The Time of the Whites

Human history​ , at least of the settled and sedentary, begins with the occupation of land. Animals are kept out or enclosed with fences. Plants and trees are cut back, dug up, selectively cultivated. Non-human occupants, spirits and resident deities are assuaged or tamed through ritual and consecration. In Latin, the words meaning to settle, to worship and to work the land all derive from conjugations of colere, while the meaning of cultus gradually shifted from the management of plants to ‘culture’ in the sense of a deliberate, ritualised way of life. These meanings have held fast for centuries. The French economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu wrote in 1874 that ‘colonisation is a considered act, subject to rules, which can only originate in highly advanced societies. Savages and barbarians sometimes – even often – emigrate [but] only civilised peoples colonise.’

The colonising impulse appears to be universal among sedentary cultures. We find one version of it in the language of the Songhay people of the western Sahel, for whom all human flourishing begins with nanguzoru, the settlement and cultivation of a land. In Songhay tradition, the koyre – the settlement and its inhabitants – must first propitiate the spirits and then develop a culture. To leave the koyre is to venture into the saaji – the wilderness – even when the move is to Paris or New York.

Western accounts of colonisation have tended to be narratives of domination. In Domination et Colonisation (1910), Jules Harmand, a retired French colonial administrator, tried to distinguish between colonisation as the cultivation of a wilderness and colonisation as a form of dispossession and domination. In Australia or North America, he wrote, colonisation involved a transfer of population to settle the wilderness. There had been earlier settlers, the so-called natives or indigènes, but they had, Harmand implies, all but died out – or could simply be regarded as aspects of the wilderness. In parts of the world where pre-European settlers were well established – Africa, Asia – it was a case of domination. Harmand admitted that what the Europeans did in such countries was unjustifiable. In the twilight of colonisation, Hausa-speaking intellectuals in Nigeria coined their own term: mulkin mallaka, ‘rule by possession’.

Colonisations: Notre Histoire attempts to consider the many aspects of France’s colonial history. Pierre Singaravélou, a historian at King’s College London and the book’s editor, is in no doubt about the difficulty of his task: ‘France and its former colonies … laid down arms only to continue the war in history books, political forums and the media.’ The book’s format has its roots in the Histoire mondiale de la France, a doorstopper collaboration between 122 historians published by Le Seuil in 2017 and edited by Patrick Boucheron, a specialist in medieval Italy who teaches at the Collège de France. Its publication was controversial, but the concept was exciting. The short essays each dealt with a significant year in French history, often from an unexpected angle. Many well-known historians provided contributions, and their pieces were intended to surprise, exploding historical pieties and presenting France in far from nationalist terms. The book was an instant hit and appeared in English two years later as France in the World: A New Global History.

The Histoire mondiale de la France inspired imitators. The Storia mondiale dell’Italia was put together within months of the French prototype (Boucheron wrote the foreword). In 2021 Le Seuil decided to replicate the formula, turning to French neocolonialism in sub-Saharan Africa with L’Empire qui ne veut pas mourir: Une histoire de la Françafrique – 1000 pages, 25 authors – which claimed to demolish the myth that France’s elites had consigned Françafrique to the grave. The following year, Le Seuil’s focus shifted to the many pressures on French society – globalisation, populism, migration, Covid, social media, the perceived challenge to secularism – with La Société qui vient (1344 pages, 64 authors), which proposed that a sense of crisis could lead to a better future. Then came Colonisations, the shortest of the series at 720 pages, but with the largest number of authors (268).

The virtues of this multi-authored, encyclopedic approach to France’s past are not always obvious, despite the liveliness of the contributions. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, the father of ‘connected history’ and Boucheron’s colleague at the Collège de France, took a dim view of the Histoire mondiale de la France, calling it a ‘global history for imbeciles’. L’Empire qui ne veut pas mourir was not really innovative either, rehashing the fixations of the Survie – a collective of old-school anti-imperialists who supplied many of the book’s authors – and doing nothing to unsettle the established image of ‘Françafrique’ as a fount of neocolonial malice. Colonisations is more interesting, in part because it takes the form of a ‘histoire régressive’. The book consists of five hefty sections – each a book in its own right – whose stories unfold in reverse chronological order.

It is tempting to begin with the last section and the coda by Amartya Sen, which could serve as a short introduction to the book as a whole, but Colonisations begins in Paris in 1961. On 17 October, dozens of Algerians were killed and thrown into the Seine, an atrocity captured by the words graffitied on the Pont Saint-Michel: ‘Ici on noie les Algériens.’ It ends in the 13th century with the Manden Charter, a vision of political order supposedly created in the early years of the Mali empire. The charter is championed as a Sahelian Magna Carta, but this is a redemptive postcolonial reverie: said to have been preserved orally, the charter was first written down in French in the late 1990s, in a town in Guinea. Its creation spoke to a long-standing sense of humiliation in the aftermath of European rule and to the need to imagine a history of Africa without colonisation.

As Colonisations moves backwards in time, Europeans lose their status as unique colonisers, a reorientation which entails plenty of de-occidentalisation. Romain Bertrand, one of the contributors, notes that the 17th-century diplomat Thomas Roe may have had a grandiose sense of his mission at the Mughal court, but Emperor Jahangir didn’t bother to note Roe’s visit in his memoirs. He did, however, discuss in detail his relations with Shah Abbas of Persia. This isn’t the way the British have seen things. In 1899, the Hakluyt Society issued a facsimile of Roe’s memoirs. The preface situates his story within the history of British India by way of a grand proleptic metaphor: the standing he was said to have obtained for Britain in the region ‘proved to be but the first step in a march of conquest which has only of late years reached its limits, and the scarlet liveries which escorted the ambassador through Rajputana were prophetic of a time when a descendant of King James should rule over an Indian empire vaster and infinitely more prosperous than ever owned the sway of a Mogul’.

The colonial romance typified by this preface and the anti-colonial romance that emerged in the colonies (and which was structured in much the same way as the story it sought to counter) both depended on the same falsehood: that the colonising impulse was not universal but particularly and horrifically European. In textbook histories, France is credited, or blamed, for being the harbinger of modern colonisation in Africa. But that dubious honour should go to Morocco, which colonised the Middle Niger in the early 17th century, or perhaps to Ottoman Egypt, which colonised Sudan ten years before France’s invasion of Algeria in 1830. Indeed, many of the great empires of the past were built, at least in part, on colonisation.

In West Africa, both the Mali and Songhay empires treated the Middle Niger as a colonial possession, bound into a centralised administration – as opposed to constitutional rule – characterised by economic exploitation and the repression of native populations. The genocidal tactics of Sonni Ali Ber, the founder of the Songhay empire, are comparable in scale to those of Caesar in Gaul or France’s massacres of the Bwa in modern-day Burkina Faso during the First World War. Yet in the story we are asked to believe, only Europeans can be colonisers: there is still too much at stake, intellectually and politically, for anti-colonialists to claim otherwise.

For Singaravélou, colonisation stages an encounter between the West and the Rest. But if we believe, as the contributors to Colonisations do, that cruelty, misapprehension and incommensurability are woven into colonial contact, we’re bound to conclude that the encounter is hopeless, despite the fact that colonisation is a geopolitical reality defined by relations of power, not a clash of civilisations. Even an arch-imperialist like Kipling knew that colonisation was not a matter of fundamental, unbridgeable differences between coloniser and colonised so much as a test of power, ideally resolved by a pact of freedom and fraternity. The most well-known line in his ‘Ballad of East and West’ – ‘East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’ – is often quoted without its resolution: ‘But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,/When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!’ Harmand put it more realistically: colonisation in the modern era amounted to domination by foreigners, no more and no less. But it was a political cataclysm, not the ontological showdown that both the colonial and anti-colonial romances envisage. Colonisations does at times acknowledge that colonisation is not quintessentially European, but too often its contributors fall into the essentialising trap of figuring the encounter between France and its colonies as asymmetrical and the outcomes as inevitable.

The Haitian revolutionaries certainly did not see themselves as ontologically different from the French Jacobins, but rather as militants in the same fight. In the mid-1820s, the French and Haitian governments engaged in negotiations to settle their bleak dispute over independence and the status of evicted plantocrats. The goal of the French was to force emancipated Haitians to compensate the French plantation owners who had lost their estates and to establish a version of neocolonial rule. The Haitians, for their part, believed that colonisation was a thing of the past. What French peasants called le temps des seigneurs, ‘the time of the lords’, was described by Haitian slaves as le temps des colons, ‘the time of the colonists’. The burning of castles in France was replicated on the other side of the Atlantic by the bonfire of plantations in Haiti. The problem the Haitians faced was that the Bourbon restoration, which came hard on the heels of Napoleonic despotism, had done away with the possibility of freedom and fraternity, to say nothing of equality. Kipling’s notion that existential difference is abolished when champions from rival cultures face off for glory was no use in Haiti: there were no French ‘strong men’ in the Bourbon restoration to match the Haitian revolutionaries.

Elsewhere, a departure from colonisation would take place at the level of consciousness. In Songhay, the word potol, which I learned in my childhood, is used to describe a time of tyrannical rule. Its syllables seemed to me to drop like beads of blood – pot-tol – and in my teens I associated it with the name Pol Pot: there is no question that Cambodians living in the days of the Khmer Rouge were experiencing potol. It is a corruption of the French term portage, used to describe the carrying of loads over long distances on colonial expeditions. Forced porterage was one of the first acts of foreign despotism, and those subjected to it were the first to be colonised. Porters were sometimes shot for being insufficiently docile, or too weak; sometimes they died of malnutrition. There was something of the death march about porterage, and in the Songhay language the term potol came to stand for political cruelty in general. For colonisation itself, Songhay has no name except ‘the time of the whites’.

In most African countries, there is a widespread feeling that the colonial era is firmly in the past and a passé obsession – not forgotten, but transcended – even though the continent’s political intelligentsias characterise themselves as fighters for the ontological liberation of Africa. In July 2023, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, Burkina Faso’s putschist leader, ranted for nearly two hours on radio and TV against Western imperialism. The fight against colonisation seems endless, he argued, because the colonising project has seeped into ‘our very genes’. From the bully pulpit of state-controlled media, a young man in uniform posing as a revolutionary was rebooting the anguished tropes of the anti-colonial romance.

If the fight against colonisation – and colonialism – is worth waging, it is not because our ‘genes’ must be purified or our ‘essence’ as Africans reinstated, but because the will to colonise has not disappeared. Colonisation may be gone from much of what used to be the French empire, but it continues in recognisable forms in France’s overseas possessions – New Caledonia, Mayotte, French Guyana. Russia seeks to recolonise Ukraine. Israel relentlessly appropriates Palestinian land. Trump speaks of ‘reclaiming’ Canada, Greenland. The conditions that make colonisation a possibility of ‘notre histoire’ are still with us.