Diagne parlayed war service into control of all Senegal’s elected offices

Evidence

By the end of the war, Diagne had acquired a reputation throughout West Africa as a spokesman for the rights of all Africans against a demanding and authoritarian colonial administration. In 1919, some of Dakar’s worst predictions were realized when Diagne used his hard-won visibility to sweep the municipal and General Council elections in the Four Communes. For the first time, the new indigenous elite held all of Senegal’s elected offices. Diagne took advantage of his strengthened position to broaden his attack upon the federation’s exclusion of most Africans from power. France, heargued, had once promised assimilation; as recently as 1916, it had recognized the citizenship of the originaires. Diagne now demanded that the Government General grant the originaires the same access to jobs as Europeans and extend the political rights of the Four Communes to the inhabitants of the rest of Senegal. He also requested that the French Penal Code be extended to the federation, thus making all Africans subject to the same punishments for felonies and misdemeanors as French citizens. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 538

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s stated goal: how republican/assimilationist ideas were asserted by an African leader rather than imposed by France, complicating the premise that republicanism was only forced on West Africa.