Military conquest in the Sudan seeded direct administration federation-wide.

Evidence

The conquest of the Western Sudan would prove pivotal in determining the ideology and actions of the civilian government in West Africa until World War I. In the years immediately following Samori’s defeat in 1899, several newly appointed lieutenant governors began to apply the principles of “direct” administration, worked out in the Western Sudan, to other colonies of the federation, even in areas where protectorates already existed. For example, the king of Dahomey and the Fulani Almamys saw their states subdivided into cantons of more or less uniform size, and their prerogatives considerably reduced. Independent villages among such peoples as the Kissi in Guinea were arbitrarily grouped into cantons and a canton chief appointed. Such patterns did not apply throughout the federation, since individual administrators still had considerable discretion to act as they saw fit. Thus, in parts of Senegal, Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, and Niger, local authorities who were against the dismantling of protectorates, on the grounds that they had served the French well, managed to preserve the old regime. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 385

Categorization

• XREF: Direct administration being spread from Sudan to existing protectorates connects with the earlier chapter treatment of protectorate policy under the republic.