page_title: Rassemblement Démocratique Africain
section_title: Formation: 1946
hierarchical_section_title: Rassemblement Démocratique Africain / Formation: 1946
caption_attribution_description: Depicted person&#58; &#32;Félix Houphouët-Boigny&#32;– doctor, Ivorian politician, first president of Côte d'Ivoire
context_page_description: The Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, commonly known as the RDA and variously translated as African Democratic Assembly and African Democratic Rally, was a political party in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa which was important in the decolonization of the French empire. The RDA was composed of different political parties throughout the French colonies in Africa and lasted from 1946 until 1958. At certain points, the RDA was the largest political party in the colonies in Africa and played a key role in the French government headed by the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance. Although the regional party largely dissolved in 1958 with the independence votes for the colonies, many of the national parties retained the RDA in their name and some continue to do so. The political ideology of the party did not endorse outright secession of colonies from France, but it was anti-colonial and pan-Africanist in its political stances.
  The RDA was formed at a conference in Bamako, in the colony of French Sudan, in 1946.
context_section_description: Within the context of a realignment between France and the colonies, one of the elected deputies pushing most significantly for increased autonomy of the colonies was Félix Houphouët-Boigny of the Ivory Coast colony.  Houphouët-Boigny had spent a brief period as a delegate in the French National Assembly, where he had aligned most closely with the French Communist Party and had taken an active role in trying to get the recall of André-Jean-Gaston Latrille, the French governor of the Ivory Coast. Following the collapse of the National Assembly elected in July 1946 and wanting to establish a pan-African party in the National Assembly, Houphouët-Boigny convinced Lamine Guèye of Senegal (and the most prominent socialist in Africa at the time) to work towards establishing a wider political movement with the goal of autonomy for the colonies of Africa. These two leaders then brought together many of the other African delegates in the National Assembly to sign a manifesto calling for all leaders to come to Bamako (today the capital of Mali) for a meeting to establish a regional political party. In addition to Houphouët-Boigny and  Guèye, the leaders who signed this manifesto were: Jean-Félix Tchicaya from French Congo, Sourou-Migan Apithy from French Dahomey, Fily Dabo Sissoko from French Sudan, Yacine Diallo from Guinea, and Gabriel d'Arboussier from Senegal. Although he did not sign it at the time of its composition, Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal openly endorsed the contents of the letter.
  The congress was held from 18 October 1946 until 21 October 1946. However, the start of the conference was undermined as a result of French Socialist opposition and conflict between some of the members. The Communist party offered full support to the meeting, which only led the other parties to approach the meeting with suspicion. Most importantly the Socialist Minister of colonial affairs, Marius Moutet, viewed the meeting as a threat to his colonial policies and thus instructed his allies to not attend and for colonial authorities to do what they could to hinder the meeting. Moutet convinced some of the signatories of the document to renounce the manifesto and persuaded Guèye, Senghor, and Diallo not to attend. In addition, the colonial authorities confiscated Tchicaya's funds for travel.  The result was that the 800 delegates who did arrive included few socialist moderates and instead was dominated by those who sought to align the party with the communists. Reflecting on the way this shaped the party, Houphouët-Boigny recalled in 1952 that "If Lamine and Senghor had been at Bamako, we would have written another page of history."
  The conference also got off to a rocky start as a result of the different factions in the French Sudan colony which was hosting the conference. When Houphouët-Boigny, Apithy, and d'Arboussier arrived on the morning of 18 October at the airport in Bamako (in a plane which was formerly the private plane of Hermann Göring and was provided by the communist party) they were greeted by a hostile Sissoko, worried the party would give support to other French Sudanese political leaders and weaken his leadership. Sissoko, as the host of the conference, refused to open up the discussion. Eventually pressure from within his own political party and from the leaders assembled led him to agree to open the meeting at 4:00 PM (although he insisted on calling it "your congress" and not "our congress" throughout his opening speech).
  The conference agreed to a few different issues. First, they agreed to form a regional political alliance between many of their different movements. Rather than a regional party which would have a significant regional infrastructure, the members viewed it as an alliance between the different political forces operating in each of the colonies. Thus they created a Committee of Co-Ordination to be tasked with selecting which party in each colony would be the representative of the RDA party and named Houphouët-Boigny as chairman and Sissoko, Apithy, Tchicaya, d'Arboussier, and Mamadou Konate (the key M
caption: Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast was the political leader of RDA for much of its existence
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