A Senegalese deputy described the colonial pact as obligations with no rights in return.

Evidence

The Senegalese Lamine Guèye, deputy of the SFIO (French section of the workers’ international) and future president of the National Assembly of Senegal, also denounced the hypocrisy of the French Union, which on paper proclaimed the equality of rights and duties, but in practice recognised to overseas populations ‘only duties and no rights’. The task of the colonised territories was ‘to produce a lot, to produce beyond their own needs and to produce to the detriment of their more immediate interests, in order to allow the metropole a better standard of living and a safer supply’. The territories themselves also had a duty to ‘sell their products below world prices even though they had the opportunity to sell them at those prices’, ‘to buy above world prices even though they had the possibility of doing otherwise’ and, finally, ‘to avoid using the currency from the sale of our products’. Lamine Guèye thus concluded his speech: ‘What have we received in return? Only promises.’ — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 79

Categorization

• SEED: Guèye’s speech is a quotable primary-source articulation of how colonial economies were structured — potential material for an essay on African intellectual resistance to the franc zone.
• XREF: connects to: Parliament unknowingly granted Senegalese originaires permanent citizenship in 1916

Related

• Parliament unknowingly granted Senegalese originaires permanent citizenship in 1916 (similarity 0.87)