Draft Proposal for SENEGAL MICROFILM PROJECT
2000-2004

Submitted by Joe Caruso, revised 10/16/2000

Please note that this is only a *draft* and not the final proposal. Printed copies of the draft proposal and the comments will be made available in Nashville at the ALC cooperative projects meeting and at the CAMP meetings.

I would like to explain the background to the proposal and suggest that what is really needed is for CAMP to submit a major grant proposal to Mellon or Rockefeller to continue filming materials in Senegal. This is particularly important given the fact that some of the Title VI African Studies Centers have been decreasing their support (or threatening to do so) since last year. It is likely that support will decline over the next few years, as other projects or acquisition schemes are adopted. Moreover, it is obvious that the cost of continuing to do microfilming in Dakar is going to require funds far in excess of the combined contributions from Title VI and CAMP.

In July, I visited Dakar for 4 days. At that time, I discussed the future of cooperation between CAMP and the National Archives with Saliou Mbaye, the director. The archives staff is ready and eager to apply the training that CAMP and Title VI Africana libraries provided for them last year. This summer they finally arranged for the French translation of the training documentation.

PROPOSED PROJECT:

The new microfilm project is: "Affaires politiques et administratives du Senegal, Serie D."

"Serie D" is a complement to the "Justice indigene, sous serie 6M" collection. The second and larger half contains rich material on colonial Senegal outside of the Four Communes and some material on 19th century French colonial policies in West Africa (beyond Senegal). In 1999, the archives published their catalog to the collection: "Repertoire Serie D - Senegal: Affaires politiques et administratives." I have a copy of the catalog and CAMP member institutions ought to be able to acquire their own copies probably through Hogarth Representation.

***NOTE: This is not an AOF (Afrique Occidentale Francaise) collection. ...and is NOT available at Aix-en-Provence or elsewhere outside of Senegal. Indeed, the National Archives of Senegal is not interested in filming any of the AOF collections at this time -- partly because some of the material is still not "classified" and partly because it could involve obtaining permissions from France and the successor states of AOF in West Africa.

The selection of Serie D and the motivation for this proposal are based on four main factors:

• First, the colonial court records ("Les Fonds du Tribunal de Saint Louis") -- which were previously identified as a good candidate for the next film project (closely related to "Justice indigene, sous serie 6M" (CAMP/Title VI project, 1995-2000) -- are still in temporary storage in Saint Louis and will not be ready for filming in Dakar for at least another year.
  
• Second, the effectiveness of the July 1999 training session and the overall impact of the 1995-1999 project experience will decline over time, unless the Archives staff continue to film and gain more experience. In addition, there is now a strong possibility that the senior microfilm technician with the most experience will take his retirement in the next 2 years.
  
• Third, "Serie D" is already classified and ready to be filmed in Dakar. I had a look at the boxes and some sample documents while at the Archives. The material is definitely in need of film preservation.
  
• Fourth, "Serie D" is a major collection on the history of "Senegal" and early French colonial rule in West Africa. Other collections on Senegal which could be filmed are of a much narrower focus...i.e. public health, agriculture, etc.

A PROJECT IN TWO PARTS:

***NOTE: If we start part 1 of this project, we will be compelled to pursue part 2. A major infusion of grant money will obviously be necessary to complete part 2.

PART 1: "Administration centrale de la colonie du Senegal, 1785-1964, sous-serie 10D"

Contents: Correspondence, circulars, treaties and conventions, political mission and tour reports, etc.

Approx. size: 272 boxes

Est. Sub-total: $24,750 (Master negative only)

Time and Payment Schedule for original filming of Serie 10D:
-- 1 to 1 1/2 years to film
-- $17,325 up front, followed by $7,425 upon receipt of the master negative.

CAMP would accept the master negative and pay for the duplication in the United States (as we did with Justice indigene, sous serie 6M.)

Est. Total: $32,000 (Completion of Part 1)

Ideally, another training program could be set up in Dakar to enable the Archives staff to take on the job of duplicating from their own master. ....but it depends on the availability of financial resources and successfully recruiting a trainer (Bob Mottice, who did the training session in July 1999, may or may not be available when we need him.)

PART 2: "Administration territoriale de la colonie du Senegal, 1785-1964, sous-serie 11D"

Contents: Correspondence, circulars, judgements, political mission and tour reports, public works reports, economic and commerce reports, etc.

Approx. size: 1,573 boxes

Est. Sub-total cost of original filming: $120,000 (Master negative)

Time schedule:
-- Another 2 years (minimum)

*Est. Sub-total cost of training, duplication, etc.: $17,000

Est. Total: $147,000

*Rough estimate: With much enhanced funding, a training session on site -- or even a 6-week training program for an archives technician to be held in the United States.

CAMP FACULTY REPRESENTATIVE COMMENTS:

Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 17:54:22 -0400

From: Dennis Galvan <dgalvan@polisci.ufl.edu>

Dear Joe,

Thanks very much for your note -- although I have been away [in Indonesia of all places] for a few months and consequently not very able to keep up with matters related to CAMP, I remain very interested, especially in your Dakar initiatives.

I find the proposed project quite compelling. Both parts of Serie D, but especially its second component, dealing with territorial administration outside the Four Communes, are quite exciting. This is especially so for the kind of research I could envision Ph.D. candidates in History, or quite possibly Political Science, doing in the archives.

Filming the second part of Serie D will ease scholarly access to a set of materials critical to understanding how the foundations of state authority and state-society relations were forged from the very beginning of colonialism in Senegal. Although it would take a very specialized kind of political scientist to do this research [a historian is more likely to emerge], mining this material can help us trace patterns of transformation in local, pre-colonial authority structures, rule-systems, land tenure arrangements, and social norms as numerous local polities were subordinated to and made sense of by the expanding French territorial administration. There are indirect echoes of local voices, of acts of local, adaptive agency in this material. Both parts of this Serie D, but especially its second component, will help us follow not simply the fits and starts, travails and tactics of the building of empire, but the rationalities of African communities as they transformed their own societies and economies in the process of encountering, working with, resisting and in subtle ways, redirecting and refashioning the colonial administration itself.

As with Serie 6M, part of the importance of Serie D [esp. the second portion] lies in Senegal as exemplar territory for the rest of French West Africa. Bureaucratic-administrative mechanisms of territorial control, resource extraction, coercion of labor, etc., were more developed and sophisticated in the "territorial" part of Senegal than anywhere else in AOF, especially before the turn of the 20th century. If there is anything to learn about deep patterns of state-society relationships which begin in the colonial era and persist to the present day [and the contemporary literature on civil society, political culture and democratization tells us there is a great deal to be learned by tracing these "lines of historical continuity" [a la Bayart], then the materials in Serie D will provide some enterprising and clever researcher with unparalleled tools in this investigation.

I also find the idea of Mellon or Rockefeller funding to really carry on this work especially exciting. Are there any prospects out there? Anything I can do to help?

Looking forward to hearing how it all unfolds,

Dennis

At 09:55 AM 10/2/00 -0400, you wrote:

On Sun, 1 Oct 2000, Kathryn Green wrote:

I agree with Dennis's assessment of the importance of this project. I have used Series D in previous research, and it is indeed rich. I was frequently told that the Senegal archives simply duplicated what was in Paris (This was in the days before everything was moved to Aix), but in fact the AOF archives contain many dossiers that are not in France, or are more complete than what is in France.

I'm coming into this a little late, and so maybe someone (Joe?) could answer this for me one-on-one rather than clutter all your mailboxes with something you already know. How was the Archives finally convinced to allow the filming, knowing that a copy would be maintained in the United States? So many information professionals in Africa are concerned about losing control over these resources.

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