World War I accelerated the process of economic and political change in the early twentieth century occurring in Africa, which was largely colonized by 1914. The war signaled the end of the final phase of French colonial expansion in Africa; it also caused the recruitment of French Africa’s first great conscript army and the first concerted effort to exploit the colonial empire’s resources on a massive scale. Because of its long tradition of colonial rule and its close ties to France, the colony of Senegal particularly felt the impacts of World War I. The influences, however, differed somewhat between the coastal Four Communes (Saint-Louis, Dakar, Rufique, and Goree), where the colonial presence was most keenly felt, and the rural interior of the colony, where most of the residents lived.
By 1914, the entire colony of Senegal was firmly under French colonial control. Residents of the coastal Four Communes, regardless of race, were considered citizens, rather than subjects, of France. They had the right to elect a deputy to the French Assembly in Paris. In 1914, the African electors sent Blaise Diagne, a former colonial official, as their deputy to the National Assembly. Military conscription had first been introduced to French West Africa in 1912 in hopes that colonial troops would eventually take over the garrisoning of the colonies in order to release French contingents for service in Europe. The colonial troops could also augment French forces in Europe if necessary. The decree mandated compulsory military service for all African males between the ages of 20 and 28. With the outbreak of war in 1914, Diagne and residents of the communes insisted that urban residents should fight as voluntary enlistees in regular units at the side of their French co-citizens. However, very few originaires, as the residents of the Four Communes were known, actually served at all until Diagne pushed through the Law of October 19, 1915, which resulted in a massive recruitment drive. In return for assistance in recruiting Senegalese soldiers for the war effort, Diagne obtained confirmation of French citizenship of this urban minority, even if they chose to retain their status under Muslim law as well. When the originaires did begin to serve in larger numbers after the law passed, their privileged conditions antagonized their countrymen from the rural areas. Subjects residing outside the coastal communes were subject to involuntary conscription into colonial units, received less pay and endured harsher conditions.
In the rural areas of Senegal, war recruitment had a marked impact on domestic slavery, or involuntary servitude, which persisted after official abolition. Village chiefs were required to fill quotas for war recruitment, and often sent descendants of slaves to the posts to meet the requirements. The servants were freed if they enlisted in place of free-born men. Sometimes masters of people of slave descent promised their subordinates freedom if they enlisted. Other slave-descended men enlisted on their own to escape servitude. In some cases, serviles had to turn over their enlistment bonus, usually the sum of 200 French francs, the price of a male slave, to their owners. This payment insured the servile’s freedom from his master.
War recruitment also influenced migration patterns throughout Senegal. Both free-born and servile-descent men migrated to other areas of the colony or to other colonies to avoid conscription. Many men and their families migrated into the central peanut basin of Senegal to escape recruitment. Desertion after enlistment was also very high, contributing to migration from areas firmly under colonial control to more rural remote regions. Returning veterans, especially those of servile descent, also migrated to other areas, especially the coastal region and peanut basin.
In 1918, France’s manpower needs for the war became desperate, and Diagne agreed to become commissioner for the recruitment of African troops, with the rank of governor general, in exchange for a French pledge to improve social services in Senegal. Diagne conducted a sweepingly successful, but much criticized campaign across French West Africa, drawing more than 100,000 enlistments, while simultaneously insisting on veterans’ benefits and other privileges to be won by fighting for France. Eventually, over
200,000 Africans from French West Africa fought for France, with about one-third coming from Senegal.
The intense war recruitment, combined with a mobilization of colonial resources to meet metropolitan needs, had a marked impact on Senegal’s division of labor. Taxes were not reduced during the war, and even families with members serving in the military had to meet their financial obligations. Subsistence crops were requisitioned and paid for at prices below the free market price. Women took an increased role in agricultural production and herding in the rural areas to make ends meet. Government revenues declined during the war. The war effort also meant increased pressures on the land to produce and soil erosion became a serious problem for many areas of the colony during the war years.
Because it seriously disrupted economic links between Senegal and France, World War I marked the end of Senegal’s most dynamic period of economic growth, which had begun in the late nineteenth century with a marked increase in peanut production and export. Even with increased migration to the peanut basin, the production of peanuts dropped precipitously after the outbreak of the war, largely in response to the deteriorating terms of trade and falling peanut prices on the world market. Throughout the colony, and even in the peanut basin, farmers abandoned the cash-crop production of peanuts for food crops to feed their families. Peanut exports dropped from over 300,000 tons in 1914 to 126,000 tons in 1918. The war also had a negative impact on the nascent industrial sector in Senegal. Most of the European personnel running the colony’s banks and industries either left or were recalled to France, leaving the colony without an experienced entrepreneurial class until well after the war had ended.
Andrew F. Clark
See also: Senegal: Colonial Period: Administration and “Assimilation”; Senegal: Colonial Period: Four Communes: Dakar, Saint-Louis, Goree, and Rufisque; Senegal: World War II.
Further Reading
Echenberg, Myron. The “Tirailleurs Senegalais” in French West Africa, 1857-1960. Portsmouth, N. H.: Heineman, 1991. Johnson, G. Welsey. The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal: The Struggle for Power in the Four Communes, 1900-1920. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1971.
Page, Melvin (ed.). Africa and the First World War. London: Macmillan, 1987.
World History
