Exploitation and Equality

“World War I is sometimes seen as a blow against empire, the advent of a world of self-determining nation-states.”

As the quote of above suggests, the end of World War II brought a self- consciousness and a sense of entitlement from the colonies held by imperial powers involved in the war. This awakening came as powers like Britain and France were at their weakest point. Not only did these powers want these colonies to enhance and sustain their colonial empires but they needed them. France, specifically, tried to rebuild their empire through a false sense of inclusivity but the people of the villages and the colonies under French control were determined to challenge the fragile promises and weakened control as they became aware of their own resources, their own skill set, enhanced of mobilization efforts and the rising awareness and discontent for inequalities between themselves and French citizens on the mainland.

One could argue that the privileges that France allowed added to the more agressive demand for freedom in the colonies. After WWI, France had to reconstruct the political infrastructure of its empire which not only included the homeland  but spanned to colonies in the Caribbean, new colonies in Africa, Algeria, and mandates and protectorates in Morocco and Cameroon.This new political system was designed around inclusivity which meant equality of all of its citizens in  the various parts of the global empire. France even allowed the colonies to help write the new constitution of the empire. However, a problem arises when the government promised equality and representation when the citizen’s resources and the citizens themselves had been exploited for centuries. This picture below references the extent in which the French exploited the resources of their African colonies.

To evaluate the level of exploitation, one could simply use the case study from Elizabeth Schmidt’s Popular Resistance and Anticolonial Mobilization. This period before and after World War II was especially important because the “French… governmen[t] had to take expanding the productive capacity of Africa more seriously than they had before.” (Cooper 204). In terms actual war efforts, over 250,000 to 350,000 West Africans were drafted in the French military and over tens of thousands died. Moreover because so many of the men were drafted, it affected crop production that not only impoverished families but also came at a time when France demanded more agricultural to support the war efforts – this was supplemented by forced labor. Not only  was there forced labor but the chiefs who did not meet the quotes were sanctioned with dismissal and even imprisonment.By the end of both wars, Schmidt states “military veterans and agricultural producers, bore the burdens of the war effort [and] [w]artime exactions had provoked general discontent” (Schmidt 459).With the new terms of “equality”, the civilians, especially the veterans who served side by side with privileged French troops from the homeland and their families gained a new sense of entitlement that served as the catalyst for popular resistance against imperialism.

           When considering this evidence, Frederick Cooper , author of “Reconstructing Empire in British and French Africa”,posed the question “could an imperial regime adopt a more democratic form of governance, a more nuanced view of sovereignty, and still remain imperial?” (Cooper 601) . In the case of the French, especially West Africa, the answer is no. The empire began to disband just as France needed it the most. In its effort to attempt to hold on to these territories with more cordial means such as inclusion meant nothing because they were too weak economically, and too reliant African resources to hold on to their empire while the African countries who had been exploited were started to have opportunity to demand and create their own.

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France Forced 14 African Countries to Pay Slave and Colonization Benefits Tax