Mixed Race Studies

The Métis of Senegal: Urban Life and Politics in French West Africa

Indiana University Press
2013-03-18
296 pages
9 b&w illustrations, 5 maps
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-253-00674-5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-253-00673-8
eBook (PDF) ISBN: 978-0-253-00705-6

Hilary Jones, Assistant Professor of History
University of Maryland, College Park

The Métis of Senegal is a history of politics and society among an influential group of mixed-race people who settled in coastal Africa under French colonialism. Hilary Jones describes how the métis carved out a niche as middleman traders for European merchants. As the colonial presence spread, the métis entered into politics and began to assert their position as local elites and power brokers against French rule. Many of the descendants of these traders continue to wield influence in contemporary Senegal. Jones’s nuanced portrait of métis ascendency examines the influence of family connections, marriage negotiations, and inheritance laws from both male and female perspectives.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Urban Life, Politics, and French Colonialism
• 1. Signares, Habitants, and Grumets in the Making of Saint Louis
• 2. Métis Society and Transformations in the Colonial Economy (1820-1870)
• 3. Religion, Marriage, and Material Culture
• 4. Education, Association, and an Independent Press
• 5. From Outpost to Empire
• 6. Electoral Politics and the Métis (1870-1890)
• 7. Urban Politics and the Limits of Republicanism (1890-1920)
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Family Histories
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Donas, Signares, and Free Women of Color: African and Eurafrican Women of the Atlantic World in an Age of Racial Slavery

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 153
Saturday, 2013-01-05: 09:00-11:00 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom II (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Hilary Jones, University of Maryland, College Park

Papers:

• “Reevaluating Saint Louis’ Infamous Signares, 1700–1850” / Lindsey Gish, Michigan State University
• “‘The Christened Mulatresses’: Interracial Marriage in a Slave Trading Town on the Gold Coast” / Pernille Ipsen, University of Wisconsin–Madison
• “Strategies of Power: Luso-African Donas of Nineteenth-Century Luanda” / Vanessa S. Oliveira, York University
• “Free African and Eurafrican Women and the Trading Companies of the French Atlantic” / Jessica Marie Johnson, Michigan State University

Comment: Lorelle D. Semley, College of the Holy Cross

In the age of the Atlantic Slave Trade, African and Eurafrican women emerged as intermediaries between foreign traders and local populations. Europeans’ lack of knowledge in African languages, trade networks, local culture, social structures and political institutions provided African and Eurafrican women a unique opportunity to become cultural and economic brokers.  Portuguese adventurers on the coast of West Africa first named these women “senhoras” in the 16th century. Although Portuguese men coined the term, they were not the only Europeans to name and have socio-economic relationships with African and Eurafrican women. Over time each European group made the original Portuguese term their own: in Crioulo it became “nhara”, in French “signare”, in English “senora”, and “dona” among the Portuguese of Central Africa.  These ‘middle-women” surfaced all along the coast of Africa from the Senegambia to Mozambique between the 15th and the 20th centuries, although the most famous of these women were found in the port cities of Bathurst, Benguela, Bissao, Cacheu, Goree, Joal, Luanda, Osu, Portudal, Rufisque and Saint Louis. These women formed a distinct group within African and Afro-Atlantic society during an age of racial slavery, but the duration and trajectory of their lives varied across time and place.

“Donas, Signares & Free Women of Color” gathers scholars working on female African and Eurafrican entrepreneurs, brokers, and partners who allied with Portuguese, Spanish, French and Danish men in one specific enclave of Africa or the Americas. Together these four papers will question what made these women unique, how different European powers perceived them, if and how partnering with one particular European power over another influenced these women, and how their actions were shaped by their local environments. Panelists’ papers will also explore the trans-regional and trans-Atlantic connections between women in each society, drawing on comparative frameworks to interrogate the similarities and differences between each group. By exploring the individual stories of African and Eurafrican “middle-women” across the Atlantic world, this panel will move the scholarship beyond exoticism and generalizations. The panel’s ultimate goal is to determine if these women can and should be discussed as a coherent collective group throughout the Atlantic World or if scholars should continue to examine each group separately.

From Mariage à la Mode to Weddings at Town Hall: Marriage, Colonialism, and Mixed-Race Society in Nineteenth-Century Senegal

The International Journal of African Historical Studies
Volume 38, Number 1 (2005)
pages 27-48

Hilary Jones, Assistant Professor of African History
University of Maryland

The institution of marriage served as the basis for the formation of mixed-race society in Senegal’s coastal towns. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, African and Afro-European women called signares entered into temporary marital unions with European merchants and officials stationed on the island of Saint Louis. These marriage practices, known in French as manage a la mode du pays, closely resembled notions of engagement and marriage found among Wolof populations of the mainland. By the early nineteenth century, the mixed-race inhabitants of the islands increasingly combined new concepts of marital exchange and ceremonial practices learned from visiting Catholic priests and European settlers with local marriage traditions. Writing in the 1840s, Abbe David Boilat, a member of the “indigenous clergy” and son of a signare, called for the Christian population to eliminate superstitious practices and abandon manage a la mode du pays. He advised Christian families to base their society on the “sacred ties of marriage” by adhering to marriage contracts that strictly conformed to the expectations of the Catholic Church and the requirements of the French state. By the establishment of Third Republic France in 1870, Senegal’s “mulatto” population no longer followed the marital practices of their foremothers but rather insisted on marital unions sanctioned by the Church and considered legal according to French civil law. For these families, the ritual ot declaring the intention to be married at town hall and having an officer of the civil state record it in the civil registry became an integral part of the marriage ceremony.

What accounted for this shift? How and why did men and women of mixed racial ancestry coming of age in late nineteenth-century Senegal develop new marriage strategies? A number of scholars have examined the formation and development of urban and coastal societies in British West Africa. These studies…

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Race-Mixing, Radicalism, and Reimaginating the Nation

Journal of Women’s History
Volume 22, Number 4, Winter 2010
pages 253-256
E-ISSN: 1527-2036, Print ISSN: 1042-7961

Hilary Jones, Assistant Professor of African History
University of Maryland

The title of Kumari Jayawardena’s monograph, Erasure of the Euro-Asian, reveals the degree to which people of mixed racial ancestry have been silenced in histories of nationalism and national identity in South Asia. The same holds true for the story of mixed race groups in Africa under colonial rule. An obsession with racial purity and the pervasive image of the “tragic mulatto” has dominated popular and academic discourse to the point that we fail to recognize the complex ways that people who lived “betwixt and between” colonial powers created their own sense of group identity and negotiated the politics of race, class, and gender to assert their own interests and even develop a radical critique of colonial rule. Overemphasis on the idea that people of mixed racial ancestry were destined to live lives of marginalization or that they acted simply as the unwitting agents of colonial powers has, thus, erased the critical contributions that Euro-Asian women and men made as leaders, public intellectuals, and reformers in the land of their birth and in the colonial societies of which they were a part.  Erasure of the Euro-Asian uncovers these hidden histories and in doing so complicates our assumptions about collaboration and resistance and disrupts the notion that assimilation or mimicry constituted the only possible response for people of mixed racial ancestry within modern colonial societies.

Jayawardena’s study of Euro-Asians over several generations, from first encounters in the sixteenth century to the emergence of modern nationalism in South Asia in the 1920s and 1930s, confirms my own research on métis identity and French colonialism in Senegal, West Africa. In Senegal, the history of Euro-Africans begins in the period of the Atlantic slave trade. African and Afro-European women known as signares married…

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