Forced collective cotton cultivation in Upper Volta displaced Africans’ own food crops

Evidence

Upper Volta not only belonged to the Sudanese savanna earmarked by Carde as suitable for cotton. It also had a reputation as a densely populated colony whose “surplus” labor could be exported to neighboring labor-poor colonies with no ill effect. Two missions of inspection visited the colony between 1925 and 1932.47 The second, led by Inspector Sol, discovered that none of the abuses identified by his predecessor had been corrected. For nine years, Inspector Sol wrote sarcastically in his final summation, the colony of Upper Volta had had the privilege of being governed by a man of action, Lieutenant Governor Hesling. He was driven by a single idea: to make the empire supply the metropole with certain raw materials, particularly cotton, that France was currently buying on foreign markets. This ambition in itself was not, the inspector argued, to be condemned. What was unacceptable was the way Hesling and his successor had tried to achieve this objective. The governor had sanctioned full-scale use of force to make the Africans under his control grow not only cotton but also peanuts, sisal, and kapok, all at the expense of their own foodstuffs. Such crops were being grown not on private plots, but in collective fields known by the Africans, tellingly, as champs du commandant. Finally, the administration also required that farmers take the harvests to specific trading posts, to be sold at a fixed price, usually arbitrarily low. If anyone refused, he was punished by the indigenat. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 809

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Could support a follow-up on how coercive cash-crop schemes displaced subsistence food production — parallel to the tree-infrastructure framing of colonial economies.
• DEFINE: Defines the actual practice of champs du commandant and the indigenat as coercion instruments.
• XREF: connects to: Detroit’s 1,000+ urban gardens trace their food-commons roots to African and slave agricultural traditions — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1482