PREFACE

When I took over the administration of Upper Senegal-Niger original: "Haut-Sénégal-Niger"; a colonial territory in French West Africa that existed under this name from 1904 to 1921. in May 1908, among the documents I consulted to study the new Colony for which I was responsible were district monographs established by order of my predecessor in 1903. These works, generally interesting, no longer corresponded to reality; documents of this kind age quickly in a colony as young and as vibrant as the Sudan Refers to the French Sudan, roughly modern-day Mali.. This led to the plan to revive my predecessor’s idea and obtain a status report on Upper Senegal-Niger in 1909; I completed this with an inquiry similar to the one I had undertaken in the Ivory Coast in 1901 regarding the customary law original: "droit coutumier"; the traditional legal systems and social rules of the local ethnic groups. of the Indigenous people original: "Indigènes"; the standard term used in the colonial era to refer to the local populations.. The two questionnaires that served as the basis and framework for this consultation will be found further on.

First of all, it is only right to acknowledge the eagerness and conscientiousness with which, almost unanimously, the Circle Commanders original: "commandants de Cercle"; the primary administrative officers in charge of a "cercle," which was the basic colonial administrative district., whether civilian or military, set about responding to the double questionnaire addressed to them. I am happy to be able to thank them once again.

Finding myself in possession of this truly considerable mass of documents—of somewhat unequal value, but almost always interesting—it appeared to me that there was something better to do than simply keeping them in our archives to be consulted in case of need.

But a full publication of all these reports was not to be considered; by their very nature, their juxtaposition would have resulted in a quantity of redundant double-work, in which the lost and weary reader would have had great difficulty finding essential information, and from which they could have extracted neither