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Archival Documents on Upper Volta: Here, There, and Everywhere1
- Raymond R. Gervais
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- Journal:
- History in Africa / Volume 20 / 1993
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 13 May 2014, pp. 379-384
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Fluctuations of colonial policies toward territorial integrity were not without effects, first on the people of these colonies and then on the organization of their own administration. A case in point is the tortuous history of colonial administration in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso). Created in 1919 out of the oversized Haut-Sénégal-Niger—which extended from the Sénégal river to lake Chad—in order to rationalize the administration Upper Volta survived as an autonomous colony until January 1933, when it was officially dismembered. The northwestern part (i.e., Ouahigouya) was ceded to the French Sudan, the central and southwestern regions (Mosi and Bobo) to Côte d'Ivoire, and a small portion of the eastern portion (Fada N'Gourma) to Niger. After harsh negotiations the colony of Upper Volta was recreated in 1947. Researchers who have worked on this part of the French empire know that every adjustment brought to the administrative arrangement also caused personnel and documents to be displaced to the new centers—Abidjan, Niamey, or Bamako.
This institutional constraint on the organization of complete sets of archival documents for the study of the region's past has been strengthened by a well-known post-independence symptom: bureaucratic plethora. Indeed Burkina Faso is probably the only country in the world to possess more archivists than organized archives. The Direction des archives, with its dozen archivists in the 1980s, had not produced a single inventory of what could be found in the capital (Ouagadougou) or in the regions, although important work had been done by individual archivists appointed to specific Ministries or by expatriate researchers.
Saving Francophone Africa's Statistical Past
- Raymond R. Gervais, Richard Marcoux
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- Journal:
- History in Africa / Volume 20 / 1993
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 13 May 2014, pp. 385-390
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Colonial administration, as every other administration, was built on the production and management of numbers: export figures (to assess the economic performance of each colony); population estimates, often falsely labeled “censuses” (to establish each colony's capacity to pay the head tax); school enrollment statistics (to establish budgets and document the road to “civilization”). French colonialism was probably one of the more centralized and number-producing systems. The regional (e.g., Dakar) and central (Paris) capitals were always requesting data for budgeting or simply for monitoring the evolution of each component of the empire.
In the field of population statistics, before 1945 the process yielded very few reliable data, though a more systematic examination is required to be sure. Historically this can be explained by the evolution both of data collection and training in statistics in France during the first half of the twentieth century. The situation was well documented in the first decades of the century by Fernand Faure, a prominent member of the Société de Statistique de Paris, who noted that training in statistics was not very popular in the French civil service because no specific demand was made by higher levels of administrative or political power. Nevertheless, the Société and individuals in the Statistique Générale de France did succeed in pressing for the creation in 1922 of the Institut Supérieur de Statistique de l'Université de Paris (ISUP), but the lack of means at the institute made it virtually impossible for it to meet its training objectives.