Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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THE FIRST WORLD WAR
and legislation over the four communes). Although this electorate
was usually manipulated by the European settlers
in
alliance with
Creole political circles,
the
first mulatto deputy, Francois Carpot,
was elected
in 1902 and in 1914 the
first black deputy, Blaise
Diagne, a former customs officer. This growth of African political
self-assertion symbolised
the
willingness
of
the 'emancipated'
to
collaborate with
the
colonial power,
but it was
also
the
sign
of
a break
in the
traditional alliance between
the
originaires
and
the
white colonial circles who were losing
the
privilege of representing
them. This rupture
was due
less
to the
black elite, which long
pursued its dream
of
assimilation through citizenship, than
to the
diminutive white minority, imprisoned
by its
belief
in its own
racial, religious
and
economic superiority.
THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Operations
On
3
August 1914 Germany declared
war on
France;
the
next
day, Britain declared war
on
Germany.
The
German colonies
in
West Africa,
now
surrounded
by
hostile territory, were
ill-
prepared
for
external attack.
23
In
Togo,
the
conflict
was
soon
over.
The
Germans quickly withdrew their small defence force
from
the
coast
and
made
for
their strategic radio station
at
Kamina.
On 8
August British forces entered Lome unopposed,
while
a
French detachment from Dahomey had already occupied
Anecho, Porto Seguro and Togoville. The Allies joined forces and
set off northwards; they met fierce resistance at the Khra river but
on
25
August
the
Germans surrendered
at
Kamina. Within
a
week,
the
French
and
British commanders
had
agreed
on a
division
of
Togo
for
purposes
of
military administration.
In
Kamerun, operations were much more protracted. Here, France
nourished
a
grievance.
In
1911
she had
secured German recog-
nition
of
French claims
in
Morocco only
at the
cost
of
ceding
much territory
to
Kamerun, including salients
to the
Congo
and
Ubangi rivers which divided French Equatorial Africa into three
separate blocks.
In
August 1914 French forces promptly began
to reoccupy
'
New Kamerun' from
the
Sangha
and
Ubangi,
and
in September
a
Franco-British force seized Duala.
The
German
13
See also below,
p.
422.
351
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FRENCH BLACK AFRICA
force, heavily outnumbered, withdrew to Yaounde on the central
plateau, but the Allies were now checked by rivers,- dense forest
and rains; their supply lines were sorely stretched
and
they
suffered severely from disease.
In
mid-1915 French columns
resumed their advance from the east, while the British pressed on
from the north and west. With the German retreat
to
Spanish
Guinea
in
February 1916 the campaign was concluded. On the
French side, 474 black troops and 41 white officers were killed
in action, while disease and malnutrition caused heavy losses
among the thousands of porters conscripted for war service.
In
March 1916 France and Britain divided the former Kamerun,
though the French had earlier suggested a condominium and still
hoped
for a
comprehensive re-partition
of
West Africa.
The
British gave up Duala, which they had occupied since 1914, but
retained Bornu,
in
the far north, along with plantations
in
the
north and west. France took the rest, now called Cameroun, and
in 1917 placed it under the governor-general of French Equatorial
Africa.
It was not in Cameroun but in Europe that the war made its
main impact on French black Africa; the whole region became
a reservoir of men for the Western Front. The potential value of
black troops had recently been argued by General Mangin, in face
of sceptical colleagues, and in 1912, after Mangin's African tour,
four-year conscription was authorised
in
French West Africa
in
order
to
strengthen France's own reserves as the threat of war
increased. The scheme was far from popular, and when war broke
out there were less than 15,000 African troops
in
French West
Africa. By November 1917, however,
it
had sent 90,000 men
to
France,
of
whom 50,000 went
in
October 1916. This drain
of
manpower
was
bitterly resented
by
Governor-General
Van
Vollenhoven, who declared in September 1917: 'The colony has
reached the limit of what can possibly be done; perhaps this limit
has even been surpassed.'
24
New measures
in
November 1917
raised 72,000 men, including,
for the
first time, 10,000 from
French Equatorial Africa. Altogether black Africa supplied
167,000 soldiers, 140,000 of whom arrived in Europe, compared
with 236,000 from
the
Maghrib.
25
More than 30,000 black
24
Governor-General Van Vollenhoven
to
the Minister
of
Colonies, Archives nation-
ales,
Section Outre-Mer,
25
September 1917. Affaires politiques, 533
(2).
25
The
exact recruitment figures
for
each colony
are
given
by
Marc Michel,
'Le
Recrutement des tirailleurs en AOF pendant la premiere guerre mondiale; essai de bilan
statistique', Revue fraitfaiie (Fhistoire efoutrt-mer, 1973, 60, no. 221, 644-60.
352
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE FIRST WORLD
WAR
Africans died on European battlefields; this was about 22 per cent
of
the
total effective black African forces
or
similar
to the
mortality rate of white troops, but it was
30
per cent of those black
troops who
had
been
in
action.
26
Participation
in the
war effort was used
by the
African elite
to
extract political concessions. The extension of conscription
to
the
four communes
of
Senegal
in
1915 was followed
in
1916
by the
recognition
of
the right
to
French citizenship
of
originaires,
and
the call-up
in 1918 was
conducted
by
Blaise Diagne,
who was
made a commissioner
of
the republic and promised
a
'
package of
reforms':
27
ex-soldiers were
to
obtain exemption from forced
labour
and
from
the
indigenat.
In
general, however, recruitment
was
a
most alarming prospect despite
a
bonus scheme introduced
at
the end of
1915. From
the
first, Africans offered widespread
resistance: they fled into the bush
or
out of the country, and many
conscripts deserted. District chiefs
had to use
force
and
village
chiefs were ingenious
in
producing sick
men and
slaves. Some
villages made collective purchases
of
slaves
to
enable their young
men to escape conscription. Thirty-five thousand Senegalese took
refuge
in the
Gambia
and in
Portuguese Guinea;
in
Futa Jalon,
where desertions ranged between
5 and 23 per
cent, there
was
considerable emigration
to
Sierra Leone
and
Liberia. Whole
districts were emptied
and
others were reduced
to
half their
numbers. French forces retaliated
by
making villages collectively
responsible and by hunting down fugitives. In French West Africa
there were three stubborn revolts:
in
February 1915, north
of
Bamako, among
the
Bambara
of
the Beledougou;
in
November
1915
in the
western Volta region;
and in
April 1916
in
northern
Dahomey. These popular revolts were predominantly animist and
prompted
by the
desire
to
preserve
the
independence
of
segmentary societies from
all
state
and
external tutelage.
In 1918
recruitment was more successful, due
to a
psychological strategy
which relied heavily
on
traditional leaders; even so, many people
fled into
the
bush.
16
On the whole of this subject the author is deeply indebted to Marc Michel, L'Apptl
a I'Afrique. Contributions
tt
reactions
a
I'effort
dt
guerre
en
AOF
1914-1919 (Paris, 1982).
"
G.
Wesley Johnson, The
emergence
of
black politics
in
Senegal: the
struggle
for
power
in
the four
communes,
1900-1920 (Stanford, 1971),
ch. 10.
553
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
FRENCH BLACK AFRICA
The war effort:
economic
problems
In 1914
a
spokesman
for
the colonial trade lobby deplored
the
production
of
France's colonies as ' wretched indeed
for
so vast
a colonial empire and so rich
a
mother-country'.
28
The govern-
ment did not
at
first even consider that the empire might make
an economic contribution
to the war
effort.
It was
only
in
November
1915
that
the
'Service d'utilisation
des
produits
coloniaux pour la defense nationale' was created, and in December
1916 that governors were ordered
to
encourage the production
of foodstuffs
for
supplying colonial troops
in
France. Finally,
in
June 1917, following
on a
wheat crisis
and a
fall
in
sugar
production,
the
idea
of
'full development'
was
asserted
at a
colonial conference. This was attended by representatives
of
the
colonial administration and
by
private colonial interests;
it
was
jointly directed
by a
businessman,
du
Vivier
de
Streel, and
the
minister of colonies, Maginot, who declared:' To obtain from our
splendid colonial empire the yield that we should normally extract
from it, we have to do ten times, twenty times more than we have
done until now. '
29
In May 1918a congress of colonial agriculture,
with similar membership, sought not only
to
remedy the current
crisis,
but to
secure
for
post-war France
'a
powerful economic
revival'. But there was an obvious contradiction between the vast
effort required and the diminishing means
to
achieve
it, as
men
continued
to be
slaughtered
at
the Front, while France reduced
subsidies
to
colonial budgets.
In
West Africa, the contradiction
provoked the resignation
in
January 1918
of
Van Vollenhoven,
who demanded to know how West Africa could send 400,000 tons
of groundnuts
to
France while its villages were depopulated.
30
The administration had the co-operation of the import—export
firms in securing purchases
of
so-called strategic produce
—
rubber, oil-products and foodstuffs — and maximum results were
28
J.
Chailly-Bert, secretary-general of the Colonial Union, cited by C. M. Andrew and
A. S. Kanya-Forstner, 'French business and the French colonialists', Historical journal,
'976,
19, 985.
19
C. Regismanset and E.
du
Vivier de Streel (eds.),
Conference coloniale institute
par
M.
Maginot
(Paris, 1917), 1-7, cited by C. M. Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, 'France,
Africa and the First World War',
journal
ofAfrican History, 1978, 19,
1, 19.
10
R.
Delavignette,
in R.
Delavignette and C.-A. Julien (eds.), Les
Constructeurs de
la
France cfoutre-mer
(Paris, 1946), 425.
354
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THE FIRST WORLD WAR
attained
in
1916-17.
31
In
Senegal, however,
the
local people,
weakened by both recruitment and desertion, were soon dragging
their feet
in
spite
of
official pressures: between
1916 and 1917
millet-production fell
by a
half
and
that
of
groundnuts
by a
quarter.
In the
Ivory Coast,
by
contrast, maize-production
in
1916-17 increased eightfold
and
that
of
castor-oil seed fivefold,
while cotton-production
had
increased
by a
factor
of
fifteen
between
1914
and
1916.
In French Equatorial Africa
a
programme
for intensifying production was launched by a circular in February
1915.
Every village
was
required
to
organise
the
clearing
and
sowing
of
considerable .additional areas. Only
a
quarter
of the
produce was left
for
local consumption; the rest was requisitioned
for troops
in
Cameroun. Since there
had
been
no
technical
improvements, progress
was in
fact very modest
and
foodstuffs
were contributed
at the
expense
of the
local communities.
In
French West Africa, granaries were emptied of reserves which had
already been depleted
by two
successive years
of
semi-drought
(1911-12)
and one
year
of
total aridity (1913).
The
lean periods
turned into lethal famine, relieved only by the 4,000 tons of cereals
which
the
hinterland
had
lacked
the
time
and
means
to
send
to
France. Indeed,
the
failure
to
solve
the
transport problem meant
that much of the effort to increase production was wasted. In April
1917 hundreds
of
tons
of
cereals bought
in
Grand Bassam went
rotten
for
lack
of
shipping.
In
France itself co-operation
was
neither decisive
nor
very substantial:
of the
500,000 tons
of
produce bought from Africa, nine-tenths was oil produce that was
insufficient
for
French industry. Grandiose projects
for
'exploita-
tion', based
on oil
produce, stock-raising
and
especially cotton,
11
Exports from French West Africa subject
to
requisitioning (thousands
of
tons):
Maize
Millet
Paddy and rice
Total foodstuffs
Groundnuts and
oil, and palm
products
1916
'•5
9.6
O.I
11.5
1917
4.6
5.6
2-7
II.I
1918
'•3
0.8
5.0
158.7
1919
«-7
1.8
3-5
297.6
Total
6.1
16.2
J-4
28.9
Source. Annuaire
du
Gouvernemenl-Gemral
de
I'AOF, 1917-1921 (Paris, 1921),
55;
cf.
Michel,
L'Appef,
452.
355
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FRENCH BLACK AFRICA
came
to
nothing
for
want
of
any real commitment
by the
mother-country
and its
capitalists.
In
Africa,
the
misdeeds
associated with war-production were out of
all
proportion to the
results obtained: coercion made people hate these ill-rewarded
types of cultivation. When in 1918 the pressure was relaxed, while
a new spell of drought afflicted the continent, exports fell to the
pre-war level. Besides, the war caused
a
recession
in
local trade
and
in the
customary credit system, while prices
of
imported
foodstuffs, such as rice, had soared.
The
consequences
The war effort
did not
bring French West Africa
out of its
marginal role
in the
foreign trade
of
the metropolis.
It was
nevertheless decisive for three reasons: for the end
of
the great
armed resistance movements, which marks the true beginning of
the ' colonial era'; the return of tens of thousands of ex-soldiers
who were inclined
to
question the traditional
as
much
as the
colonial order of
things;
and finally, the arrival on the local scene
of
a
modern elite whose ideal was still assimilation. Furthermore,
the war effort intensified
a
demographic crisis.
The defence
of
France
not
only involved
the
deaths
of
thousands
of
Africans
on
active service;
it
also worsened
the
physical condition of those who stayed at home. Not that this was
anything new: from the first, colonial intrusion had caused the
spread of endemic disease. The Native Medical Service introduced
in 1905 affected few Africans: some schoolchildren, district guards
and urban workers. Sleeping-sickness encountered little resist-
ance.
Between 1898 and 1912 it attacked half the population along
the porters' route between Brazzaville and the sea;
it
infested the
banks
of
the Congo and Ubangi, and
the
Ogowe lagoons
in
Gabon.
In
French West Africa, sleeping-sickness was especially
prevalent in the Ivory Coast. It was first reported on the railway,
in 1904, and
by
1914 was spreading northwards along caravan
routes.
In
1909 plans were announced
for
clearing bush and
isolating infected villages, but nothing effective was done before
1914.
Leprosy was also widespread, and also followed trade: along
the caravan routes of the Western Sudan and south towards the
kola-producers in the forest. New diseases struck especially hard
356
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THE FIRST WORLD WAR
against wage-earners, most of whom were overworked, separated
from their families and obliged to eat unfamiliar food. Before
1914,
beri beri was a particular scourge among prisoners and
railway-workers, who were fed with imported rice. Venereal and
pulmonary diseases also took their toll.
The war soon exposed the deplorable health of the population:
in 1915, only 6 per cent of recruits at Lahou, in the Ivory Coast,
were found fit for military service, and in general the rejection
rate was over
50
per cent. Yet conditions continued to deteriorate.
Mass movements of men fostered the spread of disease. In Bouake,
in the Ivory Coast, there was smallpox among African troops in
1914 and 1915, and the death-rate rose to 34 per cent.
32
In
Equatorial Africa, staff shortage caused the closure in 1914 of one
of the only two health centres with doctors outside Brazzaville.
Most important of
all,
the demands of war undermined people's
capacity to feed themselves. In many areas, the normal rhythm
of social and economic life was disrupted by labour recruitment
or desertion to avoid it, and by attempts — as in Moyen-Congo
— to evade the authoritarian regrouping of small scattered
settlements. Population densities fell below the level needed to
maintain the ever-precarious balance of self-sufficiency. The
advent of familiar hazards, such as drought or locusts, brought
neither emergency relief measures nor any alleviation of colonial
exactions of foodstuffs and labour. The war exacerbated the major
drought of 1913; in Niger, the famine of 1913-15 was the worst
and most protracted ever recorded. Between 1917 and 1921 there
were terrible famines in many parts of French Africa. In thinly-
populated Gabon, famine gradually enveloped the Fang people
and did not begin to recede until 1925, after killing half the
population.
33
As if this were not enough, in 1918 the influenza
pandemic invaded Africa: in French West Africa (excluding the
Ivory Coast and Mauritania) it killed at least 120,000 and in
Equatorial Africa at least 70,000. Young adults were specially
vulnerable, and mortality is likely to have been over 3 per cent
in many areas.
34
As to the overall demographic effects of famine
12
D. Domergue-Cloarec, 'Les Vingt Premieres Annees de I'action sanitaire en Cote
d'lvoire 1904-1925', Revue frattfaise dhistoire tfoutre-mer, 1978, 65, no. 238, 40-65.
JJ
G. Sautter, De tAt/antique
aufleuve
Congo.
Une glographie
du
soui-pcuplcmtnt.
Kipublique
du
Congo,
Klpubliquegabonaite (Paris and The Higue, 1966), ix, it.
34
P. Gouzien, 'La Pandemic grippale de 1918—1919 dans les colonies franfaises',
Bulletin
Mensuel
de tOffice International d" Hygiene Pub/ique, 1920, M, 707.
357
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FRENCH BLACK AFRICA
and disease in French black Africa, it is reasonably clear that total
population declined between 1900 and 1910. The available
statistics indicate that the decline continued between 1913 and
1921;
that it affected most of French West Africa; and that in
Dahomey, one of the more densely populated colonies, there was
a decline of 9 per cent. The population of the Congo and
Ubangi-Shari fell by a third, and between 1914 and 1926 that of
Camerouh fell by 15 per cent, though it is impossible to
distinguish between the effects of death and emigration.
Despite the generally wretched condition of the people, this was
not a period of major revolts: the renewal of marabout activity
was exceptional.
35
Colonial government, propped up by chiefs,
was pervasive enough to undermine people's confidence in their
ability to challenge it directly: opposition took the form of apathy
rather than open hostility. The characteristic collective action of
these years was the messianic movement, expressing various
forms of ideological assimilation to the invaders' propaganda.
There was a widespread myth that the patent inequality between
black and white originated in a test set by God, which only the
white men had been clever enough to pass. This belief legitimised
the present impotence of Africans and alleviated their frustration:
their submission was to God rather than to Europeans.
36
Such
a' flight into the world of the imagination' occurred in many parts
of Africa, and among both Christians and Muslims; it was
encouraged by the effects of the First World War and by the
economic crisis of 1921-2. The syncretic religious movements of
these years were not in origin movements of opposition to
colonial rule: some did indeed take on this character but only as
a result of blunders on the part of colonial governments, which
tended to discover subversion in any original line of thought or
form of behaviour. One such movement was founded by William
Wade Harris, a Methodist-educated prophet from Liberia who in
1913 began to travel eastwards through the Ivory Coast, baptising
with water and the Bible, healing, destroying fetishes and
preaching that salvation was to be achieved by leading a simple,
moral life. Harris's doctrine was essentially religious, and so far
from being anti-colonial it advocated self-improvement on the
" Sec above, p. 334.
56
j. Merlo, 'Sources populates de l'ideologie de l'independance en Afrique noire'
(these de 3c cycle, EPHE, Paris, 1967).
358
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THE FIRST WORLD WAR
European pattern. The French authorities distrusted Harris as
a
Protestant and anglophone influence, and in 1915 they deported
him from the Ivory Coast, but his following there continued
to
grow and by 1918 it numbered some 150,000. In Moyen-Congo,
there was an enthusiastic response in 1921 to followers of Simon
Kimbangu, who earlier that year had begun his healing mission
across the river in the Belgian Congo. Within
a
year, the French
authorities deported three
of his
disciples
to
Chad,
but the
movement persisted in the French as well as the Belgian Congo.
37
Other symptoms of these troubled times were the growth of secret
societies, such
as
the Human Leopards
in
Cameroun, and
the
intensive
use of the
poison ordeal
for
detecting witches
in
Casamance, Senegal: after decimating the Balanta in
1909-11,
this
flourished among the Diola during the war and among the Bayot
in 1920.
38
The
end of the
First World War also witnessed
the
first
'modern' expressions
of
discontent.
In
these,
the
return
of
African soldiers from France was decisive. Not only had they
obtained pensions and certain privileges from the colonial power;
they had found in France new ways of life and thought, and had
seen white people working
in
menial positions. The ex-soldiers
soon became active promoters of social change. Some were used
by the administration as agents
or
guards, and even as chiefs of
villages or districts, in order to reduce the prestige or rivalries of
the great traditional families,
as in
Futa.
The
very fact that
conscripts had been chosen by hereditary chiefs from among their
slaves contributed
to the
corrosion
of
traditional hierarchies:
having left as servants, the soldiers returned as masters.
At
the
same time, their relationship with the French authorities was also
tense. Delays
in
demobilisation engendered unrest
in
military
camps; besides, many were infected with smallpox, which in 1919
provoked mutinies in Guinea. In 1917 ex-soldiers began to form
local sections of the League for the Rights of Man, especially in
Guinea, where there were several assassination attempts, and
in
Gabon, where the local section expressed opposition by petition-
ing the governor and distributing the
£cbo
Gabonais.
Socialist ideas
influenced several strikes
for
higher wages.
In
1916 and 1918
"
Cf.
chapter j, pp. 157-8.
38
Archives nationales du Senegal,
13 G.,
}8i; Christian Roche, Conquett
el
resistance
des peuples
de
Casamance,
18)0-1920 (Dakar, 1976).
359
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FRENCH BLACK AFRICA
Abdoulaye Mara,
an
ex-soldier
of
Senegalese origin, inspired
strikes
in
the docks at Conakry, Guinea, and
in
1920 there was
a strike in the port of Dakar. In 1919 and 1920 there were strikes
on the Dakar-St Louis railway, where
for
the first time black
workers began
to
voice their claims separately from white
workers. In May
1919
the government of French West Africa was
sufficiently concerned to legislate for an eight-hour day, though
the
law
was
not
implemented
and the
Work Code
of
1927
continued to refer to a ten-hour day.
THE BOOM OF THE 1920S
Administrative
consolidation
and the
creation
of
mandates
The grant
of
citizenship
in
1916
to
the
originaires
of
the four
communes of Senegal put an end to the claims of the assimilationist
lobby.
39
Henceforward there was talk only
of
'association',
a
vague term which could cover
a
wide variety
of
local practice.
Reform was very largely confined to administrative structures. In
1920 the departments of the Ministry of Colonies were reorganised
on
the
basis
of
subject rather than area: this made possible
concerted strategies for the whole empire.
In
the same year the
Supreme Colonial Council was revived. This body (which had
existed only in 1883-6) was meant to give the French government
the benefit of advice from retired colonial officials and represen-
tatives of French citizens in the colonies, but it counted for little,
just because
it
excluded serving senior officials. Meanwhile, the
Iicole Coloniale undertook the training of junior as well as senior
administrators.
As
soldiers gave way
to
civilians
in the
last
outposts
of
military rule, new territories were formed: Upper
Volta (1919)
and
Soudan (1920) replaced Upper Senegal and
Niger; they were followed by Chad (1920), Mauritania (1921) and
Niger (1922).
40
In Senegal, the General Council, which had been elected since
1879,
was
reconstituted
in
1920
as
the Colonial Council, with
responsibility
for
the whole
of
Senegal and
not
just the four
39
In
1922
the
conferment
of
citizenship
on
Muslims
in
the communes was made
conditional
on their giving up their Muslim legal
status,
as in
Algeria.
40
In
1929 the Tibesti
mountains,
from which French forces had withdrawn in 1916,
were
transferred from Niger to
Chad.
360
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