International Journal of African Historical Studies Vol. 44, No. 1 (2011) 61 Bellah Histories of Decolonization, Iklan Paths to Freedom: The Meanings of Race and Slavery in the Late-Colonial Niger Bend (Mali), 1944–1960* By Bruce S. Hall Duke University (
[email protected]) 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 1947–48 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 post- war 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 * For their comments on earlier drafts of this article, I would like to thank Gregory Mann, Emily Burrill, Seraphima Rombe-Shulman, Philip Stern, Dirk Bonker, Christian Lentz, and the two anonymous readers for the journal.