West African Imperial Borderlands: The Specter of French Mandated Togoland in Debates over Pawnship in Colonial Dahomey during the 1930s

Felix Cochouro, a Dahomean-Togolese author and politician writing in the late 1920s, described the border between Togo and Dahomey as a “phantom” prior to 1920.  The border took on new meaning after World War I when France took over the governance of the majority of the former German colony of Togoland.  France now controlled two neighboring territories, the League of Nations mandate of French Togoland and the colony of Dahomey. International standards dictated that France govern each in distinct ways. This paper examines what this difference in governance structure meant in pragmatic terms when imperial subjects in the Mono district in the southwestern region of the colony of Dahomey and their neighbors in Togoland protested imperial policies.  This paper asks: How did Dahomeans harness this looming threat of international scrutiny as leverage for their own agendas within the colony?  It reconsiders how Dahomeans challenged colonial authority through the logic of borderlands identity in order to reveal the unanticipated social realities created through the establishment of an imperial border shared between a mandate and colony in which the same European authority governed the territory on both sides of the border. 

In particular, this paper focuses on debates about girls held in pawnship in French West Africa.  Human pawning to secure loans came under attack during the 1930s as a form of de facto slavery.  The routes through which imperial subjects participated in this debate in transnational arenas depended on their residency in the Togoland mandate or the colony of Dahomey. Togolese petitioned the Permanent Mandates Commission directly, whereas pawning in West African colonies fell under the purview of French authorities and the League of Nations Commission of Experts on Slavery.  This paper contrasts the strategies and outcomes of Togolese and Dahomean involvement with the issue of human pawning.