Between City and Country: The Devés Family Network and the Politics of French Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century Senegal

Based on research in public and private archives and oral interviews, this paper examines the biography of the Devés family and their interaction with the French colonial state in the late nineteenth century.    As a mixed-race family who operated one of the most important and successful trade houses located in Senegal’s colonial capital, the Devés developed extensive kin and client networks that linked them to merchant capital firms in Bordeaux and metropolitan lawmakers as well as the ruling elites of the Senegal River valley, caravan traders in Mauritania and commercial centers in Senegal’s peanut basin.  I argue that the Devés group defies the assumption that colonial Africa can be divided into groups of collaborators or resisters.  At times the Devés facilitated colonial conquest, and at other times they opposed colonial practice.  Relying on an intricate network of business partners, political allies and family connections allowed the Devés family to assert their authority at the highest levels of French authority in the colony and the metropolis and in Senegal’s rural countryside.  This study enters into debate on the bifurcation of the colonial state in Africa by demonstrating that the inhabitants of Senegal’s colonial towns blurred the boundaries between European city and African countryside established by colonial officials who established these administrative demarcations to rationalize the colonial state.