Direct administration made loyalty to France outweigh chiefly legitimacy and ethnicity.

Evidence

Faced with these dilemmas, the French colonial army developed a preference for, or had no choice but to resort to, a system of direct administration for its territories in the Western Sudan. That is to say, it subdivided all circles into cantons of more or less equal size, and made the canton the basic unit of African administration. According to this system, there were to be no collaborators between the French commandant de cercle and the French-appointed canton chiefs. Below these canton chiefs, village chiefs would continue to supervise affairs on the local level. Such a system was “direct” only in that it brought the French administrator into closer contact with his African subjects than was true in, say, Senegal, where an additional class of intermediaries, the province chiefs, separated the colonial administrators from the mass of Africans. In choosing its collaborators, moreover, the army was usually most concerned with finding intermediaries who would prove loyal to the French. A secondary consideration was whether they were legitimate. Finally, the army generally preferred uniformity to respect for ethnicity when it came to drawing the boundaries of each canton. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 384

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘direct administration’ concretely meant as a form of French colonial rule.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing interest in Force Noire, mission civilisatrice, and assimilation debates of the period.