Joost van Vollenhoven

Van Vollenhoven was recruited to return to West Africa in the midst of crisis both there and in the Metropole. The war was going poorly for the French in Europe. The Governors General Ponty (1908–1915) and Clozel (1915) were under pressure to produce both resources and colonial troops for the war effort. The year 1915 was punctuated by a number of revolts in rural French West Africa over forced conscription into the Senegalese Tirailleurs and growing direct taxation of Africans who had no voice in the governing of the colonies.[1]

Van Vollenhoven suspended conscription in the Second zone of West Africa: those area's where the population was governed not by French citizenship law but by the decree system of the Indigénat. Instead he offered inducements to those Africans who held nominal French citizenship in the Four Communes in modern Senegal. Here he induced African leaders such as the elected representative Blaise Diagne[2] and the Senegalese Marabout Amadou Bamba to recruit for the military, with the promise of an extension of democracy after the war.[3] In 1916 the originaires (those Africans born in the theoretically free cities of Saint-Louis, Dakar, Gorée, and Rufisque) were granted full voting rights while maintaining legal protections offered by local customary law. Prior to this, most originaires had feared abandoning their rights to face local courts, and never begun the often arduous process of becoming French citizens.

In 1908, most African voters in Saint-Louis had been removed from the rolls by Governor General Ponty, and in the Decree of 1912, the government said that only originaires who complied with the rigorous demands of those seeking French Citizenship from the outside, would be able to exercise French rights. Even then, originaires were subject to customary and arbitrary law if they stepped outside the Four Communes. The protracted battle by Senegalese Deputy Blaise Diagne, and his help to Van Vollenhoven in recruiting thousands of Africans to fight in World War I, won legal and voting rights were to the originaires with the Loi Blaise Diagne of 29 September 1916 [4][5]

Economically, Van Vollenhoven used the colonial state system to enter into centralised trade and production agreements with the largest French companies. This had been the norm in French Equatorial Africa for twenty years, where monopoly concessions had pushed out the smaller French trading firms. Historians have analysed the post-war colonial system in the AOF as monopolistic, extractive, and mercantilist. France's West African colonies now longer existed as part of a great diplomatic rivalry, or to serve the interests of specific (if influential) firms. Rather they were to pay their way. Though they never did, this market oriented government logic, combined with a market free monopoly system was first formed by van Vollenhoven's administration.[6][7] Clozel had helped create a board to coordinate colonial exports for the war effort which produced results at the expense of famine, revolt and huge flight of populations away from French colonies. Van Vollenhoven didn't change this approach so much as soften it. Under his rule the French demanded less, and did so through appointed African "chiefs". This was a model of how the French would operate after the war.[8]

Philosophically, van Vollenhoven was a proponent of the Association: a variant of indirect rule, as opposed to the Assimilationist policy of his predecessors. This change had both positive and negative aspects for Africans living under French rule, but it was to become the empire's guiding principle until decolonisation. Van Vollenhoven's assistant, Maurice Delafosse and Robert Delavignette, (who was to later become High Commissioner of French Cameroon) inspired some of the most proficient administrative dissidents pushing for French decolonisation.[9] Governors General Jules Carde (also a deputy to Van Vollenhoven) and his successor Jules Brevié put into place many of the elements of indirect and tiered authority first outlined under van Vollenhoven. In this revised colonial system, those Africans outside the urban centers and western Senegal were offered greater freedoms which (in promise) offered the full French citizenship of the Assimilation model. The rest of the population were subject to the Indigénat, and starting with van Vollenhoven's circular on 15 August 1917 "reestablishing" chieftaincies throughout AOF, Africans were increasingly subject to African intermediaries appointed by the French. During the war, with the risk of revolt fresh in the government's mind, head taxes and forced labor was used more sparingly, and greater oversight was forced on the previously unmonitored rule of French Cercle Commanders. This was not a reflection just of van Vollenhoven's regard for his African subjects, but rather a feeling that African cultures were at base un-assimilatable; a French reflection of the British concept of the "Noble savage" and a reflection of his boyhood as a European colonist in Algeria.[10][11] While such arbitrary demands returned under his replacement Gabriel Louis Angoulvant and survived under the Indigénat system until 1944-56, the model under which later Governors General in French Africa worked was changed by van Vollenhoven's reforms.[12]

But at the time, these changes were quickly reversed. By the end of the year he was engaged in a major disagreement with the French Government over the recruitment of African soldiers. Blaise Diagne had been appointed to Clemenceau's War Cabinet, and the French government felt that with his help, they could again begin recruiting African Subjects, a move resisted by van Vollenhoven. With the Governor General unwilling to put the plan into practice, the government threatened to appoint Diange a co-equal Governor General of Military Affairs. Angry and this coup, worried for the stability of the colony, and jealous of the success of Diange,[13] van Vollenhoven resigned.[14]

• (in French) Une âme de chef. Le Gouverneur général J. van Vollenhoven, Paris, 1920, 285 p.
• (in French) Y. Cazaux, « Joost van Vollenhoven », dans Septentrion, 1980, 9, 3, p. 84-87
• (in French) Pol Victor Mangeot, La vie lucide et passionnée de Joost van Vollenhoven grand administrateur colonial, soldat héroïque, Impr. Montsouris, 1940
• (in French) Pol Mangeot, La vie ardente de van Vollenhoven, gouverneur général de l'AOF. Un grand colonial et un grand Français, Paris, Fernand Sorlot, 1943, 141 p.
• (in French) Albert Prévaudeau, Joost van Vollenhoven, 1877-1918, Larose, 1953, 61 p.
• (in Dutch) Silvia Wilhelmina de Groot, Joost van Vollenhoven : 1877–1918 : portret van een Frans koloniaal ambtenaar, Amsterdam, Historisch Seminarium van de Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1991

• (in French) Essai sur le fellah algérien, Paris, 1903, 311 p.
• (in Dutch) Multatuli en congé. Documents officiels inédits publiés par Joost van Vollenhoven, Amsterdam, Maas & Van Suchtelen, 1909, 89 p.