On the Edges of Empires: Conquest, Slavery, and Conversion in West Africa, 1885-1940
FAIN: FEL-272679-21
Elizabeth Ann Foster
Tufts University (Somerville, MA 02144-2401)
Research and writing leading to a book on political and religious conflicts in 19th- and 20th-century West Africa, and how they affected the lives of four individuals caught up in them.
On the Edges of Empires is a historical book project that explores the collision of multiple African and French imperial endeavors in West Africa between 1885 and 1940 by tracing the interconnected lives of four “ordinary” people caught in the fallout. They were Téné Sako, a Malinke (Mande) girl enslaved by empire-builder Samori Touré, “liberated” by the French Army, and given to a Catholic mission; Raymond Traoré, the fellow Malinke child slave and Catholic convert whom she married; Namory Keita, the Muslim canton chief in French service whom she later left Raymond and Catholicism for; and Joseph Lacas, the French missionary who bitterly chronicled her story. These individuals’ lives, which I have pieced together in archives across Europe and Africa, will allow me to explore themes of slavery, abolition, conversion, and gendered experience of marriage, love, and betrayal amid conquest and upheaval.