Play as · Cold War 1947 · L1 · French Union Federation · Reforming
French West Africa - 1947
French West Africa in 1947 is a federation being remade from within by the reforms the war's end forced on France. The instruments that defined it a decade earlier are gone: forced labour abolished in 1946 by the law that bears Félix Houphouët-Boigny's name, the indigénat swept away, a form of citizenship extended under the Loi Lamine Guèye. In place of the old coercion there is now, for the first time, African political representation - deputies from the federation sit in the French Constituent Assembly and then the National Assembly in Paris, among them Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, Lamine Guèye, and Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d'Ivoire. In October 1946 the African political movements gathered at Bamako to found the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, a federation-wide party that, allied for now with the French Communists, presses the reform agenda and draws the administration's hostility. Dakar is still the federal capital, the commodity economy still runs, but the terms have changed. The strategic identity is the federation in reform: no longer simply extracted from, but beginning, through ballots and parties and strikes, to negotiate the terms of its own future.
Starting position
The starting board in 1947 is a federation learning to use the political openings the reforms have created, against an administration determined to limit them. The 1946 constitution has folded French West Africa into the new French Union and given it representation - territorial assemblies, a Grand Council in Dakar, deputies in Paris - while stopping well short of self-government. The RDA is the live force on the board: organising across all eight territories, mobilising the newly-enfranchised, and meeting official repression, especially in Côte d'Ivoire, where the administration works to break Houphouët-Boigny's movement. Labour has found its voice too - 1947 is the year of the great strike on the Dakar-Niger railway, tens of thousands of African railwaymen shutting down the federation's spine for months to win equal terms with European workers. The assimilationist and federalist currents around Senghor and Guèye contend with the more confrontational RDA over method and pace. The pieces are a reformed but still-subordinate federation, a mass party under pressure, African deputies working the metropolitan institutions, and a labour movement flexing its power on the rails.
What turns the campaign
What France wants in 1947 is to have reformed just enough - to abolish the worst coercions, grant a controlled representation, and bind French West Africa into the French Union as a permanent, loyal component, without letting the reforms run on into self-government or independence. What the African political class wants is more contested among its own leaders: Senghor's federalists seek equality and autonomy within a French framework; the RDA presses harder and faster; the railwaymen and the urban workers want the material equality the new citizenship implies. The campaign turns on how far the opening goes. Can France hold the reforms at the level of the French Union, or will representation, once granted, generate its own momentum toward home rule? Can the administration break the RDA, or will repression only harden it? Will the assimilationist and radical currents cooperate or divide? Beyond 1947 lies the path that in fact unfolds - the loi-cadre of 1956, the 1958 referendum, and the breakup of the federation into its independent successor states: Guinea alone with its Non of 1958, then Senegal, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger, Upper Volta and the rest in 1960. In this year that future is opening but unfixed, and the terms are still being fought over.
Signature challenge
A federation negotiating its exit
French West Africa's defining condition in 1947 is that the relationship has inverted: a bloc that a decade earlier was purely extracted from - forced labour, conscription, the indigénat, a handful of enfranchised elites - is now a political arena in which Africans vote, sit as deputies, run a federation-wide party and strike the railways to win their terms. NationFall surfaces this as the West African campaign's central tension: France has conceded enough to change the game but not enough to end it, and every reform it grants to keep the federation loyal becomes a lever the African movements use to push further. The player inherits a federation in transition - the coercive machinery dismantled, representation granted and contested, the RDA rising under repression, the assimilationist and radical roads diverging. The decisive moves are electoral, parliamentary and industrial rather than military, and the deepest fact of the position is that a federation which once existed only to feed the metropole has, in the space of two post-war years, begun to negotiate the terms of its own departure - the process that ends, thirteen years on, in the six-and-more states of independent West Africa.
Try the French West Africa campaign
Free demo. Pick Cold War. Pick French West Africa. Forced labour abolished, African deputies in Paris, the RDA rising - the federation reforming toward independence.
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