West African political hierarchy included empires, kingdoms, cantons, and villages.
Evidence
These different stages of native political association can coexist in a single state and merely form the administrative divisions of this state. Thus an empire can include several kingdoms, each divided into cantons which encompass in turn several villages composed of several quartiers. But political development can be arrested at any one of these stages, which then itself becomes a state in its own right: we have native political units that are only cantons-indeed they are the most numerous today; we have states that consist of a single village, which can be found among a few peoples in the [Western] Sudan and especially among peoples living in the forest. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 686
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- DEFINE: Delafosse’s four-stage model of West African political organization is the conceptual framework the administration used to classify and rule.