Uncovering the “Quality of Indigence”

By tracing the colonial origins and the social usages of an administrative document (the <i>certificat d’indigence)</i>, this article argues that, in late colonial Upper-Volta and French West Africa, the “quality of indigence” served as both a bureaucratic device and a category for policing work and vulnerability. First, it was a device used by the colonial administration to hide haphazard and inchoate decision-making processes through mechanisms that appeared equitable. This had the effect of stifling the implementation of new social legislation. Secondly, the administrative mechanisms through which administrators validated indigence status reveal the bureaucratic continuities of interwar period <i>commandement</i>. Using the “quality of indigence,” allowed the administration surveil people who were not present in the administrative records. In the interstices of these often arbitrary decisions, at this time of imperial reconfiguration in the 1950s, claimants navigated these bureaucratic processes, by fashioning and framing their wealth or lack thereof, strategically, to signal their eligibility.