Play as · WW2 1939 · L1 · French Federation · Seven Territories
French West Africa - September 1, 1939
French West Africa in 1939 is a federation of empire - seven territories welded into a single administrative bloc governed from Dakar by a Governor-General, stretching from the Atlantic across the Sahel to the edge of Lake Chad. Senegal, French Sudan, Mauritania, French Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, Dahomey and Niger are ruled as one - the lands of Upper Volta, abolished in 1932, parcelled out among their neighbours - their local kings and chiefs reduced to instruments of French administration under the system of direct rule and the indigénat. It is a federation run for extraction of two kinds: commodities and men. Senegal's groundnuts, Côte d'Ivoire's cocoa and coffee and timber, palm oil and cotton flow out through Dakar and Abidjan; and the population supplies the tirailleurs sénégalais, the African soldiers France recruits and conscripts across the whole federation and has leaned on since the last war. Labour is coerced - forced labour and the prestation are everyday facts of rural life - and political rights exist only for the tiny assimilated elite of the four Senegalese communes. The strategic identity is the federation that feeds France: a vast manpower and commodity reserve, held cheaply and about to be called on hard.
Starting position
The starting board is a huge, thinly-administered federation whose value to France is measured in soldiers and exports. Power is centralised in Dakar and delegated down through the lieutenant-governors of the seven territories to the commandants de cercle and the appointed chiefs; the mass of the population lives under the indigénat, subject to summary punishment, forced labour and conscription, without citizenship or franchise. Only in the four communes of Senegal - Saint-Louis, Gorée, Dakar, Rufisque - do assimilated Africans vote and send a deputy to Paris, the beginning of a Black French political class around figures like Blaise Diagne's successors. Economically the federation is a commodity exporter tied wholly to the metropolitan market; strategically, Dakar is the prize - the westernmost port of Africa, commanding the Atlantic narrows toward Brazil, a naval base of the first rank. When France falls in 1940 the whole federation comes under Vichy and Governor-General Pierre Boisson, and Dakar becomes the object of a failed Anglo-Free-French assault that September. The pieces are a centralised federation, an extractive commodity economy, a conscript manpower pool, and the strategic port of Dakar.
What turns the campaign
What France wants from French West Africa in 1939 is what a federation exists to provide: a reliable flow of commodities and, above all, of men - the tirailleurs the metropolitan army will need in Europe - drawn cheaply from a population held under the indigénat and forced labour, and a secure hold on Dakar. What the war does is intensify every one of those demands while beginning, faintly, to undermine the system that meets them. Conscription and requisition grow heavier; the burden of the war economy falls on rural labour already coerced; and the experience of West African soldiers fighting for France - and, after 1940, the split between Vichy and the Free French that runs right through the federation - plants questions that the pre-war order had suppressed. The campaign turns on holding the federation to its extractive purpose under wartime strain: keeping Dakar secure, the commodities moving and the tirailleurs flowing, while the machinery of forced labour and the indigénat grinds harder on the people who make it all possible. Beyond 1939 lie the reforms the war's end forces; but in this year the old federation still runs on coercion, and France still draws on it at will.
Signature challenge
The federation that feeds the metropole
French West Africa's defining condition in 1939 is that it is administered less as a place than as a supply - a reserve of men and commodities to be drawn on for the benefit of France, held together by a centralised bureaucracy in Dakar and a legal order, the indigénat, designed to make that drawing cheap. NationFall surfaces this as the West African campaign's central tension: the federation's strategic worth lies entirely in what it yields upward - the groundnuts and cocoa, the port of Dakar, and the tirailleurs whose blood France has spent in one war and is about to spend in another - and the whole system rests on coercion of a population with no political outlet at all. The player inherits an enormous, resource-rich, thinly-held bloc whose value is real and whose foundations are extractive: forced labour, conscription, a handful of enfranchised elites over millions of subjects. The decisive pressures are logistical and administrative, and the deepest fact of the position is that a federation built purely to feed the metropole has given its own people every reason, once the chance comes, to ask what they are getting in return.
Try the French West Africa campaign
Free demo. Pick WW2. Pick French West Africa. Seven territories, the port of Dakar, and the tirailleurs France is about to call north.
Play Free Demo as French West AfricaRegional: French Morocco · French Algeria · the Belgian Congo - see the WW2 1939 scenario hub
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