One of the first people I met in the village of Dalla was Maman Abidjan. Although she was an enthusiastic talker and had a wide vocabulary, Maman Abidjan expressed frustration about the way she had been received when she returned to her home village after living abroad for forty years. She was amazed how, despite her social, socio- economic success in Abidjan, she was put ’in place’ again once back home. She was upset about the associations people make between social status and place of residence, and reflected on how my interpreter and I, as relative strangers in Dalla, immediately identified her as a slave descendant in our first meeting because she lived in a former slave ward. We took her back to the past and literally put her ‘back in place’ because of stereotypical associations with her ward. She felt that her new status and social mobility had been undermined from the moment she returned home.
Such perceived constraints and frustrations work the other way too. Seydu Dicko, a freeborn son of Musa Dicko, grew up in Bamako and speaks better Bambara than Fulfulde. When discussing a recent visit he made to his father’s home village of Dalla in 2007, Seydu described his annoyance at his mother’s instructions about dressing in an
expensive traditional costume (French: Boubou), while he prefers his jeans and a shirt.
She wanted him to maintain his status as a prince, while he is uncomfortable with being treated as such. The moment he gets out of his vehicle in Dalla, someone of slave descent takes his suitcase, sends a child to bring him water and makes sure he is accom- panied all the way to the family compound. Seydu finds himself in an awkward situ- ation, and one he would prefer not to have to deal with.
Both of these stories illustrate how hierarchy is forced upon people when they are (back) in their home village: Seydu and Maman are ascribed a given status even though in the urban contexts they were socialised in they have developed a different habitus and identify themselves differently. Once physically present in a village, it is difficult to change historical patterns of belonging that have been established through an existing cultural field of hierarchy. As Maman Abidjan pointed out, hierarchy and the position one can take are inscribed in the landscape, literally in the place one is allowed, forced or expected to occupy. Hirsh & O’Hanlon (1995) argued that landscapes are not simply
backdrops to action but an integral part of it. Places are invested with moral value despite the anthropological denunciation of ‘localizing’ cultures (Hastrup & Olwig 1997). They cannot be reduced to mere voids: They always obtain meaning and merge with local ideologies and relating practices. This chapter describes how places are in themselves sites of memory.
My line of argument is that places are thus an alternative form whereby the history of slavery is remembered. As has been noted by several scholars, written sources of slave
voices are generally lacking,1 so academic descriptions of the external and the internal
slave trade in the West African region have increasingly focused on alternative ways of remembering to nevertheless represent slave voices and agency in written history. Various academics tried to get closer to these ‘slave voices’ by studying non-discursive and therefore radically alternative sources of slave memories. Shaw (2002) was the first to describe how several religious cults in Sierra Leone, continued to make reference to the slave past. Argenti (2007) has described the trauma still embedded and embodied in mask performances, song and children’s storytelling. Hardung (2003) addressed how
memories of slavery are still being practised in the ritual labour of Riimaayɓe in north-
ern Benin.
As mentioned in the introduction, several other scholars discussed more institution- alized memories in the public sphere, such as religious institutions & cults (Argenti & Roschenthaler 2006), cultural heritage festivals (Schramm 2007) and museums (Bella- gamba 2009). Attention has also been given to discursive claims of slave descendants who are fighting over access to cults (Noret 2008), ancestral tombs (Evers 2002) and family lineages (Ologoudou 2008), which in the respective societies remained for a long time the exclusive realm of the freeborn. This recent wave of studies demonstrates a growing body of alternative approaches to commemoration practices of slave descend- ants. In this chapter I argue that geographical organisation of specific places, can be seen as another form of non-discursive memory of slavery.
Inscribing social hierarchies from above and below
In a sense, the social and the geographical space are conflated in experience. It is impossible to ‘think away’ the actual geographical location of social life, lives are always grounded. (Hastrup 2005: 145) As Hastrup suggests, the geography of a specific space is important to an understanding of the social life of its inhabitants. At the same time, social relations identify places as being meaningful. This chapter focuses on how hierarchy ‘takes place’ in the general spatial organization of the Haayre region and, more specifically, in the residences of my network of informants in Dalla. It describes how the organization of places, both in a geographical sense (place of residence) and social sense (interactions), implicitly de- fines people’s positions in hierarchical social relations, considering how hierarchy is
1 Although many historians are doing an excellent job in reading or retrieving slave voices in Arabic correspondence (Hall 2009) and in court cases (papers by Roberts & Rodet as presented at the ‘Tales of Slavery’ conference in Toronto in May 2009.
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‘mapped’ in a physical place. It addresses the ‘grounding’ of social life in the physical landscape.
In his essay entitled ‘Walking the City’, De Certeau (1988: 92) described how ele- vation, the view from above like Icarus’s view when looking down on the world, makes one into a voyeur with a ‘celestial eye’. This chapter provides the reader with such a view. This celestial (bird’s-eye) view first maps and describes the spatial organization of the Central Malian Haayre region and its capital city, Douentza. After a short review of the literature on the interrelationship of spatial arrangements and hierarchy more generally, the third section provides a different perspective by taking the reader for a ‘walk’ through Dalla and by zooming in on the various neighbourhoods, each of which has a role in the village’s hierarchy. Dalla is presented as a concrete material landscape that structures and contextualizes the ways in which people relate and make their living.
On the walk, we will inevitably encounter people. Since the village of Dalla is home to the social network central to this thesis, a fourth section ‘casts’ the main informants who live in one of the wards and I describe the social network of the Dicko and the Kau families and present their links to the past based on the genealogies of both families (see Images 2 and 3). When encountering people on a walk, greetings are exchanged and I demonstrate how basic interactions, such as greetings, are imbued with the cultural field of hierarchy and literally ‘put people in their place’. The anthropological method of participant observation trained my eyes to ‘read’ hierarchy from the interaction between people. In the final section, important ethical issues when engaging in research on hier- archical interactions between different social groups are presented and the methodolo- gical choices taken during my field research are described.