Cercle (French colonial) would still fall under the Indigénat. The "Lamine Guèye law" of 7 April 1946 formally extended citizenship across the empire, indigènes included. Third, the law of 20 September 1947 removed the two tier court system and mandated equal access to public employment. Reduced to a political subdivision roughly equivalent to a French department and stripped of the personal power of the Cercle Commander system, the Cercle name retained enough imperial connotations to be changed by most nations upon independence to Departments or Sub-Prefectures. Mali is the only nation in Sub-Saharan Africa to retain the name Cercle for its second level
French colonial empire a dangerous liberal fantasy. In the Protectorate of Morocco, the French administration attempted to use urban planning and colonial education to prevent cultural mixing and to uphold the traditional society upon which the French depended for collaboration, with mixed results. After World War II, the segregationist approach modeled in Morocco had been discredited by its connections to Vichyism, and assimilationism enjoyed a brief renaissance. In 1905, the French abolished slavery in most of French West Africa. David P. Forsythe wrote: "From Senegal and Mauritania in the west to Niger in the east (what became French Africa), there was a parallel