Plantations, forestry operations, and salt mines in Senegal continued to be operated by forced labor, mandated by the local commandant and provided by official chiefs through the 1940s. Forced agricultural production was common in sub-Saharan Africa from the nineteenth century until the Second World War, mandated sometimes by the central French government (rubber until 1920, rice during the Second World War), sometimes for profit (the cotton plantations of Compagnie Française d'Afrique Occidentale and Unilever), and sometimes on the personal whim of the local commandant, such as one official's attempt to introduce cotton into the Guinean highlands. Unlike the Congo Free State, infamous for its nineteenth-century forced rubber cultivation by private fiat, the French government administration was bound legally to provide labor for its rubber concessionaires in French Equatorial Africa and settler-owned cotton plantations in Côte d'Ivoire.