Colonial ‘Justice’

If the economic development of the empire helped justify violence, ironically so too did notions of justice. Brutality was the clearest indication that many settlers, merchants and even travellers believed that they had every right to perform the role of judge, jury and, in some instances, executioner.

In 1922, the Ouest-Africain Franfais, a ‘republican-socialist' newspaper, under the ironic headline ‘Civilisation', reported two cases of murder in Equatorial Africa that the local administration had chosen to ignore. In the first case, a Gabonese ‘notable' named Awalo, who worked on a launch, drowned when a French mechanic on his boat threw him overboard. The second victim, who was unidentified, was shot and killed by an English agent of a local business in Gabon. The agent then doused the body in gasoline and burned it. According to the paper, he probably would have succeeded in hiding his deed but for one of his workers who stumbled upon him. The Englishman tried to shoot that worker as well, but missed. No motives were established in either case. In demanding that the administration order investigations of the murders, the Ouest-Africain Franfais noted that they were two in a ‘long series of crimes, until now kept in the shadows' of the colony.^[842] The Ouest-Africain Franfais warned that the population had been left ‘scandalised' since the criminals had been ignored simply because they were not black.

The administration, however, was unmoved and showed no interest in investigating the murders. It is perhaps not surprising that the Ouest-Africain Franfais - a minor publication if ever there was one - did not persuade the administration to open an investigation. More revealing of official recalci­trance, though, is that the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme in Paris did not fare any better. Three letters on the subject from the organisation's president to the colonial minister went unanswered. And when the minister finally replied - well more than a year after the president of the Ligue first wrote - he offered a polite brush-off. ‘I can assure you', he wrote, ‘that all measures are being taken to avoid in the future all new causes of trouble, of agitation, or of discontentment' in the region.^[843] On the brutal crimes of old, the minister had nary a word to say.

Similar incidents - and official responses - could be found across the empire in South-East Asia. In 1925, a man named Charles Yonne, who worked for a coalmine in Vietnam, shot a 23-year-old coolie named Ngò Viet Ly who was ‘satisfying his needs' near the fence around Yonne's property. Yelling, ‘go soil somewhere else', Yonne fired at the crouching man, hitting him in the side. Ngò tried to flee but soon could run no further. An ambulance took him to the hospital where he underwent surgery. The bullet had torn internal organs; he died the next day. Yonne later claimed only to have been shooting towards the victim in order to scare him away. Before dying, however, Ngò said he had not heard Yonne until the bullet hit him, calling into question the Frenchman's desire to chase him away.

Such verdicts caused anger and dismay within the wider Vietnamese community. Yonne's killing of Ngò came just one month after a Japanese employee of a French concession killed a Vietnamese worker suspected of stealing coffee plants. Uyeno Nisaku hanged the suspect, Le Van Da, by his thumbs, punched him, kicked him, and beat him with a bamboo rod. He left Le suspended for some time, hoping to elicit a confession. But when Nisaku returned he found only a cadaver. Nisaku had been accused of inflicting this punishment - which the president of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme termed ‘torture' - just the previous day by another employee.^[844] Like Yonne, Nisaku was given a two-year suspended sentence, meaning that he, too, walked out of court without even paying a fine.

The decisions the court handed down on Nisaku and Yonne caused disbelief in Vietnam. The injustice was compounded by the fact that, the same year, Phan Bòi Chau, a prominent anti-colonial nationalist who had been captured in China and returned to Hanoi, was condemned to forced labour in perpetuity. One French commentator reported that the Vietnamese were struck by the severity of Phan Bòi Chau's punishment considering the fact that he had ‘neither killed nor tortured' anyone. ‘The life of

Quotidian Violence in the French Empire a Vietnamese', the commentator noted, ‘is estimated at a very low price in Indochina.'^[845] A number of Frenchmen reflecting on the cases insisted that the acquittals did damage to the Indigenous population's respect for the French and the justice they purported to bring. But in the 1920s, the administration was interested in supporting, rather than punishing, industries like mining and plantations. Labour was a particular point of tension between business­men and officials.

By the 1930s, with criticism of colonial brutality mounting, both from anti­colonial voices and from bodies like the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization, such acts of vigilante justice had become increasingly troubling for the administration. But subject populations were not much closer to finding justice. In 1931, for example, La Revue d'Outre Mer recounted the horrific story of a Gabonese man named Massima who was accused by his employers of stealing a chicotte from the forestry concession where he worked.^[846] Ironically, the chicotte - a hide whip - was the emblem of white violence in the empire as it was regularly used to punish workers. Massima was accused randomly, but his employers decided to torture him until he confessed to the crime. They began by stripping him, tying him to the back of a tractor, and dragging him until he lost consciousness. Failing to elicit an admission of guilt, they bound him in a ‘croix de Saint-Andre' and proceeded to burn his extremities; a white woman among the group insisted they burn Massima's sexual organs as well. Finding him still alive - and still refusing to confess - the Frenchmen hanged their victim from a post by the ankles, his head dunked in a barrel of water until he passed out. Unconscious, the man was untied from the post; he died shortly thereafter. According to a number of reports, the Frenchmen sipped champagne as Massima expired.

The sheer horror of the crime, distinguished by what one commentator called the ‘incredible refinement of cruelty' shown by the torturers, brought Massima's murder into the mainstream press in France.^[847] Making it even more shocking, the Frenchmen involved in the crime confessed to certain instances of abuse, but denied the most troubling details, including the dragging and burning of Massima's body. At trial, all four of the accused were acquitted, as the court remained unconvinced that the drowning of Massima actually caused his death.

witnesses who were found guilty of giving false testimony, sentencing three of them to five years in prison.^[848] Condemnation of the decision was wide­spread. The decision was criticised in the French National Assembly. The procurer general who reviewed the case deemed it ‘shocking'. For Pierre Contet, a French writer who had spent years in the Congo, it was nothing but ‘white man's justice': in Equatorial Africa, he noted, it was customary to condemn ‘the weak in order to cover up the thefts, corruption, and crimes of the powerful'.^[849]

The fallout from the Libreville verdict revealed the difficult position that the colonial administration found itself in when it came to issues of justice. Severe shortages of officials in Equatorial Africa meant that the presiding judge had minimal knowledge of law. Strapped for cash and short on experts, the administration had no alternative but to assign functionaries from other departments to hear cases. In the Massima case, the judge's primary job was working for the postal service; the assessors were merchants and bureaucrats equally ignorant of criminal procedure. French residents were unlikely to find their compatriots guilty of mistreating Indigenous people. Such was the colour of justice in many parts of the French Empire.

But the colonial ministry in France, itself closer to much of the outrage about miscarriages of justice, did take action. It drafted and then released a circular to all administrations in the empire condemning the ‘dispropor­tionate' sanctions given to Europeans and Indigenous people for the same crime. Such ‘verdicts of race' risked undermining the principle that ‘justice is equal for all'. Tellingly, the circular admitted to being motivated by the fact that miscarriages of justice empowered ‘denigrators of our colonisation'. It also acknowledged the delicacy of racial hierarchies in the empire: the ministry's intention was not to ‘diminish the prestige of the European', but rather to emphasise that the settler's authority should be defined by his ‘magnanimity and his moral superiority', not by ‘his power'.^[850]

The ministry's call for all colonies to be more scrupulous in questions of justice where violence was involved, however, did not result in sweeping changes of practice.

The administration again became the focus of criticism from the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme and a couple of radical newspapers. The president of the Ligue complained to the colonial minister that the Vietnamese people were ‘violently moved by the insufficiency of the condemnations' and the ‘admin­istrative negligence' shown in the case. The Revue Franco-Annamite asserted that the verdict exposed a double standard in the justice system. ‘Suppose the victim had been a Frenchmen', the paper noted, ‘and the two murderers [had been] two Indigenous men, would they have been given suspended sentences?' Rebuking the ‘judges without courage' and a dysfunctional administration, the Revue concluded, ‘there is a lot to redress here'. But the Ligue and the Revue were minority opinions. Another paper, the Tribune Republicaine, reported that the mainstream press had insisted that ‘sound justice' had been rendered in the case. ‘Relations between French and Vietnamese', the Tribune dissented, ‘have nothing to gain from verdicts of this kind.'^[853]

The colonial ministry did, on paper, argue that colonial courts should crack down on the ‘tendency of some French citizens' to assume certain ‘feudal' rights. Failing to do so could be ‘prejudicial to French prestige in Indochina'.^[854] But little was done to rectify the system. The colonial minister ultimately defended the verdict in the Furcy case, saying that ‘attenuating circumstances' had led the criminal court to suspend the sentence. ‘No violation or false interpretation of the law' had occurred. The only one at the scene of the crime deemed negligent was the low-ranking Vietnamese administrator, who was said to have shown indifference and passivity in the face of the violent Frenchmen. He was relieved of his duties and a demerit (blame) was put on his record.^[855] No one apparently saw the irony that the administration was holding a Vietnamese subaltern to a higher moral stan­dard than the two native-born Frenchmen.