Re-presenting Africa: commemorative postage stamps of the colonial exhibition of Paris (1931).

During the Exposition Coloniale Internationale of Paris in 1931, France issued six commemorative postage stamps. Several scholars have written about the human exhibits, representations, and products of the fairs, but no one has examined the commemorative stamps that accompanied these exhibitions. These stamps were sold in France and its colonies and distributed by stamp dealers throughout the world. Since colonial fairs and exhibitions were mediums of colonial propaganda and trade, the commemorative issues represented Africa through evolutionary models and racial classification and commercialized the people as well as their resources. These postal images were invented and manufactured by the French government to give themselves an illusion of control over the colonies. The repertoire of stamp images was quite similar to other media, such as colonial photographs and postcards of Africa (Geary 1991, Prochaska 1991). Besides the obvious stereotype of the "other," the representations fall largely within the realm of the iconology of the French Revolution of 1789. It is apparent that the metaphors of liberty, equality, and brotherhood were subtly subverted and distorted to justify the subjugation, colonization, and exploitation of Africa.

The French issued their first domestic postage stamps, with the head of Ceres, the goddess of agriculture and symbol of liberty and of the Republic, on January 1, 1849. Later stamps honored French rulers such as Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, and on other occasions stamps documented the realities of French political, social, and economic life.

Goree Island (Senegal) was the site of the first French postal establishment in Africa. The colonial stamps issued from Paris for the African colonies were not different from those of the other French colonies around the world. In 1859 the French Postal Service shipped 6,000 non-perforated Eagle and Crown (2) stamps to Africa with the text "Colonies de l'Empire Francais" overprinted with "Goree" (Y&T 1859-1865:1-6; French Colonies Scott 1-6). These were followed by the perforated series Napoleon laurelled and nonlaurelled, Ceres, Sage, and Commerce (Y&T 1871-1872:7-8; French Colonies Scott 7-15) and a few years latter the series Balay, Faidherbe, and Palm Trees (Y&T 1906-1908:1-17; French Colonies Scott 21-36) were added. General Louis Leon Cesar Faidherbe was the conqueror and colonial administrator of Senegal from 1854 to 1865 and Dr. Noel Eugene Balay accompanied Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza in his exploration of the Congo (Durand 1943). Dr. Balay became the governor of French Guinea and later governor of French West Africa. Other notable explorers and administrators who were honored with postage stamps were Louis Gustave Binger, Renee Caillie, Joseph-Simon Gallieni, Emil Gentil, and Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, among others. These stamps were overprinted with names of the various territories: Benin (later Dahomey), Haute-Volta (Upper Volta), Senegambie et Niger, Gabon-Congo francais, Moyen-Congo. Added to these designations were AOF (Afrique Occidentale Francaise) and AEF (Afrique Equatoriale Francaise).

Whereas the images of the initial colonial stamps reflected French history and the allegory of the empire, the subsequent ones were of an Africa derived from the imagination of French artists and engravers advised by their colonial agents. On the whole, one could classify the topical issues of French colonial stamps for Africa into the following categories: flora and fauna (panther, flowers), public works (Faidherbe bridge), native/ethnic types (Poula shepherd), women (negresse de Fouta-Djalon), warfare (Targui warrior), material culture (drum), villages and architecture (gate of Djenne, Mali), local scenery (markets), economic resources (cocoa or palm oil), mosques (Mosquee de Diourbel, Senegal), and archaeological sites (Djemila, Algeria). This colonial propagandist iconology was equally exploited in media such as postcards, posters, paintings, advertisements, newspapers, magazines, cartoons, and film.

The interwar period in France, however, required special stamp iconography. There was sagging support for colonies and criticism from the anticolonialism parties such as the French Communist Party. This period also saw the beginning of a rigorous campaign for independence in the colonies. Subsequently, the French government decided to intensify colonial propaganda to renew the public's interest in the colonial enterprise and also to convince the colonized peoples that France was a powerful empire. One of the best ways to do this was through international exhibitions where the French government would showcase her colonial resources and inform the French public of the benefits derived from colonial possessions.

Marechal Lyautey, who was famous for his military exploits in Algeria, Madagascar, and Morocco, was appointed by the government to organize the colonial exhibition of 1931. He already had some experience organizing the Franco-Moroccan Exhibition in Casablanca in 1915. He was assisted by Albert Sarraut, a former minister of colonies, former governor of Indo-China, and ardent supporter of the colonial enterprise as outlined in two of his books, Grandeur et Servitudes colonials (1931) and La mise en valeurs de colonies francaises (1923). Both men and their collaborators believed in the potential of colonies to invigorate a France exhausted from war and to infuse vital native energy, natural resources, and monopoly over markets (Palermo 1998).

The idea for a colonial exhibition in Paris had been around for more that a quarter of a century but World War I and the colonial exhibition in Marseille (1922) delayed the Paris exhibition of 1931. Bois de Vincennes, on the east side of Paris, was chosen as the site of the Exposition. The eastern end of Paris was also the sector of left-wing political activism and Marechal Lyautey was convinced that the "exposition could be a major factor of social order in this region of Paris" (Hodeir and Pierre 1991:26). When President Gaston Doumergue opened the Exposition on May 6, 1931, several European countries as well as the United States were represented, but France, as expected, had the largest share of the exhibits.

Perhaps the prime attraction at the Exposition was the human exhibits. These were indigenous peoples who were "imported" to Paris to be put on display and to be represented on postage stamps, posters, postcards, newspapers, and magazines, to the enjoyment of the French public. Representing the "other" is very complex and problematic, and many scholars have exposed the limits of such practices (see, for example, Clifford 1988, Greenblatt 1991, Karp and Lavine 1991, and Clifford and Marcus 1986, among others). Greenblatt (1991) has shown, for example, that representational practices are ideologically significant; that the circulation of images has attained a global magnitude where a stockpile of accumulated representations generate new representations; and that any given representation is itself a social relation linked to group understandings, status, hierarchies, resistance, and conflict that exist in the sphere of the culture in which it circulates. It is the character of this circulation that regulates the accommodation, assimilation, and representation of the culture of the "other." Unfortunately, these images/representations are not generated by reason but rather through an imagination that feeds on the public's expectations.

One can therefore argue that since stamps are commodities with exchange value, the representations of Africans were treated as property by the colonial government and sold and circulated all over the world.

The government was equally aware of the impact of images on the rest of the world, as stated by Marechal Lyautey when, in an issue devoted to the Exposition, he referred to the magazine Illustration as a "perfect expression of French taste, French ideology ... throughout the world, an ambassador of choice" (Illustration May 23, 1931).

The committee for the organization of the Exposition in collaboration with the French postal services employed two basic rhetorical strategies to attain its two propagandist objectives: to inform the French public about the colonized peoples and their resources and to exploit the popular neoclassical iconology of the French Revolution to press home its mission of civilization. The underlying principle of these strategies was to present to the general public the idea that the colonies were not simply the home of the wild and the exotic but also source of vital resources for French industries. In effect, this was to be construed as a reciprocal arrangement benefiting both peoples whereby France provided civilization to Africans and the latter provided material resources to France.

The Ministry of Colonies had initially organized a competition for artists to produce paintings for the Exposition, but the Post Office did not appreciate the selected images because they were not suitable for postage stamps. It therefore recommended an artist, Louis Pierre Rigal, to design the stamps under the guidance of the committee of the colonial exposition. The first postage stamp to be selected was Fachi Woman (Fig. 1; Y&T 272; France Scott 258), issued on December 30, 1930. This stamp was not well received by the philatelic community. Philatelists thought it was not attractive, comparable to the label on the eucalyptus leaves package sold in pharmacies. Others felt that the portrait was rather repulsive (Brun 1998).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The choice of the portrait of an ethnic woman was not unexpected. It is embedded in the French colonial ideology of ethnic grouping and classification. This was part of the investigative modalities of the colonial project as defined by Bernard Cohn: "a body of information that is needed, the procedures by which appropriate knowledge is gathered, its ordering and classification, and then how it is transformed into usable forms such as published reports, statistical returns, histories, gazetteers, legal codes, and encyclopedias" (Cohn 1996:5). The Fachi woman was therefore a representation of the French delineation of apparent ethnic and administrative borders for efficient control and exploitation of Africa.

The next postage stamp, Les Races (Fig. 2; Y&T 273; France Scott 262), designed by J. de la Neziere (an artist who designed several colonial stamps), reinforced the ethnic and linguistic classification of the French colonies around the world. Furthermore, the appellation "les Races" is a reflection of French pseudoscientific classification of the human race. Carl Linne's classification of Homo sapiens in his 1735 Systema Naturae was popularly accepted in France. On his evolutionary scale, Europeans were on top, followed by Native Americans and Asians, and at the bottom were Africans, whom he claimed were biologically and psychologically closer to animals (Pratt 1992). Les Races stamp was the outcome of this hierarchical classification. The various "races," typically represented by their "ethnic" attire, were depicted on both sides of the eternal flame of the French Republic. It is interesting to note that despite the fact that this stamp was issued in response to criticism of Fachi Woman and approved by Marechal Lyautey himself, many stamp collectors felt that the stamp was overcrowded and resembled a cocoa sack label (Brun 1998). In their critiques of Fachi Woman and Les Races, the collectors appear to have forgotten that the prime objective of these stamps was to advertise the colonies, and thus comparison to product labels was, on some level, precisely the point. Whereas the first two stamps were issued and sold exclusively in France, the subsequent ones were sold in France and all her colonial territories. The third stamp in this series (Fig. 3; Y&T 150; French Community Scott CD71), designed by M. Cayon Rouan, presents another portrait of ethnic groups, but at the background we see the obelisk and the Eiffel Tower, the latter being the symbols of French technological progress.

[FIGURES 2-3 OMITTED]

The next two commemorative stamps (Figs. 4 and 5), designed respectively by J. de la Neziere and Geo. Francois, follow the same tradition of ethnic grouping but are very significant because of the economic message they convey. The importance of raw materials such as coffee, cocoa, rubber, precious metals, and foodstuffs was highlighted at the colonial exhibition. These were accompanied by statistics about agricultural production detailing the value of colonial products to master countries. Even roads within the exhibition complex were named after products: Cotton Street, Tea Street, Silk Street. Figure 4 is a representation of a group of colonized peoples with products like pineapples, fruits that look like oranges or coconuts, and a child with a lamb (Y&T 149; French Community Scott CD70). The setting is a tropical village scene, as indicated by the palm trees in the background and the people sitting around, as they would have done in a village market--a common theme carried by several regular stamps and postcards. In Figure 5, the setting has moved from the village to the city with a harbor (Y&T 152; French Community Scott CD73). Here again we see some women with fruit, a boy with lambs, and some barrels, probably for palm oil. These agricultural products are symbols of the abundance of resources and harvests presented by servile Africans as trophies to the French people. Both stamps recall the "Banania" advertisements in which Africans serving in the French army (tirailleurs Senegalais) are caricatures of a continent overflowing with goods. The products were transported to France by the most important image in Figure 5, the ship anchored at the harbor. It is larger than all the people and products combined. This is not an accident; it denotes the importance of the export colonial economy for France. The message of these images was designed to encourage financial investment in the colonies and also as evidence of the benefits of colonialism to the anticolonialists at home.

[FIGURES 4-5 OMITTED]

Accompanying the mercantilist argument was the idea of racial superiority. The exhibitors tried as much as possible to portray a degenerate image of the conquered peoples of Africa in order to justify their own imperialist adventures. Africans became part of a wild and uncivilized "nature" that had to be tamed and assimilated to the level of the French. This idea was so important to the organizers of the Exposition that in their General Report they included a section on the rate of receptivity of the colonized peoples to the idea of assimilation into

French culture, and following their racial classification, Africans occupied the bottom of the scale:

1. The North Africans and Syrians were to be considered white and advanced, and thus amenable to assimilation.

2. The Negroid peoples of Africa and the Pacific could be educated to a certain extent but could not be assimilated.

3. Likewise, the indigenous Malagasy and the half-caste Negroid.

4. The same for the indigenous Indochinese, half-caste Veddoid, and Negroid.

In all these cases, a gradual influence could lead to assimilation. (Rapport General 1931, in Hodeir and Pierre 1991:96-7).

And to ensure that this pseudoscientific ideology was faithfully applied, Marechal Lyautey contracted Louis Marin, an ardent supporter of racist ideology and the editor of La Revue d'anthropologie, to coordinate the ethnographic section of the exhibition.

The civilizing mission was highlighted by the last commemorative stamp (Fig. 6; Y&T 151; French Community Scott CD72), which was designed by Alph. Parent. Here we see a crowned woman (probably Ceres or Marianne), symbol of the Republic, with a branch of lilies signifying purity and spiritual transcendence. The latter symbol is further accentuated by the halo effect and the outburst of the sun's rays as symbols of universal enlightenment. The long robe of the allegoric figure as well as her appearance over water would be familiar to the majority of the nominally Catholic French nation as an allusion to the Virgin Mary. The resplendent outburst on colonized people subdued before her is reminiscent of a benevolent goddess bringing blessings and progress to her subjects. The irony of the image is that if one looks at it carefully, one can see the terrorizing effect of the "enlightening" ray. The two mothers are reluctantly raising their hands and appear to expect the child to do the same. The civilizing mission may not have been as pleasant as it was claimed to be. This was simply racist imagery that was construed as benevolent.

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

This particular stamp is reminiscent of the Revolutionary-era painting Festival Celebrated in Honor of the Supreme Being (1794) where a family paying homage to Nature and Republic represented the theme of political motherhood iconographically. Landes observed in her analyses of this painting that the "beneficent goddesses bestow their favor on present and future generations of French citizenry. Both women and men are shown in relation to their duty to the family, but only women are expected to devote themselves entirely to the latter. While her husband gazes at Nature and Republic, his wife attends to her children" (Landes 2001:99). Finally, Figure 6 also honors the fraternity of French conquerors such as Sarvorgnan de Brazza, General Alfred Amedee Dodds, General Joseph-Simon Galieni, and Lieutenant Francis Gamier, as well as Prime Minister Jules Ferry, an ardent supporter of colonial expansion. As Marechal Lyautey explained to the magazine Illustration, "French colonization was above all the work of a few dynamic men whose admirable work was not well known. Subsequently, the Exposition of 1931 was a form of rehabilitation. But, for the colonial idea to be successful, they needed to create the colonial idea at home" (July 25, 1931). Interestingly, just as during the French Revolution, when "faceless men were uniting to form the web we call the nation, the object of their political desires was represented as a beautiful, chaste, and anonymous female body" (Landes 2001:167), the fraternity of French colonial conquerors and entrepreneurs exploited the image of the prettiest and most vulnerable link--the African woman. Furthermore, to bring out the relationship between commerce, conquest, and women, the organizers of the Exposition placed a large statue of Minerva at the entrance of the Exposition at Porte Doree. Minerva was the Roman goddess of war and the defender of the state, as well as the patroness of arts, craft, and agriculture.

Why was it important to portray women in the six commemorative stamps? There is a juxtaposition of the image of mother and daughter; France was the mother and the colonies the daughters. On the other hand, in neoclassical imagery as exploited by the French revolutionary artists, the female body is also the allegorical symbol for national identity, democratic equality, political liberty, and the shaping of manners and morals (Landes 2001). Women were also symbols of family life, as we find them either nursing babies or taking care of children. The presence of a few full-breasted women echoes the reproductive metaphor of an Africa full of nature's bounty, fertile and ready for harvest. On a more sensual tone, one notices that the full-breasted women, strategically presented in their frontal pose, are all single. Instead of carrying children, they are carrying products (Figs. 2, 4, 5, and 6) which they presumably offer, along with themselves, to Frenchmen. To a certain extent these seminudes were a voyeuristic pleasure for the male spectators who longed to go to Africa to own and control these bodies. As Landes (2001) has suggested in the case of French Revolutionary female nude iconography, eros is the glue that binds private passion and public duty.

The use of the image of women in recurring stereotypes in a colonial context is analogous to the case of African American women described by Patricia Hill Collins as "controlling images"--which are in no way representative of the reality of black women's lives but are created to mystify social relations and reinforce white supremacy through the process of objectification and silencing (Collins 2000). The portrayal of women as agents of civilization and recipients of civilizing grace actually attenuates the horrors of the colonial conquest and exploitation. Ceres and Marianne were part of the "allegorical symbols of freedom and values that imperial France failed to provide for its African subjects" (Posnansky 2000:2).

Stereotypical images are violent for a number of reasons, as asserted by Anne Donadey in her analysis of images of Tirailleur senegalais: they serve to objectify and control the targeted group; they are imposed by the dominant ideology to over-determine any effort at self-definition; and they serve to cover colonial violence by domesticating African people into nonthreatening images as happy subordinates in the colonial order (Donadey 2000:15).

Finally, I want to examine the impact of these commemorative stamps on the French people and the colonized Africans. Although these observations are not the result of any scientific survey, these images of French hegemony would be reassuring to the French public. According to Francoise Lionnet, the notion of reassurance is similar to those produced by the spectator in Greek tragedies. The catharsis undergone by the theater-goer "as he experiences fear and pity: fear when he identifies with the tragic hero; and pity when he realizes that the hero's fate is different from his own ... reconfirms him in his present sense of identity and security" (Lionnet 2000:6). The situation of the Africans would make the French feel privileged to belong to a colonial power like France, and the constant repetition of these stereotypical images helped to create in the minds of the French people a certain myth about Africa and the superiority of the French person to an African. One could also argue, in line with Tony Bennet's disciplinary functions of exhibitions, that this display of an image of strong and powerful France was meant to dissuade the French masses from violence (Bennet 1988).

Aside from the general public, the group that was most vulnerable to philatelic images was school children. It was common knowledge that most French children collected stamps as a hobby; since the government was having difficulties in recruiting its colonial staff, several policies were put in place to influence young Frenchmen to work in the colonies. This was a rather urgent task for the colonial enterprise in the interwar period. Aside from colonial competitions, where students were offered scholarships, and the creation of the pen-pal system, the colonial exhibition specifically targeted students. The youth magazine Benjamin had its stand at the Exposition, and it was noted that thousands of school children were subsidized to attend. The organizers hoped that this would influence them to consider a career in the colonial service (Hodeir and Pierre 1991).

The nature of postage stamps had made it possible for the organizers of the colonial exhibition of Paris in 1931 to transcend the boundaries of the French empire to reach all parts of the globe. Besides being a source of revenue, the commemorative stamps served as ambassadors to those who would never have attended the exhibition or read about it in the newspapers but either received letters from French colonies or were collectors. And for the African, if these images were internalized without critical review, they would result in low self-esteem or a complex of inferiority. Likewise, if he or she were not aware of colonial modes of representation he or she would automatically assume that these representations were a true reflection of Africa.

[This article was accepted for publication in December 2003.]

(1.) For all stamp designations, I will use numbers from the Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue (referenced as [name of country] Scott) or Yvert and Tellier Catalogue (referenced as Y&T). It is important to note that although this paper is concerned with the representation of Africans, the same argument could be made for all colonized peoples of under French control (Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, and the Caribbean). In fact, four of the six commemorative stamps in question were used in all the colonies; they were simply overprinted with the name of the specific colony. I am grateful to Prof. Merrick Posnansky for teaching me among other things that postage stamps are worthy research topics. I would also like to thank Mary Jo Arnoldi for her suggestions on images of women in France and John B. Freed for his constructive comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Triennial Symposium of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association in St. Thomas, April, 2001. All translations from French to English are mine. It might be useful in the future to study the complete works of the French artists who designed these stamps to determine their invent ed vision of Africa and how this compared with the repertoire of popular images of the other.

(2.) It is noted in the catalogue that from 1871-80 the postage stamps for the colonies were not all that different from those of the metropole except for the fact that those from the colonies were nonperforated and had four beautiful margins.

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