War experience and Diagne’s rise created expectations that fueled 1920s anticolonial mobilization

Evidence

Additionally, the small but growing number of evolues from colonies other than Senegal had heard from Diagne himself that political and economic conditions within the empire would improve after the war had ended, and they optimistically saw in Diagne’s own rise to power a promise of things to come. These war-related experiences significantly broadened the intellectual horizons of West Africans everywhere, and made them increasingly combative. Throughout the 192o’s, Dakar faced sporadic strikes by urban workers for better pay, particularly in Senegali the political mobilization of the old and new elite in France’s second-oldest West African colony, Dahomeyi and the formation in Paris of a group of committed anticolonialists-both French and African-affiliated with the French Communist Party. These actions also formed part of the changing political circumstances in which colonial rule and ideology in West Africa had to operate after 1914. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 551