Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- ONE INTRODUCTION
- TWO COLONIAL SUBJECTS AND IMPERIAL ARMIES
- THREE MOBILIZING COMMUNITIES AND RESOURCES FOR THE WAR EFFORT
- 8 Women, Rice, and War: Political and Economic Crisis in Wartime Abeokuta (Nigeria)
- 9 Africa's “Battle for Rubber” in the Second World War
- 10 Freetown and World War II: Strategic Militarization, Accommodation, and Resistance
- 11 Extraction and Labor in Equatorial Africa and Cameroon under Free French Rule
- 12 The Portuguese African Colonies during the Second World War
- 13 World War II and the Transformation of the Tanzanian Forests
- FOUR RACE, GENDER, AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN A TIME OF WAR
- FIVE EXPERIENCING WAR IN AFRICA AND EUROPE
- SIX WORLD WAR II AND ANTICOLONIALISM
- SEVEN CONCLUSION
- Index
11 - Extraction and Labor in Equatorial Africa and Cameroon under Free French Rule
from THREE - MOBILIZING COMMUNITIES AND RESOURCES FOR THE WAR EFFORT
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2015
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- ONE INTRODUCTION
- TWO COLONIAL SUBJECTS AND IMPERIAL ARMIES
- THREE MOBILIZING COMMUNITIES AND RESOURCES FOR THE WAR EFFORT
- 8 Women, Rice, and War: Political and Economic Crisis in Wartime Abeokuta (Nigeria)
- 9 Africa's “Battle for Rubber” in the Second World War
- 10 Freetown and World War II: Strategic Militarization, Accommodation, and Resistance
- 11 Extraction and Labor in Equatorial Africa and Cameroon under Free French Rule
- 12 The Portuguese African Colonies during the Second World War
- 13 World War II and the Transformation of the Tanzanian Forests
- FOUR RACE, GENDER, AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN A TIME OF WAR
- FIVE EXPERIENCING WAR IN AFRICA AND EUROPE
- SIX WORLD WAR II AND ANTICOLONIALISM
- SEVEN CONCLUSION
- Index
Summary
A 1947 documentary entitled “Autour de Brazzaville,” filmed partly by avant-garde photographer Germaine Krull, set about informing the French public as to what “FEA had brought Free France” during World War II. By far the largest set of colonies to rally to General Charles de Gaulle's cause in 1940, French Equatorial Africa (FEA) and Cameroon had served as bastions of the Free French movement, as launching points for Free French involvement in North Africa and as sources of international legitimacy. But according to this film, the region's contribution to the allied cause had mostly to do with resources: it “offered” fighting men as well as vital transportation routes, to be sure, but mostly produced massive amounts of rubber, gold, and timber. This focus on extraction constitutes the most captivating aspect of the film today, along with its perhaps more predictable civilizing discourse and condescending tone (“FEA had a hundred years earlier been in the stone age,” trumpets the narrator). Frame upon frame focuses on Free French Africa's contribution of natural resources. Free France, one is left thinking, must have bled FEA and Cameroon dry in the span of four years.
Many historians have noted that Free French practices in Africa were no less exploitative than Vichy's. Some contend that the indigenous philosophies and policies of leading Free French officials in Africa, Félix Eboué and Henri Laurentie, shared much with the essentializing and preservationist ethos of Vichy's proconsul to West Africa, Pierre Boisson. And we know, thanks to the work of Léon Kaptué, Catherine Coquery Vidrovitch, and others, to what extent FEA had been a site of extraction and coercion since the late nineteenth century, a colony particularly prone to colonial abuses. Indeed, as J. P. Daughton and Jeremy Rich have shown, FEA seemed to draw a disproportionate amount of attention from leagues, reporters, and other groups interested in the question of colonial brutality.
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- Africa and World War II , pp. 200 - 219Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015
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