A rchive Date
[ 06-11-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Africa ]
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[http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/106.4/br_211.html
Book Review
Sub-Saharan Africa
Owen White. Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa 1895–1960. (Oxford Historical Monographs.) New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. 200. $70.00.
Miscegenation as a theoretical concept caught the attention of French scholars early in the nineteenth century. The success of Augustin Thierry's History of the Conquest of England by the Normans (1825) and his brother Amédée's History of the Gauls (1828) introduced the connection between race and history into the French intellectual arena, stimulating interest across the disciplinary board in the social role of miscegenation.
Shortly thereafter, William F. Edwards, physician and founder of the Ethnological Society of Paris, endorsed the Thierrys' ideas in Des caractères physiologiques des races humaines considérés dans leurs rapports avec l'histoire (1829) and elaborated his own theory of racial mixing. Mixed race communities in French West Africa, by contrast, were established as early as the fifteenth century and pre-existed these theoretical developments.
To begin with, therefore, the relationship between theory and practice was tenuous. By the early twentieth century, however, French concern with the métis(se) of West Africa was out of all proportion to their number (4,000 out of a total population of 14.5 million).
It is this preoccupation that forms the central theme of Owen White's monograph, whose overall aim is to recreate the lives of the mixed-race children born in French West Africa during the period 1895–1960 and draw attention to the complexities of writing on the subject. White suggests that sexual relations in the colonies cannot be seen solely in the light of French strength and African powerlessness
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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