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African Military Labour and the Building of the Office du Niger Installations, 1925–1950

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Myron Echenberg  and
Jean Filipovich
Myron Echenberg
Affiliation:
McGill University
Jean Filipovich
Affiliation:
McGill University
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Extract

In 1926, the Governor-General of French West Africa issued a decree allowing local administrations to use a portion of the annual military draft as labourers on public works programmes. The only administrations to take full advantage of this decree was that of the French Soudan, where work had already begun on the first phase of the vast Niger irrigation scheme now known as the Office du Niger. During the next twenty-five years, more than fifty thousand so-called ‘second-portion’ workers from Soudan were assigned to the Office du Niger for a period of three years' service. Ironically, this new system of forced labour to exploit the irrigated land.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , November 1986 , pp. 533 - 551
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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