French West Africa

A federation of eight colonies governed as one unit from Dakar between 1895 and 1958, covering nearly two million square miles from the Sahara to the Gulf of Guinea. It was an administrative invention rather than a country: Senegal, Mauritania, French Sudan, French Guinea, Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, Dahomey and Niger shared a governor-general, a budget, a currency, a civil service and a single school system that trained the entire region's officials at the William Ponty teachers' college. That shared apparatus produced a generation of politicians who knew each other, had been educated together and thought federally, which is why so many West African independence leaders had held office in Dakar rather than at home. Rule rested on the indigénat, a code that allowed administrators to impose punishment without trial, and on forced labour, which was not abolished until 1946. The four communes of Senegal were the exception: their inhabitants held French citizenship and elected a deputy to Paris, and Blaise Diagne became the first African to sit in the National Assembly in 1914. The federation broke apart over what should replace it. Léopold Senghor argued for keeping the union so that the poorer interior territories would not be stranded; Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast, whose coffee and cocoa paid a disproportionate share of the common budget, wanted separate states dealing with Paris directly. Houphouët-Boigny won. The federation was dissolved after the 1958 referendum, and eight countries became independent separately in 1960 - the interior ones landlocked, poor and dependent on ports they no longer controlled, exactly as Senghor had warned. Dakar remained the region's largest city and its intellectual centre. The shared currency survived the federation: the CFA franc is still used by eight of the successor states. Senghor governed Senegal for twenty years and is better remembered as a poet.

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