The Resurgence of Pawning in French West Africa during the Depression of the 1930s

Abstract

The Depression of the 1930s made itself felt in Africa in 1931 and 1932 with a sharp drop in commodity prices, which threatened the ability of many Africans to sustain and reproduce themselves. It also threatened colonial governments, which saw thin resources strained. Faced with a dramatic decline in revenues, the response of the French regime in West Africa was to tighten tax collection and cut back on staff and services.l This, in turn, placed a heavy burden on individuals and households, who responded in varying ways to the decline in income and the persistent demands for revenue. In cash crop areas, people had difficulty but generally found ways to pay their taxes. In many poor areas, where migrant labor was the major source of revenue for taxes, there were few ways to earn money, and many people were forced to pawn children, usually girls. In some areas, the administration clearly encouraged the practice. Pawning was widespread in pre-colonial Africa, but the functions it filled varied according to the social, economic, and political dynamics of the society in which it was found. Writing about Central Africa, Mary Douglas has argued that pawning offered the men of less differentiated matrilineal societies of Central Africa a special kind of adaptation to the basic residential and authority problem posed by matriliny. Pawning provided men with enduring property in the form of women and eventually dependent lineage segments, which they used to keep hold of their own young men and also to attract young men from outside the lineage group.2 Thus pawning regulated relations between groups and facilitated the accumulation of power. The literature on pawning in West Africa is analytically shallow but indicates that it was widespread. The greater penetration of the market in West Africa clearly shaped a different kind of institution. Most accounts link it to famine, to debt, and to economic inequality. Among the Asante, a matrilineal society more complex than those Douglas studied, pawning reflected two linked processes: the increased importance of control over people and a progressive erosion of lineage based forms of subsistence security through increased market activities.3 For the patrilineal Yoruba, E. A. Oroge has argued that pawning developed in response to monetization and was stimulated by an unequal distribution of wealth. Oroge suggests that it was marginal before the nineteenth century, but expanded dramatically during the Yoruba Civil Wars. Parents pawned children to raise money to redeem kin who had been taken prisoner. Parents also offered their children to Yoruba patrons, usually military leaders, who protected and provided for their pawns while training them.4 Pawning existed in almost all parts of French West Africa. It was particularly widespread in Mande areas and in the Voltaic