Van Vollenhoven resigned over sharing power, not over Diagne’s race.

Evidence

In January 1918, only eight months after his appointment to Dakar, and shortly after a new colonial recruiting drive was announced, he resigned and returned to the front. There he was killed during a spectacular charge on German lines. It was assumed at the time that Van Vollenhoven left office out of pique at the appointment of an African, the Senegalese deputy to Parliament, Blaise Diagne, to head the new recruiting effort. In fact, Van Vollenhoven quit his post because he did not believe that the governor general could share the powers and prerogatives of office with anyone else, white or black, within the colonial administration. This reaction was entirely in character for a man who felt that, at every level of the bureaucracy, there could only be “one who commands” and who created something of a mystique about the exercise of authority during his year in Dakar. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 624

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to the reader’s interest in republicanism forced on West Africa: the refusal to share executive authority even with a legitimately elected African deputy reflects the assimilationist limit.