WWI conscription discredited French emancipationist policies and revealed defiant African elites

Evidence

From its founding until 1914, the Government General had taken for granted that African society could easily be transformed in the image of republican France. Between 1914 and 1917, this early optimism waned, and Dakar’s conception of the mission civilisatrice began to change. Several developments help account for this shift. In West Africa, the French forcibly recruited soldiers during World War I and abruptly concluded that their earlier “emancipationist” native policies were producing unanticipated results that threatened French hegemony in West Africa. The prewar emphasis upon eradicating “feudal vestiges” was not winning over the local populations and facilitating bureaucratic rule; instead, this policy was fomenting discontent with French authority and alienating the rural masses. Conscription and its consequences also revealed that even “adapted” French education was producing a new elite of Africans, more anxious to share power equally with the colonizer than to evolve gradually within their own cultures. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 492

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader knowledge of how imperial projects that cast themselves as liberating produce the very resistance that discredits them internally.