Cooper - French Africa, 1947-48 Reform, Violence...

French Africa, 1947–48: Reform, Violence, and Uncertainty in a Colonial Situation
Author(s): Frederick Cooper

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 40, No. 4, Around 1948: Interdisciplinary Approaches to
Global Transformation, edited by Leela Gandhi and Deborah L. Nelson (Summer 2014), pp.
466-478
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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French Africa, 1947–48: Reform, Violence,
and Uncertainty in a Colonial Situation
Frederick Cooper
Focusing on 1948 gives us the opportunity to recapture the diverse and

conflicting ways in which people at the time viewed their future possibil-
ities. They did not know how things would turn out. What some people
thought would be pathways to change ended up as blind allies; many ended
up with what they could get, not what they wanted. Students of history—
guild members and others—are often tempted to do history backwards, to
write as if the present we have was inevitable, to construct a genealogy from
where we are, to look for origins of what we now know, and to forget all the
futures that people once imagined but did not get to see. We tend to look
for the logic of a system, for the nature of a regime and fail to realize how
contested and uncertain political and social arrangements were at any
moment, especially at particular moments—including 1948.
Analyses of the end of colonial empires provide a vivid example of the
limitations of doing history backwards and the possibilities of studying
conjunctures when different futures were in play. We now live in a world
of nearly two hundred nation-states, each jealous of its sovereignty. Most
of those states did not exist in 1948. So the temptation is to look for the
roots of the nation and to assume that territorial sovereignty was what
people wanted all along. The colonial powers appear in such a story only as
obstacles, defenders of a status quo that they should have known was past
its time. France is sometimes seen as worse than Britain in that regard,
stubbornly clinging to a “colonial myth.”1 Often, the story is written as if it
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

1. See Tony Smith, “A Comparative Study of French and British Decolonization,”
Critical Inquiry 40 (Summer 2014)

© 2014 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/14/4004-0003$10.00. All rights reserved.
466
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2014 467
had been decided long ago—the inevitable triumph of the national imag-
ination, dated perhaps to the French Revolution of 1789, to the creole
revolutions of Spanish America in the early nineteenth century, or maybe
even to the supposed advent of territorial sovereignty in the treaty of West-
phalia of 1648.2 The decolonizations of the 1950s and 1960s, in such a view,
represent the playing out of a story of a transition from empire to nation-
state whose origins lie much earlier.
But if one looks at the French empire in 1948, a rather late date in this
metanarrative, there is little of this aura of a defined pathway with predict-
able obstacles. Few political activists in French West Africa embraced the
idea of a territorial nation-state. They sought some combination of a com-
mon African polity and a reformed French one, a balance of autonomy and
equality within a restructured French empire. There were certainly die-
hard defenders of old-style colonialism in France, but they did not control
the government. What most politicians from European France hoped to
do was to shape or control a process of political, economic, and social
change. But the most important dimension of 1948 was uncertainty.
Most political activists knew the old colonial order was gone, but they
did not know what would replace it. Various forms of federation and
confederation were on the table. Two years before, politicians—from Af-
rican as well as European France—had decided to rename the French em-
Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (Winter 1977): 70–102, and D. Bruce Marshall,
The French Colonial Myth and Constitution-Making in the Fourth Republic (New Haven, Conn.,
1973).
2. For an alternative narrative, see Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World
History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2010). For a critical look at
approaches to the study of colonization and decolonization, see Cooper, Colonialism in
Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005). For strong critiques of how the
disciplines of political science and anthropology err by centuries in locating the origins of the
nation-state, see Jan Erk, “The Risks of Scholarly Insulation: When Political Science Forgets
Law and History,” Comparative European Politics 11 (July 2013): 530–49, and John D. Kelly and
Martha Kaplan, “Nation and Decolonization: Toward a New Anthropology of Nationalism,”
Anthropological Theory 1 (Dec. 2001): 419–37.
F R E D E R I C K C O O P E R is professor of history at New York University and a

specialist in the history of Africa, colonization, and decolonization. He is the
author most recently of Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History
(2005), Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (with Jane
Burbank, 2010), Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and
French Africa, 1945–1960 (2014), and Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire,
Nation-State (2014).
468 Frederick Cooper / French Africa, 1947– 48
pire the French union, a deliberately vague category that reflected consensus
that empire could not be defended as such. But few had a clear conception of
what kind of political arrangements they could get or even wanted. Recaptur-
ing that uncertainty is the goal of this essay.
I need to begin a few years before 1948. At the end of World War II,
French leaders knew how weak their country was. Not least of the prob-
lems was that France’s most lucrative colony, Vietnam, had been con-
trolled indirectly by Japan since 1942 and directly from March 1945 until
Japan’s surrender. At that point, Ho Chi Minh and his communist follow-
ers established de facto control of its northern region. Vietnam would have
to be recolonized, but France never found the capacity to do so. There were
flare-ups of violence in Algeria, too, the worst of it by French settlers and
the military. But the government agreed that it had to coopt elites in its
diverse overseas territories if it were to hold the whole thing together.
Sub-Saharan Africa, where clashes had not developed, seemed the best
hope for finding strategies that would bring new legitimacy—as well as
more reliable production of resources—to the composite and hierarchical
system that had gone by the name of empire.
Citizens and Strikers in French West Africa, 1946 – 48

French officials at war’s end wanted to bring a small number of
évolués—the French educated elite—into French political institutions.
Peasants, meanwhile, were to be freed from forced labor and excessive
taxation and allowed to produce and reproduce in their own communities
and cultural frameworks. The goal was to preserve empire by reforming, as
well as renaming, it. For French Africans, the key question was citizenship.
Most Africans before 1946 were considered French nationals and French
subjects, but not French citizens. They could in theory become citizens but
only if they renounced their personal status—the right to have civil affairs
including marriage, inheritance, and filiation come under Islamic or
customary law—accepted that their status would be regulated by the
French civil code, and convinced French officials that they had adopted
a “French” way of life. Few desired to do so; fewer still were accepted
into citizenship.
For African political activists, the crack in the edifice of exclusionary
politics was there to be pried wider. Elections in 1945 for a handful of
noncitizen constituencies for the French legislature (also charged with
writing a new constitution) led to active campaigns in Africa, even given
the limited franchise. Candidates campaigned with slogans like Citizen-
ship for All or Equality of Rights and Duties that called for the removal of
“distinction of race or religion.”3 As soon as a tiny number of colonial
deputies (six from French West Africa) arrived in the Paris legislature,
forced labor and the hated colonial judicial system—heretofore protected
by the law of silence—came into the open and were soon abolished. The
major struggle of African deputies in 1946 was to write a new constitution
for the Fourth Republic that would eliminate the status of colonial subject
and extend the rights of the citizen to all inhabitants of the colonies. It was
quite a struggle, but by briefly boycotting the assembly—a tactic that
would have denied any legitimacy overseas to the new constitution—the
colonial deputies successfully defended the citizenship provisions they
wanted in the constitution. Nevertheless, the constitution maintained
power in the Paris assembly in which colonial deputies were a minority
and left to that assembly the task of deciding whether the assemblies in
each territory, where Africans would have been a majority, would have any
real power. In 1948, that question was still unresolved; it would remain that
way until 1956.4
But, meanwhile, citizenship had become a claim-making concept. The
explosion of citizenship in early 1946 was happening in Africa as well as
Paris, among workers as well as évolués.5 The social movement there put
the equivalence of all French people on the agenda, alongside political
participation and the recognition of cultural difference. In Senegal, a gen-
eral strike movement that lasted two months in early 1946 embraced the
illiterate dockworkers and the highly literate civil servants. Equal Pay for
Equal Work was a key slogan.6 Ordinary laborers focused on the calcula-
tion of the minimum wage; there could not be an African standard of living
distinct from a French one. Civil servants demanded family allowances
equivalent to those of European workers. Such payments to workers with
children to offset the costs of child rearing had previously carried racist
baggage, to promote the reproduction of French people in the face of
foreign challenges. What was at stake was not just money but a conceptual
apparatus, a classificatory grid that had been based on race, tribe, and
civilization. By the time the general strike ended, the strikers had not only
improved wages and benefits but they had remade categories: civil servants
won their family allowances, not yet equal ones, and ordinary workers won
3. The election manifestos may be found in 20G 24, Archives du Sénégal; hereafter
abbreviated AS.
4. For a detailed analysis of the constitutional debates, see Cooper, Citizenship between
Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton, N.J., 2014).
5. This section is based on Cooper, “The Senegalese General Strike of 1946 and the Labor
Question in Post-War French Africa,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 24, no. 2 (1990): 165–
215.
6. Ibid., p. 203.
the principle of standard calculation of the minimum needs of a worker.
And the trade union movement developed confidence and militancy–and
an expectation of being taken seriously in negotiations and institutions
regulating industrial relations.
The citizenship that exploded after 1946 was not focused on a nation. It
was empire citizenship, equivalent across a France that was both European
and overseas. It had concrete consequences: a discourse about political
representation had opened a debate about living standards.
Here we come to the great railway strike of 1947–48, affecting the entire
system of French West Africa. The escalating violence in Vietnam and the
rightward drift in the politics of European France are part of the back-
ground to this event, but it turns out not to be an instance of national
liberation against a stubborn defense of rigid colonial racial hierarchies or
heavy-handed repression but something more ambiguous than that. The
strike was about the cadre unique, the demand of African railwayman for a
single, nonracial job hierarchy, with the same scale of benefits for all mem-
bers, whether their origins were in European or African France. This strike
is the subject of Ousmane Sembène’s novel God’s Bits of Wood. But when I,
along with some Senegalese colleagues and graduate students, was doing
interviews with strike veterans, one of them sought to distance himself
from the fictional representation. It was “our strike,” he said.7 And if Sem-
bène wanted to see the strike as a big step toward the end of empire, it was
actually a struggle within empire—for equality among the French citizens
of Europe and Africa.8
A young, politicized leadership had taken over the railway union in
1946, installing as secretary general Ibrahima Sarr, graduate of an elite
secondary school, railwayman since 1935, and clerical employee. Sarr’s first
speech seized the rhetoric of imperial reform, calling for “the abolition of
antiquated colonial methods condemned even by THE NEW AND TRUE
FRANCE which wishes that all its children, at whatever latitude they may
live, be equal in duties and rights and that the recompense of labor be a
function solely of merit and capacity.”9
Sarr organized not just elite workers but the auxiliaries, workers with-
7. Interview with Amadou Bouda Guèye, 9 Aug. 1994, Thiès, Senegal.

8. See Cooper, “‘Our Strike’: Equality, Anticolonial Politics and the 1947–48 Railway Strike
in French West Africa,” Journal of African History 37, no. 1 (1996): 81–118, and Ousmane
Sembène, God’s Bits of Wood (1960; Portsmouth, N.H., 1962). See also James A. Jones, Industrial
Labor in the Colonial World: Workers of the “Chemin de Fer” Dakar-Niger, 1881–1963
(Portsmouth, N.H., 2002), and Brandon County, “Cheminots into Citizens: Labor, Migration,
and Political Imagination along the Dakar-Niger Railroad, 1923–1974” (PhD diss., Columbia
University, in progress).
9. Ibrahima Sarr, Renseignements, 29 May 1946, K 352 (26), AS.
out job security and other indemnities. The auxiliaries then numbered
16,000, compared to 500 Europeans and 1,700 Africans in the regular cad-
res. The railway union demanded a single cadre for all workers, including
auxiliaries. The claim went to a commission. Then, the union pulled off a
theatrical coup. At the moment of a visit to Senegal by the president of
France, it organized a strike. In such circumstances, the government could
not publicly go against principles of equality. An official commission ac-
cepted the principle of the cadre unique, while the union accepted man-
agement’s demand to rationalize the employment structure and reduce
staff.
Much was at stake in the details of making a colonial institution for-
mally nonracial. The railway board rejected the commission’s proposals.
Betrayed, the union mobilized. Its demands included making the integra-
tion of auxiliaries retroactive, revising the table of equivalences that slotted
people into the wage hierarchy of the cadre unique, housing benefits to
auxiliaries, and equal indemnities for working away from home—impor-
tant details, but not exactly the stuff of heroic anticolonial struggle.
The strike of 10 October 1947 was virtually total. Governor General
Barthes insisted that the strike was illegal; he would not negotiate. The
strike remained remarkably solid until January 1948, when the branch in
the Côte d’Ivoire broke away and went back to work. Even this did not lead
the rest to lose heart. Workers survived this long only because they were
integrated into family-centered networks, which gave them access to agri-
cultural products and fish. Women played a crucial role in pulling together
such resources. Merchants in railway towns contributed money, food, and
vehicles to strikers, and the union opened a cooperative store.
This was a long strike. The chief labor inspector commented, “here the
means of defense are very different—and singularly more effective—than
in the case of metropolitan strikes.”10 The incompleteness of workers’ ab-
sorption into proletarian society gave them more diverse roots than their
French comrades. They were part of Africa. But neither other African trade
unions nor African political parties joined to build a solid front against the
colonial regime. Whenever the possibility of calling a general solidarity
strike came up at union meetings, it was rejected. The railway union had
itself failed to join the 1946 strike in Senegal; unions had different political
affiliations; and, after the 1946 strike, unions had a great deal to gain by
working within professional boundaries. The leaders of political parties
were at best ambivalent about the strike, and Félix Houphouët-Boigny of
10. IGT to Deputy Dumas, 6 Jan. 1948, in IGT, report, 24 Jan. 1948, IGT 13/2, Archives
d’Outre-Mer (AOM).
the Côte d’Ivoire, whose political base was made up of farmers hurt by the
disruption, worked actively behind the scenes to undermine it. Léopold
Sédar Senghor, then becoming the leading political figure in Senegal, ap-
parently told strikers in private of his support, but he was discreet in
public, expressing a desire to see the conflict resolved rather than
throwing his full support to the strikers.11 In this sense, French labor
policy was working. The strike thus remained a railway strike, becom-
ing neither a proletarian movement in general nor part of a political
movement for ending colonialism.
The government revealed how uncertain it was about handling a dis-
ruption of the reformed colonial order. Its caution in using repressive
means—arrests, requisition, ejecting strikers from railway housing—
reflected the postwar conjuncture. Railway workers represented the best
hope for the kind of stable, skilled, workforce officials wanted to build, and
officials feared—more than was actually the case—that railwaymen could
leave the labor market altogether. At the same time, the administration,
having committed itself to an industrial relations model of labor control,
found it hard to go back to the old-style colonialist methods.
The administration was stubborn about playing by the rules of the new
industrial order; it would not negotiate to end an illegal strike. Finally in
March 1948, a new governor general decided to seek compromise. He sus-
tained the railway on some of the issues and split the difference on others.
There would be no punishment for striking; all workers in the cadres
would be rehired; and striking auxiliaries would be taken back until the
staffing levels had been filled. Negotiations on the specifics went on so long
that few striking auxiliaries lost their jobs.
The administration now knew that restructuring the colonial labor sys-
tem would involve African agency as much as imperial design. The prin-
ciples of the equivalence of citizens could not be kept within a Parisian
container. The government made its point, too: African unions could fight
and win but only within certain legal and institutional structures. The very
battle brought both sides deeper into those structures, and the strike did
not become a popular liberation struggle or an exercise in colonial repres-
sion. At the end of 1948, a government report applauded the form in which
the two sides had joined their conflict: “Social peace can only profit from
such a crystallization of forces around two poles, certainly opposed but
11. See Cooper, “‘Our Strike.’” After the strike was over, Senghor was astute enough to
recruit Sarr into his political movement.
knowing each other better and accepting to keep contact to discuss collec-
tive bargaining agreement and conditions of work.”12
Beginning in 1948, African labor unions and African deputies to the
French legislature were working for a new labor code that would include a
forty-hour week, paid vacations, union recognition, and other standard
labor entitlements that Africans could only envy before that time. It took
until 1952, but, with the help of demonstrations and strikes in Africa, Af-
rican parliamentarians eventually persuaded their colleagues to enact a
code that was acceptable to them. It was heralded as a great victory for the
labor movement.13 Imperial ideology had been turned into a claim by col-
onized people for the social as well as political entitlements of any French
citizen.
In 1948 there was a revolution in categories, and one with concrete
results: wages, benefits, and job security. The mobilization for social equal-
ity drew not just on French citizenship doctrine but on railwaymen’s in-
tegration into society, yet its consequences increased their distinctiveness
from other Africans. Both sides in the strike tried to keep it on industrial
rather than political terrain, but when officials lost control of the pace and
mechanisms by which a colonial society would be deracialized, they were
left wondering what they were getting out of their status as chiefs of an
empire.
Madagascar, 1947
Just before the brief April strike that led to the acceptance in principle of
the nonracial job structure in French West African railways, something
very different happened in Madagascar. On the night of 29 March, an
insurrection broke out in several parts of the eastern coastal area of the
island. There had been some riots earlier, and the most important Mala-
gasy political group had tried to cool things off. But that night coordinated
and deadly attacks on French garrisons and police stations took place.
Then European plantations and settlement outposts were attacked. The
undermanned French military lost effective control of much of the eastern
part of Madagascar, and an alternative government was set up. Then came
the repression of the utmost brutality. Patrols burned villages, killed cattle,
and put prisoners into camps. They killed lots of people, as did the depri-
vation that resulted from the economic destruction. Non-Malagasy fatal-
ities numbered some 350 military and 200 civilians—which makes this a
12. “La Vie syndicale en A.O.F. au cour de l’année 1948,” 31 Jan. 1949, AP 3406/1, AOM.
13. See Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and
British Africa (Cambridge, 1996).
serious colonial insurrection. Estimates of deaths among Malagasy went as
high as 100,000, although knowledgeable opinion now suggests it was
more like 20–30,000, a number that is devastating enough. Jennifer Cole
has shown that memories of the events of 1947 were still traumatic decades
later.14
It is not easy to explain either the extent of the insurrection or of the
repression given the limits of struggle in another French colony.15 But the
Madagascar revolt cannot be neatly separated from the dynamics of citi-
zenship, political party formation, and social mobilization on the other
side of Africa. Madagascar also participated in elections in 1945 and sent
three delegates to Paris. They were from the national Democratic Move-
ment for the Renovation of Madagascar (MDRM), a militant party, di-
verse in its makeup but strongest among urban, educated people, who also
tended to come from Malagasy elites. In 1945–47 the MDRM talked about
becoming “a free state within the French Union,” and they were talking
about it openly, among other places, in the Assemblée Nationale.16 In
insisting that the Great Island was a coherent whole capable of running
itself, they went further than almost all of their colleagues from sub-
Saharan Africa and much further than an administration talking about
fuller participation in French institutions and cooperation in economic
development.
When the revolt occurred, the French government blamed the MDRM.
The three deputies were eventually stripped of their parliamentary immu-
nity, jailed, tried, and imprisoned; many MDRM members were detained.
Actually, the MDRM was many things at once: an évolué organization, but
also a network organized along the lines of Madagascar’s linguistic/com-
14. See Jennifer Cole, Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar
(Berkeley, 2001). On the continuing controversies over memory and responsibility in the
repression of the insurrection, see Le Monde, 23 July 2005, p. 4, and 29 Mar. 2007; and Jean
Fremigacci, “Madagascar: La Grande Révolte de 1947,” Les Collections de l’Histoire 49 (2010):
65–67 and “1947: L’ Insurrection à Madagascar,” Études Coloniales, 22 Nov. 2006, etudescoloniales
.canalblog.com/archives/2006/11/22/3246791.html
15. The standard account of the revolt on which these pages draw is Jacques Tronchon,
L’Insurrection malgache de 1947: Essai d’interprétation historique (Paris, 1974). See also Eugène-
Jean Duval, La Révolte des sagaies: Madagascar 1947 (Paris, 2002), and Madagascar 1947: La
Tragédie oubliée, ed. Francis Arzalier and Jean Suret-Canale (Paris, 1999). See Stephen Ellis,
“The 1947 Anti-Colonial Insurrection in Madagascar,” review of The Many Faces of an Anti-
Colonial Revolt: Madagascar’s Long Journey into 1947, by Raymond Kent, Journal of African
History 49 (Mar. 2008): 158–90. I have not been able to obtain Kent’s text.
16. Commission de la France d’Outre-Mer of the Assemblée Nationale Constituante, 3, 10,
16 Apr. 1946, C//15293, Archives Nationales de France, Paris. Malagasy deputies submitted a bill
to this effect, not entirely inconsistent with conceptions of the French union as an assemblage
of diverse political entities with different degrees of sovereignty, but too close to independence
for the comfort of many deputies.
munal groups—secret societies, village-based networks, linkages to trade
unions, as well as bands that preyed on both settlers and Malagasy. Demo-
bilized soldiers were important in the insurrection; so too were youth
groups. There was—as with the Mau Mau in British Kenya—a campaign
of oathing intended to invoke symbols of Malagasy affinity and to bind
people to a solidarity that at the start was ambiguous. The insurrection
certainly had leadership; the orders to strike were precise and clear. The
deputies were participants in parts of these loosely affiliated networks and
societies but not necessarily in a position to control them. The MDRM
leadership was trying to hold together a coalition and was in danger of
being accused of being too moderate, too collaborationist, too distant
from Malagasy culture. So they apparently counseled moderation but did
not betray the insurrectionary movement.
What is interesting in all this is the interplay of educated and uned-
ucated people, of people working within French institutions and Mal-
agasy networks, of different idioms of solidarity and different forms of
militancy. Acting within empire and against it were not entirely com-
partmentalized, although there were elements on both sides who did
their best to make it so.
The French government’s extreme brutality suggests that the insurrec-
tion was not just a challenge but an affront—precisely because French
policy makers thought they were fostering political inclusion and social
progress. The minister of overseas France and the governor general of
Madagascar were both, at the time, members of the Socialist Party, and
both had a track record of trying to stem the worst abuses of colonialism
and to foster the integration of African workers and peasants into what
they saw as a forward-looking social order. The government could very
well have held up the parliamentary wing of the MDRM as an example of
proper behavior as opposed to the savagery of revolt. But it did the oppo-
site, taking an ambiguous involvement of constitutionalist politicians and
rebels and trying to collapse the two into each other. Undoubtedly, the
Vietnamese comparison was in leaders’ minds.
Over the long run, drawing lines—excluding a particular movement—
was the most the French could do to define the limits of politics. And by
1947 the French could not draw the lines just anywhere. The limits of
exclusion would be tested by all sides, and the Madagascar repression was
probably all the more brutal because the French government was so un-
certain of its power to define the rules of politics. Drawing lines between
movements to be included in the political process and those to be excluded
would remain an important dimension of politics in Africa.
The Founding of La Condition Humaine, 1948
We have seen two contrasting dynamics in the politics of France and
French Africa—one leading to extremes of repression, another to a more
ambiguous dialectic of claim making and response around the concept of
citizenship, one which shifted the ground on which issues of labor and
social conditions more generally were framed. Citizenship in overseas
France was not window-dressing. If there were political mobilization be-
hind it, it could translate into concrete benefits. And it added another
element of uncertainty to official calculations: when would the demand for
equality stop? Would such demands, using the language of the equivalence
of French citizens and the connections Africans could put together among
themselves, end up forcing the state to bring up its poorest citizens to the
level of its most affluent? Let me conclude with a blueprint for the future
that was set forth in 1948 by Senghor, poet, philosopher, and deputy from
Senegal. In that year, he founded a new newspaper with a title that revealed
the underlying premise of his thought: La Condition Humaine.
Its opening editorial called for “the liberation of Africa in the frame-
work of the French Union.” Beginning with a vision he had long articu-
lated of different civilizations interacting to constitute humanity, Senghor
deduced a set of political consequences. He sought an inclusive polity in
which Africans could both express their personality and remain part of a
larger whole: “we say autonomy, not independence. We are frank and clear
on this essential point. And we say that assimilation is an illusion in a world
in which peoples have become conscious of their personality; and we af-
firm that independence is an illusion in a world where the interdependence
of peoples is manifest.”17
The French connection was essential to him: “It is this,” he said, “that
we call vertical solidarity.” Senghor’s “vertical” notion captured the reality
of inequality. But the vertical relationship was still a relationship and one
from which Africans had much to gain, though only when vertical solidar-
ity was conjugated with another sort of relationship. Senghor explained
that there was “another solidarity, more real, because founded on ethnol-
ogy and geography; that is horizontal solidarity.”18 By this, he meant soli-
darity among Africans. Horizontal solidarity needed to be organized.
17. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Pourquoi ce nouveau journal?” La Condition Humaine, 11 Feb.
1948. For Senghor’s earlier thoughts on assimilation out of which this argument grew, see his
1945 book chapter, Senghor, “Vues sur l’Afrique noire, ou Assimiler, non être assimilés,” in La
Communauté impériale française, ed. Robert Lemaignen et al. (Paris, 1945), pp. 55–98. See also
Janet G. Vaillant, Black, French, and African: A Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor (Cambridge, Mass.,
1990), and Gary Wilder’s study of the political thought of Senghor and Aimé Césaire, Freedom
Time: Negritude, Decolonization, Utopia (forthcoming).
18. Senghor, “Pourquoi ce nouveau journal?”
Behind this choice of words was a focus on the need for political action;
vertical solidarity without horizontal organization would be the old colo-
nialism restored, but horizontal solidarity without the vertical would be
unity in poverty, a failure to understand the nature of interdependence in
the world as it was. Later that year, Senghor explained the political forma-
tions he was seeking. Horizontal solidarity would give rise to a federation
among African territories in French Africa—a federation of equals. But
that federation would take its place in a transformed French union, turned
into a “confederation,” a composite polity that recognized a distinct, na-
tional personality of each of its components.19
It was also in 1948 that Senghor broke with his mentor Lamine Guèye. It
was a personal as well as political break and also a reaction against the way
in which the Socialist Guèye had allowed himself to become constrained by
his vertical relation to the Socialist Party in France, making it difficult for
him to take a critical stance whenever the socialists were part of a coalition
government in France. Senghor insisted, however, that “we remain faithful
to the socialist ideal,” even as he founded a new party, the Bloc Démocra-
tique Sénégalais (BDS).20 That party would continue to look beyond Sen-
egal by cooperating closely with other African parties in the association
Indépendants d’Outre-Mer, and it remained focused on the goal of federal
or confederal relationships among Africans and between Africa and
France. Senghor and many other leaders would continue to strive to build
such a complex form of polity until 1960.21 In the end, the territorial
nation-state was what they could get, not what they wanted.
Conclusion
We could point to other events that fall into the spectrum between the
West African citizenship discourse and the revolution and repression in
Madagascar: the stalled effort in the French legislature during 1948 to move
toward universal suffrage for citizens in the colonies, as well as the standoff
over the so-called double electoral college that effectively reserved legisla-
tive seats for citizens of metropolitan origin in Algeria and sub-Saharan
Africa. This road would open up in sub-Saharan Africa by 1956, but not in
Algeria, where what were probably the last opportunities to avoid revolu-
19. Senghor, “L’Union française, mission de la france,” La Condition Humaine, 5 Oct. 1948.
20. Ibid. On party politics, see Ruth Schachter Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-
Speaking West Africa (Oxford, 1964); Joseph Roger de Benoist, L’Afrique occidentale française de
la conférence de Brazzaville (1944) a l’indépendance (1960) (Dakar, 1982); and Christian Roche,
Le Sénégal à la conquête de son independence: Chronique de la vie politique et syndicale, de
l’empire français à l’Indépendance 1939 –1960 (Paris, 2001).
21. See Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation.
tion were missed. A particularly obscene instance of election rigging oc-
curred in Algeria in 1948 to keep Muslims and liberal non-Muslim allies
from gaining a majority in local assemblies. The French government
would proceed to exclude a radical political party in Cameroon from the
political arena, and it tried, with less determination and limited success, to
do so in Côte d’Ivoire.22 Whom to allow into the realm of politics and
whom to keep out was not, entirely, the government’s choice. The com-
mon thread here was not an obdurate defense of colonial rule as it had been
but an insistence that its agenda for turning empire into something else be
followed and that contestation take place within certain—not entirely
clear—bounds.
In brutally repressing the Madagascar revolt of 1947, the French govern-
ment forced out of the political arena movements with any connection to
insurrection, but in the railway strike of 1947–48 both the union and the
government were careful to work within tacitly accepted boundaries,
keeping a labor dispute a labor dispute. The government wanted to deter-
mine exactly how its earlier commitment to a nonracial employment
structure would be implemented, but in the end it had to concede that the
railway workers’ union would have its voice, too. Senghor had played a key
role in 1946 in getting the citizenship provision most Africans wanted
inscribed in the constitution; in 1948 he was pushing to develop a political
structure in French Africa in which Africans could claim both their dis-
tinctive personality and interests and equality with other French citizens.
He was not making much progress in 1948 in reforming French institu-
tions, but by 1956 he got some of what he wanted: universal suffrage, the
single college, and elected territorial governments with real authority over
internal affairs. Just where in the spectrum French Africa would end up
among top-down control, autonomy within the French union, and full
independence was very uncertain in 1948. The least defended positions in
French West Africa in 1948 were the two that are often seen as what the
politics of decolonization were all about: between a stubborn colonialism
and demands for total independence.
22. On Côte d’Ivoire, see ibid., chap. 4, and on Cameroon, see Richard Joseph, Radical
Nationalism in Cameroon: The Social Origins of the UPC Rebellion (Oxford, 1977), and Achille
Mbembe, La Naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (1920 –1960): Histoire des usages de la
raison en colonie (Paris, 1996). On Algeria, see a growing literature including Todd Shepard, The
Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006).

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French Africa, 1947–48: Reform, Violence, and Uncertainty in a Colonial Situation

Author(s): Frederick Cooper

Focusing on 1948 gives us the opportunity to recapture the diverse and

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

Critical Inquiry 40 (Summer 2014)

F R E D E R I C K C O O P E R is professor of history at New York University and a

Citizens and Strikers in French West Africa, 1946 – 48

7. Interview with Amadou Bouda Guèye, 9 Aug. 1994, Thiès, Senegal.

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