French administrators feared continued exclusion would provoke colonial revolt

Evidence

The Sudan is not a settler colony and the collaboration of the natives is indispensable to us. Up until now this collaboration has been obtained without difficulty by authoritarian means. But it would reveal a strange blindness to imagine that our native subjects will tolerate indefinitely such methods. The events of exceptional gravity that have occurred in various foreign colonies since the war demonstrate that upon attaining a certain degree of evolution, subjected races no longer accept being kept out of their government. This movement will occur in our colony and if we refuse to envisage it, if we do not prepare for it through a methodical and progressive participation of the most enlightened and influential elements in the administration of the territory, we will dredge between ourselves and the natives a chasm, which nothing will be able to overcome. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 723

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how French republican ideas were imposed and how West Africans were forced to ‘evolve’ toward participation — this primary text shows a colonial administrator admitting the strategy was self-preservation, not principle.
• SEED: This lieutenant governor’s memoir-quality foreboding — ‘a chasm which nothing will be able to overcome’ — is a usable primary quote for an article on how empire forecast but refused its own collapse.