Colonial Civil Service Research Articles

Towards an Understanding of Local African Abolitionism: George Ekem Ferguson, an Unexplored Abolitionist in 19th Century Ghana

The research problem discussed in this article centers on the historical role of George Ekem Ferguson, a 19th-century Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) figure, in the abolition of slavery. Despite Ferguson’s significant contributions as a colonial civil servant, cartographer, surveyor, and other roles, his potential involvement in anti-slavery efforts has been largely ignored in academic literature. Meanwhile, there is a local perception of him as an abolitionist in modern Ghana. This paper aims to reassess Ferguson’s legacy and specifically examine his reported anti-slavery activities. The study utilizes Ferguson’s colonial reports and community reflections to explore his advocacy against slavery in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, challenging the traditional narrative that predominantly highlights European contributions to abolition efforts in the region. The research utilizes archival records from The National Archives in London, including George Ekem Ferguson’s colonial reports, and field interviews with Ferguson’s family in Anomabo and residents of Wa, where he died and was buried in Ghana. These sources provide insights into Ferguson’s anti-slavery activities and local perceptions of him as an abolitionist.Part 1 outlines George Ekem Ferguson’s origins, education, and career within the colonial administration of Ghana. Born in Anomabu to a family involved in the colonial establishment and the church mission, Ferguson was educated in Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom, becoming a skilled cartographer and civil servant. Ferguson’s role in the Gold Coast was multifaceted; he was a teacher, a clerk, and eventually a political agent involved in treaty negotiations. Ferguson’s views diverged from those of other educated Fante contemporaries such as Casely-Hayford, who were influenced by James Hutton Brew’s advocacy of a greater African voice in colonial governance. Ferguson is presented as a proponent of expanding colonial rule for civilization purposes, in contrast to the Fante nationalist aspirations of his peers. The part provides essential background on Ferguson’s life, establishing his position and networks. It sets the stage for examining Ferguson’s reported activities in the northern hinterlands.Part 2 of the paper delves into George Ekem Ferguson’s diplomatic efforts in the Northern Territories and his engagement with local leaders, which may have led to his reputation as an abolitionist. While treaties of protection included anti-slavery clauses, treaties of friendship did not, focusing instead on preventing alliances with other European powers. Ferguson’s writings highlight the Asante tributary system’s contribution to regional slave sourcing and how British intervention reduced such practices. He emphasized the importance of the British defeat of the Asante, which led to a reduction in slave raiding and encouraged the replacement of the slave trade with legitimate trade to further curb slavery. Despite the lack of explicit anti-slavery provisions in many treaties, Ferguson implied to local rulers that treaties with Britain would provide protection against slave raiding. His efforts to prevent slave raids and to promote trade as an alternative to slavery contributed to his reputation as an abolitionist among local communities.Part 3 argues that community memory in Anomabo and Wa intersects with the historical record to portray Ferguson as an initiator of anti-slavery measures beyond his official colonial duties. His relatives in Anomabo maintain that Ferguson’s opposition to slavery was a personal initiative, not a colonial directive, thus affirming his status as an abolitionist. In Wa, where Ferguson is buried, the local community honors his memory as someone who defended their interests against slave raiders, with his grave site reflecting traditional customs for honoring respected strangers. The community’s view of Ferguson as an abolitionist is linked to his personal interventions against slave raiding and his efforts to establish boundaries that helped protect against slavers, reinforcing the narrative of Ferguson as a pivotal figure in the fight against slavery in Northern Ghana.The conclusion of the article presents George Ekem Ferguson as a pivotal figure who possibly contributed to the fight against slave raiding in Northern Ghana. It also outlines opportunities for future research to confirm the impact of Ferguson’s treaties on the reduction of slave raiding and to explore the perspectives of local African rulers and slave raiders of that era.

John Stewart: A personal appreciation

John Stewart: A personal appreciation

Public Policy, Training, and Civil Service Reform

There are very few countries of the world that are satisfied with their public bureaucracies and civil service systems. Civil service reform is being discussed in Africa, Latin America, Europe and North America [Ingraham (1996)].1 There are some that are trying to develop a career civil service and others that are fixing the problems of having a career civil service. There are some that are dealing with legacies of past colonial civil service systems while others that are struggling with identifying the role of civil service in a changing political environment. Whatever the case may be, civil service reforms are a topic of interest around the world. Each nation of the world is faced with the challenge of adjusting its domestic and international policies rather rapidly in response to forces of globalisation and technological change [Skogstad (2000) and Farazmand (1999)].2,3 The role of the civil service in economic development, governance, and public service is vital irrespective of the institutional and structural differences across countries. It is not surprising to see in the table below the number of civil service reform programmes funded by the World Bank in different parts of the world. The number of such programmes has significantly increased from 1980 to 2001.

Pontianak Trouble: Gender and Postcolonial Identities in the Malay Vampire Film

Pontianak Trouble:Gender and Postcolonial Identities in the Malay Vampire Film Rosalind Galt (bio) The pontianak is one of the most popular supernatural creatures in Malay cinema: a female vampire who has died as a result of male violence or childbirth and who returns to haunt patriarchy. She first came to cinematic prominence in the late colonial studio cinema of Singapore. This article argues that the pontianak is a complexly expressive figure: a female vampire or ghost who troubles both normativities of gender and presiding narratives of postcolonial and global identity in Malaysia and Singapore. The pontianak is one of the most popular supernatural creatures in Malay cultures and is featured in a number of films, but she does not easily travel the world in the manner of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean ghosts. Instead, there's something stickily local about her, and in getting at the specifics of the pontianak, I want to think about how the popular mediates globality in this particular cultural context. Malaysia and Singapore as nations have been distinctively constituted in relation to the global flows of colonialism and capitalism, with highly racialized social structures, and folkloric horror films stage at once a desire for the local and the transnational circuits of its undoing. In the pontianak film, gender becomes the central term with which to negotiate what kinds of identity and social power are possible, and I argue that the pontianak disrupts both traditional and global forms of being. To begin, then, what is a pontianak? In Malay folklore, she is one of many hantu, or ghosts, and is a childbirth spirit. Walter Skeat, the British colonial civil servant who wrote the first major Anglophone account of Malay folklore, writes of [End Page 40] the spirits which are believed to attack both women and children at childbirth. . . . the Langsuir, which takes the form of an owl with long claws, which sits and hoots upon the roof-tree, the pontianak which is also a night-owl and is supposed to be the child of the langsuir. (325) Colonial anthropologists were not always entirely accurate, and the pontianak is more usually viewed as the spirit of a woman who dies in childbirth, rather than the child. Moreover, in transition from folk mythology to cinema, the pontianak has been revised: although she is sometimes still represented as an owl and can often be found in trees, she is more often represented as a beautiful woman with flowing black hair. Andrew Hock Soon Ng complains that characteristics such as fangs and rising from the grave are drawn from Western vampire stories (2009, 217), and we might equally link her to other international figures of female vampirism and undead vengeance, such as the Thai Mae Nak and the Indian churel. The pathways of these generic influences are complex, but as a distinctly Malay figure, the pontianak has become a mainstay of Malaysian popular cinema. We first see the pontianak in a series of hugely popular films in late colonial Singapore. Cathay Keris studio made five pontianak films: Pontianak (B. N. Rao, 1957), Dendam Pontianak/Pontianak's Revenge (B. N. Rao, 1957), Sumpah Pontianak/Curse of the Pontianak (B. N. Rao, 1958), Pontianak Kembali/Pontianak Returns (Ramon Estella, 1963), and Pontianak Gua Musang (B. N. Rao, 1964). In an effort to copy the success of the series, rival studio Shaw Brothers made their own series, with Anak Pontianak/Son of Pontianak (Ramon A. Estella, 1958), Gergasi (Dhiresh Ghosh, 1958), and Pusaka Pontianak/Pontianak Legacy (1965). After the studio system crashes in the wake of Malaysian and Singaporean independence, there were almost no pontianak films for decades. In 1975, an Australian filmmaker, Roger Sutton, made a low-budget film titled simply Pontianak in Singapore. Twenty-five years later, Djinn's Voodoo Nightmare: Return to Pontianak (2001) attempted a modern revision of the genre, more influenced by The Blair Witch Project (Sánchez and Myrick, 1998) than by Malay hantu films. The pontianak really returns in Malaysia after 2002, when the government relaxed censorship rules that had banned horror films and supernatural themes, and the second horror film to be made was Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam/Fragrant Night Vampire (Shuhaimi Baba, 2004). Since...

The influenza pandemic in colonial Asante: Lesson drawing for the fight against COVID-19 in the twenty-first century

This paper pays attention to colonial strategies that were deployed to fight against the influenza pandemic among the Asante of Ghana. It does a comparative analysis of the outbreak and mode of spread of COVID-19 and influenza pandemics in Ghana and Asante, in particular. Based on the theory of lesson-drawing, the authors aimed to ascertain whether the strategies adopted to fight the current COVID-19 pandemic reminisce the earlier strategies deployed during the influenza pandemic of 1918. Based on primary and secondary data, the authors have constructed a history which proffers some insights into the fight against COVID-19. Authors conclude that the various health interventions toward the prevention and control of influenza in Asante during the colonial period were skewed in favour of Europeans and natives who worked within the colonial civil service. This did not support relevant strategies and efforts to reduce the spread of the disease at a faster pace. Despite several efforts made to curtail the spread of the disease, the colonial administration together with traditional authorities encountered challenges of inadequate health personnel, culture conflict, financial. The role of security agencies and the collaboration between the colonial administration and traditional authorities offer a very significant lesson for confronting the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana.

Grave Reservations

Abstract This article considers how Nigerians experienced decolonization through encounters with “European reservations.” It argues that Nigerian literature offers an “alternative archive” for histories of the built environment and decolonization. British colonialists established reservations as distinct areas, typified by low-density arrangements of bungalows, to house officials and other white expatriates. Reservations’ depiction in the work of writers including Chinua Achebe, T. M. Aluko, Chukwuemeka Ike, Wole Soyinka, and more recently Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, offers important evidence of how Nigerians experienced decolonization. During decolonization the colonial civil service was “Africanized,” and Nigerian civil servants took up residence at reservations in increasing numbers. This represented a triumph, but literary representations suggest that living in reservations, and in the similar spaces of new Nigerian universities, was often an ambivalent experience. These built environments helped to structure Nigerians’ experience of decolonization, but Nigerians also invested reservations with new meanings through their use and representation of these spaces. Reservations’ shifting meanings reflected changing perceptions of decolonization in postcolonial Nigeria. They proved to be significant imaginative locations through which the changes of decolonization were experienced.

Life and Times of HRH by Herman Ronald Hochstadt

Reviewed by: Life and Times of HRH by Herman Ronald Hochstadt Kevin Blackburn Life and Times of HRH By Herman Ronald Hochstadt, Singapore: NUS Press, 2020, xvii + 192 pp, ISBN 978-981-3251-19-9. In April 1971, Lee Kuan Yew famously quipped that Singapore’s progress depended on the efforts of a talented elite governing Singapore whose number was so small that they could all fit into a jumbo jet—300 people. If all these people were on the same plane and it crashed, he joked, Singapore would fall apart. Lee never gave an indication of who would be on his doomed metaphorical jet, but it is likely that Herman Hochstadt, one of Lee’s trusted trouble shooters in the civil service, would have had a ticket. He was Lee Kuan Yew’s Press Secretary from 1962 to 1965 and thereafter held key positions at a string of Ministries, such as Foreign Affairs, Defence, Education, Communications, Finance, and Law. His amusing and frank accounts of how he worked with Lee Kuan Yew during his long career in the Singapore civil service make his autobiography valuable to readers interested in knowing more about Lee’s relationship with his civil service. Hochstadt has written a very Eurasian autobiography of his life, with a self-deprecating style of humour. The first few chapters give insights into Eurasian life during the colonial era and how complex identities could be. Among them is the memorable story of his father, Henry Hochstadt, waving his birth certificate in front of the Japanese Occupation administrator Mamoru Shinozaki to prove his racial identity. At the time of decolonization, the ‘Malayanization’ of the civil service saw the departure of many of the British colonial administrators who were being replaced with fresh local graduates from the University of Malaya, such as Hochstadt. He entered the civil service in 1959, around the same time as other graduates who would also go on to be crucial key figures in the Singapore civil service—Sarjit Singh and Ngiam Tong Dow. Hochstadt describes how initially he picked up the work of departing colonial civil servant Tony Colton, who gave him much assistance, and remained his good friend after Colton took up a managerial position at the Straits Times. Hochstadt recalls during his first decade of his days in the civil service not just the successes, but quite a number of events that did not go according to plan or were near mistakes. The autobiography gives a thorough account of Hochstadt’s early career in the civil service, but as he moves into the period when he held high office later in his career, readers hoping for a detailed account of policy making and implementation will be disappointed. Like many civil servants, he invokes the Official Secrets Act, which they all sign, as a reason not to give such thorough accounts. Instead, he offers a number of anecdotes, which are amusing and interesting. They do give insights into decision-making. [End Page 244] From reading Hochstadt’s autobiography, the reader gets a sense of how crucial the well-educated University of Malaya graduates were to maintaining and increasing the civil service’s efficiency and expertise, working with the political leaders to implement their policies in an era of early nation-building. Yet, the small Singapore civil service of the 1960s would be unrecognisable to the staff of its present-day counterpart with its 85,000 civil servants working in the large concrete and glass air-conditioned towers today. Kevin Blackburn Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Copyright © 2020 Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society

Administrative Reforms in India

Unlike other developing countries, India abandoned the concept of catching-up development, and all its administrative reforms supported the ideology of Indian identity by introducing the most promising scientific achievements in the field of public administration. We identify three stages of administrative reforming in India: 1) the stage of formation of the national public administration; 2) the stage of the state interventional development of the public administration; 3) the stage of liberalization and informatization of the public administration. Since India had received independence, the new state used of the achievements of the colonial civil service and maintained institutions guaranteeing the unity of the state. The Indian government has succeeded in establishing a "living democracy" as the inherent part of Indian culture which supports the traditions of pluralism and is based on the application of rule by consensus and accommodation. Established in 1966, the First Administrative Reforms Commission ensured the leading role of the state in economic development. It improved the organizational foundations of public administration, including the mechanisms of socio-economic planning. The Commission’s reports prepared the base for constitutional recognition of India as a socialist republic. The most important instrument of the Union public administration was the licensing system, which extended to all spheres of economic activity and spawned the creation of numerous inspections with broad jurisdictional powers. The economic crisis and the inability of the Union to solve the social problems by interventionist methods — these were the reasons of the liberal reforms of the 1990s — 2000s. The rejection of the license system, the transition to the methods of soft administrative and legal regulation, the empowerment of decentralized bodies have changed the main areas of activity of the Indian public administration. The National Institute for Transforming India has provided the solutions to the problems in 80 areas of the country’s socio-economic development, acting through the mediation of all stakeholders — central, state and local government officials, public organizations and citizens. Liberal reforms are also aimed at democratizing governance and forming a citizen-oriented administration. They are focused on the implementation of innovative e-technologies in business and public administration.

Una geografía imaginada: el Muni a través del proyecto de compañía de franquicia de Valeriano Weyler

El trabajo se adentra en la construcción del espacio colonial español en el Golfo de Guinea a través del concurso de 1905 para la adjudicación del Muni. Este es habitualmente presentado como el proyecto de Valeriano Weyler. Sin embargo, la autoría intelectual recae en Enrique D’Almonte, antiguo funcionario colonial en Filipinas, miembro de la Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid y persona plenamente identificada con el discurso colonial español en África. A pesar de que la única propuesta admitida es la de Weyler, la subasta no llega a adjudicar el Muni a una compañía. Este trabajo no confronta por tanto lo que se pensó con lo que se realizó. Se esfuerza por entender qué conocimientos geográficos son los que confluyen en la propuesta elaborada por D’Almonte y de qué manera se ponen al servicio del proyecto colonial. El conocimiento que se moviliza bebe fundamentalmente de los relatos de exploración del Muni. A su vez, es un conocimiento asimétrico: adquiere textura y detalle para el litoral de la Guinea continental y el espacio más inmediato a él, pero se muestra genérico para el interior y este de la colonia. Las fuentes primarias utilizadas provienen del Fondo África del Archivo General de la Administración. En él está depositada la documentación de la subasta del Muni.

The Filipinization of the American City Beautiful, 1916–1935

The historiography of the Philippine City Beautiful recurrently centers on one date, 1905; two cities, Manila and Baguio; and one urban planner, Daniel Burnham. The colonial civil service's Filipinization of city planning after 1916 remains an unexplored facet of planning history. This article explores the planning practices of the Bureau of Public Works' Division of Architecture, which from 1919 was headed by Filipinos, and the relationship of these efforts to the City Beautiful, given the power mediation between the Americans and Filipinos in the run-up to the creation of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935.

The birth of cultural materialism? A debate between Marvin Harris and António Rita-Ferreira

Abstract This article addresses a specific phase in the career of Marvin Harris, the founder of cultural materialism: his fieldwork in Mozambique. In particular, it examines the debate on the migration of the "indígenas" of Mozambique to the mines of South Africa, in which he engaged with António Rita-Ferreira, a colonial civil servant and amateur anthropologist (or "self-made scholar", as he liked to represent himself). The article analyses that debate from two related perspectives: a disciplinary or anthropological perspective, and an historical-political one, marked by the movement of decolonisation in the second half of the 1950s

The Anthropology of Transcultural Storytelling: <em>Oui mon commandant!</em> and Amadou Hampâté Bâ's Ethnographic Didacticism

This article examines the relationship between literary virtuosity and ethnographic exposition in Oui mon commandant!, the second volume of memoirs by Malian writer and anthropologist Amadou Hampâté Bâ. In this memoir, Hampâté Bâ recounts his early career as a colonial civil servant before beginning professional training in anthropology. He offers an in-depth ethnographic look at the political universe of French colonial bureaucracy while inserting carefully honed stories and vignettes designed to instruct non-African readers about “traditional” African cultures and about everyday life under colonial rule. I call this narrative strategy “ethnographic didacticism” and argue that it allows Hampâté Bâ to connect his prowess as a storyteller to a broader anthropological knowledge project while reimagining the African autobiography as a cross-disciplinary palimpsest. Further, I suggest that Oui mon commandant!’s ethnographic didacticism provokes us to reimagine anthropology and cosmopolitanism as narratives of modernity with African genealogies.

Translation and the British Colonial Mission: The Career of Samuel Turner Fearon and the Establishment of Chinese Studies at King's College, London

AbstractThe University of London was the first institution in the United Kingdom to establish a professorship in Chinese. Within a decade of the first half of the nineteenth century, two professorships in Chinese were created at its two colleges: the first at University College in 1837 and the second at King's College in 1847. Previous studies of British sinology have devoted sufficient attention to the establishment of the programme and the first Chinese professorship. However, despite the latter professorship being established by the same patron (Sir George Thomas Staunton; 1781–1859) during the same era as the former, the institutionalisation of the Chinese programme at King's College London seems to have been completely overlooked. If we consider British colonial policy and the mission of the Empire in the early nineteenth century, we are able to understand the strategic purpose served by the Chinese studies programme at King's and the special reason for its establishment at a crucial moment in the history of Sino-British relations. Examining it from this perspective, we reveal unresolved doubts concerning the selection and appointment of King's first Chinese professor. Unlike other inaugural Chinese professors appointed during the nineteenth century at other universities in the United Kingdom, the first Chinese professor at King’s, Samuel Turner Fearon (1819–1854), was not a sinophile. He did not translate any Chinese classics or other works. His inaugural lecture has not even survived. This is why sinologists have failed to conduct an in-depth study on Fearon and the genealogy of the Chinese programme at King’s. Nevertheless, Samuel Fearon did indeed play a very significant role in Sino-British relations due to his ability as an interpreter and his knowledge of China. He was not only an interpreter in the first Opium War (1839–1842) but was also a colonial civil servant and senior government official in British Hong Kong when the colonial government started to take shape after the war. This paper both re-examines his contribution during this “period of conflict and difficulty” in Sino-British relations and demonstrates the very nature of British sinology.

The untamed archive

Interest in the history of colonized areas has always been existent. For utilitarian purposes colonizers wanted to know more about the past of the areas they started to trade with and where they settled themselves. This article is confined to the use of the sources for the writing of history in the Dutch East Indies in the 19th century. On a limited scale and for diverse purposes, colonial civil servants, scholars and amateur historians started to investigate the history of the colony. This article scrutinizes whether in the 19th-century Dutch East Indies the European tendency to base history writing on a systematic use of archival sources became in vogue. This question, however, raises immediately some epistemological and practical problems that will be discussed in this article. Was there a similar European concept of archives in the Dutch East Indies? How were indigenous archival sources valued and used? What infrastructure was available to study historical archives? This explorative case study shows how historical interest within a 19th-century colony got stuck into an almost obsessive collecting of historical archives and other source material as a prerequisite for historical research.

“Because God Has Given Us the Power of Reasoning”: Intellectuals, the Eritrean Muslim League, and Nationalist Activism, 1946–1950

Abstract This article discusses the rise of Eritrean nationalism in the context of Muslim intellectual acüvism during the later penod of the Bntish Military Administration (BMA). It argues that many of the leading members of the pro-independence Muslim intelligentsia, defined in thh article broadly as the fluid group of waters, Eritreans within the former Italian colonial civil service, and religious scholars serving within or associated with the Eritrean Muslim League, contributed to the naüonaUst movement by taking advantage of the extensive "Islamic social capital" across the region. Using Muslim League publicaüons, personal testimonies, British archival sources, and secondary literature, tfús article will show that throughout the period in question, proactive members of the intelligentsia helped strengthen Muslim civil society while they engaged in broader struggles aimed at achieving social reform and establishing cooperative relationships within the broader nationalist constituency. Their efforts had a tremendous influence on the overall trajectory of nationalism among both League leaders and the orgamzation’s general membership.

Sankofa: ‘Gazing Back’ to Indigenous Knowledge and Skills for Socio-economic Development of Ghana

Ghana attained political independence in 1957. Before colonial rule young people were taught indigenous skills like food preservation, weaving of clothes and brewing of gin for livelihood. Unemployment was unknown as no one idled about. Formal school was introduced to educate young people for colonial civil service as clerks, interpreters and preachers. To protect European interests, indigenous economic activities were banned. This did not only stifle development of indigenous economic activities but encouraged school graduates to look down upon indigenous industries. The negative colonial attitude has contributed to high unemployment and low industrialization. This study employed the qualitative research approach where 400 students and school leavers, 10 headmasters, 10 parents and 5 employers were selected for interviews. The study found that Ghanaian school graduates have no specific knowledge and skills for employment. It was recommended that to reduce unemployment and increase socio-economic development indigenous industries should be taught at school.

"Because God Has Given Us the Power of Reasoning": Intellectuals, the Eritrean Muslim League, and Nationalist Activism, 1946-1950

This article discusses the rise of Eritrean nationalism in the context of Muslim intellectual activism during the later period of the British Military Administration (BMA). It argues that many of the leading members of the pro-independence Muslim intelligentsia, defined in this article broadly as the fluid group of writers, Eritreans within the former Italian colonial civil service, and religious scholars serving within or associated with the Eritrean Muslim League, contributed to the nationalist movement by taking advantage of the extensive "Islamic social capital" across the region. Using Muslim League publications, personal testimonies, British archival sources, and secondary literature, this article will show that throughout the period in question, proactive members of the intelligentsia helped strengthen Muslim civil society while they engaged in broader struggles aimed at achieving social reform and establishing cooperative relationships within the broader nationalist constituency. Their efforts had a tremendous influence on the overall trajectory of nationalism among both League leaders and the organization's general membership.

The Đèo Family of Lai Châu: Traditional Power and Unconventional Practices

Although of negligible economic interest, the Black River Basin during the French colonial period enjoyed special administrative status as a military territory. The region's patchwork pattern of ethnolinguistic groups as well as problems of distance and strategy led the colonizer to renew the autonomy of the muäng, or Tai polities. Among principal Tai clans, the Đèo of Lai Châu exemplified political resilience: pursuing their own prerogatives (until 1954) by exploiting the French administrative framework. These hereditary leaders, employed as colonial scholar-officials and civil servants, were keen to combine contradictory vocations. For example, the Đèo were frontier wardens even though their ancestral muäng overlapped the border; they were tax collectors who were nevertheless involved in opium smuggling. This paper attempts to recreate an overall pattern of the constitutive elements traditionally governing the attribution and implementation of power on a local basis.

Gregory Mann. Native Son: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. ix + 334. Photographs. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $84.95. Cloth. $23.95. Paper. - Raffael Scheck. Hitler's African Victims. The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xiii + 202 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $65.00.

Gregory Mann. Native Son: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. ix + 334. Photographs. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $84.95. Cloth. $23.95. Paper. Raffael Scheck. Hitler's African Victims. The German Army Massacres of Black Soldiers in 1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xiii + 202 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $65.00. Cloth. In 2004, a multimedia exhibition opened in Toulon celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the soudi of France by the Free French. In fact, the vast majority of these troops were the men of the Tirailleurs Senegalais from West and Equatorial Africa, together with contingents from North Africa, Indo-China (and General Patch's American Seventh Army). Yet despite the major role they played in the liberation of France, African soldiers had not been permitted to march in either the Bastille Day parades or the celebrations marking the liberation of Paris-thus perpetuating the de Gaulle myth that France was liberated by the French (with a little help from the Americans and the British). That the forgotten colonial soldiers were to be unexpectedly commemorated in Toulon sixty years later was a result of the challenge of the National Front in Le Pen's stronghold in France's own Deep South. Uncompromisingly entitled Nos Liberateurs, the exhibition was a poignant opportunity to remind the liberated of what they owed to those who had arrived from the colonies to free them. Having apparently slipped off the pages of history once France shed its empire, the Tirailleurs Senegalais finally achieved the recognition they deserved for the vital part they played in overthrowing the racist German state. Back in the dark ages of the 1980s, when I began my doctoral research, very little had been published on the Tirailleurs-and virtually nothing by African authors. Historians of modern Africa tended to emphasize resistance to colonialism; by implication, this registered disapproval of those who collaborated with colonial power-and, of course, the men that actually carried out the colonial conquest of Africa. If, as it is often claimed, history is tainted by being written by the victors, then what happened to the African soldier? Twenty years on, all this has changed. New books on the soldiers of Algeria, Burkina Faso, and Tunisia have appeared in the last two years alone; there is also a burgeoning comparable literature, refreshingly no longer restricted to the memoirs of retired British officers and colonial civil servants, on the soldiers of Anglophone Africa. Does all this mean the field is getting too crowded? Clearly not, for the two additions to the corpus here under review both (in different ways) make important contributions to our knowledge of the Tirailleurs Senegalais. Gregory Mann's Native Sons clearly commenced with a strong focus on Mali, but inexorably became concerned with a full sweep of the tirailleur [African colonial soldier] experience-although he does not explore in any detail the tirailleur in combat. Raffael Scheck's Hitlers African Victims, by contrast, focuses mercilessly on the matter of German inhumanity, notably toward captured African soldiers in that brief period during the collapse of the army in June 1940; but what Scheck forfeits in scope, he makes up in intensity. Native Sons takes the reader seamlessly from recruitment to retirement and thence from the politics of pensions to the politics of the connection. The reader will readily recognize Mann's determination to describe the situation in starkly realistic terms, without making concessions to any preference for palatability rather than accuracy. Mann reminds us early in the work that like many of its neighbors, contemporary Mali is as much a post-slavery society as a post-colonial one; the relationship between the Malian soldier and slavery is a prominent theme throughout the book, for many of Mali's former soldiers were drawn from the lower strata of society. …

A humble service that has delivered public health good

On 1 June 1976, the first methadone clinic was officially opened in Hong Kong, following pilot studies in the preceding years, and in response to the recommendations of Dr Robert Newman, then consultant to the Hong Kong Government. One year later, an extensive network of 21 clinics came into being, serving up to 10 000 drug users in the territory on a daily basis. Mr Peter Lee, a British colonial civil servant and then Commissioner for Narcotics, was the innovator behind this new programme. In retrospect, we argue that the low threshold methadone treatment programme is not just essential in promoting health in drug users, but has contributed to public security, and protected Hong Kong from the onslaught of HIV infection. Over the past 3 decades, the mode of operation of Hong Kong’s methadone clinics has remained the same. The clinics are operated as a walk-in methadone treatment service, for which 98% are on maintenance. Although largely a public health concept today, methadone treatment served public security objectives when it was first established. As an expensive habit, many drug users committed crime to obtain quick money to pay for their heroin. Not surprisingly, a significant proportion of the prison population in the 1960s and 1970s were drug users. Shortly after the introduction of the methadone treatment programme, crime rates fell