Popular Resistance and Nationalist Mobilization: The War Effort in French Guinea

At the historic Brazzaville Conference in the French Congo in January 1944, General Charles de Gaulle, president of the Free French government-in-exile, stressed the importance of Africa in sustaining France during World War II.  “Up to the present, it has been largely an African war,” he declared.  “The absolute and relative importance of African resources, communications and contingents has become apparent in the harsh light of the theatres of operations.”  Although this claim was made more than six decades ago, there has been surprisingly little investigation of the contributions of African communities to the war effort, the impact of the war on African societies, and the implications of wartime experiences for postwar political mobilization.
    In the colonies, mobilization for the war effort was not voluntary.  The colonial state imposed stringent demands on the indigenous populations, hitting peasantries especially hard.  The wartime burden of forced labor, military conscription, and crop requisitions, compounded by shortages and inflation, generated immense popular hostility toward the French colonial state, sparking widespread resistance that would lay the groundwork for postwar nationalist movements.
    In this paper, I discuss the impact of the war effort in Guinea, one of eight territories in French West Africa.  I will explore the ways in which women, who found it increasingly difficult to provide for their families, resisted the onerous labor and crop exactions, how forced laborers, embittered by poor pay and working conditions, deserted their work sites in droves, and how whole villages absconded across territorial boundaries to avoid military and labor recruiters.  Military veterans, who returned home with a new sense of confidence and entitlement, took the lead in articulating rural grievances.  I will argue that the wartime exactions, imposed by government-appointed chiefs, lay the groundwork for postwar rejection of chiefly authority and colonial rule in general.