FEA and Cameroon had certainly experienced forced labor and abuses for decades prior to 1940. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch has described how FEA's entire economy had long been “founded on coercion” and “based on crime.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wholesale murder was commonplace in colonial Central Africa. Hostage-takings, corporal punishments, sexual violence, and legions of other crimes constituted a kind of “exploitation method” predicated on terror. In the 1920s and 1930s, Albert Londres, André Gide, and Marcel Homet among others, deplored some of the abuses committed in the region and testified to the devastating human effects of the Congo to Ocean railway construction project. Organizations like the League for the Rights of Man regularly denounced timber and rubber companies. Whether formulated by the League of Nations, by journalists, or by concerned travelers, such criticisms shone the spotlight of international public opinion on Central Africa. The Komintern and anti-colonial nationalist groups also seized the image of colonial slaughter along the Congo River Basin.

The interwar years brought some change, but no revolution in labor practices. Despite its unique status, the situation in French mandate Cameroon did not differ fundamentally from that in FEA. As J. P. Daughton has shown, in 1926 the World Labor Organization received a report suggesting that working conditions were actually harsher in Cameroon than in its colonial neighbor. FEA also struggled to reform. Other than a brief respite under the more liberal Governor François-Joseph Reste between 1935 and 1939, it remained in Elikia M'Bokolo's words: “The domain of brutal economic exploitation and uncompromising political domination.” Gaullist rule ushered in a recrudescence of surveillance and control and a redoubling of forced labor in the wake of the Governor Reste hiatus, all for the sacrosanct war effort. In its name, colonial authorities stepped up production, and developed transport routes in a veritable binge of coercion.