World War I Conscription and Social Change in Guinea

When the French government introduced military conscription into the A.O.F. in 1912, the Guinean colonial authorities saw the measure as a means of training a local administrative corps to replace the traditional chieftaincy, through whose military defeat the conquest of Guinea had very largely been effected. However, the chiefs had by no means disappeared by 1914, and wartime demands for recruits were too massive to be supplied without their assistance. Their help was bought with promises to consolidate their authority in peacetime. Although able to marshal recruits, the chiefs seem to have been unable to prevent large-scale desertions before the moment of embarkation for France; village populations could also avoid conscription by overland migration out of the A.O.F. The colonial authorities therefore felt constrained to offer substantial inducements, mainly concerning improved social status vis-à-vis the chiefs, to the individual recruits. These contradictory policies were compounded by the recruitment drive of Blaise Diagne in 1918, which involved a further promise to recruits of improved status vis-à-vis the French authorities. The return of ancien combattants to Guinea was marked by outbreaks of strike action among workers in Conakry and along the railway line; by riots in demobilization camps; and by rejection of or agitation against chiefly power in the home cantons to which they dispersed. The anciens combattants did not form a coherent or organized political movement, but remained a conspicuous social grouping between the wars. Although they appear to have been strongly influenced by their experience of war and by contact with French socialists, their conflict with the chiefs seems to have counted for more with them than any confrontation with the French.