French claims of African laziness disguised rational economic self-interest

Evidence

The different African peoples of Ivory Coast or the Sudan worked on their own as hard as any producers throughout the world. When the French argued that the inhabitants of these colonies were indo- lent, they meant that the Africans did not work as the administration wished they would. That is to say, they did not grow the crops that the Government General desired, or did not choose to work for Europeans rather than on their own plots of land, or failed to volunteer to build railroads and roads planned by the local administration. The decision by individual Africans not to undertake any of these tasks was determined by rational economic calculations. It made no sense to grow crops for which there was no demand, or from which the African farmer could not profit. Wages on European concessions and for public works projects were usually too low to make the displacement worthwhile. French ideology effectively obscured these explanations for African behavior, by focusing upon the African’s supposed psychological barrier to labor. Although there was some attempt to improve Africans’ health care and diet, older stereotypes refused to die. Indeed, they gained new potency in the particularly race-conscious and commodity-hungry 1920’s. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 863

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reading goal of understanding how forced republican/colonial ideology misread West African behavior.
• SEED: Angles for an essay on how colonial ‘laziness’ accusations universally mask rational labor markets refusing unfair terms.