ABSTRACT
This chapter explores two demographic aspects of French military policy in West Africa in the interwar years. It examines the tentative, quasiscientific efforts of French planners in the early 1920s to measure the size of the cohort of males in their twentieth year in the West African colonies. The chapter explains how military recruitment policy affected overall migration. The entire collection was prepared annually under the signature of the General Commandant Superieur (GCS) of the French Colonial Army in West Africa. French West Africa was in fact thinly populated, notwithstanding a few densely peopled regions such as the Mossi plateau, the Bambara belt south of the Niger, and the Futa Jalon mountains around Labe in Guinea. The French military, impatient to fill its depleted ranks with colonial troops after 1918, did not wait for the results of the inquiry before expanding peacetime conscription.
