The Human Price of Development: The Brazzaville Railroad and the Sara of Chad

Leopold Senghor's poem expresses the paradox of the Sara in their encounter with the French.' The French labeled them la belle race-the beautiful people. Yet more than any other ethnic group in West or Equatorial Africa, the Sara, after a protracted struggle to free themselves from Muslim slave raiders in Central Africa during the 1890s, were decimated by European introduced epidemics. They also fell victim to a systematic attempt on the part of the early French administrators of Chad to make them the first target for forced labor, railroad construction, porterage, and induction into the French African army to fight for France as far away as Indochina. The weak political organization of the Sara, their apparent peacefulness and unusual stout physical appearance (in sharp contrast to that of their neighbors such as the Baguirmi and the Wadaians), made them the best prey for the administration. In the prefectures of Moyen-Chari and Logone such treatment resulted in demographic instability and the depopulation of many Sara districts due to deaths, emigration, and the constant sociopolitical dislocation which the administrators nonetheless chose to ignore. The prefecture of Moyen-Chari, for example, provided the government with an average of six hundred Sara troops every year between 1918 and 1931.2 Despite open and widespread Sara resistance to recruitment which often resulted in the assassination of several collaborating chiefs and guards, French administrators never abandoned their preference for this southern ethnic group.