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158 C H A P T E R F I V E Localized Biologies: Mapping Race and Sickle Cell Difference in French West Africa As French colonialism was coming to an end in the late 1950s, Senegal’s future president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, was among the few influential African politicians who held posts in Afrique occidentale francaise (AOF) to argue that the newly independent African states should retain the form of a federation. In his tract African Socialism, he reasoned, “Wealth springs from the diversities of countries and persons, from the fact that they complement each other. We shall always remember a truth often expressed by Father Teilhard de Chardin: races are not equal but complementary, which is a superior form of equality. So it is with countries and men” (Senghor 1959, 4; emphasis added). Together with Modibo Keita of the Sudanese Republic and Mamadou Dia, who became Senegal’s first prime minister, Senghor created the Mali Federation with these statements in mind on April 4, 1959. The union was the first iteration of postcolonial political independence for the former French territory. Senghor imagined this new “French Commonwealth,” which he encouraged the other former AOF territories to join, as parallel to the political cohesion of France itself. Showing the extent to which he felt French history to be a reliable model, he wrote: “The building of a state is a long-term enterprise , requiring centuries of effort and patience. France took more than 2,000 years—up to Napoleon’s time—to become a nation-state. . . . [W]e were wise to begin at the beginning, with . . . the Mali Federation” (1959, 4). He continued : “In the interest of Black Africa and of France, our aim must be to unite. . . . By so doing, we will only be following the French example . . . to make a nation out of diverse races” (1959, 5). Senghor’s plea for unification went beyond French notions of nationhood however. As he pointed out, his own political imaginings might be French, yet the French design of grouping peoples under its colonial dominion was, in turn, deeply African. In his historical presentation of the rationale for new articulations of a federation, he reminded his audience that “France borrowed, for her own use, the great designs of the emperors of Mali and Songhoi: To link Senegal to the Hausa country and the Sahara oases to the Gulf of Benin Localized Biologies 159 in order to group the Sudanese races” (1959, 5) within the AOF. History shows that “ancient Africans,” the French, and now Africans anew held a similar vision, he maintained. For him, this vision, and racial ethos, was worth retaining for political and economic reasons. The Mali Federation dissolved the same year it was created, however. Mistrust among its leaders led Senghor to declare Senegal’s independence from the pact on August 20, 1960. As tensions were running high, he sent all the “Soudan leaders” in Dakar back to Bamako, the Malian capital, in a locked train (Kurtz 1970, 406). Senghor’s advocacy of federalism was founded in a belief in cultural affinities that were at work long before and that continued well after his political and economic proposals. For him, certain West African peoples who shared “climate, soil, blood, language, and customs, art, and literature” (1959, 4–5) could be united with other races “not so much as equals but as complements.” His idea of starting with likeness and then absorbing difference was about “assimilating” groups within “frontiers” that he knew were not “natural” (5; emphasis mine). These notions resembled those of the French colonial authorities , who at different points in history emphasized philosophies to solidify federalism and to encourage “civilizing,” while also preserving racial distinction to different ends (Amselle 2003, 86–88). French colonial ideas of African races, whose malleable or intractable cultural traits were central considerations, became the basis of their policies of “assimilation” and/or “association” during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Betts 1961). From the 1890s until the First World War, assimilationist ideals of “uplifting” Africans were based on 1789 Enlightenment universal principles of rational self-determination, which prevailed mostly in theory (Conklin 1997, 75). It was actually after the revolution of 1848 when France extended political rights to its possessions and gave the inhabitants of its territory in Senegal the right to vote and to elect a deputy to the National Assembly in Paris. Yet Republicanism, based on individual rights and human universals, also offered rationales for “associationist” approaches to...

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