By the early 20th century the French held most of what would become their colonial territory in West Africa (including Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Guinea, Ivory Coast and Niger). A governor-general of French West Africa was appointed to administer the federation and was based in Senegal, the only place where African people had minimally been assimilated under the original French plan. Only in St. Louis did a small percentage of West Africans come to participate in French national affairs. Outside of this area West Africans had become subjects (sujets), not citizens. This was most likely due to the reality by the French that the newly colonized african people would not make suitable French citizens.
Most of the inhabitants of the colonies were subjects of France with no political rights. Moreover, they were drafted for work in mines, on plantations, as porters, and on public projects as part of their tax responsibility. They were also expected to serve in the military and were subject to the indigénat, a separate system of law. When the original federation of the French West African colonies was achieved there was no strong statement of the program for assimilation. The French began to install a very centralized federalist administration in their new territory, a system of direct rule.
Until 1958, governors appointed in Paris administered the colonies using a system of direct, centralized administration that left little room for African participation in policy making. The French colonial administration also adopted divide-and-rule policies, applying ideas of assimilation only to the educated elite. The French were also interested in ensuring that the small but influential elite was sufficiently satisfied with the status quo to refrain from any anti-French sentiment. In fact, although they were strongly opposed to the practices of association, educated Africans generally believed that they would achieve equality with their French peers through assimilation rather than through complete independence from France, a change that would eliminate the enormous economic advantages of remaining a French possession. But after the assimilation doctrine was implemented entirely, at least in principle, through the postwar reforms, African leaders realized that even assimilation implied the superiority of the French over them and that discrimination and inequality would end only with independence.
French expansion in Africa during the last quarter of the 19th century was so rapid that it was difficult to find enough administrators to govern the growing number of possessions effectively. For a brief period, therefore, the French adopted a system of indirect rule using indigenous leaders as their surrogates. The local rulers, however, exercised authority only by sanction of the French administrators. Those rulers who refused to submit to French directives were deposed and replaced with more cooperative ones.
With the consolidation of French power in West Africa at the end of the 19th century, French officials increasingly assumed direct administrative powers, and they reduced local rulers to the level of low-ranking civil servants. In 1895 France grouped the French West African colonies of the Ivory Coast, Dahomey (present-day Benin), Guinea, Niger, French Sudan (present-day Mali), Senegal, Upper Volta, and Mauritania together and subordinated their governors to the governor of Senegal, who became Governor General. A series of additional decrees in 1904 defined the structure of this political unit and organized it into French West Africa (Afrique Occidentale Française - AOF).
France divided the individual colonies into districts known as cercles, each of which was governed by a district commander (commandant du cercle) who, because of poor communications between the cercles and the colonial governors, exercised his responsibilities with relative autonomy. Within a cercle, the commander ruled through a hierarchy of local rulers, whom he appointed and could dismiss at will. He was advised by a council of notables (conseil des notables) consisting of these local rulers and of other individuals appointed by him.
The French thinker Albert Sarraut expounded on how education should further the French idea of mise en valeur - the exploitation of African human resources. He believed that the education of the natives was their duty but that it coincided with their obvious economic and political interest. Education serves to increase in the mass of native workers the quality of intelligence and the variety of skills. Additionally, picking out and training from among the labouring masses, elites of collaborators, (technical assistants, foremen, employees, clerks etc.) who will make up for the numerical insufficiency of Europeans and satisfy the growing demands of colonial agricultural, industrial and commercial enterprises. This required a change in African culture, which could only be brought about by education.
Governor General Brévié believed that however pressing the need for economic change and the development of natural resources, that their mission in Africa was to bring about a ‘cultural renaissance’, an association of two races which can be brought about only by a free and wholehearted acceptance of the African by the French. This directly contradicted the established British educational doctrine, that education ‘should train a generation able to achieve ideals of its own, without a slavish imitation of Europeans, capable and willing to assume its own definite sphere of public and civic work, and to shape its own future. Lugard went even further than this, and declared that from the Nigerian experience, ‘the impact of European civilization on tropical races has indeed a tendency to undermine that respect for authority which is the basis of social order.’
This divergence of attitude towards the aim of native education mirrored the colonial powers’ attitudes towards cultural assimilation in general. Until the second quarter of the twentieth century, the syllabus and aims of education did not greatly matter, since few Africans attended European schools. When in subsequent years Africans did attend school, they too began to imbibe the divergent versions of progress: cultural education under the French.
According to the theory of mise en valeur, the natural products, land and human resources of Africa were to be exploited under French leadership, to the benefit of both Africans and French. In reality the intensive focus upon improving the African producer’s health and farming reflected a conviction that Africans would never progress unless the French made them progress. This can be seen by the coercive powers that French governments kept to themselves after the initial military pacification of the African hinterland. Twenty years after France established her rule throughout French West Africa, the vast mass of the population still had the inferior status of sujet: they had no political rights, were subject to summary administrative justice and were liable for the corvée (forced labour). Although these measures directly contradicted Republican principles, the French did not even recognise the rights of their African subjects to become genuine citizens. Out of a total population of fifteen million in AOF in 1936, there were only 2,136 French citizens - excepting the citizens of the four towns or Quatre Communes of Senegal - of which only around 500 had acquired French citizenship. Forced labour or the corvée was not a complete novelty in West Africa, since slavery was already a prominent source of labour in both coastal regions and the Muslim empires of the interior. The West African region provided most of the slaves that went to the Americas. The abolition of the international slave trade many years before did not diminish its prominence inside African society. However, when the region was under European rule, there was a conflict between the concepts of freedom from slavery and the need for cheap labour to complete the mise en valeur. The French answer to this was to reverse logic. A report to the Minister of Commerce suggested in 1901 ‘The black does not like work and is totally unaccustomed to the idea of saving; he does not realise that idleness keeps him in a state of absolute economic inferiority. It is therefore necessary to use the institutions by which he is ruled, in this case slavery, to improve his circumstances and afterwards gently lead him into an apprenticeship of freedom. In advocating a system of forced labour, French administrators ignored the fact that they were subverting the whole course of Republican doctrine. They even managed to find supporters from those sections of the African community who benefited from the slave-based system. Blaise Diagne, the first black deputy in the French parliament, even defended the corvée system at the ILO conference in Geneva in 1930 - to the disbelief of other countries. Réné Mercier, speaking shortly afterwards, said ‘a single method appeared capable in certain cases of overcoming the inertia of the natives: the use of constraint, forced labour.’
As France consolidated its holdings in Côte d'Ivoire, it began to take steps to make the colony self-supporting. In 1900 the French initiated a policy that made each colony responsible for securing the resources--both money and personnel--needed for its administration and defense; France would offer assistance only when needed.
The public works programs undertaken by the Ivoirian colonial government and the exploitation of natural resources required massive commitments of labor. The French therefore imposed a system of forced labor under which each male adult Ivoirian was required to work for ten days each year without compensation as part of his obligation to the state. The system was subject to extreme misuse and was the most hated aspect of French colonial rule. Because the population of Côte d'Ivoire was insufficient to meet the labor demand on French plantations and forests, which were among the greatest users of labor in the AOF, the French recruited large numbers of workers from Upper Volta to work in Côte d'Ivoire. This source of labor was so important to the economic life of Côte d'Ivoire that in 1932 the AOF annexed a large part of Upper Volta to Côte d'Ivoire and administered it as a single colony.
In addition to the political and economic changes produced by colonial rule, the French also introduced social institutions that brought about fundamental changes to Ivoirian culture. Catholic missionaries established a network of churches and primary schools, which in time provided the literate Ivoirians needed by government and commerce. Some of the wealthier and more ambitious Ivoirians continued their educations at the few secondary schools and at French universities, adopting European culture and values and becoming members of a new African elite. The members of this elite were accepted as cultural and social equals by their white counterparts and were exempt from military and labor service.
Except in remote rural areas, the colonial government gradually destroyed the traditional elite by reducing the local rulers to junior civil servants and by indiscriminately appointing as rulers people with no legitimate claims to such titles. In areas where traditional leaders retained their position and power, they often developed strong rivalries with educated Ivoirians who tried to usurp that leadership on the grounds that their education and modern outlook better suited them for the position.
Bibliography
Betts, Raymond F. Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory,
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Manning, Patrick Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa 1880 – 1985. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
The Growth of African Civilisation: The Revolutionary Years, West Africa Since 1800
Boahen, A. & Jacob F. Ade Ajayi. Topics in West African History (2nd Ed) Longman, 1986
Industrialization and economic conditions in Europe influenced the expansion of European interests in West Africa from the nineteenth century on.
