ABSTRACT
The period is one of striking contrasts. I t is apparent that Africans were being presented in their everyday life with an infinitely more intensive and sometimes brutal form of repression than they had experienced in the early years of colonial rule. The French West African recruiting drive of 1915-16 clearly deserves its awful reputation for harshness. As Ann Summers and R. W. Johnson show, few of its recruits were volunteers in any of the accepted senses of that word, and the methods employed in impressing men both by administrative officers and chiefs rank alongside some of the worst horror stories of the epoch. Similarly, as Cross sought to emphasize in a paper on social movements during and after the war, examples abound throughout Africa of arbitrary and uncompensated crop requisitioning, and cavalier treatment (to put it mildly) of entire areas with the misfortune to be cast as war zones. Robert Archer’s interesting paper on Madagascar rebutted the ‘inevitability’ of all this. His account singularly lacked the oppressive thread of both the West and East African stories. (Unfortunately both these last papers have had to be omitted from the collection of papers published here for reasons of space). I t is at any rate clear that the economic impact of the War on southern Africa was a great deal more equivocal than Katzenellenbogen has acknowledged; increased demand for strategic minerals, for example, did not necessarily ‘drive up’ wages, for as Charles Perrings has shown recently in the case of Katanga, the response to labour ‘shortage’ might simply be to tighten the screws on African villagers.11
