This dissertation is a history of Banjul (formerly Bathurst), the capital city of The Gambia during the period of colonial rule. It is the first dissertation-length history of the city. “Heart of Banjul” engages with the history of Banjul (formerly Bathurst); the capital city of The Gambia. Based on a close reading of archival and primary sources, including government reports and correspondences, missionary letters, journals, and published accounts, travelers accounts, and autobiographical materials, the dissertation attempts to reconstruct the city and understand how various parts of the city came together out of necessity (though never harmoniously). In the spaces where different kinds of people, shifting power structures, and nonhuman actors came together something which could be called a city emerged. Chapter 1, “Intestines of the State,” covers most of the 19th century and traces how the proto-colonial state and its interlocutors gradually erected administration over The Gambia. Rather than a teleology of colonial takeover, the chapter presents the creation of the colonial state as a series of stops and starts experienced as conflicts between the Bathurst administration and a number of challengers to its sovereignty including Gambian warrior kings, marabouts, criminals, French authorities, the British administration in Sierra Leone, missionaries, merchants, and disease. Chapter 2, “The Circulatory System,” engages with conflicts between the state, merchants, Gambian kings, and urban dwellers. Through a focus on the circulation of men, materials, debts, lorries, groundnuts, and prisoners in the colony this chapter establishes a fundamental difference between the state and capital. The state attempted to establish a regulated, measured circulation through the city which it could direct towards its own enrichment and growth. Capital, on the other hand, pushed the pace of circulation both in terms of its speed and intensity as well as the area it covered. Merchants attempted to increase their bottom lines by increasing the circulation of capital, the collection of debts, and harvests upriver. Chapter 3, “Dead Meat,” tells the story of the single most neglected residents in African cities: urban animals. The forces which assailed the bodies of urban animals were many: sanitary regulations, pesticides, commodification of their bodies, the trade in exotic animals, hunting, roundups, and hunger. Despite these challenges urban animals continued to scratch existence (and possibly more) out of the city. This chapter not only takes historians to task for writing urban animals out of African history, but it also shows how the history of urban animals in Africa might contribute to the broader historiography of urban Africans and their engagement/disengagement with the wider urban ecosystem. Chapter 4, “Politics of the Belly” takes up the history of labor in the city. This chapter attempts to focus on the places where labor, the state, and capital met. The state understood its role in this tripartite relationship as the “head” which could rationally mediate between the “hands” (labor) and the “heart” (capital). Chapter 5, “The Excretory System” deals with the waste products of the city and the efforts by the administration to banish them from sight and, more significantly, from smell. Taking up the challenge to privilege senses other than sight, the chapter uses the sense of smell to show how sanitary measures in the city were often based not on sound understandings of germ theory, but old ideas about miasmas arising from bad air (smells). The emergence of an aspiring bourgeois class in the city pushed for sanitary reform to ease their sense of smell while the administration encouraged gardening to ensure that Bathurst “blossomed like the rose.” Chapter 6, “The Nervous System,” plays off the well documented role Muscular Christianity has played in shaping the lives of youths in the West. The chapter shows how colonial officials wavered between denigrating education based on the (animal) bodies of schoolchildren as “monkey ticks” and criticizing education which ignored young bodies as filling heads full of ideas which had no outlet in the colonial setting.
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