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2007-2008 Fellows

 

Richard Roberts

Stanford University
History Department

Richard Roberts is Professor of History and Director of the Center for African Studies at Stanford University. His PhD is from the University of Toronto and has been teaching at Stanford since 1980. He has published widely on French West African history including economic history, the end of slavery, and household conflicts as seen in court cases.

Project Summary

My project examines Faama Mademba Sy, a post-and-telegraph clerk, who was appointed an African king by the French, abused power, and was subject to a colonial legal hearing on his actions. On one level, this is a micro-social history of a relatively obscure part of a far-flung colonial world that on another level raises important new ways of understanding colonialism and the competing logics of different regimes of power and authority during the transitional phases of the implantation of colonialism. Intermediaries like Mademba made colonialism possible.