Senegal’s peanut wealth rested on preserving the old chiefly aristocracy

Evidence

These new demands only further alienated the Government General, with good reason. They promised, if successful, to have the most damaging repercussions upon the federation’s political and economic interests. Senegal was the federation’s richest colony, thanks to its peanut crop. The profitability of this cultivation depended upon a carefully worked-out collaboration between the old ruling elite there and the French administration. By agreeing to allow the former aristocracy to stay and carry out routine administrative tasks, even when Dakar’s instructions were to the contrary, the different lieutenant governors of the colony had ensured that the successful peanut crops of the precolonial era had continued under colonial rule, with minimal cost to the French. The chiefs had agreed because this system allowed them to retain their traditional access to wealth; the peasants had cooperated because it represented a continuation of what they had always known. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 539

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to reader’s goal: shows why indigenous elites threatening this arrangement endangered the whole federation’s economics.