The Kingdom of Unreason

Referring to the colonial period, the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembé spoke of a “completely baroque and ridiculous circus”. The historian Guillaume Lachenal takes up the expression and illustrates it through the story of Doctor David, a medical administrator of the Wallis and Futuna protectorate (1933-1938), then of the Haut-Nyong region in Cameroon (1939-1944). In these two colonies, David was successively called king then emperor, with unlimited powers to transform these regions as he wished. The investigation intended to find traces of this extravagant enterprise bears witness to the fanciful or irrational dimension of colonization. From this borderline case, the author, a specialist in the history of medicine in Africa, delivers a contribution to the history of the “emancipatory mission” (p. 12) of colonization, as well as to that of the European medical profession in the first XX^e century. The claims of the colonial officers of the medical corps reflect the painful contradictions of the emancipatory vocation of the colonist and the particular relationship of doctors to power.

The work deviates from pure academic demonstration: one of its iconoclastic aspects, which in reality commands all the others, is the decision to tell a “playful visit” (p. 17) in search of Doctor David. G. Lachenal thus completes the work of the Cameroonian historian Wang Sonné, who himself studied this character in 1996, by extending his initial research in the field. Thus, the passages of strict historical narration are interspersed with personal accounts by the author on his investigation in Cameroon and Wallis, interviews with witnesses of the “reign” of Doctor David, all to scrutinize an archaeology of the past in the present. This choice, sometimes disconcerting when it gives the impression of replacing archival analyses, has the merit of staging the complex relationship between colonial history and its own trace. It does not disconnect historical reflection from its resonance in the present, without however getting lost in psychological explanations. The thread of the investigation also reverses the chronological perspective: like the author, the reader first discovers Doctor David’s Cameroonian experience, then his Wallisian past.

This surprising inversion has the great merit of showing two very different faces of Doctor David, a suave African philanthropist in the early 1940s, a brute armed with his whip in the Pacific 10 years earlier. It suggests that we should not forget that historical actors are not a coherent whole, but a superposition of different faces. On the other hand, this return to the past prohibits us from scrutinizing the accumulation of experiences and their successive reinvestments, learnings that are nevertheless decisive in a career as a colonial officer. It is sometimes difficult to restore to the reader the unity of the two moments. By bringing together these two periods, two observations nevertheless seem salient, one on the singular moment of the 1930s in colonization, and the other on the styles of authority in these two regions.

The colony justified by works

David’s experience reveals the particularity of two forms of colonization that enjoyed new fortunes after the First World War: the mandate and the protectorate. After the great disenchanting conflict, the French colonial power tried to breathe new life into its empire by justifying, in an increasingly hostile world, colonization through its work. The mandate, well known as a product of the redefinition of international power relations, carries this design within itself. This form of colonization, intended to be provisional and light, is presented as being more virtuous, it respects local societies and powers more. In the context of this humanist colonialism, medicine “presents itself as the standard of the colonial system and its benevolence” (p. 29) and thus participates in this process of conviction.

David seemed the right man for the job: trained in the army health services, from which he graduated in 1929, the doctor already had solid experience as a medical administrator at the head of Wallis and Futuna. The aim of his mission was primarily diplomatic: the League of Nations had entrusted German Cameroon to France after its victory in 1918. By entrusting a “medical region” to David, France championed the prophylactic cause to silence the claims of Germany, which wanted to recover its protectorate. The region was in fact strongly marked by the sleeping sickness epidemic; Doctor David intended to reorganize colonial society to prevent and eradicate diseases. Freed from fussy and economical administrators, the doctors devoted themselves to a government that subjected Cameroonians to a new health discipline. The standard of living had to be increased, children schooled, women welcomed into maternity wards, and populations were moved without discussion. The idea is to turn this region, which is hopeless for the metropolis, into a new, prosperous rubber plantation.

This Pasteurian model then serves France’s anti-German propaganda, which wants to convince international society of the superiority of French methods over German biopolitics, which it considers ineffective. III^e Reich tried to convince the League of Nations’ Health Organization that “germanine”, a prodigious molecule, cured diseases and justified the restitution of the territory to the Germans. But beyond this context of international rivalries, G. Lachenal insists on the ambiguity of this utopian experiment which is combined with the horror of “mass death” (p. 38). This great project ended in a real health and economic disaster. Paradoxically, the need for rubber caused by the Second World War increased the spread of sleeping sickness, nestled in latex vines and other swamps crossed by Africans forced to carry out a massive harvest.

Ten years earlier, in Wallis and Futuna, it was the protectorate that had been honored by David’s policy. While the colonial world was animated by Lyautey’s sensational success in Rabat, the doctor demonstrated the same skill as the marshal in handling the institutions of the small island kingdom placed under the protection of France since 1887. Mastering the language and the workings of this monarchy of compromise of chiefs, David achieved a form of royalty. On the death of the last elected Lavelua, he obtained the extension of the regency and became a de facto sovereign. Understanding that “power is performance” (p. 218), David became a charismatic figure by associating himself with the local Prime Minister and putting customary chores at the service of his medical development project. Certainly, the doctor’s authority is part of his charisma, the author emphasizes, but the link with the great African design that will follow is not obvious in the Pacific.

The impotence of circumstantial kings

Without forgetting anything about the violence of these two medical dictatorships, G. Lachenal complicates the analysis of colonial power, which cannot be summed up as a simple and brutal “domination” (p. 243). Like Lyautey, David could sometimes pay lip service, but he also governed with the flat of his sword. The fact remains that his political experience has something unique: unlike most colonial regions where the administration knows almost nothing about its subjects, David gave himself the means to achieve his ambitions by deepening statistical methods. It was necessary: ​​to carry out their project, the doctors needed a population under orders, whom they could move around as they wished and force in their slightest behavior. This is also what explains David’s final bitterness, who, invited to great responsibilities in Côte d’Ivoire after the Second World War, could no longer constrain Africans as he had previously.

Finally, the eugenic and hygienist excess of this project was only possible in this laboratory that was, for a time, the colonial empire. This experimental role was perfectly explicit and claimed by the actors. This is where the ambiguity of the notion of utopia put forward by the author lies, which evokes a future that has not yet come to pass, but also a certain ideal. It is true that government therapists like David resemble Balzac’s country doctor convinced of bringing the benefits of modernity to remote Dauphiné. But this cheerful future seems rather destined for the profits of the metropolis, which intends to use the demography, restored by robust health, to better exploit the country. To speak, as the author does, of a medical utopia, may seem questionable: its purpose is first and foremost economic and colonial. We understand very little what the new characteristics of a society run by doctors would be, who often behave, in truth, like ordinary administrators. Above all, this utopian future does not seem to make room for the happiness, even vague, of the “natives”.

These are not absent from the work: the well-known role of indigenous auxiliaries is abundantly underlined. The various interviews, often touching, with witnesses show the mixed character of the colonial experience for Cameroonians and Wallisians. The nostalgia for it, which is a criticism of their present after independence, coexists with a feeling of horror or inhibition at the memory of certain demographic catastrophes. The reluctance of Africans in the face of foreign medical science is evoked, but without further content, just as David’s royalty is told mainly through his eyes. The author shows well that colonial power is a mirror and adapts to pre-existing forms, much more than it changes them. He even underlines the genuine misunderstanding between the Wallisians and this Frenchman who took himself for their king. As with Lyautey, this mirror is above all distorting, because the so-called “indigenous tradition” is referred to a form of exoticism and often frozen in European categories. The book questions only a little this translation which betrays.

What this work finally highlights is the paradoxical impotence of one-day tyrants. If the traces left in the memory of the inhabitants and places are deep, the failure of the two projects is particularly significant. It is unlikely that the Wallisians and the Cameroonians found in David a king after their heart: in both cases, the primacy of the economy imposed a pace contradictory with the prophylactic objectives. Twice, the ultimate recourse of this supposedly philanthropic experience was direct violence. David’s dynastic career thus shows, according to G. Lachenal, the farcical aspect of a comedy in which the colonial authorities leave no one fooled. In this, the story of the good doctor is not isolated, the Tunisian nationalist Ali Belhouane spoke well, to criticize the Tunisian Protectorate in 1953, of the “most astonishing of colonial farces which wanted the Resident General to be crowned king”. Guillaume Lachenal’s book reminds us that this comedy only lent itself to a hollow laugh.