Old homes and new homelands: imagining the nation and remembering expulsion in the wake of the Mali Federation's collapse

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.

»Failed« Migratory Adventures?

“…It was the gradual disappearance of the locally rooted slave trade in Senegambia, which sparked off a system of seasonal migration or outmigration to complement and enable their agricultural production (Manchuelle, 1989). Abundant literature exists investigating their "traditional" migratory networks and the dynamic transnational spaces encompassing not only the subregion but also other African countries as well as the Global North (e.g., Lima, 2015;Cisse & Daum, 2009;Rodet, 2009;Quiminal, 2002;Manchuelle, 1997Manchuelle, , 1989Chastanet, 1992;Pollet & Winter, 1971). Since the 1950s, 85% of all Black African migrants to France have originated from the Soninké ethnic group (Meadows, 1999, p. 208).…”

“…The first Malians were expelled from neighboring Senegal (which, together with Mali, constituted the French colonial territory "Fédération du Mali" from 1958 to 1960; cf. Rodet & County, 2018), and from the former Belgian Congo in 1964 24 ; other countries took up this practice: Ghana in 1969, Nigeria in 1983, Angola in 1996, Libya from 1990 Guinea starting from the 2000s, and not least Gabon, which carried out deportations of several hundred in 2015 (Daou, 2016;field notes). 25 From the mid-1980s on, these expulsions increasingly took place in the context of economic crises and were legitimized for xenophobic and domestic political reasons as well as to assert the foreign policies of the states involved.…”

“…80f; see next subchapter). Marie Rodet (2009), on the other hand, deduces from archival sources, the often overlooked, but economically im-portant role of women actively migrating to neighboring countries in the first half of the 20 th century, but eventually disappearing from statistical sources.…”

Nomos, Hostis, and War: State-Building Process and Armed Forces in Africa

“…Starting with the independence and the Mali Federation, two competing ideas about the future political identity of the federation stood at its beginnings. The Senegalese understood the federation as a shared house for the two nations (Rodet & County, 2018, pp. 469–470) with aims of economic and cultural development as key to true liberation (Heitz, 2008).…”

“…First of these events was the attempted integration of the Senegalese Muslim leaders, on whom Senghor, a Catholic and the future president of Senegal, depended for electoral support, into the Union soudanaise party in 1959 (Kurt, 1970, p. 419). The second one was the rapid increase in Malian officials in Dakar in just a year, termed as implied new colonization by the Senegalese leadership (Rodet & County, 2018, p. 472). Both events display the particular friend and hostis distinction that permeated the nascent Senegalese identity.…”