Forced labor drained Upper Volta of thousands of workers annually

Evidence

Buell recorded a to- tal of 49,000 workers recruited from Upper Volta for railroad construction in Ivory Coast and the Western Sudan between 1921 and 1925 (Native Prob- lem, I: I043). Between 1920 and 1930 the administration recruited an addi- tional I5,839 Africans, or approximately IAOO annually, from the colony to work for three separate French enterprises (David, Les navetanes, pp. 154-158). The circle of Koudougou in Upper Volta lost an average of 3,117 workers a year, out of a total able-bodied male population of 6o,ooo, to forced wage labor between 1925 and 1931; most of this labor was directed to either the Ivory Coast railroad or European-owned forest or cocoa con- cessions — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 1413

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Koudougou’s loss of 3,117 of 60,000 able-bodied men ties into the earlier cotton coercion data — scale of demographic drain on the colony.

Related

• Forced labor drained a fifth of Upper Volta’s able-bodied men yearly (similarity 0.96)
• French recruiters drained tens of thousands of Upper Volta workers for forced labor (similarity 0.93)
• Forced cotton cultivation in Upper Volta collapsed food production and then itself (similarity 0.84)
• France created Upper Volta colony mainly to exploit Mossi labor (similarity 0.84)
• Labor coercion concentrated in Ivory Coast, Western Sudan, and Upper Volta. (similarity 0.83)
• France created Upper Volta purely as a reservoir of forced labor (similarity 0.80)
• Forced cotton cultivation tripled output while millet and later cotton collapsed (similarity 0.80)
• Labor requisitions drove tens of thousands of French West Africans to British colonies (similarity 0.80)
• Forced labor concentrated in colonies with labor shortages or surpluses (similarity 0.80)
• Africans in Upper Volta were forced to grow cotton under armed guard (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• French recruiters drained tens of thousands of Upper Volta workers for forced labor #corroborates (0.90) — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 1412