Forced labor drove Ivorians to become independent cocoa planters instead

Evidence

Kair’s complaint that excessive coercion was only increasing the African’s “natural” antipathy for work reflected a growing African aversion to the kind of wage labor being offered in the colony. What Kair failed to see was that though Africans rejected wage labor, they were going to work for themselves. Faced with the constant threat of recruitment and the undesirable labor conditions on European farms, Africans in Ivory Coast showed less interest in working for the settlers and more in becoming independent cocoa planters. The 192o’s thus saw the rise not only of a European settler class but also of an indigenous African farmer class comparable to that already flourishing in Gold Coast. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 1433

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broader literature on how colonial coercion generates unintended economic autonomy — parallels with settler-indigene dynamics elsewhere in the book and in comparative colonial historiography.