Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa by Kathleen Keller

Abstract

Reviewed by: Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa by Kathleen Keller Benjamin Sparks Keller, Kathleen. Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa. UP of Nebraska, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8032-9691-6. Pp. 243. Surveillance of suspicious individuals in AOF (Afrique-Occidentale française) during the First World War and the interwar period highlights the paranoia of the colonial state in regard to the propagation of anticolonial and communist ideologies. Kathleen Keller argues that her work provides a lens to understand French colonial rule by analyzing individuals and organizations in the margins of society considered suspicious by the government. Keller looks at archival police documents to tease out the preoccupations of the colonial administration through an analysis of surveillance practices. According to Keller, the surveillance of suspicious persons differs from other forms of surveillance, such as immigration and hygiene, in that it attempts to monitor and control certain aspects of colonial life through bureaucratic measures. The surveillance practices examined in this work act as a form of imperial control that seeks to quash potential political dissent and behaviors contrary to the aims of the French state. This work begins with an introduction to a culture of suspicion and the practices of surveillance through its various techniques, emphasizing the practices of shadowing, postal checks, ports, home searches, and even gossip. Keller then devotes the majority of her work to an examination of the lives of supposed suspicious individuals as a means of providing glimpses into a colonial life rarely told in colonial histories. The authorities divide individuals into different categories based, not on their proclivities, but on their race, gender, nationality, occupation, and political affiliation. Keller, on the other hand, divides her work into foreign subjects, metropolitan Frenchmen, and Africans. Foreign subjects, those not hailing from metropolitan France or a colony of the AOF, were often deemed suspicious due to their extensive travels in and out of countries with ties to communism, pan-Africanism, and pan-Islamism during the interwar period. Keller argues that the investigation of foreign subjects reveals a colonial [End Page 233] state gripped by fears and the influences of those who threaten the social organization of colonialism. Suspicious behavior of foreigners in the 1930s also came to include unpredictable and antisocial behavior. The benefit for the colonial government in dealing with foreigners was that they could efficiently expel them from the territory. In contrast to foreigners, the means to deal with French men and women considered suspicious became more complicated. However, the concern that foreigners could propagate ideologies contrary to existing state ideologies remained the same for the French subjects, with the inclusion of anticlericalism and royalism. In addition to political policing, the surveillance of Frenchmen focused on moral deviances as these individuals were meant to model civilization but failed to represent the state. In discussing the monitoring of Africans, Keller shifts to look at the networks formed by African suspects, rather than the information compiled in police reports, as a means of looking at the methods used by the authorities to repress political networks. Colonial Suspects presents enlightening insights into the lives of the suspicious, marginalized individuals in the AOF while highlighting the colonial administration's anxiety about the flow of ideas and people. Benjamin Sparks University of Memphis (TN) Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French