New Orleans, Louisiana, and Saint-Louis, Senegal

Mirror Cities in the Atlantic World, 1659-2000s

Emily Clark, Cecile Vidal, Ibrahima Thioub, Emily Clark, Cecile Vidal, Ibrahima Thioub

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780807171110
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807171714
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This book explores the intertwined histories of Saint-Louis, Senegal, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Although separated by an ocean, both cities were founded during the early French imperial expansion of the Atlantic world. Both became important port cities of their own continents, the Atlantic world as a whole, and the African diaspora. The slave trade not only played a crucial role in the demographic and economic growth of Saint-Louis and New Orleans, but also directly connected the two cities. The Company of the Indies ran the Senegambia slave-trading posts and the Mississippi colony simultaneously from 1719 to 1731. By examining the linked histories of these cities over the longue durée, this edited collection shows the crucial role they played in integrating the peoples of the Atlantic world. The essays also illustrate how the interplay of imperialism, colonialism, and slaving that defined the early Atlantic world operated and evolved differently on both sides of the ocean. The chapters in part one, "Negotiating Slavery and Freedom, " highlight the centrality of the institution of slavery in the urban societies of Saint-Louis and New Orleans from their foundation to the second half of the nineteenth century. Part two, "Elusive Citizenship, " explores how the notions of nationality, citizenship, and subjecthood—as well as the rights or lack of rights associated with them—were mobilized, manipulated, or negotiated at key moments in the history of each city. Part three, "Mythic Persistence, " examines the construction, reproduction, and transformation of myths and popular imagination in the colonial and postcolonial cities. It is here, in the imagined past, that New Orleans and Saint-Louis most clearly mirror one another. The essays in this section offer two examples of how historical realities are simplified, distorted, or obliterated to minimize the violence of the cities' common slave and colonial past in order to promote a romanticized present. With editors from three continents and contributors from around the world, this work is truly an international collaboration.

I

NEGOTIATING SLAVERY
AND FREEDOM

THE ROLE OF SLAVERY IN THE
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY
OF SAINT-LOUIS, SENEGAL

MARTIN A. KLEIN

The cities of the slave trade were almost all cities with a slave majority.¹ In fact, slavery played an important role in almost all of the cities created by expanding European powers between 1450 and 1800. This was certainly true in Saint-Louis, Senegal, where slaves were a majority of the population from several generations after it was founded in 1659 until the abolition of slavery in 1848. Slaves were important in Saint-Louis because they were available, because they were more reliable than free labor, and because they were the most efficient way that labor, both skilled and unskilled, could be provided. This does not mean that there were no other sources of labor. During the first decades of the trade, workers recruited from nearby communities were the most important source of laptots, the sailors on the convoys that went upriver to seek slaves and gum, but the number of slaves steadily increased, and they became an overwhelming majority by the middle of the eighteenth century. Only just before abolition in 1848, the process was reversed as free laborers began to replace slaves in the river trade. Ironically, they were men who worked on riverboats in order to buy slaves and improve their economic position in their home societies.² Slaves predominated because they were available in greater numbers, they were more reliable, they could be trained, and they could be more profitably exploited. Urban slavery was not as regimented or as harsh as that of the slave plantation, and it allowed the slave a much greater degree of autonomy and the possibility of accumulation. Slave plantations everywhere depended on the ability to extract labor from slaves by coercion. In the cities, slaves played diverse roles and had a greater degree of autonomy. This was especially true in Saint-Louis because of the river trading system. Slaves were, however, still property and could be exchanged, sold, or most likely given to offspring as part of a dowry.

The mouth of the Senegal River was the place where the transatlantic slave trade began in 1443 when the first Portuguese ship to get south of the Sahara kidnapped several people to show the King of Portugal what they had accomplished. The slave trade lasted there for over four centuries. Though there was not a Portuguese settlement on the Senegal River, the area from Cape Verde to Sierra Leone was peppered with Luso-African villages, which were linked to a Portuguese colony on the Cape Verde Islands. From the late sixteenth century, the English, Dutch, and French challenged the Portuguese monopoly of the slave trade. The climate and the disease environment of Senegambia were somewhat more hospitable to Europeans, and it thus became the site of several permanent installations, though the number of Europeans in these colonies was always very small, and during the eighteenth century actually became smaller.³

In 1659, the French settlement on the island of Saint-Louis was founded by the Compagnie du Cap Vert et du Sénégal. This was the first of a succession of charter companies which controlled Saint-Louis. Only in 1783 did the French state take over. During the seventeenth century, the convoy of ships that went upriver every year included and was controlled by French men. The different companies wanted to ship to America as many of the slaves under their control as possible. Thus, much of the labor was provided at first by French soldiers and sailors, but they experienced a high mortality and were gradually replaced by free men recruited locally. They were a majority of the workers until early in the eighteenth century, though the number of slave workers on the convoy probably began increasing early. Africans increasingly controlled the boats, and slaves did most of the work. As late as 1738, there were still 231 Europeans in Saint-Louis, Gorée, and the upriver post at Galam, but the French slave trading companies had decided by then that it was more economical to rely on African sailors and artisans and métis enterprise.⁴ By 1835, the population of these settlements had multiplied about ten times, but there were only 151 Europeans. European soldiers, sailors, and artisans were paid more and had a much higher mortality. The slaves who replaced Europeans even in skilled and leadership roles were more knowledgeable and probably more productive. This was in part because they were given a measure of autonomy and were sufficiently rewarded that they were loyal participants in the system. By the 1740s both the annual convoy and productive activity within Saint-Louis were dominated by slaves owned mostly by women called signares. The signares were, and their families remained, very much a part of the French presence. More important, they were crucial to the local economy, the export economy, and the development of Saint-Louis. Saint-Louis was from early on very much an African town. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was dominated by African enterprise, and labor was provided overwhelmingly by slaves.

Each of the European settlements in West Africa developed its own trade network.⁵ Often the trade came to various slave trading entrepôts, only a few of which were under direct European control. In Saint-Louis the traders went up the river to seek slaves and other commodities. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Bambara areas of what is now western Mali were the major source of slaves for both the French and British in Senegambia.⁶ In the Gambia, these slaves were brought down to British trading posts by African traders. In the Senegal River, the French developed a number of trading posts in Gajaaga in the upper river area in the 1690s, of which the most important was Fort Saint-Joseph (1698). These posts tapped the slave trade from the Bambara states of Segou and Kaarta and also tried to develop the gold trade.⁷ The French also developed a trade in gum arabic, which was produced by slaves working under the direction of Mauritanian slave owners in desert areas north of the Senegal River. There were four trading posts, called escales, in the lower Senegal River Valley, which was accessible all year long. Gajaaga in the upper river was accessible only during the rainy season when waters were high. There were thus two trading seasons. From February to May, there were trade fairs in the escales. In June, the whole trading community moved upriver in a convoy, the boats pulled by laptots.⁸ In the eighteenth century, the gum trade became as important economically as the slave trade.

The convoy was made up of different groups, free and slave, métis and black, and an occasional French trader.⁹ The vast majority, however, were slaves, at least from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. Not all of the states bordering the river were friendly. The river was shallow and marked by sandbars, which meant that local horsemen could stop ships, which forced them to move in convoy and sometimes to require protection. The French made regular payments to the rulers of the African states along the river to keep the river open and tried, not always successfully, to influence the politics of the river.¹⁰ The convoy finally returned to Saint-Louis in October, an event that was one of the most festive of the year. The convoy bought slaves and gum for export, but also gold, wax, ivory, and hides. Grain and other foodstuffs were also purchased in the middle and lower Senegal River area and sold to the Moors or used to feed Saint-Louis and supply oceangoing vessels that stopped in Saint-Louis. Much of the commercial activity in the lower river was in the hands of marigotiers, slaves or ex-slaves who worked the creeks and bought grain, products of local artisanship, and salt from Gandiole.

The slave trade was thus part of a vibrant Senegal River trading system. During the late eighteenth century, gum was actually more important than slaves. Gum had long been traded on the Mauritanian coast, but from the late seventeenth century, demand increased with the growth of European textile industries. The gum-producing areas used the gum to buy slaves, grain, and cloth.¹¹ The gum and slaves were largely for export, but much of the trade was also for local consumption. Gold was much desired by Europeans, but the local demand for gold jewelry was such that relatively little gold found its way onto French, British, or Portuguese ships. The river commercial system existed long before the French arrived, but the existence of Saint-Louis and its demand for African products stimulated its growth. Thus, salt, jewelry, textiles, livestock, and agricultural produce were traded back and forth within the river economy. The vibrancy of this economic system was rooted in the diversity of commodities produced and the links between the export trade and trade between different riverine peoples.

The slave trading companies were monopoly companies, but regularly failed because of interlopers and European wars. They were not eager to create a large costly establishment, but they found it difficult to control the growth of the colony or the behavior of men they sent out to Africa. Central to that growth was the signares that company officials cohabited with.¹² Company employees were suspected of using their partners to trade and of providing these women with the best merchandise. Employees were forbidden to trade on their own. None of the companies, however, could control either their employees or the local population. Men were prohibited from bringing their French wives until the 1720s, but even after that, French women were rare in the colony...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: NEGOTIATING SLAVERY AND FREEDOM
• PART II: ELUSIVE CITIZENSHIP
• PART III: MYTHIC PERSISTENCE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX