Guinea - French Colony
Guinea acquired its present territorial boundaries early in the twentieth century. France negotiated Guineas present boundaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the British for Sierra Leone, the Portuguese for their Guinea colony (now Guinea-Bissau), and Liberia. Under the French, the country formed the Territory of Guinea within French West Africa, administered by a governor general resident in Dakar. Lieutenant governors administered the individual colonies, including Guinea.
Less than 100 years before, the French, pushing down from their older base in Senegal, had established trading posts on the estuaries of the swampy coast. In the mid-1800s the aggressive colonial policies of France's Second Empire added the motive of military and political expansion to commercial incentive. The advance into the interior in the succeeding decades was a record of military expeditions and treaty making with local chiefs. In one region after another, trading rights were converted into powers of protectorate and finally into outright French sovereignty.
The early French traders, soldiers, and civil officials encountered in this area a diverse collection of peoples. Beyond the similarities of village living patterns and subsistence farming with primitive tools, the population was divided ethnically and linguistically. Social organization varied from the highly stratified class system of the cattle-breeding Peul to the simple cultivating communities of some of the coastal groups. Among the Peul and the Malinké a complex hierarchy of hereditary chiefs suggested the centralized and autocratic structure of the early West African kingdoms and empires. By contrast, on the coast and in the Forest Region the authority of the chief did not usually extend beyond the village or cluster of villages, and he was expected to act with the consensus of the community expressed through a council of elders. Throughout the whole area the extended family was important, but the forms of its organization varied with marriage and residence patterns. Although most groups reckoned descent through the male line, some were matrilineal. Most of the people were nominally Muslim, but an indigenous pattern of locally based religious beliefs prevailed in the forests and on the coast.
Although strong local opposition was sometimes encountered, French rule eventually imposed a unity on this human diversity. Within the arbitrarily drawn boundaries of the colony, the people were not only members of this or that ethnic group or local community but also inhabitants of French Guinea and subjects of France. Not until after World War II was any concentrated effort made to develop the territory.
The European impact — strongest on the coast — nonetheless was felt throughout the colony. Under the French system of direct administration, the chiefs were replaced by the colonial bureaucracy or converted into its agents and charged with tax collection, labor and military recruitment, and the dispensation of justice in the spheres left to customary law. French, the language of the administration, had to be learned by any who aspired to service on the lower levels of the colonial bureaucracy open to Africans.
The export of agricultural products to world markets did not much affect the subsistence farming practices throughout the territory, but it caused the development of banana and coffee plantations, introduced wage labor, and commercialized the gathering of forest products. With these developments, money transactions were introduced into an economy in which goods and services formerly had been exchanged almost exclusively by barter or through the traditional forms of cooperation among kinsmen or obligation of serf or slave to master. The French ban on slavery and feudal tribute finally became effective and, although barter continued to predominate in the villages, the impersonal money nexus permanently undermined the traditional economic relationships.
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