Individualism, Community, and Cooperatives in the Development Thinking of the Union Soudanaise-RDA, 1946–1960

In the late 1940s and 1950s, nationalists and colonial officials in French Soudan (Mali) shared a language of development centered on the concepts of tradition, modernity, community, and individualism. This shared language permitted collaboration but also masked important differences in nationalist and colonial analyses of social change and the direction of rural development. Particular areas of contention were social evolutionary models of change, the likelihood of rising individualism, and the potential of communitarian development. The patterns of interaction in this debate reveal that intellectual exchanges between and among officials and nationalists were multidirectional and characterized not by borrowing but by exchange, adaptation, and reformulation.