France diluted Four Communes power by stacking councils with dependent chiefs.

Evidence

In practice, this meant reorganizing Senegal’s liberal political institutions, in order to give the administration and its aristocratic allies a greater voice than that of the originaires. In 1920, Dakar reamalgamated the budget of the rest of the colony with that of the Four Communes. The General Council of Senegal, renamed the Colonial Council, was likewise changed to allow an equal number of chiefs and urban representatives to sit on it. Since the chiefs were dependent upon the colonial state for their positions, they could be counted on to vote with the administration. These changes could be justified on the grounds that the chiefs, too, had a right to participate in the colony’s representative institutions. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 548

Categorization

• XREF: A textbook case of ‘divide and rule’ institutional engineering — stack voting bodies with officials dependent on the state, then call it representation, echoing indirect-rule patterns in other empires.