The young men, it turned out, were seeking to emigrate as contract laborers to the Congo Free State (CFS), the distant central African territory under the personal rule of the Belgian king, Leopold II. This was the fifth consecutive year that French colonial administrators found themselves struggling to thwart CFS agents’ recruitment operations in Senegal. The administrators feared that labor emigration to foreign colonies would deprive the colonial state and French entrepreneurs of troops and workers. French colonial officials also claimed it was their humanitarian duty to prevent recruits from falling victim to the Leopoldian state’s notoriously sordid working conditions and insalubrious climate. Dismayed by the colonial administration’s repeated failures to stem emigration to the CFS, the governor of Senegal ordered a special inquiry into migrant workers’ motivations.
This presentation draws on the depositions of over 300 would-be migrants collected during the investigations into the 1894 recruitment. I explore how information and ideas flowed along migratory routes linking the Western Sahel to the CFS. The eagerness of young Sahelians to emigrate to Congo contrasted sharply with the reluctance of migrant workers from the Bight of Benin and southeastern China, where Leopoldian emissaries also recruited intensively. To trace the sources of this contrast, I examine how western Sahelians imagined the conditions awaiting them in Congo; how they understood their legal rights and obligations; and how they treated competing reports from colonial officials, recruiters and returnees. Ultimately, these inquiries elucidate how norms regarding atrocity, free labor and migration circulated across Asia and Africa in the late nineteenth century.
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