The essays which follow here are the work of one of France's most distinguished living students of Africa, at once a pioneer in the modern achievement of a scientific understanding of the continent and a fearless critic of all easy orthodoxies and accepted attitudes. If Suret-Canale is less known in the English-reading world than other French thinkers over the past two decades, this can only be because useful teaching seems always to move slowly across language frontiers and find often a slow acceptance. As it has happened, however, the English edition of one of Suret-Canale's principal works, French Colonialism in Tropical Africa, 1900-45, when published here by Christopher Hurst in 1971, was forthwith received as an important contribution to studies of the colonial system in the vast territories of French West and Equatorial Africa. Now we have again to thank Mr. Hurst for giving us, as both publisher and translator, this new volume of Suret-Canale's work.
Written at various times, some of these essays have responded to particular debates along the way or the challenges of particular discussions, but in any case of a kind which has in no way lost its relevance to the 1980s and 1990s. Such is the case, for example, with the first essay, where the author considers the application of a marxist analysis to the elucidation of Africa's pre-colonial societies, a subject on which the last word is far from said but to which this essay adds its characteristic clarity of mind. Such is again the case with the second essay in which Suret-Canale looks at the historical and social significance of the Fula (Peul) hegemonies of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, another subject of crucial importance, then and now, for an understanding of the growth and variety of West African state structures.
Other among these essays have marked steps in the evolution of a coherent understanding of the processes of ‘decolonisation’, a horrible but useful term which has now got itself into use to describe the ending of formal empires in Africa. In this context the most influential, perhaps, has been the eighth essay here, treating the nature of ‘chieftainship’ within the French colonial system, and the ways in which the chiefs of the Futa-Jalon, in (then French) Guinea, were dislodged by the pressures of an anti-colonial nationalism. The tenth essay belongs to the same category, and offers Suret-Canale's thoughts on what has been sometimes, if sometimes quite misleadingly, called ‘development theory’. And then two quite different essays, those on Vigné d'Octon and Louis Hunkanrin, reveal other aspects of this writer's wide concerns. Here he recovers from oblivion an early critic of French colonialism, a polemicist and publicist who was seen in those days of high imperialism — unavoidably, no doubt — as an eccentric and extremist but whose voice, today, comes down the wind of time with a bracing gravity and good sense. In comparison with d'Octon there is the early nationalist of Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin), Louis Hunkanrin, whose stubborn intelligence has likewise won Suret-Canale's sympathy.
These essays are written to be enjoyed as well as to instruct. Aside from their inherent interest then value will be found, I think, to lie in their qualities of erudition, lucidity and independence of judgment. They are produced from a painstaking and even passionate attachment to the facts. This is an analyst who wants above all to know what really happened, and, if also possible, why it happened. Yet there is little use in knowing what happened and why — in so far as either can be known — unless one can set forth one's knowledge. This is a writer who knows how to share his lucidity. And then, thirdly, this is a thinker who follows no conventional or beaten track. He thinks for himself, no matter what the cost may have to be.
Now that the colonial period and the culture of outright imperialism are receding into memory, even into distant memory, it may be hard to imagine the price in personal toil and turmoil that had to be met by those who, like Suret-Canale, preferred to stand against the orthodoxies of the time. They had to expect the certainty of every sort of administrative obstacle and established obstruction in the way of their travels and researches, and yet somehow manage to persevere. They could hope for no pleasant grants and subsidies, and their tenure in any particular African place was likely to be brief. It might afterwards be claimed on behalf of the French colonial system, as of the British, that it was ‘preparing our Africans, step by step, for independence’; one's experience on the ground, however, was just the reverse of whatever such ‘preparation’ might be thought to imply. As only one small example of that experience, I myself remember being threatened with expulsion from French Sudan (now Mali) in 1952 for having dared to interview a local nationalist leader : ‘a person of absolutely no importance’, I was told by the police commissioner of Bamako, but all the same the very same person, Mamadou Konaté, who afterwards became the first president of his country.
Suret-Canale has had to suffer much persecution, whether in Africa or at home, because he has always taken his own line and followed it. The nature of his use of Marx shows this independence, for it pursues no doctrines or dogmas but stands on the principles of analysis which Marx evolved for the benefit of later development ‘on the spot’. As a lifelong member of the French Communist party, of course, he might well be thought to possess a willingness to bend to that party's usually authoritarian discipline. But his work denies it. Over a long acquaintance I have often disagreed with him, but I have never once discovered him following any line of thought except his own. It is perhaps in this quality of staunch independence that his principled critique of the colonial project becomes most effective.
There is much that one should say about this devoutly committed thinker; committed, that is, to the search for truth through whatever entanglements and minefields the fashion of our times may have erected in its path. Born in 1921, he was still a student — a brilliant student, one should add — when France was engulfed in the Second World War. He persisted as a student in so far as that was possible, but he persisted just as much, or more, in his refusal to stand aside from the fearsome challenges of those times. As an active patriot even during the first grim months of Nazi occupation, he was arrested by the German military authorities in September 1940 and spent the following winter in infamous jails, only to join once again, when released in February 1941, an active resistance which was then far from being any kind of' widespread movement. And the rest of the war saw him in the ranks of anti-Nazi defiance.
His African years, following the war, have been spent chiefly in Senegal and Guinea, and it was there, onwards from 1946, that he prepared himself intensively for the books which he would write during the 1960s: a three volume study of French West and Equatorial Africa (written in 1957-72), of which Mr. Hurst has already given us, in English, the middle volume mentioned above; a study of the Republic of Guinea (1970); a splendid array of specialist papers and studies (some of Which we have here); and latterly, a doctoral thesis on 'The Geography of Capital in French-speaking tropical Africa, with an outline of which this present volume closes. Although by training a geographer, he is in reality a polymath — he himself would claim, no doubt, that this is precisely because of his training as a geographer — and the range of his learning reaches far beyond the limit of any introductory note. From the benefit of a long acquaintance let me add that Suret-Canale has remained a warm and genial participant in whatever challenges the years continue to bring him. It is excellent that more of his work should here become available in English.
February 1987