Republican free-labor ideology coexisted with systematic forced labor in French West Africa

Evidence

In 1905, the Government General of French West Africa had abolished the legal existence of slavery throughout its territories. In advocating the abolition of slavery, Dakar nevertheless failed to make clear what form of labor should replace it. Implicit in the 1905 decree was a belief in the superiority of free labor and the law of the marketplace; both beliefs were unquestioned tenets of liberal republicanism. Yet a pervasive feature of the French colonial system in West Africa was administrative recourse to forced labor, which the Government General made no effort to conceal. To the contrary, it insisted that use of force was required to help Africans progress; this justification was particularly evident in the 192o’s, when a new demand in Paris for the mise en valeur of the federation encouraged Dakar to develop a coherent labor doctrine and regulate its labor practices. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 743

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader project on how French republican universalism was exported to West Africa; the liberal theory/free-market justification versus coercive practice paradox parallels tensions in other French colonial domains.
• QUESTION: What specific labor doctrine did Dakar articulate in the 1920s, and how did it formalize the coercion that ideology said free labor should preclude?