Contesting Colonial Development: Agricultural Aspirations and Agrarian Visions at the Mission d’Aménagement du Sénégal, 1934–70

In an extraordinary April 1956 meeting, Senegalese territorial councilors confronted French colonial administrators over a massive agricultural project designed to transform the Senegal River Valley. The Mission d’Aménagement du fleuve Sénégal (MAS), established in 1934, was one of several midcentury colonial development initiatives that became especially prominent after World War II, as France both sought to reassert political authority in its colonies and drew on imperial resources for national rebuilding. French officials, operating under the developmentalist logic of mise en valeur and influenced by the ideological legacy of the civilizing mission, promised that this effort would improve the living conditions of agrarian populations. The transcript of the April 1956 meeting shows that Senegalese councilors saw in the French approach to modernizing rural landscapes and people a grave threat to the survival of the communities they represented. I argue that the MAS was designed to subsidize the reproduction of cash crop cultivators and urban workers whose labor directly contributed to the colonial capitalist economy, to the detriment of agrarian populations. In the April 1956 meeting, the Senegalese councilors articulated a powerful critique of mid-twentieth century efforts to incorporate colonized landscapes and populations into the logic of colonial capitalism.