Extraction and Labor in Equatorial Africa and Cameroon under Free French Rule

Abstract

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, Felix Eboue 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 Leon Kaptue, 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.