World War I drove Dakar from transforming Africans toward respecting precolonial aristocracies.

Evidence

The upheaval of World War I altered this progressive interpretation of the mission civilisatrice. In the course of recruiting soldiers and intensifying production for the war effort, Dakar began to reassess what it meant to civilize Africans. The wartime and postwar generation of governors general felt their predecessors had made mistakes. African chiefs were not tyrants, but genuine representatives of democratically organized collectivities. The new educated elite was not turning out as Dakar had expected. The policy of mise en valeur, predicated upon the construction of railroads, had neglected the most important factor in West Africa’s agricultural productivity: the human element. A more conservative vision of the mission civilisatrice thus emerged, in which the prewar preoccupation with transforming African society yielded to a greater respect for the precolonial aristocracy-who were now to become associated in the civilizing process-and an emphasis upon power sharing generally. And a greater concern for inculcating in Africans “the law of labor” and new strategies of race preservation-what the French referred to as faire du noir-replaced the tenet of civilizing through railroads and modern sanitation. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 875

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how republican ideals transplanted into West Africa produced a conservative turn — echoes themes in A Mission to Civilize’s earlier chapters on mise en valeur and French assimilationist ambitions.