French West Africa

French West Africa was a federation of French colonies in West Africa, created in 1895 and dissolved in 1958. Governed from Saint-Louis and, from 1902, from Dakar, it eventually included Senegal, Mauritania, French Sudan, now Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso, Dahomey, now Benin, and Niger, an area nearly eight times the size of France.

France's presence in West Africa began in the seventeenth century, with trading posts at Saint-Louis, founded in 1659, and the island of Gorée, centres of trade in gum arabic and enslaved people. The inhabitants of the four communes of Saint-Louis, Gorée, Dakar and Rufisque gained French citizenship and the right to elect a deputy to the French parliament after 1848.

From 1854, Governor Louis Faidherbe expanded French control along the Senegal river, fighting the Toucouleur leader El Hadj Umar Tall and building forts. In the 1880s and 1890s, French military expeditions conquered the interior. Samori Touré, who built a large Mande empire with a modern army, resisted for nearly twenty years until his capture in 1898. The Toucouleur Empire fell in 1893, Timbuktu in 1894, the kingdom of Dahomey in 1894 after two wars, and Mossi kingdoms in 1896. Resistance continued in many regions into the early twentieth century, and the Tuareg revolted in 1916–1917.

The federation was ruled by a governor-general in Dakar, with lieutenant-governors in each colony. Most Africans were French subjects, not citizens, governed by the indigénat, a code allowing administrators to imprison people without trial, and subject to forced labour on roads, railways and plantations. A head tax forced people to work for wages or grow cash crops, such as groundnuts in Senegal and cocoa and coffee in Ivory Coast. Railways, such as the Dakar-Niger line, opened the interior. A small number of Africans were educated in French schools, such as the École William Ponty in Senegal.

Over 170,000 West African soldiers, the tirailleurs sénégalais, fought for France in the First World War, many recruited by force, and about 30,000 died. Blaise Diagne, elected deputy for Senegal in 1914, the first Black African in the French parliament, helped recruit them in exchange for promises of citizenship. In the Second World War, West Africans again fought for France; in 1944, at Thiaroye, near Dakar, French troops killed dozens of returning African soldiers protesting over unpaid wages.

After 1945, forced labour and the indigénat were abolished, and Africans gained more political rights. The Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, founded in 1946 and led by Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast, became the main political movement. Léopold Sédar Senghor, a poet and politician, became a leading figure. In the 1958 referendum on de Gaulle's French Community, Guinea, led by Sékou Touré, voted no and became independent immediately; France withdrew its aid and staff abruptly. The others voted yes, the federation was dissolved, and all became independent in 1960.

French remains an official language across the region, and the CFA franc, created in 1945, is still used by many former French colonies. France kept close ties with its former colonies, a relationship often called Françafrique, which has been increasingly challenged in recent years.

Our maps show French West Africa from 1914 to 1938. Its largest outline, about 6.4 million square kilometres on the 1914 map, includes today's Mali, Niger, Mauritania and others, but the basemap also places Chad and the Central African Republic inside it, which were part of French Equatorial Africa. Dakar and Timbuktu lie inside it.