CHAPTER VI 
FRENCH COLONIAL EXPANSION IN WEST AFRICA 
THE SUDAN, AND THE SAHARA 
FRENCH colonial enterprises in Africa began in 1637, 
when Claude de Rochefort built Fort St. Louis at the mouth 
of the Senegal River on the West Coast and explored the 
interior for a hundred miles. He was followed during the 
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by other intrepid 
explorers, who made settlements at Mellicouri on the Guinea 
Coast and at Assinie and Grand Bassam on the Ivory Coast, 
and who penetrated farther and farther into the interior 
until the valiant Réné Caillié, after marvelous adventures, 
reached Timbuctu, on the Upper Niger, in 1828. The 
French holdings on the Senegal were extended and consoli- 
dated into an effective base for future operations by the 
energetic General Faidherbe from 1854 to 1865, who added 
the Oulof country as far south as Cape Verde and the 
kingdom of Cayore, and built the harbor at Dakar. He 
was the first to recognize the possibilities of West Africa 
as a colonial center. “Our possession on the West Coast,” 
he wrote to the Colonial Office, “is possibly the one of all 
our colonies that has before it the greatest future; and it 
deserves the whole sympathy and attention of the Empire.” 
By the middle of the nineteenth century, other trade cen- 
ters had been established at Libreville on the Gaboon River, 
and at Porto Novo on the Dahomey coast; but it was not 
until the early eighties that the dream of a wonderful 
colonial empire, stretching from the Mediterranean to the 
Congo, was first conceived. It arose when the Senegal 
colonists had reached the Niger, and De Brazza was explor-