Colonial rural development: French policy and African response at the Office du Niger, Soudan Francais (Mali), 1920-1960

The Office du Niger, a rice and cotton irrigation project in the Niger River valley in Soudan Francais (now Mali) was among the first large-scale development projects in sub-Saharan Africa. It set precedents for the irrigation and resettlement schemes which became popular in Africa after World War II and dictated to a great degree the direction of agricultural research, development, and food policy in colonial Soudan.; France's decision to develop the Niger valley was a result of a shift in the 1920s in its African development policy to include not only improvements in infrastructure but also investments in production. The creation of the Office responded to a metropolitan demand for cotton and to the food needs of peanut-producing Senegal and as such was part of a grander plan for imperial autarky.; To achieve their aims, colonial officials adopted a policy of colonisation indigene--a compromise between peasant and plantation agriculture. They believed that this policy, rooted in the French sociology of Africa, could generate an agricultural revolution, similar to Europe's, in Africa. Convinced that European agrotechnical knowledge was superior, planners made no effort to draw on the expertise of African farmers or on precedents for rice farming in the Inland Niger Delta.; Office managers employed coercion to implement their policies, forcibly recruiting settlers for the project and regulating all aspects of production and marketing. Settlers, in an effort to ensure their livelihood, were optimizers seeking a balance between profit maximization and risk minimization. Settlers found ways to circumvent management controls and changed the project in ways not anticipated by planners. Many settlers also fled the project, and especially in the 1950s, organized collective protests.; The Office du Niger, facing wide-ranging social and technical problems, implemented a mere fraction of the original development plan. Whereas Office managers attributed many of the project's problems to the settlers' refusal to follow their directives, the roots of the project's failures lay not in settler intransigence but in the managers' refusal to accept the settlers' needs, priorities, and knowledge.