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Accepted Paper:
“The cultivator is tired”: the fight over agricultural development in the late colonial Senegal river valley
Dimitri Diagne
(University of California, Berkeley)
In a 1956 meeting, Senegalese local politicians confronted French colonial officials over the technocratic design of a massive rice cultivation project. They articulated a vision of a future characterized by flourishing agrarian production, in opposition to colonial capitalist agriculture.
Paper long abstract:
Following the upheaval of World War II, France embarked on an ambitious program of developmental imperialism, investing substantial public funds in its colonies’ infrastructure and agriculture. Massive state-led projects meant to “rationalize” production and stabilize imperial trade networks frequently came into conflict with longstanding local economic systems. This conflict is vividly illustrated by the transcript of a 1956 meeting where French and Senegalese officials discussed the rice-farming project known as the Mission d’Aménagement du fleuve Sénégal (MAS). In the meeting, the governor of Senegal and administrators who oversaw the MAS were confronted by councilors in Senegal’s Territorial Assembly, almost all of whom were Senegalese and many of whom hailed from the rural valley of the Senegal River. The councilors criticized the French administration’s inattention to the needs of rural populations, arguing that current MAS plans did not address the threats posed to agrarian communities by urbanization, state land management, and the expansion of colonial capitalism. Read alongside other Senegalese responses to French economic and agricultural policy, the heated discussion in the 1956 meeting illuminates tensions between industrialization and agrarianism, urbanization and ruralism, economic integration and economic autarky. I argue that the Senegalese councilors articulated a vision of a future characterized by flourishing agrarian production in opposition to colonial capitalist agriculture.