Wartime requisition schemes made Africans produce goods that then rotted undelivered

Evidence

Van Vollenhoven hoped to supply the metropole with both cereals and oleaginous products. Before arriving in Dakar, he reached an agreement with the major trading firms in West Africa granting them the exclusive right to purchase these products at fixed prices. Dakar then instructed administrators to encourage Africans to intensify cultivation of both foodstuffs and cash crops, instructions which led to widespread coercion. Although production went up, a shortage of available shipping meant that the merchandise stockpiled on the coast never reached France; instead, the bulk of it rotted in coastal ports. The only exception was the Senegalese peanut crop; exports in peanuts increased 40 percent between I9I6 and I9I7. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 1220

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader forced-labor and economic-coercion story of French West Africa in this and earlier chapters.