Bellah Histories of Decolonization, Iklan Paths to Freedom: The Meanings of Race and Slavery in the Late-Colonial Niger Bend (Mali), 1944-1960

The standard story of the decolonization process in French-ruled West Africa involves race in a very direct and obvious way. Beginning with the Popular Front government in France (1936-38), and again with the Brazzaville Conference in 1944, a new reformist imperialism was outlined that would, in theory, be universal in its application to all people in the Empire. The implications of such rhetoric were latched onto by many Africans who increasingly formulated political demands based on principles of non-racial universality. Among the best-known examples is the strike in 1947^18 on the Dakar-Bamako railroad in which workers demanded a single pay scale (cadre unique) for all employees, European and African alike.1 In this and other well-known cases, African leaders learned, as Tony Chafer put it, "that they could turn the French language of assimilation to their own advantage, by using it to justify the demand for equality between Africans and Europeans in the socio-economic field."2 The language of racial equality was made particularly potent in the immediate postwar period because of the experience of Vichy rule in West Africa and the extensive demands made by wartime French administrations upon Africans at this time.3 In an interview in 1965, Mali's first president Modibo Keita explained that he had been motivated to join the anti-colonial movement by French racism during the war: "I can still recall that gathering of the population, called by the governor of Soudan in Bamako, to hear an envoy of Marechal Petain. That evening, even though the white civil servants had not been able to occupy all the empty chairs and benches, we were invited as blacks, dressed in white, to sit on the red ground."4 Such indignities served as reference points for many anti-colonial activists, providing a racial gloss to the political struggles of the late colonial period. The larger story of decolonization in French West Africa, and the racial basis of colonial rule, is well known. What is not properly understood by historians of this period is the extent to which European-African racial dynamics, so central to late-colonial politics, sometimes sat uncomfortably on top of more local racial formations. In the arid regions along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert where Arab, Tuareg, and Fulbe pastoralist groups were concentrated, and where slavery had been most durable and long lasting, ideas about intra-African racial difference played an important role in orienting political responses to colonial reforms and eventual independence. For many representatives of the colonial state, and certain anti-colonial activists, the visibility and continued servility of darker-skinned slaves in places such as northern Mali, northern Niger, and Mauritania, made race an important problem to be addressed in the post- World War II period. It also provided a racial idiom for the much more widespread - and usually non-racial - political struggles between the often conservative representatives of established chiefly and prominent families and the proponents of more radical social change. These Sahelian ideas about race grew in importance after political independence was achieved in 1960. In postcolonial Mali, race has been at the center of the relationship between the Malian state and the Tuareg and Arab populations of the Saharan borderlands. According to Baz Lecocq, racial arguments have played a significant role in the two civil wars fought in northern Mali in 1963-64 and 1990-95: "The conflict between the Malian state and the [Tuareg and Arabs] forms part of a problem that haunts all of the Sahel, a problem often seen by foreign experts as one of ethnicity, but locally phrased in terms of race."5 I contend in this article that in order to understand the racialized conflicts in the postcolonial Sahel, we must attend to the local history of racial ideas and practices that produced them.6 One of the reasons that racialized conflict has become so prolific in the postcolonial Sahel is because the first generation of leaders who brought Sahelian countries to independence deployed one set of racial arguments drawn from the larger French imperial context (Europe-Africa) to deal with problems in local settings where race meant very different things. …