Missionary education produced an elite with grievances but no political channel.

Evidence

Coastal Dahomey was another thorn in the side of the Government General. This area, like the Four Communes of Senegal, had a small but important well-to-do mulatto population and a long history of trade with the West. It had also been the locus of greater missionary activity than any other French colony of the federation except Senegal. The missionaries had provided local inhabitants with greater opportunities for primary education than existed in its neighboring colonies, Guinea and Ivory Coast. As a result, even before World War I, the colony of Dahomey saw the emergence of a modern elite committed to defending its own economic interests. Without the political freedoms that existed in the Four Communes, however, this elite had no institutional means for demanding redress of their grievances-although they did have a flourishing press. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 555

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the mechanism in Senegal’s Four Communes where political rights gave elites institutional recourse — this case shows the contrast when those freedoms were absent.