Dakar built surveillance files and censorship powers to contain anticolonial dissent.

Evidence

On January 15, 1921, Dakar created a federal service anthropometrique, to compile dossiers on suspect Africans throughout the federation. Although compliance was sporadic at the local level, Dakar claimed to have 1oo,ooo fiches in 1930. … Decrees in 1921 and 1928 prohibited the circulation of seditious material, gave Dakar the right to censor all drawings, cartoons, paintings, and emblems considered prejudicial to French authority, and allowed it to suppress the sale, circulation, or publication of any newspaper in any language in West Africa that it considered defamatory. Although the Government General could not go so far as to forbid individual Africans from receiving seditious French newspapers published in the metropole, it confidentially instructed the lieutenant governors to censor all incoming mail. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 565