Colon statue, Côte d’Ivoire. Author’s collection, 2023.

The burgeoning scholarship over the past several decades documenting youth stalled in their quest for adulthood, the scholarship on waiting, on restless underemployed laborers buying time in the informal economy, on the crisis of African masculinities, on the accumulating material and psychic pressures of unmet familial and community responsibilities – all these are ways of depicting the longue durée of failure best contextualized within the beguiled patriarchal promise of colonial civilizing missions: the breadwinning wage.

In this blog, I draw from my recent book, A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism, to explore how socioeconomic forces particular to the postcolonial African city induce a permanent state of pressure among young men at the interrupted point of social becoming. Observing that the crisis of work is also a crisis of masculinity, I historicize the pressures of late capitalism in African cities – namely, surviving in informal economies – within the longue durée of the wage economy. I show how the introduction of wage labor during European colonial rule produced at its outset an overwhelmingly unachievable male breadwinner norm. The salary was both an entitlement and a source of intense pressure as it produced a novel form of patriarchal privilege but also the social and domestic responsibilities that came to collapse manhood with this exceptional, and exceptionally rare, form of economic activity. Examining these pressures within the long shadow of colonialism critically illuminates the role of race-making and racial difference in the emergence of financial expectation and deeply personalized societal failure among contemporary urban African men.

From these racialized and gendered consequences I situate the longue durée of the unmet aspiration to become a breadwinner under the dual frameworks of racial capitalism and the political economy of patriarchy. Racial capitalism reframes the pressures young African men face in the city as a long, continuous crisis, spanning the new social value that emerged out of colonial conquest to the lopsided formal/informal economic divide that has become ever more apparent in the decades since structural adjustment. The political economy of patriarchy further reveals the politics of gender, as it links the expectations of breadwinning at the intimate realm of social becoming and social reproduction to post-colonial citizenship and ongoing inequalities of global belonging. Social pressure begets economic pressure, and vice versa.

To advance this framework I examine a fixture of West African popular art: the colon (colonist) statue, a figurative embodiment of colonial-era social and economic transformations whose manifestation in human form was “évolué” masculinity – a French term literally meaning “evolved” that was used in the colonial project to denote Africans who approximated a European civilizational ideal. Évolués were those men earliest incorporated into the imperial economy as interlocutors of the colonial state as well as the first salaried urban professionals. Designated évolué in French and Belgian Africa, but also “advisors” of indirect rule in British Africa, or assimilado in Portuguese Africa, these intermediaries attained a select status and were conferred special rights and entitlements vis-à-vis the colonial regime and over their fellow African subjects.

Like access to higher education or military service, the salaried work associated with évolué membership was restricted to men according to the division of a masculine public and feminine private constitutive of the industrializing metropole’s ideological order. This gendered bifurcation led Didier Gondola to write that the évolué was the “main subordinate variant” of the European and underscored “a phallocentric vision of colonial modernity.” By representing the race-gender signifiers and cultural expression of évolué identity, I argue that colon statues underscore the intersection of wage labor and masculinity and propose that interrogating them as such offers a longer historical scope to the crisis of informal work in African cities. Colons demonstrate how economic anticipation begets profound social pressure for a majority of contemporary urban African men.

The colon statue is an iconic figure of the colonial encounter. Standing hesitant yet at attention, the colon appears to await a command from his superior. Past his twilight years, he betrays a slight paunch. His dark skin and phenotypical features indicate that he is African, but he dresses as the white man. Traditionally costumed in a crisp suit and pith helmet, his attire and accessories change depending on his profession: sometimes he holds a briefcase or a book, other times a camera or a doctor’s stethoscope hang around his neck; all signify that this man embodies one of the new, European trades imported during the colonial conquest. These trades would secure masculine dominance in the imaginary of the civilizing mission and minds of those African men initially poised to become its interlocutors – and upon independence, its inheritors. In addition to regime proximity, what set these trades apart were the salaries they bestowed. Soon after conquest the salary had become a vehicle that would render men desirable partners, thus transforming what was commonly the African precolonial prerequisite for “adult masculinity” – marriage – into the colonial producer-provider role of breadwinner. In other words, by enabling breadwinner masculinity, the salary came to mediate between African and European criteria for manhood – the former as husband, the latter as worker. To be recognized as social elders, African men now experienced the financial pressure to participate in the wage economy.

Colon statues trace from Africans’ first coastal encounters with Europeans. Appearing first as representations of white colonists (colons), they were soon indigenized to represent Africans themselves. Found from within a wide range of West and Central African ethnic groups, they reflect the socioracial schema of the early colony in which salaried laborers were either European settlers or their African administrators who approximated them in dress and comportment. Werewere-Liking contends that colons “designate, first and foremost, a foreign body in Africa, one whose lifestyle and accessories have influenced the customs of an entire continent at its most personal and intimate level.” Confirming an emergent Westward frame of reference,  Éliane Girard and Brigitte Kernel suggest that colons symbolized a cultural diffusion in the bodies they portrayed, in which European clothing and accessories “had become a sign of wealth and social change.” Highly significant in the iconography of colonial Africa, colons “bear witness to an era, as well as reveal a society’s desires, fantasies, projections, and interests: desires for social progress, fantasies of appearance, projections into the past, future, or hereafter, and interests simultaneously spiritual and mercantile.” These embodied fantasies, projections, and interests were simultaneously new sources of social and economic pressure, orienting the internal and external dimensions of modern manhood towards an imported colonial ideal.

In Côte d’Ivoire, for example, colon statuary art derives from what Philip Ravenhill explains were the Baoulé ethnicity’s “spirit mates,” representations of ideal mates in the spirit world. The proliferation of spirit mates portrayed in dominant colonial professions indicated the desire that one’s mate, albeit remaining Baoulé, “exhibit signs of success or status that characterize a White-oriented or -dominated world.” In a parallel index to that which was indicated by colon sartorial expression, Laurent Bazin and Roch Yao Gnabéli found that even into the first decades of Ivoirian independence the vernacular for salaried work was “travail des Blancs” (white people’s work). As typical across postcolonial Africa, the modern realm of wage labor was moreover spatialized as an urban identity and therefore also categorized as “travail de ville” (city work). At the axis of these novel ideological frameworks, material conditions, and spatial distinctions were “expectations of modernity” configured by breadwinner masculinity. Aspiring to, achieving, or failing at breadwinning structured the hierarchies and social pressures of racial capitalism and the political economy of patriarchy in the colonial and later postcolonial African city.

Articulating the ambitions of colonial African subjects, colon statues exemplified the influence of the évolué ideal on public and private and public life, as husband-father as well as worker-citizen. Achille Mbembe has observed that in the postcolony, the salary constituted political subjects, or “clients,” such that the “state granted means of livelihood to all it had put under obligation.” Contiguous with the socioeconomic hierarchies of the colonial order, the salary was the boundary marker between civilization and backwardness. The domain of the salary was to compose a realm that could be made legible to the state and rendered equivalent to the standards of the world market; on the individual level it was to enable modern consumer citizenship and social reproduction. Its exterior – peddling vegetables and food preparation in the market or petty commerce, for example, generally all that was labor without a salary – consisted of activities that the colonial regime had neither easily captured nor fully understood. They existed prior to and in despite of conquest; moreover, they paid no heed to the metropolitan gender roles that were being imposed upon the imaginations of future generations of African men and women. When colonialism gave way to independence, the unruly autonomy of the latter continued to be derided and excluded from the developmental state’s modernizing vision and its image of a modern man. Thus arose the new social order, on top of which stood a minority of breadwinning men formally linked to state and economy. On the bottom was a lumpenproletariat majority of unmarriageable men. Here were social juniors whose relationship to the state was one of mutual antagonism, “quiet encroachment” exchanged for petty extraction. The pressures to conform to this idealized modern man were immense, and the social and political stakes for doing so severe.

In short, the salary predicated évolué masculinity, with consequences that extended to all areas of postcolonial life. The proximity to power inhered in évolué identity not only masculine entitlement but also the social, political, and economic privileges of the white colon, the portal to full participation in the world political economy. Frantz Fanon famously wrote that “In the colonies, the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.” To this one could add that in the new wage economy, you had money because you were a man, and you were a real man if you had money. Colonialism introduced a set of pressures in modern life along the axis of access to money, or not. For men across racial and class divides, this pressure articulated as expectations of producing and providing; for African men, this pressure was too frequently experienced as painfully falling short. These expectations therefore constituted the base measure of masculine identity; however, the salary demarcated a life of pleasure at the end of the paycheck from one, living day-to-day, condemned to unrecompensed pressure. The racial division between one experience and the other remains stark.

Video still of “vendeur ambulant” (mobile street vendor), Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Author’s photo, 2009.

And yet still there remained the lumpen majority, with salaried work only ever available to a privileged few. Just as it was incompatible with the vision of the modern state, work that fell outside of this exclusive category was feminized and rendered incompatible with modern masculine identity, leading to immense economic and societal pressures for the vast majority of African men. This was work in the informal economy – and far from a new phenomenon when Keith Hart coined the term in his research in Ghana in the early 1970s. Rather, what was the colonial economy became the formal economy when African states gained their independence. Thus while the “informalization” of post-structural adjustment economies surely reflects the contraction of civil service employment, a sector which disproportionately constituted the formal economy as a consequence of a stubbornly inchoate private sector, the phenomenon of informality was not novel and never exceptional. For African men, informality is the gulf between the salaried, breadwinning expectation and the reality of the daily hustle: to be a man is not a one-day job. On the heels of economic contraction, women without salaries certainly also face intense economic pressures to provide for themselves and their children; it is not, however, their femininity that is at stake.

The civilizing mission sought to acculturate African men into whiteness in a pursuit that rendered registers of race and culture equivalent and was expressed through men’s livelihoods and lifestyles. It bound modern manhood, as a source of value and dignity, to participation in the modern economy. And the civilizing mission was no better symbolized than by the colon statue, an icon of the colonial era. We might conclude that the colon, the embodiment of the évolué ideal, emerged at the intersection of racial capitalism and the political economy of patriarchy. The colon statue is an aestheticized composite of salaried work and its racialized and gendered registers of inclusion and exclusion. As such he signifies the dual colonial legacies that infused ideas of labor and manhood. In contemporary sensibilities around formal and informal work in the postcolonial African city we find his persistent relevance, identifying in his pith helmet or briefcase the gendered social architecture of the new economic order. The colon statue is therefore revealed as a cultural artifact of racial colonial capitalism and the enduring pressures of breadwinning masculinity.

When we hear about “pressure,” we might at first think of a condition of limited temporality under otherwise normal circumstances, or an extreme or abject state of abnormality. Like “crisis,” pressure invokes a suspension of life-sustaining and life-thriving conditions experienced in certain peripheral places and by certain marginalized people. After all, to live under a permanent state of pressure should be unsustainable – and by no means normal. And yet as becomes apparent from examining the breadwinning wage in the long shadow of colonialism – the longue durée of racial capitalism and the political economy of patriarchy – the pressure deriving from the intense uncertainties of making ends meet on a day-to-day basis, and of a stasis that limits temporal horizons to the day-to-day, is both common and enduring.

It is therefore through this longue durée perspective that the pressure of arrested social becoming reveals itself not as a temporary condition of frustrated masculinity in the neoliberal African city, but as an entrenched reality produced by the economic and social transformations of the long twentieth century. How then might value, as measured within the household unit and the policy realm alike, be alternatively affirmed by work that reflects the structure of the urban African economy as it is, and not as it was imagined first in the civilizing mission and later in the developmental project? How might manhood be affirmed differently, by care work for example, as much as by remunerated work? In seeking to answer these questions, it becomes clear that alleviating this unbearable pressure is about more than creating a more robust formal economy. Rather, it requires a total reevaluation – perhaps a delinking – of the manhood-salary-breadwinner triad.

Jordanna Matlon is Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University, interested in questions of race and belonging in Africa and the African diaspora.