Transactional Relationships and State Racism1

In colonial Dakar, the intersection of urban African networks and colonial policies concerning African fiscal lives produced a local transactional culture in which informality was central. These dynamics were very apparent in Dakarois’ everyday money management. Colonial administrations in Africa created a system in which most financial resources such as credit were available through official channels over which the state had control and were limited or inaccessible to colonized populations. In Dakar, part of the mechanism of ensuring the exclusivity of the formal economy and the exploitative economic basis of colonialism was an ideological framework that cast Africans as fiscally immature, severely restricting access to funds other than the most necessary. At the height of its colonial rule in West Africa, the French state pursued the rhetoric of African fiscal responsibility to a granular level in its wage policy, marrying a paternalism that proposed a need for tutelage to shape Africans into savvy economic actors with an overt urgency to produce more and more reliable labor.

Colonial policies were fraught with unintended consequences, and as state efforts to keep permanent African settlement in town at bay ultimately encouraged expanding informal settlement, the French administration's efforts to curb African accumulation merely encouraged creative fiscal practices to flourish in colonial Dakar. In the context of racist constraints, which limited formal fiscal management and a wage regime aimed at limiting any form of real earnings, Dakarois focused on quick, adaptable, and flexible strategies of resource access. Social networks were key to such a system. People in the colonial capital forged opportunities with one another, placed in a colonial schema meant to create perpetual need among African city dwellers and retain them in the low-paid labor force. The many transactional court cases individuals brought to the Tribunal reveal that the ability of Dakarois to turn toward other city dwellers as financial resources was a key necessity in the colonial city. Particularly within the context of concerted state efforts to entrench Africans in a form of poverty prior to the end of the Second World War, maximum flexibility among city dwellers in their monetary dealings was necessary and commonplace. The French colonial state, in fact—and contrary to its own goals—helped create a vibrant informal system.