The Regimentation of the Peasants

The colonial administrations sought to force the peasants to abandon their traditional systems of self-subsistence and produce for the market; agronomic research and technical assistance was focused totally and solely on that objective. After independence the general orientation did not change. In the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, especially in the French colonial area, the regimentation of the peasants was for over twenty years the state's normal mode of intervention in agriculture. The regimentation of the peasants had some paroxysmal effects. Everywhere the agents of regimentation complain of the difficulty of getting technical plans adopted—farming operations to be done, seed and chemicals to be used—attributing this to the closed minds of the peasants. The peasants' conditions had worsened overall; their income was a quarter less than in colonial times. Everywhere they had been subjected to ceaseless regimentation by state authorities, and in the groundnut-growing basin, also to ideological regimentation by the Mouride Brotherhood which had a financial interest in groundnut exports.