Rivières du Sud
Encyclopedia
Rivières du Sud was a French colonial division in West Africa
French West Africa
French West Africa was a federation of eight French colonial territories in Africa: Mauritania, Senegal, French Sudan , French Guinea , Côte d'Ivoire , Upper Volta , Dahomey and Niger...

, roughly corresponding to modern coastal sections of Guinea
Guinea
Guinea , officially the Republic of Guinea , is a country in West Africa. Formerly known as French Guinea , it is today sometimes called Guinea-Conakry to distinguish it from its neighbour Guinea-Bissau. Guinea is divided into eight administrative regions and subdivided into thirty-three prefectures...

. While the designation was used from the 18th to 20th century, the administrative division only existed from 1882-1891.

Early Usage

Since the 18th century, Pourtugese, British and French traders had established small stations on the coast which was called Rivières du Sud by the French. The Pourtugese had trading stations at Rio Pongo and Rio Nunez, mostly for the purchase of enslaved Africans
African slave trade
Systems of servitude and slavery were common in many parts of Africa, as they were in much of the ancient world. In some African societies, the enslaved people were also indentured servants and fully integrated; in others, they were treated much worse...

 captured inland and brought to the coast. By the 1820, British suppression of the slave trade and Portuguese imperial decline saw these posts abandoned, with British and French traders moving in. The French admiral Bouët-Willaumez
Louis Edouard Bouët-Willaumez
Louis Edouard Bouët-Willaumez was a French admiral.He was born Louis Edouard Bouët, the son of a businessman in Maison-Lafitte, near Paris...

 made a number of treaties with coastal communities in the area (usually under the threat of force), and ensured Marseilles based trade houses exclusive access to the palm oil trade by the 1840s. Used for making soap, the palm oil trade was with Diola merchants who established markets in the interior, and transported it to the coastal stations.

Administrative expansion

The French colonial governor of Senegal
Senegal
Senegal , officially the Republic of Senegal , is a country in western Africa. It owes its name to the Sénégal River that borders it to the east and north...

 Louis Faidherbe
Louis Faidherbe
Louis Léon César Faidherbe was a French general and colonial administrator. He created the Senegalese Tirailleurs when he was governor of Senegal.- Background :...

 in the 1850s formalised the colonial structure which was christened Rivières du Sud. In 1854 Guinea
Guinea
Guinea , officially the Republic of Guinea , is a country in West Africa. Formerly known as French Guinea , it is today sometimes called Guinea-Conakry to distinguish it from its neighbour Guinea-Bissau. Guinea is divided into eight administrative regions and subdivided into thirty-three prefectures...

 ports were placed under control of Naval administration and split from new colonial administration in Saint-Louis, Senegal
Saint-Louis, Senegal
Saint-Louis, or Ndar as it is called in Wolof, is the capital of Senegal's Saint-Louis Region. Located in the northwest of Senegal, near the mouth of the Senegal River, and 320 km north of Senegal's capital city Dakar, it has a population officially estimated at 176,000 in 2005. Saint-Louis...

 under the name Gorée and Dependencies. Previously, they had fallen under the naval 'supreme commander in Gabon
Gabon
Gabon , officially the Gabonese Republic is a state in west central Africa sharing borders with Equatorial Guinea to the northwest, Cameroon to the north, and with the Republic of the Congo curving around the east and south. The Gulf of Guinea, an arm of the Atlantic Ocean is to the west...

' of the Establissements francais de la Cote de l'Or et du Gabon.

By 1859, Faidherbe's
Louis Faidherbe
Louis Léon César Faidherbe was a French general and colonial administrator. He created the Senegalese Tirailleurs when he was governor of Senegal.- Background :...

 campaigns of conquest on the riverine coast south of Gorée saw the region annexed to the colonial administration, under the arrondissement
Arrondissement
Arrondissement is any of various administrative divisions of France, certain other Francophone countries, and the Netherlands.-France:The 101 French departments are divided into 342 arrondissements, which may be translated into English as districts. The capital of an arrondissement is called a...

 of Gorée. The Rivières du Sud now referred to the entire region from Sine-Salmon to the border of British Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone , officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Guinea to the north and east, Liberia to the southeast, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west and southwest. Sierra Leone covers a total area of and has an estimated population between 5.4 and 6.4...

.

In 1865 the fort at Boké
Boké
Boké is the capital city of Boké Prefecture within the Boké Region of Lower Guinea near the border with Guinea-Bissau. It is also a sub-prefecture of Guinea. Located along the Rio Nuñez which flows to its not-too-distant mouth on the Atlantic Ocean, Boké is a port. It is known for the Fortin de...

 was built in the Rio Nunez area, expanding from the main French-controlled town of Conakry
Conakry
Conakry is the capital and largest city of Guinea. Conakry is a port city on the Atlantic Ocean and serves as the economic, financial and cultural centre of Guinea with a 2009 population of 1,548,500...

. Shortly after this, Bayol was taken as a 'protectorate' as well. The Rio Pongo area, nominally held by Germany, was traded to France for their 'rights' to Porto-Seguro and Petit Popo on the Togo
Togo
Togo, officially the Togolese Republic , is a country in West Africa bordered by Ghana to the west, Benin to the east and Burkina Faso to the north. It extends south to the Gulf of Guinea, on which the capital Lomé is located. Togo covers an area of approximately with a population of approximately...

lese coast. The British formally recognised French control of the area, and the administrative division collecting these possessions was created under the name Rivières du Sud in 1882.

Pause

The background to this legalistic and administrative mavouvers was the Berlin conference
Berlin Conference
The Berlin Conference of 1884–85 regulated European colonization and trade in Africa during the New Imperialism period, and coincided with Germany's sudden emergence as an imperial power...

 of 1884 and the "loaded pause" of French imperial expansion. Domestically, this stemmed from the disastrous French defeat in Tonkin
Tonkin
Tonkin , also spelled Tongkin, Tonquin or Tongking, is the northernmost part of Vietnam, south of China's Yunnan and Guangxi Provinces, east of northern Laos, and west of the Gulf of Tonkin. Locally, it is known as Bắc Kỳ, meaning "Northern Region"...

 and the collapse of the colonial policy of the Ferry ministry
Jules Ferry
Jules François Camille Ferry was a French statesman and republican. He was a promoter of laicism and colonial expansion.- Early life :Born in Saint-Dié, in the Vosges département, France, he studied law, and was called to the bar at Paris in 1854, but soon went into politics, contributing to...

. European horse-trading followed the Berlin conference, in which foreign powers divided the African continent and attempted to consolidate their own possessions. Rivières du Sud was a formal division which, apart from the coast, had lttle relation to actual governance until the next decade.

Evolution of French administrative division

In 1891, Rivières du Sud was placed under the colonial lieutenant governor at Dakar
Dakar
Dakar is the capital city and largest city of Senegal. It is located on the Cap-Vert Peninsula on the Atlantic coast and is the westernmost city on the African mainland...

, who had authority over the French coastal regions east to Porto-Novo
Porto-Novo
Porto-Novo is the official capital of the West African nation of Benin, and was the capital of French Dahomey. The commune covers an area of 110 square kilometres and as of 2002 had a population of 223,552 people.Porto-Novo is a port on an inlet of the Gulf of Guinea, in the southeastern portion...

 (modern Benin
Benin
Benin , officially the Republic of Benin, is a country in West Africa. It borders Togo to the west, Nigeria to the east and Burkina Faso and Niger to the north. Its small southern coastline on the Bight of Benin is where a majority of the population is located...

).

Governor general Gallieni
Joseph Gallieni
Joseph Simon Gallieni was a French soldier, most active as a military commander and administrator in the French colonies and finished his career during the First World War. He was made Marshal of France posthumously in 1921...

, having faced fierce resistance to French expansion on the upper Senegal and Niger basin from the Toucouleur Empire
Toucouleur Empire
The Toucouleur Empire was founded in the nineteenth century by El Hadj Umar Tall of the Toucouleur people, in part of present-day Mali....

, Samori
Samori
Samory Toure was the founder of the Wassoulou Empire, an Islamic state that resisted French rule in West Africa from 1882 until his capture in 1898.-Early life and career:...

, and then Mahmadu Lamine
Mahmadu Lamine
al-Hajj Mahmadu Lamine was a nineteenth-century Senegalese marabout who led an unsuccessful rebellion against the French colonial government....

's forces, turned the colonial gaze to the Rivières du Sud in the late 1880s, marking a new phase in French expansion.

Between 1889 and 1894, Rivières du Sud, Coted'Ivoire and Dahomey
Dahomey
Dahomey was a country in west Africa in what is now the Republic of Benin. The Kingdom of Dahomey was a powerful west African state that was founded in the seventeenth century and survived until 1894. From 1894 until 1960 Dahomey was a part of French West Africa. The independent Republic of Dahomey...

 were each successively separated into 'independent' colonies, with Rivières du Sud being renamed the 'Colony of French Guinea
French Guinea
French Guinea was a French colonial possession in West Africa. Its borders, while changed over time, were in 1958 those of the independent nation of Guinea....

'. In 1895 these colonies came under the authority of the governor general of French West Africa, and in 1904, this was formalised into the Africa Occidental Francais
French West Africa
French West Africa was a federation of eight French colonial territories in Africa: Mauritania, Senegal, French Sudan , French Guinea , Côte d'Ivoire , Upper Volta , Dahomey and Niger...

. French Guinea, along with Senegal, Dahomey, Cote-d'Ivoire and Upper Senegal and Niger
Upper Senegal and Niger
Upper Senegal and Niger was a colony in French West Africa created in 1904 from Senegambia and Niger. Niger became a separate military district in 1911 and a separate colony in 1922, Upper Volta was split off in 1919, and the remainder reorganized as French Sudan in 1920...

 each were ruled by a lieutenant governor, under the Governor General in Dakar.

Fouta Djallon opposition

The Rivières du Sud colony never extended far from the coast, as the French were unable to conquer the people of the Fouta Djallon
Fouta Djallon
Fouta Djallon is a highland region in the centre of Guinea, West Africa. The indigenous name is Fuuta-Jaloo...

 highlands, running from the south of modern Senegal though the interior of modern Guinea.

The Fouta Djallon confederation was located mainly in present day Guinea as well as parts of Guinea Bissau, Senegal, Sierra Leone. A powerful force, it stymied French expansion until 1898 when the French colonial troops defeated the last Almamy
Almami
Almami is a title of West African Muslim rulers, used especially in the conquest states of the 19th century. It is a contraction of Amir al-Mu'minin , usually translated "Commander of the Faithful" or "Prince of the Faithful"...

, Bokar Biro Barry, dismantled the state and integrated it into their colony of French Guinea.
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