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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Setting the Story Straight: Louis Hunkanrin and Un forfait Colonial |
Author: | McDougall, E. Ann |
Year: | 1989 |
Periodical: | History in Africa |
Volume: | 16 |
Pages: | 285-310 |
Language: | English |
Geographic terms: | Mauritania France |
Subjects: | colonialism slavery historical sources History and Exploration |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/3171788 |
Abstract: | In Paris 1931, the League des droits de l'homme published the pamphlet 'Un forfait colonial: l'esclavage en Mauritanie'. Its author was Louis Ouéssou Hunkanrin, born in Porto Novo in 1886, and best known in the context of radical Dahomean politics. Along with five other prominent political figures, he was exiled to Mauritania following the 'Porto Novo incidents' of 1923. His revelations about corrupt French administrators as highly placed as the governor's office add to an understanding of the implementation of colonial slavery policy and the differences between theory and practice. They generated an internal inquiry in late 1933. On the basis of an analysis of the available archival material on the 'Hunkanrin affair', the author concludes that the value of Hunkanrin's work lies as much in the unpublished inquiry it produced as in the published material itself. The cases dealt with reveal something of the intricacies of Mauritanian slavery, amongst others its relation to witchcraft and the strong beliefs about it in an ostensibly Muslim society; its role in the economy as a means of wealth distribution and as a point of intersection between the emerging market economy and the more traditional nonmarket sectors; the different nature of the slave experience according to gender; and the special complexity of its reality in the context of a new political economy operating through an old, Islamic social structure. App., notes, ref. |