Dakar neglected regulating African labor until 1925, a dozen years after it was proposed.
Evidence
In I9I2, what appears to have been the first general circular on labor re- cruitment before World War I was drawn up by the interim gover- nor general Franc;ois Clozel. In his directive, Clozel suggested that individual lieutenant governors should consider submitting pro- posals for regulating labor contracts in their colonies. Nothing came of this suggestion; Dakar would wait until I925 before issuing the first labor regulations in West Africa. At around the same time an internal memorandum on the subject of labor in all of West Af- rica noted that there were no African agricultural laborers who lived exclusively by working for others. The Africans who hired themselves out did so for only part of a year, and only to a member of their extended family. This situation made it difficult for the few European farmers in West Africa, who needed steady workers to succeed. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 231
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Directly relevant to reader’s purpose about how republican ideals were implemented and their concrete governance consequences in West Africa.
Related
- French West Africa issued no labor regulations until 1925 (similarity 0.90)
- No full-time African wage laborers existed before World War I (similarity 0.87)
- Republican free-labor ideology coexisted with systematic forced labor in French West Africa (similarity 0.81)
- West African wage labor was embedded in family and seasonal ties (similarity 0.78)