Ponty’s politique des races broke traditional chiefs and drove them to revolt in 1915

Evidence

Revolt broke out first in 1915, in the Western Sudan in the circle of Beledougou, located to the east of Bamako in an area inhabited by the Bambara peoples. 12 Beledougou had not borne the brunt of exactions in 1914. The new demands of 1915 thus caught the Africans by surprise. In May 1915, the canton chiefs of all the Bambara villages collectively refused to give up a single tirailleur. They then stopped the mails, executed the local circle guards, and retreated armed to a village, where they awaited the French. Within three weeks, they had been defeated. Subsequent analyses revealed that although hostility to recruitment was the immediate cause for the revolt, an overly zealous application of Ponty’s circular on the politique des races in the years preceding the war accounted for the chiefs’ decision to turn against the French. This circle was physically isolated; as a result, French penetration had been slow. Until Ponty’s governorship, the traditional chiefs had ruled, with little interference from the local French administration. Under Ponty, the authority of these notables had deliberately been broken, leaving behind, as Clozel put it, “only the hatred of dispossessed chiefs.” 13 The war had thus provided these malcontents with an opportunity to reclaim their former prestige. Their reaction fit the circumstances: unused to accommodation as a means for holding on to some of their authority, they opted for resistance in a bid to recover all of it. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 511

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to earlier chapters treating Ponty’s politique des races as the central civilizing policy—this passage shows its violent consequences.