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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Ivory Coast
Index
World War II had a profound effect on the future of all
French
West Africa. The fall of France and the establishment of
the
German-allied Vichy government in France forced the French
colonies
to declare loyalty either to the Vichy regime or to the
Free French
under General Charles de Gaulle. Although all the AOF
governors
remained loyal to the Vichy government, Ivoirians largely
favored
the Free French.
The Vichy government, espousing Nazi racial theories,
subjected
French West Africa to economic exploitation and overt
racism.
French planters intensified their labor recruitment
practices and
military conscription. Farmers were forced to meet
production
quotas to supply the armed forces at the expense of the
local
residents, whose standard of living had already been
greatly
lowered by the cutoff of imports from Europe.
The onset of World War II and the rapid surrender of
France,
the self-described purveyor of a so-called higher
civilization,
sharply revised political thinking in Côte d'Ivoire.
Ivoirians
resented Vichy policies and began to express feelings of
Ivoirian
nationalism. Ivoirian intellectuals were attracted by some
of the
Marxist ideas introduced by anti-Nazi movements and by
some French
teachers and labor organizers. In 1943 branches of an
organization
known as Communist Study Groups were established in the
principal
cities of West Africa, including Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire.
Many
African intellectuals in these groups later became
prominent as
postwar national leaders.
Data as of November 1988
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