, that they were separated along largely arbitrary religious lines.54 For Joseph Lagu, who began at RSS in 1954, being at the school is where he first encountered the notion of ‘southern-ness’, and is his first memory of ‘being’ a southern Sudanese.55 The experience of schooling in the southern Sudan in the early post-independence period was reminiscent of what Benedict Anderson has termed ‘academic pilgrimage’ in the colonial Indonesian context.56 Like southern Sudan, colonial Indonesia was both linguistically and ethnically diverse, but bonding at schools nurtured a shared sense of ‘being’ Indonesian. Young children, or ‘pilgrims’ in Anderson’s formulation, from all across the vast colony journeyed to school where they met other pilgrims from different places – different villages at primary school and different ethno-linguistic groups at middle school.57 For Anderson, the common experience of schools and the competitive comradeship of the classroom helped to forge a sense of the nation.58 Likewise at Rumbek, school trips to places such as Wau, Equatoria, Bahr al-Ghazal, Upper Nile and Juba, developed the boys’ sense of the South as a territorial unit, while at football and athletics meets, held at schools across southern Sudan, Rumbek’s successes confirmed the place of the students within southern society.59 For example, the school football team, established in 1949, quickly earned a reputation for distinction.60 Writing in 1952, the captain of RSS football club boasted that the team had just returned   Joseph Lagu interview.   Joseph Lagu interview. 53   Joseph Lagu interview; William Chut, interview by Harjyot Hayer, Rumbek, 4 April 2007; Aggrey Akec Naar, interview by Harjyot Hayer, Rumbek, 5 April 2007. 54   Joseph Lagu interview. 55   Joseph Lagu interview; H. L. Stevens, ‘Rumbek Secondary School’, August 1989, 779/2/1-6, SAD. 56   Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edn (London, 2006), p. 121. 57   Ibid., pp. 121–22. 58   Ibid., p. 122. 59  Rumbek Secondary School Magazine 1952, pp. 22–5, PK 1528.2 RUM, SAD; Rumbek Secondary School Magazine 1954, p. 48, PK 1528.2 RUM, SAD. 60   Rumbek Secondary School Magazine 1952, p. 22, PK 1528.2 RUM, SAD. 51

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from a tour, ‘victorious as usual. Let no team hope to beat us, because it cannot.’61 Sharkey has already shown how sport at Gordon College cultivated strength and character, while literary and debating societies promoted free thinking among pupils.62 At RSS, students belonged to one of four houses, South, North, East and West that competed in athletics and football competitions. This promoted both self-sufficiency and group spirit. Other clubs and societies run by the boys at the school included a young farmers club, established to provide out-of-doors activity for the boys and to generate interest in farming, a music club, a radio club that had a wireless set bought by subscriptions raised by its members, a photographic society, a scout troop and numerous Christian groups for prayer and bible reading.63 This is not to say that ethnic divisions were forgotten at Rumbek. The nostalgic memories of schoolboy solidarity that pervade the interview transcripts do have to be read in light of divisions that later opened up within the southern resistance.64 There is also a vast literature on the ways in which Africans gave meaning to colonial construction of ethnic identities.65 This was often a complex and contested process that produced various different formulations of what it meant ‘to be’ this or that ethnic group. By participating in school societies, the students at Rumbek participated in the process of ‘imagining’ their ethnicities. Mark Mayool Malek remembers of the dance society that ‘we put on plays in which we would learn the Shilluk dance, the Dinka dance, the Nuer dance’.66 However, through the popularization of cultural ‘traditions’, this was also a process of constructing ‘the nation’. The boys at Rumbek ‘celebrated’ the dances of all the southern peoples. ‘You know, it would not just be the Nuers who would present their dance, it would be all of us as a collective’. 67 This underscores the argument made by Øystein Rolandsen that, from the late 1940s, a regional southern identity started to take root that was different from the Arab-Islamic nationalism of the northern elite, and provided southerners with an identity that transcended their own differences.68 The celebration of the many cultures of southern Sudan present at RSS is reflected in a selection of articles that were published in the school’s magazine. In the first edition, which was published in 1952, there was an article on Zande dance, and an article written by Abel   Rumbek Secondary School Magazine 1952, p. 23, PK 1528.2 RUM, SAD.  Sharkey, Living, pp. 45–7, 53–5. 63  Rumbek Secondary School Magazine 1952, pp. 20–28, PK 1528.2 RUM, SAD; Rumbek Secondary School Magazine 1954, pp. 43–45, PK 1528.2 RUM, SAD. 64   For details see Johnson, Root Causes, p. 32. 65  Terence Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition Revisited’, in Terence Ranger and Olufemi Vaughan, eds, Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-Century Africa: Essays in Honour of A. H. M. Kirk-Green (Basingstoke, 1993), p. 84. 66   Mark Mayool Malek, interview by Harjyot Hayer, Bradford, 9 November 2007. 67   Ibid. 68   Rolandsen, ‘A False Start’, p. 109. 61

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Alier called, ‘the contribution of music and song to the life of my country’.69 In the 1954 edition, after self-government in the Sudan, the magazine included a poem written by a boy named Paskwale Pacoto that describes his country, the ‘Southern Sudan’. The following are the first, second and final stanzas: This dearly beloved grassland of mine, Through which runs the mighty Nile, Is where my heart so firmly dwells; Let’s pause and think of it a while. Binding in the east are ranges of mountains, Far to the north is the hell-hot sand; The swamps have made its field of fountains, The rains in the south an evergreen land. May it please God that her wakening folks, Longing for peace and nearby freedom, And politics their favourite talks, Peacefully have and govern their kingdom.70

The poem both rejects and demonizes the ‘hell-hot’ North, and embraces the geographical diversity of the southern Sudan, expressed by the author’s ‘love’ for ‘[his] land so fair’.71 The process of Sudanization of the education system was sped up after independence. According to Lilian Passmore and Neville Sanderson, there were still very few within the southern Sudan who understood the implications of this process beyond a small number of intermediate and secondary schoolboys, and a few educated school leavers who experienced the effects of a rapid increase in northern Sudanese control over southern education.72 Even so, Rolandsen argues that government policy towards the South after 1956 should have been more conciliatory, but instead served to entrench elite southern resistance to northern rule.73 It is certainly the case that at Rumbek, rather than facilitate national integration, the acceleration of Sudanization bred discontentment. The northern teachers posted to Rumbek to replace the outgoing expatriate staff were ‘experienced but not properly qualified’.74 According to Sanderson and Sanderson, the decline in the standard of schooling thereafter, made the graduates of Rumbek ‘embarrassingly articulate critics of the southern policy’.75 Wada Manyiel Cindut, who   Rumbek Secondary School Magazine 1952, PK 1528.2 RUM, SAD.   Paskwale Pacoto, contribution to Rumbek Secondary School Magazine 1954, PK 1528.2 RUM, SAD. 71   Ibid. 72   Sanderson and Sanderson, Education, Religion and Politics, p. 326. 73   Rolandsen, ‘A False Start’, p. 122. 74   Ibid., p. 333. 75   Ibid. 69

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attended RSS between 1952 and 1958, remembers, ‘with Arabization, the standard dropped sharply – education dropped very sharply, very badly’.76 A number of the other individuals interviewed for this research also argued that the new history that they were taught was too northern biased. Classes began with Turko-Egyptian rule, and then moved to the period of the establishment of an Islamic state in the Sudan called the Mahdiyya, before ending with the period of Anglo-Egyptian rule. However, the northern interpretation of this history differed from the oral historical accounts of southern Sudanese people, as told to the boys by friends and family. The most contentious issues were the period of the Mahdiyya, and the history of slavery.77 With regards to learning Arabic, the problem as the former students of Rumbek remember it, was not that they were learning Arabic, but that the Arabic that they were taught was ‘special Arabic’, and different from the Arabic that was taught in the North. While students in the North were taught Koranic Arabic, those in the South only learned colloquial spoken Arabic.78 The schoolboys believed that this was a conscious policy decision taken by the northern Government to make sure the South remained behind the North.79 A similar sense of forced inferiority was felt by high school students in South Africa, after Afrikaans gradually replaced English as the language of instruction between 1972 and 1976.80 Not only was Afrikaans the language of the oppressor, in the same way as Arabic was for the boys at Rumbek, but for many Africans during the colonial period, English was crucial for social mobility.81 Sudanization at Rumbek also coincided with the school’s first relocation to Khartoum. For the boys at the school, being in Khartoum exposed them to the reality of their position as ‘southerners’ in a northern-dominated Sudan. It became clear that although students of Rumbek were an elite group in southern Sudan, they were marginalized in terms of Sudan as a whole. For one, there was no socialization between the students of Rumbek and their northern counterparts, and the continuation of ‘special Arabic’ lessons at Rumbek served to highlight this differentiation.82 Second, all the ex-students interviewed about their experiences in Khartoum complained of harassment, the use of bad language towards them and name calling while they were out in public.83 For instance, rumours spread among the schoolboys, and their families south of the border, that northern food was poisoned. These were fears and suspicions that appeared to be confirmed by peri  Wada Manyiel Cindut, interview by Harjyot Hayer, Rumbek, 5 April 2007.   William Chut interview; Gabriel Kuc Abiei, interview by Harjyot Hayer, Rumbek, 5 April 2007. 78   William Chut interview. 79   Enoch Manyon Malok, interview by Harjyot Hayer, Rumbek, 6 April 2007. 80   Clive Glaser, ‘“We Must Infiltrate the Tsotsis”: School Politics and Youth Gangs in Soweto, 1968–1976’, Journal of Southern African Studies 24(2) (2008), p. 314. 81   Bunyi, ‘Constructing elites’, p. 147. 82   Aggrey Akec Naar interview. 83   William Chut interview; Wada Mayiel Cindut interview. 76

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odic outbreaks of diarrhoea and dysentery at the school 84 – in fact the consequence, as one former student now admits, of the boys eating unwashed fruit and vegetables.85 Whether these are real memories or whether they are imagined through the prism of the history of North– South relations, the school’s move to Khartoum did result in a deepening of the students suspicions of the North and northerners at the time. Nonetheless, being a student at Rumbek was still a source of pride in the South. Young boys from across southern Sudan were aware of the competition for a place at the school, and knew that only the top students from each intermediate school would be able to compete for a place.86 From these, it was then again only ‘the very best that got in’.87 Such sentiments were reinforced once they started at the school by its surroundings and by the high esteem with which the students of Rumbek were held within the local community.88 The students were respected in particular for their discipline, cultivated through the strict daily routine of Rumbek’s schooldays, and for their appearance.89 Students at Rumbek looked different from other boys. They had a school uniform of khaki shorts and white shirts, which made them look ‘smart’.90 The boys at the school certainly celebrated self-respect and academic achievement among themselves. This is demonstrated by the reputation acquired by William Deng, and the respect that he was shown by his fellow classmates. Deng was nicknamed the ‘Gentleman’ for his smart appearance – it was reported that he parted his hair in the middle and wore long stockings – and for excelling at his schoolwork.91 In his final year at the school, Deng was senior prefect in East House, and was awarded his Cambridge School Certificate in December 1953.92 When placed in the context of clothing culture across the British Empire, the case of RSS stands out. Although Gordon College allowed Western dress during its first decade, by the 1920s, ‘native’ dress had become school uniform, and the boys there were made to wear white cotton robes and turbans.93 This was a reflection of a belief held by colonial officials that the wearing of Western dress by local educated elites threatened the imperial order, which was based upon notions of difference.94 The boys at Rumbek certainly saw their Western clothes   Joseph Lagu interview.   Daniel Dut Mabeny, interview by Harjyot Hayer, Rumbek, 6 April 2007. 86   Joseph Lagu interview; Enoch Manyuon Malek interview; William Chut interview; Christopher Marier Hon, interview by Harjyot Hayer, Rumbek, 5 April 2007. 87   Joseph Lagu interview. 88   Joseph Lagu interview. 89   Aggrey Akec Naar interview. 90   Aggrey Akec Naar interview. 91   Joseph Lagu interview; Wada Manyiel Cindut interview. 92   Rumbek Secondary School Magazine 1954, PK 1528.2 RUM, SAD. 93  Sharkey, Living, p. 49. 94  Sharkey, Living, pp. 47–8; Richard Reid, A History of Modern Africa: 1800 to the Present (Oxford, 2009), p. 169. 84 85

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as a marker of progress and achievement and, on graduating from Gordon College, northern elites also adopted European dress as a sign of social exclusivity and national leadership.95 If the students of RSS felt special while they were at school, there is a corresponding belief held among its former students that the education they received there further elevated them above the crowd. According to William Chut, who attended RSS between 1962 and 1968, ‘the school produced people with high standards’ and, in the words of Joseph Lagu, ‘set them apart from common people’.96 As the students of RSS, they were therefore expected to take responsibility for their wider family units. In this respect, being at RSS taught boys how to assume leadership roles within the community, and was their first step away from childhood and into adulthood.97 For William Chut, this meant ‘setting a good example by helping people to overcome the differences between them’.98 It was also the case that as ‘community authorities’, and as graduates of the school they saw themselves as the only people qualified to understand the complexities of national politics.99 Indeed, many of the first wave of southern politicians had only received intermediate level schooling.100 The boys at Rumbek took an active interest in politics, and they were always well aware of the political situation around them, since the radio club had been established specifically to solve the problem of obtaining new and reliable news.101 In addition to the official school magazine, the students of Rumbek also wrote a wall newspaper (produced for public display on a wall within the school), The Daily Spark, which dealt with social and political issues. By writing the wall newspaper, students created their own forum to talk and debate about political issues, and about changes that they saw at Rumbek, which mirrored wider political changes that were occurring at the national level. After 1954 for instance, articles published in the wall newspaper concerned issues such as the history of slavery in the South, the economic relationship between North and South Sudan during the nineteenth century and the introduction of Arabic lessons at the school.102 Overtime, RSS also became a centre for non-military political dissent. Student strikes were called in 1960 (contributing to the school’s second move to the North in 1961), in 1962 and in 1963.103 The first strike was called after the students’ day of rest was moved from Sunday to Friday, while later grievances manifested because of an increasing lack of toleration for political discussion at the school – a reflection of  Sharkey, Living, p. 50.   Joseph Lagu interview. 97     Mark Mayool Malek interview. 98     William Chut interview. 99     Enoch Manyuon Malok interview. 100   Howell, ‘Politics’, pp. 168, 170. 101   Enoch Manyuon Malok interview. 102   Wada Mayiel Cindut interview. 103   Christopher Marier Hon interview; Howell, ‘Politics’, p. 171.  

95

 

96

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the Sudanese Government’s increasing focus on public security rather than social and economic development.104 In taking a stand against northern domination, the students of the 1960s drew on an existing tradition for direct action at RSS established by the school’s very first students. The precedent for student strikes at Rumbek began in late 1950, when a number of boys at the school refused to take part in their lessons. They were demonstrating their dissatisfaction with the response of Keith Williams, then the headmaster at the school, after they reported to him that a northern Physical Education master had called a number of the boys ‘dogs’. When Williams refused to suspend the Physical Education master pending an investigation, the rebellion spread through the school, and Williams wrote to the Governor of Bahr al-Ghazal province to report a situation of ‘grave trouble’. The Governor, Richard Owen, was forced to attend to the situation and, in order to placate the striking students, held an official inquiry. Owen’s investigations revealed that the accusation made by the students was ‘perfectly true’, and the Physical Education master was referred to the Board of Discipline.105 Underlying the incident and the students’ dissatisfaction with Williams, as revealed by a number of the former students interviewed for this research who were at Rumbek at the time of the strike, was that they felt that Williams used too much force when he disciplined them.106 Their anger at such treatment stemmed from the fact that as secondary school boys they expected to be treated like adults.107 Other studies of children and schools in Africa have shown that being beaten by a teacher was something expected at primary but not at secondary school.108 Owen also noted the possible political cause of the strike, which he believed to be rooted in anti-northern sentiment. Writing in November 1950, Owen acknowledged his existing awareness of latent southern fears about a future independent Arab government in Khartoum, but he admitted that he had not been aware of the extent to which this was felt at Rumbek.109 It is not exactly clear the extent to which Owen’s political interpretation of the strike is an accurate assessment of the motivations of the striking students in 1950, which was before any significant Sudanization or Northernization of the South. In a recent study of childhood in colonial Ghana, Jack Lord has demonstrated that childrens’ encounters with authority and empire were different from those of adults. In particular the short time frame in which they engaged with the world meant that children were largely apolitical on a colonial scale, even if they did ‘stand up for their interests if the situation demanded   Rolandsen, ‘A False Start’, p. 106.   Richard Owen, Wau to Father, 29 November 1950, 647/2/1-51, SAD. 106   Joseph Lau interview; Wada Manyiel Cindut interview. 107   Joseph Lagu interview. 108   Joseph Lagu interview; Sandgren, Mau Mau’s Children, p. 64. 109   Richard Owen, Wau to Father, 29 November 1950, 647/2/1-51, SAD. 104 105

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it’.110 Owen may have seen the strike as political, when actually it was an isolated protest against a teacher for infringing the boys’ perceived rights as secondary school pupils. Nonetheless, the politicization of Rumbek’s schoolchildren was later confirmed in 1960, when a number of graduates of RSS, Aggrey Jaden, Joseph Oduho and William Deng among them, went into exile.111 In the more immediate term, the lesson on how to make and take a stand given by the striking boys was certainly not forgotten by the subsequent generations that attended the school, and over time it became part of what being a schoolboy at RSS meant. This reinforces conclusions drawn in other studies of schools and schoolchildren in East and South Africa, in which schools are considered as sites of political action.112 When Christopher Marier Hon explained why he and his classmates went on strike during the early 1960s, he drew directly upon the events of 10 years earlier, and stated proudly that at Rumbek, ‘we exerted our influence’.113 A number of students left RSS during this period in order to join the insurgency. 114 Ten years further on, and the tradition was still strong. Gabriel Kuc Abiei, who attended Rumbek between 1971 and 1974, remembers how sensitive students were to anything that they thought deprived them of their rights as students or as ‘southerners’.115 In the words of William Chut, ‘our difference between North and South did not come by chance: it came through the students of Rumbek, from 1955 to today’.116

Conclusion In two ways, boys attending Rumbek Secondary School contributed to the formation of the southern Sudanese nationalist elite. First, during their school days at Rumbek, boys from all across southern Sudan were inclusively socialized. They gained a reputation for leadership within the wider community and were part of a peer culture that was politically active. Second, through the boys’ movements from intermediate school to Rumbek, and then from Rumbek to Khartoum, they were made aware first of their identity as ‘southerners’ and second of the ‘other’, the North. Overall the chapter shows how migration as well as literacy and education projects, facilitates the development of nation  Jack Lord, ‘The History of Childhood in Colonial Ghana, c. 1900–57’ (Ph.D. diss., SOAS, 2013), 185. 111  Johnson, Root Causes, p. 31. 112  Glaser, ‘We Must’; Carol Summers, ‘“Subterranean Evil” and “Tumultuous Riot” in Baganda: Authority and Alienation at King’s College, Budo, 1942’, Journal of African History 47(1) (2006), 93–113. 113   Christopher Marier Hon interview. 114   Christopher Marier Hon interview; Gabriel Kuc Abiei interview; Enoch Manyon Malok interview. 115   Gabriel Kuc Abiei interview. 116   William Chut interview. 110

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alist ideologies. Rumbek Secondary School twice occupied the anomalous position of being a ‘southern’ school located in the North, which both reinforced a sense of alienation from northern culture among the students of the school, as well as their position as an elite in the South. As such, and rather than reproduce the dominant national culture, which other studies of the connections between education and national elites have emphasized, the movement of RSS to and from Khartoum produced an alternative southern political imagination. The case of RSS therefore clearly also reflects the importance of children in terms of colonial and post-colonial power relations. The students at Rumbek not only challenged the authority of the adults working within the school, but also the configuration of the state. Nor was this rebelliousness simply an example of student or youthful ‘deviance’. Those involved saw themselves as justice seekers and agents of change, much like Duke Bryant’s Senegalese child migrants and Ferrell’s Ghanaian schoolchildren.117   Kelly Duke Bryant, ‘“An Ardent Desire to be Useful”: Senegalese Students, Religious Sisters & Migration for Schooling in France, 1824–1840’, this volume, Chapter 1; Ferrell, this volume, Chapter 7.

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10

Child Narration as a Device for Negotiating Space & Identity Formation in Recent Nigerian Migrant Fiction

Oluwole Coker

Several factors account for the emergence of the migrant fiction tradition that underscores the imperative of mobility in African literature. As a corpus, African literature is generally viewed as a responsible art through which writers relate their socio-historical experiences and show their inclinations towards social commitment.1 Migration is a human phenomenon with social, economic and cultural significance. In other words, the theme of migration in African letters is a response to the socio-historical dynamics of the twenty-first century. Aside from migration’s multidisciplinary relevance, it has remained a strong trope in the African creative imagination. Fictional narratives of migration appeal to the sensibilities of writers (in this case, Nigerian writers), because of their potential to represent the experience of living in exile. In fact, exilic consciousness remains a vibrant theme in African literature due to the ravages experienced by most post-independence African states. It is therefore imperative that African fiction captures contemporary realities of migration in the emerging corpus of third-generation African writers. The continued exploration of migrant aesthetics and representations of migratory experiences in post-colonial African literature has been a response to the dictates of the twentieth century, where writers cross boundaries and become ‘cultural travellers’ whose works portray experiences in diverse settings. This pot-pourri of cultural experiences enables them to fashion a distinct character of ‘cosmopolitanism’. This is akin to ‘Afropolitanism’, which seeks to connect Africa to ‘mainstream’ intellectual knowledge production and dissemination.2 In evaluating this trend, Boehmer writes: In the 2000s the generic postcolonial writer is more likely to be a cultural traveller, or an ‘extra-territorial’, than a national. Ex- colonial by birth, ‘Third World’ in cultural interest, cosmopolitan in almost every other way, he or she works within the precincts of the Western metropolis while at the same time retaining thematic and/or political connections with a national, ethnic, or regional background.3 1   Dennis Brutus, ‘Childhood Reminiscences’, in Per Wästberg, ed., The Writer in Modern Africa (New York, 1969), pp. 33–34. 2   See Jennifer Wawrzinek and J. K. S. Makokha, eds, Negotiating Afropolitanism Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore (Amsterdam, 2011). 3   Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford, 1995), p. 233.

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It should be pointed out that the migrant tradition in African literary hybrid consciousness necessarily has political and economic ancestries. The relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, for instance, has encouraged migration and/or constant mobility among African writers. In most African societies, the former colonial powers continue to wield such diverse influences that there is a historical pull for refuge in Western capitals.4 As post-independence decadence sets in, some Nigerian writers drift towards the West for economic refuge and artistic spaces, often due to the political direction of their works, while still participating in the nationalist discourse back home. Kehinde and Mbipom emphasize that: This relatively new trend of writings from Nigerians in the Diaspora signals a paradigm shift from the picture of motherland and the numerous creative statements that have been generated internally by writers at ‘home’ to those in the Diaspora.5

The tendency painted above has continued even in the present generation of writers. It is quite clear that most writers have continued to be attracted by the seemingly saner conditions offered by exile, in contrast to the homeland. These writers include Chimamanda Adichie, Helon Habila, Sefi Attah and Segun Afolabi, explaining the predominant influence of migration in their literary output. It should be noted that African literature has a peculiar history. In the first generation of writing – that is, the period shortly before and immediately after independence – most writers concentrated on cultural nationalism and romanticized the various cultures of their nation states. For example, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart celebrates African identity.6 Though the fascination with self-inscription did not dwarf the depth of these early writers’ political engagement, especially in their involvement with anti-colonial struggles, their representation of reality was clothed in the desire to assert distinct African cultural identities.7 Notwithstanding the above, the African creative imagination has always focused on migration as a thematic trope, as evidenced in such classics as Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.8 However, migrant aesthetics were not a defining force in early African writing. Following the dawn of independence, African nations started 4   Aderanti Adepoju, ‘Migration in Africa. An Overview’, Jonathan Baker and Tade Akin Aina, eds, The Migration Experience in Africa (Uppsala, 1995), pp. 87–107. 5   Ayo Kehinde and Joy Mbipom, ‘Discovery, Assertion and Self-Realisation in Recent Nigerian Migrant Feminist Fiction: The Example of Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come’, African Nebula 3 (2011), 62. 6   Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London, 1958). 7   Sam A. Assein, ‘Literature as History: Crisis, Violence, and Strategies of Commitment in Nigerian Writing’, in D. I. Nwoga, ed., Literature and Modern West African Culture (Benin City, 1999 [1978]), p. 105. 8   Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (London, 1991).

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witnessing political disillusionment as a result of military incursions into national governance. In other words, political realities changed and African literature became a key site of political engagement. Across Africa, the next generation of writers responded to these overbearing political influences; issues like migration became imperatives as a result of political machinations, the victimization of writers and suppressions of liberty. Writers therefore directed their artistic energies towards socio-political engagement, in the hope of developing a better society.9 Against this backdrop, migration is generally more visible in the third generation of writers than in the two earlier generations described above. As Africa’s political and economic fortunes dwindled, African writers became victims of military misrule. Many writers were labelled enemies of the state and some, such as Wole Soyinka in Nigeria and Ngugi wa Thiongo in Kenya, were hounded into exile.10 Furthermore, the book industry suffered along with many other aspects of the economy, and there were major setbacks in publishing. Major outfits like the Heinemann African Writers series, first edited by Chinua Achebe, fizzled out as a result of economic challenges. This was as a result of economic policies that devalued the nation’s currency, making it difficult for businesses to thrive due to poor exchange rates. Effectively, the growth of literature was stunted. The new writers of the late 1990s emerged from new sensibilities conditioned by physical and economic migration. This is because, in addition to the political pressures in most African states, there was an upsurge in economic migration to Western societies by Africans in search of economic and educational empowerment. Some of the literature produced in the twenty-first century therefore emerged from the diaspora and from the consciousness of home or – to use the catchy phrase – ‘root-seeking consciousness’ among African writers based in the West. In other words, it is apt to say that the tradition of migrant fiction has been energized by post-independence disillusionment in most African states, as highlighted by Stone: African fiction writers in the 21st century, often labeled children of the postcolony, can be characterized by the mobility of both their geographic locations and their narrative choices. Driven by economic and educational opportunities as well as political upheavals, this new generation is moving from villages to ‘global cities’ … from one African country to another, and from Africa to other parts of the world. Their characters are often transnational, and their narratives focus on some of the key ethical issues of globalized living – immigration, genocide, AIDS, the environment and civil conflict. This third generation is shifting the boundaries of national, 9   George Nyamdi, ‘Prospective Commitment in African Literature’, Nordic Journal of African Studies 15(4) (2006), 566–78. 10   Oyèníyì Okùnoyè, ‘Writing Resistance: Dissidence and Visions of Healing in Nigerian Poetry of the Military Era’, Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde, 48(1) (2011), 64–85, available online: www.scielo. org.za/scielo.php [accessed 21 July 2013].

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ethnic and gendered identities by exploring the outside limits of violence, empathy and consciousness. Their work is not only shifting the parameters of African fiction, it is reshaping other national literatures as well.11

As suggested above, some Nigerian writers in particular are passionate about connecting diaspora experiences with the challenges faced by their homelands. Their artistic visions are enriched by their exposure to their locations, and the opportunity this offers to connect several spaces. This chapter seeks to interrogate how two exemplars of third-generation Nigerian fiction deploy this connecting convention to negotiate space and underscore the essence of identity formation. Furthermore, as vulnerable elements of the demographic constitution, children are the most important barometer through which the pulse of self-denial and dehumanizing regimes is most strongly felt. While children are generally constructed as victims in the social conflict equation, this seems to have been gradually refuted as paradigms are rethought. This perception is an important feature of recent studies on children and migration in Africa, as analysed in the Introduction to this volume. Indeed, in the past few years, there has been a clear ideological shift towards recognizing children’s agency.12 While this rethinking occupies an important critical space in sociological and anthropological studies, it can also be located in the Bildungsroman tradition of the prose fiction genre in literature. This chapter examines the use of child narration in two novels in particular: Sade Adeniran’s Imagine This13 and Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl.14 As Bildungsroman novels, both focus on child characters who are afforded freedom of expression, the carving of space and the evolution of a cosmopolitan personality. Interestingly, the Bildungsroman is quite a popular form in African literature and has become synonymous with twenty-first century literary productions. The creation of child protagonists or characters who ‘come of age’ is thus a recurring feature of the corpus of third-generation Nigerian fiction. This implies that the Bildungsroman is a form that actualizes aspirations of self-representation and identity formation. The relationship between form and medium is thus foregrounded. These two writers have been chosen not only because they are both migrant writers of the third generation, but also because they deploy child heroes as agents to narrate socio-political experiences. This echoes the concept of ‘collective agency’ and the socio-political importance of their migration experience, as analysed in the Introduction to this book. In addition, the two writers are significant in their respective 11   Kim E. Stone, interview on ‘African Fiction in America Today’ (1 November, 2010), available online: www.britannica.com/blogs [accessed 16 February 2012]. 12   See Sandra J. T. M. Evers, Catrien Notermans and Erik van Ommering, eds, Not Just a Victim: The Child as Catalyst and Witness of Contemporary Africa (Leiden, 2011). 13   Sade Adeniran, Imagine This (Abuja, 2009). 14   Helen Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl (London, 2005).

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representations of exile and the quest for roots associated with most migrant Nigerian writers of the twenty-first century. The two writers are also passionate about invoking African cultural images, and deploy their novelistic crafts in identifying with the prevailing circumstances through the enabling milieu of artistic engagement.

Voices of Reason Commitment is a dominant feature of the Nigerian creative imagination. Since Nigerian art is generally inspired and motivated by oral tradition and socio-historical realities, some Nigerian writers naturally tap into the ideology of social commitment. This explains why they often identify with the realities of Nigeria’s socio-political situation in their literary production. Against this backdrop, most Nigerian migrant writers exhibit a conscious desire not only to connect with home, but also to stay on top of political developments there. This also extends to their cultural sensibilities. Unlike their home-based counterparts, exiled or migrant Nigerian writers often feel a duty to be cultural ambassadors of sorts by constantly celebrating the common humanity of the ‘African self’. This is underlined by Kehinde and Mbong: The African writer and his craft predictably continue to rise to the challenge of remaining committed to his community in the face of diverse socio-political instabilities and the contending trend of modernization. In crafting an art which is relevant, the African writer not only probes, but also responds to the yearning of his environment. Specifically, contemporary Nigerian prose fiction continues to witness a tremendous emergence of literary works marked by diverse degrees of creative innovation and experimentation. However, remarkable in the development of this genre is the creative effort of migrant Nigerian prose fiction writers who project commitment and responsiveness to the socio-political and socio-economic realities of their motherland through their works. This commitment also reflects these writers’ affinity and awareness of their socio-cultural heritage though physically removed from this matrix.15

This relates to Nigerian migrant writers’ use of the Bildungsroman. As a unique form of the novel which emphasizes the central character’s coming of age, Sade Adeniran’s Imagine This and Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl typify the quintessential Bildungsroman and its appropriation in contemporary Nigerian fiction. The novels thus represent fusions of craft, form and message. As we intend to show, the strategy of child narration in these novels draws attention to the plight of children, who are victims in their migrant experiences. The relationship between the narrative voice and themes in these two works demonstrate that   Kehinde and Mbipom, ‘Discovery’, p. 62.

15

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migration breeds cultural misfits who are perpetually searching for their self-identity. Child narration, the device or craft through which the clamour for identity and space is anchored in this paper, is not a new phenomenon in the African creative imagination. From the abiku protagonist of Wole Soyinka’s poem ‘Abiku’16 to Azaro in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road,17 the image of the child has always loomed large in Nigerian literature. Child narrators in earlier writing have handed a potent path to third-generation Nigerian novelists in pursuing their thematic and stylistic agenda. There is a strong relationship between a story and the person who tells it. In other words, narrative technique gives a work of fiction the necessary bite to function and deepens the thematic agenda, since ‘narrative techniques form an important aspect of the novel as they play a vital role in making the novel interesting and coherent’.18 Critical attention has been devoted to the child in contemporary fiction. Olufunwa contends: The young person is, more often than not, the character chosen by Nigerian novelists to portray the loneliness, rebellion and alienation that are attendant upon social change. This cannot but be so. Young people occupy a very special place in African society and no literary depiction of society or the processes, manifestations and effects of social change can be considered complete without reference to them.19

Child narration is shown as a key path through which the thematic agenda of contemporary Nigerian novelists is channelled. As Seraphinoff argues, the significance of child narration lies in its ‘special usefulness, particularly for the way it evokes sympathy for the suffering of the innocent’.20 This critic observes that the main character elicits a kind of sympathy in the writer, while also drawing attention to the peculiarity of the novel’s rural setting. The inherent literary dexterity of the child as ‘a literary invention’21 is instructive in this regard. The conceptualization of child narration and its significance as a narrative technique in African literature, especially the novel, deserves closer examination. This will allow us to understand the value it confers on a work of fiction. Closely related to this is the dynamism associated with childhood globally. These changes seem to foreground  Wole Soyinka, ‘Abiku’, A Selection of African Poetry, ed. Kojo Senanu and Theo Vincent (London, 1976). 17   Ben Okri, The Famished Road (Ibadan, 1991). 18   Ayo Kehinde, ‘Character and Characterization in Prose Fiction’, in Lekan Oyeleye and Moji Olateju, eds, Readings in Language and Literature (Ile-Ife, 2003), pp. 233–41. 19   Harry Olufunwa, ‘From the Lips of Children: Youth as Indicators of Social Change in Selected Nigerian Fiction’, Ife Studies in English Language 7 (2008), 81. 20   M. Seraphinoff, ‘Through a Child’s Eyes – a special role of the child as narrator in Macedonian literature’, Occasional Papers in Slavic Studies (2007), 3. 21   Ibid. 16

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childhood as a barometer of development. As such, issues of childhood have become central in global affairs.22 In the light of all the above, child narrators who are ‘presumed innocent’ naturally evoke the right tones in narration, even in a general sense. Closely linked to this is the domestic experience of asking a child to relay an event. The child is likely to supply every detail, to the chagrin of the adults. Using this simple analogy, it seems that child narration in fiction may confer a form of authenticity upon the thematic thrusts of the novels concerned. Added to this is the fact that children, as first-hand victims whose formative years are devastated by the vicissitudes of survival, seem a viable narrative vehicle. The child narrator is generally closer to the reader, as their voice easily connects that of their adult counterparts.23 It should be stated that, in Nigerian culture, the child is not necessarily an infant. In recent times, socio-economic demographic delineations in most developing societies have been hotly contested. As unemployment rates are high and young people are increasingly dependent on their parents, the child figure is gradually becoming a metaphor of sorts, as Gardini argues in this volume with respect to ‘boys’ in Togo (Chapter 5). This is also captured in a proverbial saying among the Yoruba of south-western Nigeria: ‘bi a ba dagba, ti a ko ni ohun ti agba n ni lowo, bi ewe laa ri’ (an adult who is not independent or empowered is no better than a child). The Nigerian child depicted in the novels analysed here is conceptualized, first and foremost, as someone who is still under the protective custody and care of the parents. The use of child narration in Nigerian novels effectively draws the subject matter closer through emotional connections. The device of child narration in migrant fiction lays bare the pangs of pain experienced by the child characters. This is quite evident in the two selected texts. For example, Jessamy in The Icarus Girl unconsciously invites the reader into her innermost battles of dual experiences and expectations: Left alone again, Jessamy and her grandfather sat quietly, her arms now flung around his neck as she marveled at how at ease she had begun to feel with him. Then, remembering her grandparents in England, she shuddered slightly, wondering if this grandfather would understand that sometimes people needed to have lights on. (p. 23)

Child narration therefore represents the voice of reason in Nigerian migrant literature, given the intensity with which it delivers its message and the objectivity of allowing the victims to tell their own stories. More importantly, the child protagonists are gradually made to come to terms with the confounding realities of their situations. Hence, as seemingly objective voices, the child narrators in the post-colonial 22   Madeleine Borgomano, ‘Being a child in Africa’, Mots Pluriels 22 (September, 2002). Available online: www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP2202edito2.html [accessed 2 August, 2009]. 23   Seraphinoff, ‘Through a Child’s Eyes’, 3.

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Bildungsroman eventually deliver the message of identity construction, as well as negotiating a space for the child to be visible in the context of the challenges of migration. In the context of contemporary development discourse, the representation of the child figure in the African creative imagination deepens the dynamics situating children’s fates within the ultimate aspiration of finding their place. Creative experimentation thereby replaces invisibility and silence, which are often synonymous with children in migration contexts, and objective voices are accentuated through child narration.

Devising Space, Negotiating Identities: Sade Adeniran’s Imagine This Several studies on migrant literature in contemporary African literature have emphasized the place of memory in the development of migrant aesthetics. For instance, Kehinde reveals that the migrant tradition is motivated by an exilic consciousness hinged on a globalized world order. The critic links this phenomenon to the post-colonial dismantling of exclusive space. Memory plays a significant role in the drive by migrant writers to develop new spaces by drawing on their experiences of exile. In Sade Adeniran’s Imagine This, there is an attempt to downplay the nostalgic consciousness trend, by focusing on roots consciousness through an imperative to possess a supposed lost identity. This is the story of Lola Ogunwole in Imagine This. Born of parents who parted ways, Lola returned home to Nigeria, eager to integrate, but was unfortunately rejected immediately. Her hopes for reconnecting with her roots were met with complications stemming from underdevelopment and cultural alienation. In the epistolary dialogue with Jupiter, Lola wonders: Everything here is confusing. I have too many relatives and I don’t know how we are related. It seems I’m related to the whole village … Now I’m going to spend the rest of my life here with no one but you to speak to. (p. 4)

This sets the stage for a story of frustration, a tale of perpetual searching for the young protagonist and narrator. To compound her woes, the domestic situation of a broken marriage rarely offers any succour, but instead creates further complications. This leaves Lola in a perpetual cycle of self-loss. Even though she bares her anguish to ‘Jupiter’, the circumstances surrounding her existence in the ‘motherland’ are, at best, denial and dehumanization. As a character who longs for cultural and social integration, Lola can be said to be suffering as a result of her father’s act of culturally uprooting her from the transnational space where she belonged. The implication is that Lola’s travails

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emanate primarily from the fact that she is not recognized as a cosmopolitan being. Lola’s lament confirms this: I’m miserable … everyone hates me. I don’t know whether it’s because I was born in London or whether it’s something I’ve done. They just try to put me down all the time. It seems like I have a fight with someone every day … Maybe I’m not really here, maybe this is a dream … but where is home? (p. 53)

This clearly suggests Lola’s desire for self-realization. The character’s pattern of perpetual dejection is intriguing. It is not really the society that is at variance with the Nigerian locale, but rather her own identity. At the level of domestic violence and inhumanity, Lola is also a victim. She nonetheless could not have fared any better, even in more favourable conditions. This can be readily seen in her preference for the Western ideology of family relationships: Daddy told me that it is the custom for a man to marry more than one wife. I asked him if it was possible for a woman to have more than one husband but he told me not to be silly, which I think is unfair. When I grow up and I get married, if my husband decides he wants another wife then I’ll have to have another husband. (p. 8, emphasis added)

The device of child narration in the excerpt above affords the child character a voice of her own; her opinion not only condemns the polygamy prevalent in many African cultures, but also suggests a feminist temperament in the radical mould. This reveals within childhood-driven fiction a sense of what is good or right; the motif of childhood or child narration is a strategic device for negotiating or interpreting meaning in post-colonial discourse. In accordance with the transversal concept that dominates child migration studies, which is discussed in detail elsewhere in this volume, there is an obvious transition from total naivety to consciousness or a sense of discernment: The most recent writers of childhoods appear to be addressing a concern that a shift has taken place, that instead of living in a multi-cultural world made up of easily identifiable cultures, we are living in a more fluid transcultural or even transnational world.24

The above connects to Lola’s remark that ‘it’s a very small world’ (p. 228), which implies a borderless humanity irrespective of spatial locations. She fully realizes and discovers her identity only after major setbacks: the deaths of her father and Adebola, and her discovery of her lost mother. Lola therefore sets out on a mission to assert her identity, declaring:   Richard Priebe, ‘Transcultural Identity in African Narratives of Childhood’, African Literature Today 25 (2006), 50.

24

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To you, I bared my soul and now that a new chapter in my life is to begin, I look back and I ask myself who is Omolola Olufunke Olufunmilayo Ogunwole? I don’t truly know. All I know is that she’s no longer a lost little girl looking for salvation. (p. 266, emphasis added)

Re/Imagining Diaspora: Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl extends the frontiers of mythic consciousness found in most writing from the African diaspora. Like Okri’s ‘Abiku’ in The Famished Road, Oyeyemi re-imagines the ibeji myth of the Yoruba people. This Yoruba myth offers an insight into the metaphysical-cum-religious worldview of the Yoruba of south-western Nigeria, and so will be briefly discussed below. The nature of myths and their perception among the Yoruba people are situated between their belief system and the structure of their religious pantheon. For the Yoruba, there seems to be a general principle of mythic construction as long as a phenomenon is regarded as strange.25 In the Yoruba pantheon, the descending hierarchy consists of the Supreme Being, called Olodumare, followed by various strange or odd beings. Examples include: abami eda – ibeji – twin children; afin – albinos; abuke – hunchbacks; etc. These figures are accorded special places as eni orisa (divine beings). The cultural and metaphysical identity associated with ibeji children runs so deep that they are often regarded as gods in their own right.26 They are believed to possess super-human capacities which can make or mar their parents. What makes Oyeyemi’s thematic exploration of the ibeji myth interesting is the fact that, unlike Okri who could be said to have had the full cultural experience, Oyeyemi can hardly be placed in the same category. Oyeyemi affirmed this in an online interview with New York Times in July 2005, stating that Jess ‘represents this kind of new-breed kid, the immigrant diaspora kid of any race who is painfully conscious of a need for some name that she can call herself with some authority’. By using mytho-poetic narrative structures, Helen Oyeyemi therefore weaves her story around mythologies of African, Greco-Roman and even English fairy tales. This is reminiscent of Harry Garuba’s ‘animist materialism’, which is based on the realization that: Magical elements of thought in an African social, cultural, economic and political milieu] assimilate new developments in science, technology, and the organization of the world within a basically ‘magical’ worldview.27   For further discussion, see E. Bolaji Idowu, Olodumare, God in Yoruba Belief (London, 1963).   There is a deity called Orisa Ibeji among the Yoruba, with its own cults, values and principles of worship or supplication. 27   Harry Garuba, ‘Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture and Society’, Public Culture,15(2) (2003), 267. 25 26

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To appreciate Garuba’s position is to appropriate a multicultural epistemology. This implies that animist consciousness is a function of psychological disposition, rather than physical experimentation. Thus, the universalizing, post-colonial pull in Helen Oyeyemi’s work allows her to move freely between world cultures, as far as the imagination can stretch. The emphasis here is on imagination, and not necessarily experience. This indicates that a consciousness of diaspora cultural sensibilities conditions the novelist’s creative imagination. This is what probably moulds Jess’s conduct: Outside the cupboard, Jess felt as if she was in a place where everything moved past too fast, all colours, all people talking and wanting her to say things. So she kept her eyes to the ground, which pretty much stayed the same. (p. 4)

Jessamy’s existence is therefore primarily within her imagination, through which she carves out an identity. This explains her emotional connection when she sees the ibeji statue: Jess looked and looked, then pulled the book from her mother’s lap into her own, her fingers tracing the features of the statue, her lips moving in silent amazement as she tried to understand. (p. 183)

Notwithstanding her imaginative exploration, Jess is immediately connected to this spirituality. In other words, her essence is located within a mythopoetic construct of the abiku/ibeji myths in Yoruba cosmology. Through these experiences, Tilly becomes the metaphysical other to whom she spiritually connects through the imaginative prowess of the narrative. Here lies the core of Oyeyemi’s mythopoetic aesthetics. She embodies multiple personalities in physical and metaphysical senses, demonstrating the capacity of the human psyche to re-imagine essence. Gradually, Jess asserts her spirituality in the imaginative fortress: She was vaguely aware that she was still in the room, but it was now a frightening place: too big and broad a space, too full, sandwiching her between solids and colour. She felt as if she were being flung, scattered in steady handfuls, every part of her literally thrown into things. She could sense the edges, the corners of her desk, the unyielding lines of her wardrobe. (p. 190)

As a tribute to the power of imagination, Jessamy Harrisson therefore emerges from a double consciousness to fashion an identity. In fact, it can argued that the re-imagination of Jessamy’s identity is directly linked to her visit to Nigeria. This ultimately becomes the indicator for the final undoing of her ‘self’, which is akin to the Icarus allusion. Oyeyemi therefore promotes her notion of diaspora, which is premised on the critical place of the imagination, in order to resolve a transnational identity. Jess becomes fully realized when she is reunited with

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her abiku/ibeji other on her redemptive second trip to Nigeria. She thus traverses contested borders which oscillate between Nigeria and the United Kingdom. It appears that her spiritual odyssey negates colonialism and favours migration.28 All this provokes an understanding of the complexities of hybrid identity construction. While the critical contention happily prides migration, for instance, this appears to be a more generalizing perception, which may not be restricted to the child figure. However, diaspora as a concept does not override essence; rather, as Helen Oyeyemi demonstrates, it equips the individual for the self-identity quest. As the construct of diaspora is integral to migration, the aesthetics of migration can be enshrined in cultural productions projecting the globalized identity that evolves from the intersections of cultures and mythologies. This occurs through the vehicle of re-imagined cultural dynamics, evidently represented in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl. The message is clear – myths are products of critical and metaphysical re-imagination, and are central to identity construction.

Conclusion Migration is a complex process that promotes cultural diffusion and aids transnational realities.29 This is further enhanced by the boom in information and communication technology, which deepens transcendence in the production and utilization of knowledge. Apart from reasons of economic motivation, the constitution of contemporary society favours interrelationships and transnational networks. As societies intermingle, cultural and artistic resources are brought into constant dialogue. With the resulting epistemological diffusion, boundaries of knowledge production and transmission will necessarily pave the way for new understandings. Like all areas of human advancement, however, there is a need to mitigate the negative effects of migration on vulnerable populations, especially children. It has been shown that the device of child narration acts as a catalyst for the dynamics of evolving space and identity formation in recent Nigerian migrant fiction. Nigerian migrant fiction manifests the inherent potential to satisfactorily negotiate a positive identity and to locate the diaspora self in the rightful transnational/cosmopolitan self without losing cultural consciousness of one’s roots. The intersection is well located in Jessamy Harrison’s bifocal vision in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl. At another   Sarah Ilott and Chloe Buckley, ‘“Fragmenting and becoming double”: Supplementary twins and abject bodies in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (Online First 28 January 2015), 1–14. 29  E. Chielozona, ‘Cosmopolitan Solidarity: Negotiating Transculturality in Contemporary Nigerian Novels’, English in Africa 32(1) (2005), 102. 28

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level, the travails of Lola Ogunwole in Sade Adeniran’s Imagine This should be seen, not as a demonstration of the futility of a quest for one’s roots, nor as the failure of a primitivistic nostalgia, but as evidence of the imperative of a globalized identity, promoted by the cosmopolitan spirit. This essay contends that Sade Adeniran and Helen Oyeyemi deploy child narration as a device for repositioning the figure of the child in African migrant fiction. This has greatly deepened the Bildungsroman aesthetics of the novels, with the main characters both operating as omniscient and first-person narrators. In fact, the use of child narration accentuates an egotistic rendition and makes memory a corollary of experience. This shows that young female characters possess the will for self-representation. It further affirms the relationship between narrative intensity and identity formation in moving towards self-realization. Child narration therefore contributes to the process of empowerment, and is necessarily linked to the deployment of such strategies as flashback, foreshadowing and suspense in the novels. The ease with which Lola connects to her past in London in Imagine This and the mythic consciousness of Jessamy in The Icarus Girl demonstrate that the children capture both individual and communal experiences. Literature, as an ally of cultural representation, thus supports such quests to protect children. The purveying of artistic art forms, like the Bildungsroman, with the capacity for positive edification of the self, shows ‘that transnational markets, technologies, and cultural forms promote both global homogeneity and local diversity’.30 This chapter has engaged with the notion of child migration in the context of identity formation, as it is represented in the selected African migrant novels. This exploration of the Bildungsroman and its foregrounding of child narration has indicated the ideological and thematic leanings of the writers. By thematizing child characters and strategically positioning them as unbiased and objective voices, the novelists are deploying the lens of the child narrator to underscore the peculiarities of migration and its consequences for African children. As a narrative strategy, therefore, child narration is effective in identity construction. It is also used as a metaphor to engage with the attendant despair that children may encounter, and the strategies they deploy to counter it. Twenty-first century African literature, irrespective of location or canonical delineation, serves as a viable canvas for foregrounding seemingly ‘extra-literary’ issues in the enabling milieus.31 Thus the present chapter clearly shows that, in the selected migrant texts, migration presents a window for airing issues of identity. Here, in the quest for self-assertion, identity formation and exilic consciousness,   Wendy Griswold, ‘The Writing on the Mud Wall: Nigerian Novels and the Imaginary Village’, American Sociological Review 57(6) (1992), 722. 31   Obi Nwakanma, ‘For Structure & Infrastructure in Nigerian Culture’, African Writing Online (June–August 2007), 1. 30

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the narrative voice adopted has penetrated the multiple discourses interwoven in issues concerning children and migration in Africa. As Obafemi argues, ‘literature needs to interface disciplines in order to distil a more humane notion of the human condition’.32 32   Olu Obafemi, ‘Literature and Society on the Border of Discourse’, Inaugural Lecture, University of Ilorin, Nigeria, delivered on 31 July 1997 (Ilorin, 2001).

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Verhoef, Heidi and Morelli, Gilda. ‘“A Child is a Child”: Fostering Experiences in Northwestern Cameroon’, Ethos 35(1) (2007), 33–64. Vernberg, Eric M. and Field, Tiffany. ‘Transitional Stress in Children and Adolescents Moving to New Environments’, in On the Move: The Psychology of Change and Transition, Shirley Fisher and Cary L. Cooper, eds (Chichester, 1990), pp. 127–51. Viti, Fabio. Schiavi, Servi e Dipendenti: Antropologia delle Forme di Dipendenza Personale in Africa (Milan, 2007). Waller, Richard. ‘Rebellious Youth in Colonial Africa’, Journal of African History 47 (2005), 77–92. Ware III, Rudolph T. ‘Njàngaan: The Daily Regime of Qur’ânic Students in Twentieth-Century Senegal’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 37(3) (2004), 515–38. Ware III, Rudolph T. The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa (Chapel Hill, 2014). Wawrzinek, Jennifer and Makokha, J.K.S., eds. Negotiating Afropolitanism Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore (Amsterdam, 2011). Weindling, Paul, ed. International Health Organisations and Movements, 1918–1939 (Cambridge, 1995). Wesley Pitman, Frank. ‘The Treatment of the British West Indian Slaves in Law and Custom’, The Journal of Negro History 11(4) (1926), 610–28. West, Michael O. ‘Ndabaningi Sithole, Garfield Todd and the Dadaya School Strike of 1947’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 18(2) (1992), 297–16. Wilks, Ivor. Wa and the Wala: Islam and Polity in Northwestern Ghana (New York, 1989). White, Luise. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, IL, 1990). White, Owen. Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895–1960 (Oxford, [1999] 2004). Whitehouse, Bruce. ‘Transnational Childrearing and the Preservation of Transnational Identity in Brazzaville, Congo’, Global Networks 9(1) (2009), 82–99. Wilson, Godfrey. An Essay on the Economics of Detribalization in Northern Rhodesia (Livingstone, 1941). Willson, Perry. Women in Twentieth-Century Italy (Basingstoke, 2010). Wouango, Joséphine. ‘L’éternel retour du travail des enfants dans les politiques publiques au Burkina Faso: Perspective historique’, in Modèles d’enfances: Successions, transformations, croisements, Doris Bonnet, Catherine Rollet, Charles-Édouard de Suremain, eds (Paris, 2012), pp. 193–206. Wright, Marcia. Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life Stories from East/ Central Africa (New York, 1993).

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Index

Aba, Nigeria: 27, 56, 57, 61 ability: 12, 15n67, 20, 32, 35, 40, 47, 48, 50, 62, 74, 78, 84, 99, 101, 103, 117, 153 Adeniran, Sade: 194, 195, 198, 203 adulthood: xii, 5, 9, 12n45 21,  102, 104–106, 115, 120– 122, 187 and gender: xii, 13, 18, 21 and masculinity: 104, 105,  120–122 as a social age: 12 postponed access to: 22, 106,  118, 121 transition to: 104, 105, 120 afrocentric psychology: 91 agency: 6, 6n20, 8, 10, 17 20,  21, 33, 42, 47, 49, 50, 83, 89, 173 and gender: 3, 20 and patronage: 47 lack of: 10, 37 tactical agency: 6 v. structure: 4 v. vulnerability: xi, 3, 8, 9 See also navigation as a form of   individual agency Agou, Togo: 27, 105n10, 108, 111, 113, 114 Agoué, Togo 108 agricultural labour: 60, 74 Antananarivo, Madagascar: 23, 28, 127, 128, 130–140

Children on the Move.indd 231

Antsirabe, Madagascar: 28, 133 Anya-Nya: 177, 189 Ashanti, Gold Coast: 27, 108, 109, 143, 144, 147, 149n38 Atakpamé, Togo: 27, 116, 118 Atar, South Sudan: 29, 181 attachment ties : 86 See also sentimental  attachment authority: 24, 32, 49, 63, 106, 153, 188, 190 Bailleul-sur-Thérain, France: 26, 31, 35 Bamako, Mali: 26, 139 Bildungsroman: 24, 194, 195, 198, 203 biological family: 91, 96, 97 Bole, Ghana: 27, 147 boarding school(s): 81, 132, 133,  136, 146, 148, 149–151, 153, 154, 156 See also colonial education;  education; educational institution(s); educational opportunities; educational policy; French education; French schools; school(s); school policies boy(s): 11, 12, 22, 31, 35, 36,  37, 39, 44, 56, 102, 103, 104, 131, 155, 159, 161, 163, 164–171, 173 as domestic servant: 6, 20, 21,

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232 Index

 78, 105–107, 112–122, 197 and fosterage: 97, 113, 114, and school education: 128,  145, 146, 148, 149, 152, 154, 158n80, 175–179, 181–189 See also male child(ren);  boy pawn(s) boy pawn(s) 58, 60, 143 See also girl pawn(s) brideprice: 54n25, 56, 57, 61, 64 See also marriage customs;  marriage negotiation(s); marriage practices brideprice payment: 58, 60, 62,  63, 64, 110 See also marriage customs;  marriage negotiation(s); marriage practices Calabar, Nigeria: 27, 56, 57, 58, 61 Cape Colony, South Africa: 28, 160, 162, 163 Cape Town, South Africa: 28, 160, 161, 161n11, 162–165, 167–173 child brides: 52, 53, 65, 162 child circulation: 10n34, 52, 55,  80, and fosterage: 85n2, 94 and labour: 3,13 and slavery/trafficking: 3, 13 child labour: 3, 14, 15, 18, 61 and trafficking: 66, 120 See also child circulation  and labour; child trafficking; fosterage child marriage: 54, 60, 61, 64,  65, 169 See also child brides child memory: 8 See also childhood(s) and  memory child narration: 194–199, 202, 203 child pawnship (or pawning): 15,

Children on the Move.indd 232

18, 32, 33, 52, 54–56, 58–65, 109, 143, 144 See also boy pawn(s); girl pawn(s) child trafficking: xi, 3, 13, 16, 17, 20, 20n88, 33, 51–66, 70, 82–84, 120 childhood(s): 1, 11, 14, 126, 129,  131, 134, 139, 140, 141, 161, 169, 187, 188, 196, 197, 199 and confusion with youth: 9 and exploitation: 4, 15, 20,  22, 32, 33, 53, 54, 70, 75, 82, 83, 84, 105, 106, 107, 113, 114, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 171; See also trafficking or slave dealing or slave trade(s) and gender: xii, 22 and interviews of adults: 127,  128, 142, 161, 176 and memory: 8, 96, 99, 127,  128, 134, 161, 172, 182 and migration: xii, 3, 10, 18,  20, 24, 127, 139, 141, 181 as a barometer of development:  197 as a social age: 12 as a social category: 1, 106,  120 as a biological age: 1, 9, 12 as social and symbolic steps: 13 construction(s) of: 7, 10, 13 deconstruction of: 20 models of: 4, 10, 20 universalist vision of: 7 western perceptions of: 70 See also childhood experiences;  childhood studies; globalized childhood childhood experiences: 8, 50, 71, 142, 144, 147, 157, 158, 161, 176 childhood studies: 10 children as transmitters of memory: 8, 21

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children’s agency: 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 17, 49, 50, 141, 194 children’s guardianship: 51, 52, 55 children’s rights: 3, 15, 106n11 children’s voice: xii, 3, 6, 7, 8, 17, 24, 50, 98, 127, 169, 195, 197, 198, 199, 203, 204 children’s vulnerability: xi, 2, 10,  15, 17, 20, 37, 70, 82, 83, 86–89, 100, 103, 121, 125–128, 134, 139, 140, 164, 114, 194, 202 See also agency v.  vulnerability Chililabombwe, Zambia: 29, 81 Christian school(s): 24, 50, 134, 135, 137, 141 circulation: 2, 138 See also child circulation;  distinction between migration, mobility and circulation chores: 76, 150, 152, 153, 156, 158 Christianity: 4n10, 13, 17n76, 34, 37, 38, 46 circumcision (for boys): 131 civilization: 35, 36, 38, 48 civil war: 24, 175–177, 180 clothing: 151, 152, 172 clothing culture: 186 cocoa economy: 109, 111, 112 collective agency: 3, 8, 9, 17, 24, 194 colonial school(s): 23, 47, 139 See also colonial education;  education; educational institution(s); educational opportunities; educational policy; French education; French schools; school(s); school policies colonial education: 34, 36, 180 See also colonial school(s);  education; educational

Children on the Move.indd 233

institution(s); educational opportunities; educational policy; French education; French schools; school(s); school policies colonization: 51, 128, 130–132, 135, 136, 179 commitment: 34, 35, 38, 44, 173, 191, 195 confiage: 7, 19, 21, 86 See also fosterage; foster family;  foster parents; pseudofosterage contemporary forms of slavery (or modern-day slavery): 3, 66 correspondence (or letters): xi, 32, 34, 36n13, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 137 cross-cultural psychology: 91 customary laws: 54, 64 detribalization: 23, 145, 148, 149, 156 deviance (or deviancy): 14, 190 distinction between migration, mobility and circulation: 2, 140 domestic service(s)/labour or domestic servant(s)/worker(s): 5, 6, 20, 33, 58, 61, 64, 65, 69, 70, 71, 71n9, 73–84, 105, 106, 112–115, 118, 119, 149 domestic worker rights: 84 drawing(s): 4, 92, 93, 97, 153, 154, 155 Durban, South Africa: 28, 163, 169, 171 education: 18, 19, 24, 31, 32,  34–36, 38, 40, 41, 42n31, 43, 44, 46–49, 75, 76, 82, 86, 91, 93, 95, 96, 99, 112, 128, 129, 131–134, 136, 137, 141, 144, 145, 145n18, 148, 149, 153, 156, 175–178, 181, 184, 185, 187, 188, 190 and child labour: 18, 19, 21,

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234 Index

and fosterage: 18, 91, 93, and migration: xi, xii, 15, 18,  20, 70, 125, 141, 158, 181 and the family: 17n76, 18, 135 See also colonial education;  colonial school(s); educational institution(s); educational opportunities; educational policy; French education; French schools; Koranic/Qur’anic/Muslim schools (or medersas); school(s); school policies educational institution(s): 9, 19,  127, 175 See also colonial education;  colonial school(s); education; educational opportunities; educational policy; French education; French schools; school(s); school policies educational migrant(s) (or  migration): 24, 127, 134, 141, 142, 144, 145, 148, 153, 154, 156–158, 177, 181 See also colonial education;  colonial school(s); education and fosterage; education and migration; educational opportunities; educational policy; French education; French schools; school(s); school policies educational opportunities: 33,  80, 82, 126, 131, 143n6, 193 See also colonial education;  colonial school(s); education and fosterage; education and migration; educational migrant(s) (or migration); educational policy; French education; French schools; school(s); school policies educational policy: 14, 15, 23,  141, 142, 147, 148, 151

Children on the Move.indd 234

See also colonial school(s);  school policies elder(s): 9, 32, 56, 58, 60, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 104, 105, 106, 107, 110, 111, 112, 119, 145, 172 elite(s): 14, 24, 32, 109, 112, 126, 131, 135, 157n76, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183–190 employer(s): 21, 70, 71, 75–79, 81, 82, 84,113, 160 employment: 15, 69, 70, 71n8,  72, 74–77, 79, 80–84, 105, 121, 141, 148 See also employer(s);  unemployment; unpaid work entourage: 19, 20, 23, 125, 130, 132, 138 ethnicity: 181, 182 extended family: 91, 101, 159, 164 family: xii, 8, 5, 16, 20, 21, 38,  44, 45, 50, 56, 57, 59, 64, 65, 70, 74–76, 81, 87, 92, 93, 95, 97, 100, 109, 110, 111, 114, 118, 125, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 138, 139, 146, 153n61, 158, 159, 163, 166, 171, 172, 185, 187 and fosterage: 95, 96, 113,  132 and social status: 5, 11, 115,  121 and the decision-making  process: 4–5, 17n76, 50, 74, 76 See also confiage; education  and the family; extended family; family members; family networks/ connections/relationships/ ties/links; fosterage; foster family; foster parents; kin; kinship; parents; pseudofosterage; relatives; siblings

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family business: 173, 174 family economy: 11, 58, 74, 75, family life: 4n10, 22, 59, 98 family member(s): 5, 57, 59–62,  64, 101, 132, 137, 157 See also extended family; kin;  kinship; parents; relatives; siblings family networks/connections/  relationships/ties/links: 22, 41, 50, 82, 132, 133, 136, 137, 138, 140, 199 See also extended family; family  members; fosterage; foster family; kin; kinship; parents; relatives; siblings family story(ies) or history(ies):  125, 127n16, 165, 167, 168 See also interview(s); memory family work (or labour): 11, 21,  80, 113 See also child labour; family  economy   female-centred social networks:  79–82, 84 See also family networks/  connections/relationships/ ties/links female child(ren): 59, 60, 62–65,  70, 73–84, 143 See also girl(s) female labour force: 69, 77, 78,  78n41foster family: 91, 96, 97, 99 See also education and the  family; extended family; family; family networks/ connections/relationships/ ties/links; fosterage; pseudofosterage food: 61n64, 74, 76, 79, 81, 82, 86, 95–98, 113–116, 118, 147n30, 149, 151n51, 152, 185 forced labour: 13, 53, 63n72, 109, 111

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forced migration: xi, 4, 32, 135 fosterage: 19, 21, 52, 85, 85n2,  86, 87, 88, 88n21, 89, 91–99, 100, 102, 103, 113, 132 and education: 18, 19, 33n7,  91, 93, 94 and its psychological impacts:  88, 89, 91, 92, 95 and pawnship (or pawning):  15, 33 and resilience: 90, 92, 100,  102, 103 and child labour: 52, 87, 96,  113, 118 See also confiage; education and  the family; extended family; family; family networks/ connections/relationships/ ties/links; foster family; foster parents; pseudofosterage foster family: 96, 97, 99, 113 foster parents: 85n2, 89, 94, 95, 97 French education: 34, 36, 37, 48,  138 See also colonial education;  colonial school(s); education; educational institution(s); educational opportunities; educational policy; French schools; school(s); school policies French school(s): 37, 43n33, 50,  133, 136, 138 See also colonial education;  colonial school(s); education; educational institution(s); educational opportunities; educational policy; French education; French schools; school(s); school policies French Sudan: 13, 139, 175 Fridoil, Charles: 40, 41, 42n30, 43, 43n33, 46, 47, 47n43, 48, 49, 49n49

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236 Index

Gambaga, Ghana: 27, 145, 149, 150, 153, 154, 156n73, 158n80 gender: and generation: 7, 12, 18, 20,  21, 22, 23, 69, 70, 73, 74 and age: 5, 12,55, 69, 72, 74,  107, 122, 153 and kinship: 5, 23, 122 and pawnship (or pawning):  55, 58 models of: 23 and work: 20, 76–79, 81, 83,  107, 153 See also agency and gender gendered discourse: 76 gendered (or sexual) division of  labour: 76, 76n35, 78, 79, 79n44, 80 See also child labour; family  work; labour migration gendered identity(ies): 22, 102,  104, 106, 194 construction of: 107, 110 See also gendered discourse;  gender (models of) generation: and fosterage: 92, 93 and social status: 7, 12n45 and age: 9, 12 See also gender and generation;  intergenerational relations; third-generation writers girl(s): 11, 45 and migration: 12, 20, 21, 37,  38, 39, 83, 103, 112, 114, 138, 161, 168, 169, 170 and school education: 20, 31,  34–36, 81, 96, 128, 131, 146, 150, 152, 177, 178, as domestic worker: 78, 79,  113, in fosterage: 96, 113 as ‘entrepreneurs’: 21 pawnship (or pawning) of: 56,  58, 59, 63–65 trafficking of: 62, 64

Children on the Move.indd 236

See also boy pawn(s); child  brides; female children; girls’ boarding school; girl pawn(s); school for girls (or girls’ school); school for boys (or boys’ school) girl pawn(s): 56, 58, 59, 60, 62 See also boy pawn(s) globalized childhood: 16 Gold Coast: 27, 110, 111, 114, 143, 144, 147 grandparents: 58, 92, 96, 97, 110, 112, 165, 197 Gujarat, India: 28, 159, 161, 170, 171 health: 31, 36, 38–41, 46, 86, 89, 95, 98, 102n47 Igbo/Igboland: 52, 53–55, 59, 61, 62–3, 65 Imagine This (novel by Sade Adeniran): 194, 195, 198, 203 Imerina (region of), Madagascar: 125, 126, 128, 130, 135 immigration encounters: 160, 161, 162, 164, 168, 174 immigration law: 164, 174 immobility: 2, 15, 15n67, 86 India: 24, 28, 137, 159–163, 165, 166–169, 171–174 Intergenerational relations: 19n84, 20, 23 intermediary(ies) or intermediate: 2, 20, 21, 49 international law: 106 interview(s): 51, 52n6, 59, 71, 73, 74 76, 84, 92, 96n38, 106, 142, 146n25, 161, 169, 170, 171, 174, 176, 178, 200 Itasy (region of), Madagascar: 133, 138 Javouhey, Anne-Marie: 16, 31, 31n2, 34, 34n10, 35, 35n13,

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Index 237

36, 36n13, 36n14, 37, 38, 38n22, 39, 39n22, 39n23, 40, 43, 44, 45n37, 46, 46n41, 47n42, 48, 48n45, 48n46, 49, 49n49 Javouhey, Clothilde: 40, 41, 41n28, 42–47, 47n43, 48 Johannesburg, South Africa: 28, 159 Juba, South Sudan: 28, 29, 178, 182 junior(s) or junior member(s): 12, 12n45, 22, 56, 74, 107, 119

 (or medersas): 18, 143n12, 144n17 Kpalimé, Togo: 27, 114, 115, 118 Kumasi, Ghana: 27, 144, 151 labour condition(s): 52, 78, 107 labour legislation: 84, 160 labour market: 70, 74, labour migration (or labour migrants): xi, 15, 25, 69, 69n2, 70, 71, 83, 142n4, 144, 145, 158 labour relations: 71, 83, 84, 105, 110, 113 Lagos, Nigeria: 27, 32 language(s): xi, 7, 18, 35, 42, 65, 135, 136, 142, 147, 147n33, 148, 149, 150n45, 153, 157, 162, 164, 171, 176, 178, 181, 182, 185 La Réunion (île de): 28, 134, 135 life story/stories (or history/ histories): 21, 71, 83, 105, 106, 138, 161 Limoux, France: 26, 36n14, 37, 39, 39n23, 39n24, 40, 41n28, 41, 29, 42, 42n30, 42n31, 43n33, 44, 44n35, 47n43, 48n45, 49n49 lineage: 4n10, 13, 17n76, 96, 107, 113, 119, 130 Loka, South Sudan: 29, 181 Lomé, Togo: 27, 105n10, 115–121 Lusaka, Zambia: 28, 29, 70, 71, 73, 73n20, 74, 74n23, 74n25, 74n26, 75, 75n28, 75n29, 75n30, 76, 77, 77n37, 77n38, 77n39, 79, 79n44, 79n45, 80, 80n50, 81, 81n51, 81n54, 82, 82n55, 83, 84

Khartoum, Sudan: 24, 28, 29, 176, 178, 179, 185, 186, 188–190 kin: xi, 70, 71, 79–84, 108, 113,  117, 132 See also extended family;  family; family members; family networks/ connections/relationships/ ties/links; kinship; kinshipbased obligations; parents; patrilineage (or patrilineal family); relatives; siblings kinship: 5, 83, 95, 98, 101, 107,  109, 113, 122, 129, 130 network(s)/ties/relations 5, 12,  20, 23, 71, 72, 79, 80, 82, 83, 88, 137, 140 system(s)/models of : 11, 19,  19n84, 23, 101 See also extended family;  family; family members; family networks/ connections/relationships/ ties/links; kin; kinshipbased obligations; parents; patrilineage (or patrilineal family); relatives; siblings Madagascar: 23, 28, 125, 126, kinship-based obligations: 80, 82, 127, 127n16, 128, 129n23, 83 130n29, 132, 132n34, 133n37, Kitwe, Zambia: 29, 78n43 133n38, 133n40, 134–136, Koranic/Qur’anic/Muslim schools 136n52, 137, 137n57, 138–140

Children on the Move.indd 237

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238 Index

male child(ren): 77, 78, 79, 143 See also female child(ren) marriage: age of: 53, 55 and parenthood: 107, 120,  121, 126 and pawning (or pawnship):  15, 54–56, 59, 62–65 and slavery: 15, 62, 63,  63n72, 65 See also brideprice; brideprice  payment; child brides; child marriage; children’s guardianship marriage certificate: 55, 61, 63, 65 marriage customs: 55, 63, 64 marriage negotiation(s): 56, 57 marriage practices: 55, 57, 58 marriage with Europeans: 126, 126n8, 129, 130, 172n69 masculinity: 12n45, 22, 105,  107–110, 112, 116, 118, 121 and adulthood: 104, 105,  120–122 memory: and history: 71, 71n12 and space: 139n65 See also childhood and  interviews of adults; childhood and memory; children as transmitters of memory; interview(s) métis children school: 128, 133 See also boarding school(s) migrant fiction: 191, 193, 197, 202, 203 migrant writers: 194, 195, 198 migration studies: 10, 20, 20n85, 73n22, 199 missionary(ies): 34, 38, 56, 59, 110, 132, 135, 175 missionary sisters: 34, 40, 47, 48, 49, 50 missionary (or mission) schools: 110, 111, 144n17, 177, 178,

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mission(s): 10, 32, 35, 49, 141, 144, 144n14, 144n17, 177, 178, 181 mixed-race children: 11, 34, 37, 125n2, 127 mobility: xi, xii, 2n4, 14, 16,  22–24, 71, 77, 84–87, 89, 94, 101, 125, 126, 127, 134–140, 151, 170, 191–193 See also distinction between  migration; immobility; mobility and circulation; socio-economic mobility Moussa, Jean-Pierre: 40, 41, 42n30, 43, 43n33, 44, 45, 46, 47, 47n43, 49, 49n49 Natal (Colony of): 28, 160, 160n9, 161, 162, 162n15, 163 nationalism: 142, 150, 183, 189, 190, 192 Native Administration or Authority(ies): 149–151, 156 navigation as a form of individual agency: 89, 92, 102 Navrongo, Ghana: 27, 144 negotiation(s): 89, 92, 96, 100, 102 Nigeria: xi, 13, 17, 26, 27, 51n1, 52, 52n6, 54, 55, 56, 59, 64, 66, 144n17, 193, 197, 198, 200–202 Nigerian writers: 103, 191–195 Nimule, South Sudan: 29, 181 Northern Sudan: 175, 176 Northern Territories, Gold Coast: 27, 141–144, 144n16, 145, 145n20, 147, 147n32, 148, 149n38, 149n40, 150n49, 156, 156n71, 157 nostalgia: 8, 128, 183, 198, 03 nuclear family: 93 obligation(s): 24, 56, 100 towards adults: 97 Onitsha, Nigeria: 27, 56, 59,

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Index 239

59n52, 61 oral history(ies): 10, 23, 71, 71n12, 108, 109, 127, 161, 162, 166, 169, 173, 174 oral sources: 4, 8 oral testimonies: xi, 24, 58, 64, 65 orphan(s): 4, 11, 37, 75, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133 orphanage(s): 128, 132, 139 Owerri, Nigeria: 27, 55n28, 56, 57, 58, 59n51, 60, 60n58, 61, 61n66, 61n67, 62, 63, 64, 65n83 Oyeyemi, Helen: 194n14, 195, 200–203

relatives: 31, 52, 61, 64, 70, 71,  74, 80, 87, 95, 97, 136, 164, 167, 198 See also extended family;  family; family members; family networks/ connections/relationships/ ties/links; foster parents; foster family; kin; kinship; kinship-based obligations; patrilineage (or patrilineal family); siblings; parents repatriation: 40–44, 49 resilience: 8, 21, 89, 90, 92, 93, 96, 98–103 Rumbek, Sudan: 24, 175–190 parents: xi, 5, 10, 10n34, 15, 17, Rumbek secondary school (RSS):  17n76, 31, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41, 175, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181, 43–47, 49, 50, 53, 55–57, 59, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 60, 62–66, 73–77, 80, 81, 85, 189, 190 86, 89, 92, 94–97, 101, 107, 112–115, 117–119, 121, 125, Saint-Louis, Senegal: 26, 35n12, 130, 131, 133, 134, 134n41, 35n13, 36, 38, 38n21, 41n28, 136, 138, 140, 145n18, 149, 41n29, 43n34, 44n36, 45, 153, 156, 160, 164, 170–172, 45n37, 46, 46n41, 47, 47n43, 174, 197, 198, 200 48n44 See also extended family; Salaga, Ghana: 27, 108, 147  family; family members; Sanankoroba, Mali: 26, 92 family networks/ school(s): 15, 18, 31, 35, 36, 38, connections/relationships/ 39, 42–44, 48, 73, 75, 81, 83, ties/links; foster parents; 93, 96, 97, 102, 112–118, 121, foster family; kin; kinship; 126n7, 127, 128, 131, 133–136, kinship-based obligation; 138, 139, 141–145, 145n18, patrilineage (or patrilineal 145n19, 146, 146n24, 146n25, family); relatives; siblings 147, 147n30, 148, 148n34, patrilineage (or patrilineal 148n35, 149, 149n38, 149n39, family): 96, 99, 108 149n41, 150, 150n42, 150n47, Petauke, Zambia: 29, 80 151–153, 153n61, 154, 156, political engagement: 25, 192, 156n72, 157, 157n74, 157n76, 193 157n78, 158, 159, 162, 171– post-colonial: 11, 13, 14, 21, 23, 174, 176–179, 181–190 24, 52, 69, 70, 72, 73, 76, 77, schools for boys (or boys’ schools): 83, 111, 150, 151, 178, 190,  36, 178 191, 197, 198, 199, 201 See also orphanage; boarding priests: 17, 31, 34, 35, 46, 47, 48  schools; boys and school pseudo-fosterage: 21 education

Children on the Move.indd 239

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schools for girls (or girls’ schools):  34–36, 81, 96, 150, 178 See also orphanage; boarding  schools; girls and school education school policies: 32, 151 See also educational policies;  colonial school(s) schoolteacher(s): 17, 31, 35, 44, 48, 53, 74, 78, 80, 81, 101, 111, 112, 114–116, 130, 139, 141, 142, 146, 147, 147n32, 147n33, 148, 148n35, 149, 152, 152n54, 157n 76, 171, 179, 181, 184, 188, 189 seminary: 34, 35, 37, 45, 47 Senegal: 26, 31–36, 36n13, 37– 41, 41n29, 42, 42n31, 43–49 senior(s): 2, 12, 12n45, 56, 57, 74 seniority: 12n45, 22 sentimental attachment: 127, 138–140 Serenje, Zambia: 29, 73 sex trafficking: 33 sisters of Saint-Joseph of Cluny: 16, 17, 31, 32, 34, 36, 38–44, 48–50 slavery: xi, 3, 13, 15, 32, 52–55,  58–61, 62n72, 65, 94, 106–109, 117, 118, 121, 143, 185, 187 abolition of: 33, 105, 108 social ecological approach: 89, 90, 93, 97, 101, 103 social networks: 20, 22, 23, 69,  80 See also family networks/  connections/relationships/ ties/links; female-centred social networks; kinship networks socio-economic mobility: 47,  110, 111, 114,130, 131, 133, 135, 137, 173, 174, 185 See also immobility; mobility;  distinction between

Children on the Move.indd 240

migration, mobility and circulation South Africa: 23, 24, 28, 75, 137, 159, 160, 160n9, 166–169, 171, 173, 185, 189 South Sudan: 24, 28, 29, 141n1, 157n78, 175, 187 Southern Sudan: 24, 175, 177– 186, 189 strike(s): 119, 187, 188, 189 students: 31, 32, 33n7, 34–36, 36n13, 37–44, 46–50, 141, 142, 145n20, 147n30, 148– 154, 156, 157, 176, 181–183, 185–190 Sudan: 24, 175, 176, 178–181, 184, 185 Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA): 177 Sy, Mamoudou: 38, 40, 41, 43, 47, 49 Talensi: 153 Tamale, Ghana: 27, 144, 145, 148, 149, 149n38, 149n40, 150, 151, 156, 157n74 The Icarus Girl (novel by Helen Oyeyemi): 194, 195, 197, 200, 202, 203 third-generation writers: 103, 191, 193, 194, 196 Toamasina, Madagascar: 28, 132 Togo: 6, 20, 26, 27, 105n10, 107, 108, 110–114, 120, 197 Tonj, South Sudan: 29, 181 Torit, South Sudan: 29, 179 Trade or trader(s): 61, 111, 112, 116, 117, 119, 135 trafficking or slave dealing or  slave trade(s): xi, 11, 32, 52, 59, 61–66, 70, 83, 84, 108, 109, 110, 141, 143, See also child trafficking; sex  trafficking; slavery transnationalism: 16, 18, 22–24, 193, 198, 199, 201–203

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Transvaal (Colony of): 28, 160, 161, 163 tuberculosis: 31, 39, 40, 40n27

without family: 125, 128, 129, 140, 148 Wungu, Ghana: 27, 150

unemployment: 112, 197 See also employment;  employer(s) unpaid labour: 111, 119 See also employment;  employer(s)

youth(s) (or young people): 2, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 10n34, 12n42, 14, 16, 22, 31–33, 33n7, 34, 40, 42n31, 44, 45, 48, 49, 73, 75, 76, 76n36, 83, 85, 86, 88–90, 92, 93, 96, 96n38, 97–102, 104114, 119–122, 134, 135, 137, 138, 143, 144, 148n34, 148n35, 149, 163, 168, 174, 177, 196, 197 youth migrants (or migration): 5, 6, 16, 20, 21, 24, 70, 73, 103, 105, 106, 120, 152 youth subculture: 16 See also childhood and  confusion with youth

victim(s): 1, 2, 3, 4, 11, 50, 51, 87, 89, 103, 108, 114, 119, 120, 140, 168, 193–195, 197, 199 violence: 9, 52n6, 113, 114, 119, 120, 194, 199 Wa, Ghana: 27, 145, 149, 151 Walewale, Ghana: 27, 142, 146n25, 146n27, 150n43 Wau, South Sudan: 29, 178, 182 wealth: 52, 56, 58, 75, 110, 143 wealth-in-people: 107 See also brideprice

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Zambia: 5, 20, 21, 28, 29, 52, 69, 70, 72, 72n13, 73n16, 73n17, 18, 19, 76, 77n40, 79, 79n44, 82, 83

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Children_PPC_19mm v6_B+B 22/03/2016 11:20 Page 1

Cover photograph: Young girl at work carrying washing to the fountain, Rufisque, Senegal, 2012 (© Babacar Traoré aka Doli)

JAMES CURREY an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com www.jamescurrey.com

ISBN 978-1-84701-138-1

9 781847 011381

Children on the Move in Africa

Elodie Razy is Associate Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Liege (FaSS). She is the co-founder and co-editor of the online journal AnthropoChildren: Ethnographic Perspectives in Children & Childhood. Marie Rodet is a Senior Lecturer in African History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London).

PAST & PRESENT EXPERIENCES OF MIGRATION

The widespread movement of children across African borders and beyond has been a defining characteristic of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries, yet we know too little about these children’s migratory trajectories and the opportunities or constraints that propel them to leave home. Drawing on the personal experiences of African children over more than a century, this book analyses the diversity and complexity of their experiences of mobility and how this shapes their identities. The authors examine patterns of fosterage and child circulation; the gendered aspects of child migratory trajectories and strategies; the role of education, child labour and conceptions of place and ‘home’. Comparing different methodological and theoretical approaches and setting the case studies – from Ghana, Madagascar, Mali, Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, Sudan, Togo and Zambia – within the broader context of family migration, transnational families, colonial and postcolonial migration politics, religious encounter and globalization in Africa, this book provides a muchneeded examination of this contentious and critical issue.

Edited by RAZY & RODET

‘a strongly original perspective on histories of childhood and migration in Africa, and more contemporary developments in child labour and educational migration. ... a good contribution to the fields of migration histories, African childhoods, and colonial and early postcolonial social history.’ – Dr Stacey Hynd, Senior Lecturer in African History and Director of Postgraduate Research, History, University of Exeter

Edited by Elodie Razy & Marie Rodet

Children on the Move in Africa

PAST & PRESENT EXPERIENCES OF MIGRATION