Abstract This article addresses two understudied concerns in Senegalese historiography: the peripheral region of eastern Senegal during the twentieth century and rural perceptions and manifestations of Senegalese citizenship. It argues that farmers in sparsely populated eastern Senegal engaged with the colonial state primarily as members of the Sociétés de Prévoyance and successive state agricultural institutions rather than indirectly as members of Sufi brotherhoods. Acting as “farmer-citizens” of the postwar state rather than “peasant-members” of the Sociétés, rural residents impelled institutional reforms and inspired African politicians’ rhetoric. Despite (or perhaps because of) the changes wrenched by French colonialism and World War II, farmers advocated for a social contract based in Senegambian moral economies of agrarian production. Given the longstanding importance of regional migrant labor, farmers’ work arrangements affected the colonial and postindependence economy and statecraft. Senegalese and Malian farmers’ understandings and expectations of political belonging influenced the legislation of citizenship in mid-twentieth-century Senegal. This article uses colonial and postindependence administrative reports, Senegalese dissertations, and oral histories from the Senegal-Mali borderlands to find an articulation of agrarian citizenship attentive to jus seminum and jus sudoris rights based in seed and sweat that were brought to bear on existing civic and legal conceptions of citizenship based in jus sanguinis, jus soli, and jus culturae rights.
Drawing on recent studies of Mali's foreign relations (Gary-Tounkara 2008, Skinner 2012, Cooper 2014, Mann 2015) this paper examines how Modibo Keita and his allies understood national and international frameworks for state policies, from Bamako's autonomous Loi Cadre government to Keita's audacious Active Revolution. Earlier scholars (Foltz 1965, Snyder 1967, Meghahed 1970, Diarrah 1986, Sanakoua 1990) have traced Malian internationalism through ideologies such as decolonization, federation, pan-Africanism, liberation wars, recalcitrant imperialism, revolutionary Communism, and non-alignment. In contrast, we focus on Mali's relations with several European countries--Italy, Germany, and Scandinavia--that, at this time, claimed no African colonies as they embarked on nation(re)building projects at edges of Iron Curtain. Drawing on state newspapers, archives, and institutional histories in Mali and Sweden, we seek an empirical, not comparative, study of Modibo Keita's philosophy of the national in dialogue with other nations--in Africa and beyond. Focusing on exchanges of students, diplomats, bureaucrats, and artists, this paper also suggests a historically-grounded starting point for research into West African diaspora in Central and Northern Europe and rise of North-South intergovernmentality that mobilizes state institutions and resources to create new spheres of cultural sovereignty in Europe and Africa today.
Drawing on postcolonial archives, this paper examines citizenship in independent Senegal through Cape Verdean migrants in the 1960s. A political palimpsest, independent Senegal – and Dakar’s Cap-Vert peninsula in particular – had to contend with its role as French West Africa’s capital and the Four Communes’ relationship with France. After 1960, migrants from neighboring Guinea, Mali, and Mauritania would be defined by a matrix of independent nation-states; the porous inter-imperial borders with British Gambia and Portuguese Guinea transformed into the very limits of colonialism. Dakar sought “an adequate formulation for the African situation,” an accommodating citizenship law that in practice hindered citizenship applications from Malian, Guinean, and Bissau-Guinean migrants. Counterbalancing the histories of exclusion and expulsion described by Ousman Kobo and Bruce Whitehouse, citizenship applications by Cape Verdean ocean migrants were favorably received. By offering citizenship to subjects of a recalcitrant colonial state, Senegal opened new possibilities for challenges to Lisbon’s Estado Novo. A simultaneous caution in dealing terrestrial migrants hardened the definitions of Senegalese nationality and state in distant provinces struggling with separatist movements and military threats from unfriendly neighbors.
In the years since I started working on the research for this book I have lived in four different cities and have been fortunate to receive the support, guidance, and encouragement of many friends and colleagues.First of all, I want to thank the members and leaders of financial self-help groups in New York and in Argentina, who let me join them in their activities and learn from their lives.This book would not exist without their openness, generosity, good will, and eagerness to teach me.To preserve anonymity, I am not using their real names.But they know who they are, and I am grateful to them.This project started at Columbia University.I was fortunate to receive the extraordinary guidance of Gil Eyal, who continues to influence my sociologi-
Abstract This article examines concepts of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ for migrants and citizens in the twilight of empire. It focuses on the ‘ cheminots refoulés ’, railway workers with origins in the former French Sudan (today's Republic of Mali) who were expelled from Senegal shortly after both territories declared independence, and other ‘Sudanese’ settled in Senegal, sometimes for several generations. Using newly available archives in France, Mali and Senegal, and interviews with former cheminots and ‘Sudanese migrants’ on both sides of the border, this article seeks to historicize memories of autochthony and allochthony that have been constructed and contested in postcolonial nation-building projects. The Mali Federation carried the lingering memory of federalist political projects, but it proved untenable only months after the Federation's June 1960 independence from France. When member states declared independence from each other, the internal boundary between Senegal and the Sudanese Republic became an international border between Senegal and the Republic of Mali. In the wake of the collapse, politicians in Bamako and Dakar clamoured to redefine the ‘nation’ and its ‘nationals’ through selective remembering. Thousands of cheminots and ‘Sudanese migrants’ who had moved to Senegal from Sudan years (or decades) earlier were suddenly labelled ‘foreigners’ and ‘expatriates’ and faced two governments eager to see them ‘return’ to a hastily proclaimed nation state. This ‘repatriation’ allowed Republic of Mali officials to ‘perform the nation’ by (re)integrating and (re)membering the migrants in a nascent ‘homeland’. But, having circulated between Senegal and Sudan/Mali for decades, ‘Sudanese migrants’ in both states retained and invoked memories of older political communities, upsetting new national priorities. The loss of the Mali Federation raises questions about local, national and international citizenship and movement in mid-century West Africa. Examining the histories invoked to imagine postcolonial political communities, this article offers an insight into the role that memory has played in constructing and contesting the nation's central place in migration histories within Africa and beyond.
