The Travels and Tribulations of an African Prince

In 1906, Ibrahim Kachala—born in French West Africa and claiming descent from the rulers of the Bornu empire in northern Nigeria—traveled to France, eager to “encounter and learn from European civilization.” Over the next sixteen years, as he moved through Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, dozens of government reports and newspaper articles described him, at various moments, as an interpreter, an adventurer, a troublemaker, a pilgrim, a tourist, a thief, a pauper, and a prince. By the early 1920s, he was destitute and sought to return home—but it was unclear where exactly “home” was, and whether it remained within French territory. Officials in Europe and France’s African colonies shared, and sought, information about Kachala, hoping to definitively confirm his identity, his claims of royal descent, and his nationality. In particular, they hoped to find out whether he was, in fact, a French subject and whether they could, legally, restrict his movements or send him back to West Africa. Yet the answers to those questions remained elusive, owing both to Kachala’s changing stories and multiple identity papers and to the changing boundaries, states, and legal regimes through which he traveled.

In this paper, I use Kachala’s story to explore how the interplay of race, imperialism, and mobility shaped notions of identity in the first decades of the twentieth century. Amidst unstable national and imperial boundaries—and the efforts by governments to more formally “fix” individuals’ identities and keep track of their movements with passports and identity papers, fingerprints, and photographs—Kachala’s extensive travels within and beyond the boundaries of the French empire both used and challenged the cultural and racial hierarchies upon which the French empire, and European society more broadly, rested.