French recruiters drained tens of thousands of Upper Volta workers for forced labor

Evidence

Statistics on men recruited in these colonies only began to be kept after the war. Research is providing a picture of the scale and the devastating impact recruitments could have upon local economies. 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 (Cordell and Gregory “Labour Reservoirs and Population/’ pp. 222-223). — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 1412

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Quantifies the human cost of the civilizing mission’s development projects, core to the reader’s theme of imposed French republican order in West Africa.

Related

• Forced labor drained Upper Volta of thousands of workers annually (similarity 0.93)
• Forced labor drained a fifth of Upper Volta’s able-bodied men yearly (similarity 0.90)
• France created Upper Volta colony mainly to exploit Mossi labor (similarity 0.87)
• Labor requisitions drove tens of thousands of French West Africans to British colonies (similarity 0.86)
• France created Upper Volta purely as a reservoir of forced labor (similarity 0.85)
• Labor coercion concentrated in Ivory Coast, Western Sudan, and Upper Volta. (similarity 0.84)
• Each French West African colony’s labor fate hinged on land and population (similarity 0.84)
• Forced cotton cultivation in Upper Volta collapsed food production and then itself (similarity 0.82)
• French colonial infrastructure relied on forced African military labor (similarity 0.81)
• France used drafted African military reservists as forced labor on public works (similarity 0.81)
• Forced labor concentrated in colonies with labor shortages or surpluses (similarity 0.81)
• Africans in Upper Volta were forced to grow cotton under armed guard (similarity 0.80)
• French labor coercion became legally codified via the 1925 wage contract code (similarity 0.80)
• West African migration to British colonies was flight from French forced labor (similarity 0.80)
• French officials openly acknowledged illegal administrative aid in recruiting African labor (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• France’s colonial recruiting pushed African populations to revolt #expands (0.75)