Capture of Samory - Major Lartigue
This album, Prise de Samory (“Capture of Samory”), was created by a Major Lartigue late in the war against Samory Touré’s Wassoulou Empire, which, at its height, extended over parts of present-day Guinea, Mali, and Côte d’Ivoire. Touré had built a strong state and modernized army, resisting and terrifying the French all over the region since the early 1880s. Over the course of the 1890s, however, he had been increasingly isolated and militarily pressured. The album contains 166 photographs in various formats. Lartigue produced some himself, while others were acquired from other photographers. They document Touré’s capture, sentencing, and expulsion on board a ship at Saint Louis headed to the Congo (present-day Gabon), where he would die in exile in 1904. This last campaign leading to his defeat was particularly violent. Lartigue’s reports recount apocalyptic scenes of destroyed villages, widespread starvation in the areas that formed Touré’s base of operations, and attacks on civilian populations by “anthropophages,” (cannibals) recruited by the French as auxiliaries. Some of the pictures depict the aftermath of this violence, creating a narrative that places the blame for violence on Touré, and portrays his defeat as a liberation for populations he had enslaved and oppressed. Daniel Foliard points out that such quasi-humanitarian themes were common in photographic representations of European colonial conquests in the late nineteenth century (Foliard 2022, 164-65). Other photographs show colonial installations in Kayes and Siguiri, French officers, ethnic “type” photography, particularly of young women, scenes of daily village life, and practices such as dancing. Many of the images were published in other forms, such as postcards. The album entered the collection of the Sérvice historique de la defense in December 1938 as a bequest from the Lartigue’s estate.
Bibliography:
Bertho, Elara. “Photographies de Samori Touré : de la carte postale coloniale aux pochettes de vinyles”. Cahiers d’études africaines, 230 | 2018, 301-322.
Bertho, Elara et Marie Rodet. Essai d’histoire locale by Djiguiba Camara. L'oeuvre d’un historien guinéen à l’époque coloniale. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
Devaux, Claude Marie Irénée. L’Afrique occidentale française. Paris: A. Voltaire, 1901.
Dilley, Roy. Nearly Native, Barely Civilized: Henri Gaden’s Journey Through Colonial French West Africa (1894-1939), Leiden: Brill, 2014.
Foliard, Daniel. The Violence of Colonial Photography. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022 (orig. published Édition La Découverte 2020).
Person, Yves. Samori : Une révolution dyula. Tome 2 d’une thèse présentée à l’Université de Paris, 1970.