Two young men met on a quay at the port in Conakry, Guinea in 1946.Footnote 1 One, waiting dockside, was Mamadou Madeira Keita, a low-level civil servant and archivist. Years later, when he was a political prisoner in the Malian Sahara, some would argue that he was “the first francophone African ethnographer.”Footnote 2 The other, descending the gangplank, was the Frenchman Keita had come to meet. Georges Balandier was unknown then, and Conakry was his second African port of call. The work with which he would make his name remained literally over the horizon, in Brazzaville. Yet the encounter between Keita and Balandier was foundational for both men. Conakry incubated a canonical intervention—Balandier's 1951 article on “La Situation Coloniale” (The colonial situation)—one to which some attribute an ancestral role in a particular francophone tradition of postcolonial thought. Conakry, and Guinea at large, was also the crucible in which Madeira Keita and his allies were to forge a powerful anti-colonial politics. In this particular corner of West Africa, that politics and an emergent, engaged social science conditioned each other, like the two strands of a double helix, each a necessary yet ultimately contingent element of the other's structure. Those links were short-lived; indeed they proved nearly as ephemeral as the conjuncture that enabled them. Still, they were not without effect. Diverging from a well-established literature on the connections between the social sciences—notably anthropology—and European colonial rule,Footnote 3 in this article I privilege the political, arguing that anti-colonial activism both effected and was affected by a shift more profoundly epistemological than methodological in the practice of the social sciences (more precisely, sociology and ethnography) in West Africa.Footnote 4 One forgotten place where the two began to come together was on the quay in Conakry.
THE “ANTE-POSTCOLONIALIST”Footnote 5
George Balandier's name is now well known. Over the last decade, his sixth as a leading figure in the social sciences, he has loomed ever larger. Those who engage in postcolonial scholarship can hardly avoid his work, particularly if they cross the francophone frontier.Footnote 6 One article in particular is a landmark; first published in 1951, “La Situation Coloniale: Approche Théorique” is the rare academic article to have sparked (and merited) sustained engagement on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, as it has continued to do in the years since.Footnote 7 It is no accident that this article should return to such intellectual prominence at a moment when tools for understanding the relationship of colonial history to present-day inequality are so urgently needed, particularly in France itself. The decade between the article's fiftieth anniversary and its sixtieth was punctuated by insurgency unknown in France since the Algerian war, as well as by ever-sharpening debate over what postcolonial thought, broadly construed, might have to offer to French intellectual and political life.Footnote 8 In such a context, how can a work emerging from a distant moment of moderate imperial reform possibly be relevant? In invoking Balandier, what are his champions claiming?
For some, Balandier's article is a predecessor, if not the progenitor, of a particularly francophone postcolonial tradition.Footnote 9 Others, notably Achille Mbembe, accord no place to Balandier, claiming as ancestors Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and other “volcanic thinkers.”Footnote 10 Mbembe excoriates a willful “provincialization” of French thought following a long, enclosed “imperial winter” that coincided with the period when foundational work in postcolonial scholarship seemed to be sending up shoots across the Anglophone academy.Footnote 11 Jean-François Bayart and Romain Bertrand profoundly disagree with this position, insisting that French intellectuals have been attuned to developments in postcolonial studies, and more importantly, that they have already elaborated a social science cognizant and critical of the colonial situation.Footnote 12 Here Balandier represents a cardinal reference. In their different fashions, Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler recognize “La Situation Coloniale” as a particular kind of opening, one that, both argue, scholars including Balandier himself allowed to close.Footnote 13 Going further, Stoler diagnoses a “colonial aphasia” in contemporary France, a metaphorical disorder that captures a collective inability to recognize and name a known phenomenon—race—and its place in French history.Footnote 14 Whether or not the diagnosis is entirely apt, it is historically contingent, as are Mbembe's winter, the current spring in which Balandier seems to play an important, if distant role, and the circumstances of his original intervention.
That intervention and the context in which it arose represent a distinct opening, a moment when an anti-colonial social science began to be elaborated under the very real constraints imposed by an embattled and aggressive colonial administration. Balandier's own colonial situation was simultaneously concrete and comparative, nomadic and precisely located. It is also African. His best-known work from this period is largely grounded in Brazzaville, but his analysis had been developed, at least in part, while working with Madeira Keita in Conakry in 1946–1947. For him, Guinea, like postwar French Africa, was more than a laboratory. It was a workshop,Footnote 15 and he was one of its creations. I argue that Balandier's experiences there framed the political and theoretical approach to the colonial situation that he elaborated in equatorial Africa, and they paved the way for his path-breaking work on youth, modernity, and sociability in Brazzaville in the early 1950s.Footnote 16 I pursue these arguments by focusing on two individuals in order to apprehend both the structural reasons for and the contingencies that anchored a critical challenge to the social sciences in a precise but little-known moment of African history. That moment begins at the foot of the gangplank, with Madeira Keita.
THE ANTI-COLONIALIST
The young archivist who awaited Balandier in Conakry was an exceptional figure, one of the architects of a new form of radical anti-colonial politics in francophone West Africa that is now largely obscured. Mamadou Madeira Keita was an agent of the West African social science research institute, l'Institut Français de l'Afrique Noire (IFAN). He was also a founding figure of the inter-territorial, anti-colonial political party known as the RDA (Rassemblement Démocratique Africaine), and of its Guinean chapter. Born in Kourounikoto in the Soudanese (later Malian) cercle of Kita around 1917 and educated at French West Africa's highest institution of learning, the Ecole Normale de Gorée (later the Ecole William Ponty), Keita had trained as a librarian and archivist in the office of the governor general in Dakar and in Conakry before the Second World War. Mobilized from October 1938 to October 1940, he served in Dakar and left the ranks of the colonial military (the tirailleurs Sénégalais) as a staff sergeant (sergent-chef). Keita then worked as an archivist and librarian for the Government of Guinea in Conakry and Kouroussa. In 1944, he established the IFAN center in Guinea, which grew out of the archive and which Balandier would be sent to take over. Keita remained there, periodically serving as interim director, until 1950.Footnote 17
While at IFAN-Conakry, in April 1946, Madeira Keita stepped into a pivotal role in the city's emerging Communist Study Group (Groupe d’études communistes, or GEC), which had been driven by French Communists until Keita, Sékou Touré, and a few other West Africans became involved.Footnote 18 When he met Balandier, Keita was working with Touré, Ray Autra, and others to found the Guinean branch of the RDA, the party that later evolved into the Parti Démocratique de la Guinée (PDG). Autra will play an important supporting role in our narrative; Touré, of course, became Guinea's first president at independence in 1958 and ruled autocratically through the PDG until his death in 1984. Touré and Keita had represented Guinea at the founding congress of the RDA in Bamako in October 1946, and by March 1947 Keita was holding meetings at Conakry's Rialto cinema to establish the party's Guinean chapter.Footnote 19 Keita quickly folded one of the colony's fledgling political parties, the Parti Progressiste Africain de Guinée, into the inter-territorial initiative, and in years to come he and Touré struggled to integrate the other, ethnically or regionally based parties. Police reports echoed the press in referring to Keita as the Guinean RDA's chief organizer (responsable), and he was elected its first secretary-general.Footnote 20 His wife, the schoolteacher Mme. Keita Nankoria Kourouma, was a leader and co-founder of the women's wing of the movement in Guinea, and their house served as a meeting ground for anti-colonial activists.Footnote 21 Madeira Keita's importance in anti-colonial politics is less often underestimated than overlooked entirely by historians hypnotized by Touré,Footnote 22 yet a 1948 report from the head of security in Guinea makes his importance clear: “Very intelligent, subtle, and an ardent partisan of the Communist doctrine, Madeira is indisputably the soul and the brains of the group (i.e., the RDA), and it seems certain that, if he was transferred to another territory in the Federation…, the RDA could not easily find in Guinea a leader and a coordinator who would be his equal.”Footnote 23
In years to come, Touré became that man, and more. But in 1948, his alliance with Keita seems to have been based on a loose division of tasks. Keita, the intellectual, led the party (albeit in close collaboration with others), served as its spokesperson, and later edited one of its short-lived newspapers, Coup de Bambou (1950–1951).Footnote 24 Touré was the secretary-general of the Guinean chapter of the powerful French Communist trade union, the Conféderation Général du Travail, and in 1948 he exchanged a position in the Guinean postal service, in which he had led early postwar strikes, for one as an accountant in the federation-wide colonial civil service.Footnote 25 Touré's strong allies in the labor movement in West Africa and Europe helped to protect him to some degree from persecution by the colonial administration, but on the other hand his status as a civil servant—a status long held by Keita—made him vulnerable to punitive transfers from one territory to another. This was a delicate balance to maintain, and it tipped in June 1950 when Touré led a general strike in Conakry over the minimum wage.Footnote 26 The administration refused his request for a leave of absence from the civil service, posting him instead to Niger. Touré refused to go, and after a voyage to Warsaw that raised his international profile, he was dismissed from the civil service early in 1951. He left almost immediately for a long sojourn in France, and returned to contest unsuccessfully a seat in the territorial assembly. Touré finally came out of the political wilderness in July 1952, when he succeeded Keita as secretary general of the Guinean RDA, and in 1953, when he won both a seat in the assembly and, following a sixty-seven-day strike, a territory-wide increase in the minimum wage.Footnote 27
In the wake of the 1950 general strike, Keita too was on the ropes. Guinea's governor had already banned meetings of the RDA. In August, after years of harassment from the colonial administration (this at least was mutual), Keita was suspended from his duties and his salary cut off after he refused a transfer out of Guinea.Footnote 28 In November, a court fined him 100,000 francs for libel in a case brought by Iréncé Montout, a colonial administrator from the Antilles, against Coup de Bambou.Footnote 29 A six-month suspended sentence hung over his head after that case, and other judgments had already gone against him, leaving him with heavy fines to pay and the prospect of multiple months’ imprisonment.Footnote 30 Ironically, the article that provoked Montout's lawsuit may have been written by Touré, under the pseudonym Erdéa (phonetically, RDA).Footnote 31 Whoever the author was, Keita was the defendant. He was silenced, and Coup de Bambou swept from the table. This was check, but not yet checkmate.
That year, politics was souring all around. Keita found himself on the wrong side of a battle to maintain the parliamentary alliance between the French Communist Party and the RDA. Led by the Ivoirian Félix Houphuët-Boigny, the RDA had decided on a complete break with the communists. Keita disagreed strongly, but his dedication to party discipline obliged him to accept a maneuver designed to make the party less threatening to the colonial state and more effective in its metropolitan legislative coalition.Footnote 32 Touré had been persuaded to follow the new party line, and over the next few years worked to keep his Conféderation Général du Travail and his RDA activities distinct.Footnote 33 For Keita, this compromise must have been especially galling; unlike Touré or Houphouet-Boigny, he never enjoyed parliamentary immunity or the relative protection from the colonial administration that presence in France or a high profile in the labor movement could provide.Footnote 34 He was more vulnerable than his peers, and suffered accordingly. Nonetheless, Keita maintained his position as secretary general of the Guinean RDA affiliate (now renamed the Parti Démocratique de la Guinée) until 1952, when he was reintegrated into the ranks of the civil service and transferred to Dahomey.Footnote 35 His transfer was meant to neutralize him politically and to decapitate the RDA, just as Guinea's security chief had proposed four years earlier. This seems to have worked for a short time, but Keita's political career was far from over, and Sékou Touré soon filled the void opened by his absence. Six years later, Guinea became the only territory to refuse to join the French Community under the constitution of the Fifth Republic, and by rejecting that constitution in a referendum, gain immediate independence.
Scholars have overlooked the politics of Keita and his allies. This has contributed to the misapprehension that francophone Africa was “always” neocolonial, and has occluded the region's tradition of political radicalism. What it meant to be anti-colonial changed over time. In the 1940s, it meant contesting the dual authority of French administrators and canton chiefs in the countryside, demanding equal pay for equal work in the formal sector, and struggling to give content to the promise of colonial citizenship held out by the Fourth Republic and its French Union. By 1960, it meant asserting autonomy from France in three key sectors preserved for Paris in the constitution of the Fifth Republic: diplomacy, defense, and monetary policy. Concretely, it was expressed through support for the Algerian revolution and non-alignment, attempts to establish multi-territorial political units such as the Mali Federation or the Ghana-Guinea-Mali union, the expulsion of French military bases, and the creation of national currencies. Abolition of the chieftaincy represented an important fourth element. In different ways, Mali and Guinea pursued each of those objectives, but at its heart this was a trans-territorial politics, just as the RDA was a trans-territorial party, and focusing on one territory alone renders a fluid and potentially federal or pan-African political scenario artificially stable.
Inversely, recognizing Keita's political commitments and establishing the weight of his influence are necessary steps to understanding the context in which Balandier diagnosed “the colonial situation.” Keita's career as a militant and party leader was intertwined with his work as a researcher and archivist. Other leading RDA militants also worked for IFAN, but Keita became the most politically powerful of them.Footnote 36 His exposure to the social sciences colored the ways in which he thought about two of the key social issues in postcolonial politics—youth and urbanization—and it informed his vision of a closely related problem that would provoke great controversy in Mali, namely, the reform of marriage and marriage payments.Footnote 37 In short, examination of the political commitments Keita brought to the intellectual project in which he was engaged reveals a complex, shared lineage of particular, historically situated forms of anti-colonial politics and social science.
THE SOCIOLOGIST'S ASSISTANT
It is hard to imagine that Keita's years with IFAN had no effect on his approach to political problems. The nature of that effect cannot be assumed, however; the traditionalist intellectual Amadou Hampaté Bâ, then the sole African to hold the same rank at IFAN, was closely allied with an officer in French military intelligence, Commandant Marcel Cardaire, who in his scientific endeavors was in turn a protégé of Marcel Griaule.Footnote 38 Together, Bâ and Cardaire sought to protect what they saw as a distinctly African Sufi tradition from West African, Egyptian, and Saudi reformers. Keita, on the other hand, participated in studies of emerging urban societies undertaken from a theoretical perspective attentive to relations of power and committed to engaging with the dynamism of the objects of study. He was engaged with one of the most innovative of the social science research agendas then at work in francophone Africa, one that tried to take the measure of contemporary African social life as it was lived, while recognizing that political struggle loomed large within it.
In IFAN-Conakry, that innovative agenda was in its infancy. Nonetheless, it is worth lingering there, while considering the research center as a kind of workshop in which the spheres of social science and politics (understood narrowly in terms of activism, and broadly as an ethics) were not entirely distinct.Footnote 39 In the last years of the Second World War, just before he began to build the Guinean RDA, Keita worked to establish the new IFAN center in Conakry and to organize the colony's archives. On a peninsula jutting from Guinea's coast into the Atlantic, Keita labored alongside Ray Autra in a recently abandoned leprosarium that lay at the end of the road dividing the city's European and African cemeteries. In another part of the former leprosarium, which served as an antechamber to the burial ground, the bodies of Africans lingered before burial, the cemetery reserved for them being so crowded that still decomposing corpses often had to be to be displaced to make room for new ones.Footnote 40 Here, in the intermittent absence of a European director, Keita remained a librarian-archivist “responsible for day-to-day administration and financial management.”Footnote 41 Mere days after returning to Conakry from the founding Congress of the RDA in Bamako in October 1946, he went to the port to welcome the center's new director, who was arriving from Dakar.Footnote 42 Relations that Balandier later described as “affectionate, friendly” and “not very hierarchical” began there, in a situation that could hardly have been more colonial, as the Frenchman assumed the leadership of IFAN-Conakry. For Balandier, Conakry would represent a transformative episode in his political awakening. When he left Guinea in August 1947, Keita was “the only person who came to see [him] off … standing helpless in the rain … in that primitive and sinister Conakry airport.”Footnote 43 After his departure, it appears that Keita once again took over the day-to-day running of the Institute under the supervision of Jean Poujade, a jurist presiding over the city's court.Footnote 44
As the publications emerging from this place, and more broadly this moment, make clear, in the brief period that Balandier and Keita worked together, IFAN-Conakry began to incubate a critical, politically engaged social science. At the time, the IFAN centers of the different colonies of the AOF (l'Afrique Occidentale Française, French West Africa) were establishing their own journals; in Conakry Balandier launched Etudes Guinéennes, asserting in an editorial foreword, “We have to go beyond the stage of picturesque relations and colonial novels. There is more here than those childish surroundings. There are men who are neither as simple—you know the classic assimilation of the Black man to a child—nor as strange—when the observer relied on superficial impressions—as it was customary to say. In this domain,” he wrote, “everything remains to be done (nous avons tout à faire)” in order to understand what Guinea had been historically and to attempt “a thorough and objective analysis” of what it was becoming.Footnote 45 In the pages that followed, both men wrote on issues that would retain their interest in the years to come. Balandier, in an article on “Ethnologie et Psychologie” in the new journal's very first number, embarked on an exploration of the relationship between the two fields of inquiry that later anchored “La Situation Coloniale.”Footnote 46 In it, he rejected the ethnographic impulse to offer totalizing portraits of “pure” or traditional collectivities, and insisted instead on the study of “societies as they are now.”Footnote 47 Based on concrete examples, such studies needed to focus on individuals, not groups. That is where psychology came in, as a necessary tool for ethnographers committed to analyzing in a rigorous and concrete fashion life as it was lived by individual people.
Madeira Keita's article in the same number illustrated just how difficult that task was, even as it seemed to ignore Balandier's advice. Qualified by an editorial footnote—surely Balandier's—specifying that Keita drew his own examples from “the Malinké of the regions of Kouroussa and Kankan,” “le Noir et le secret” suggested a paradox between the rapidity with which news traveled in rural Africa and the high value African societies placed on discretion, secrecy, and “esotericism.” In it, Keita noted that, faced with “metropolitan and even native researchers … informants are reticent … they lead the interviewer astray. They are perfectly aware that ‘paper’ is very indiscreet.”Footnote 48 He went on to note that a griot (traditionalist) had told him as much when his questions on the history of the Mali empire (thirteenth to sixteenth century) had gone too far: “We cannot give you the information that you want. You will write it down for the schools, and we will lose a source of income.”Footnote 49 No native informant, Keita had gone beyond transcription and translation to lay bare the material conditions in which knowledge was produced and exchanged.
Given his political activities at the time, it is perhaps understandable that in the pages of Etudes Guinéennes Keita was as discreet as his informants. Nonetheless, in a review dominated by European authors, he published two other articles. They are notable less for the richness of their exposition—very brief pieces were the norm at the time—than for their author and their subject matter. The first, “la Famille et le mariage chez les Tyapi,” comments favorably on marriage practices among a very small ethnic group that favored “the liberty of the individual, and especially of women,” emphasized a bride's consent, and kept marriage payments modest.Footnote 50 The article, however, seems to have been drawn from the archive rather than the field. Based, as a footnote to the title explains, on an administrator's 1910 response to a questionnaire from the Société anti-esclavagiste de la France, this short piece is evidence of Balandier's policy of publishing the rich material on Guinea that could be found in the colony's archives, which Keita managed.Footnote 51 In the second article, about his own ethnic group the Malinké, Keita broached the questions of polygyny, bride wealth, and levirate marriage. With a mild critique of previous ethnographic work on these topics, which had poorly understood the economic motives of polygyny and tended to regard the widow in a levirate marriage as “movable goods” (un bien mobilier), Keita suggested that economic and political forces had begun to change these family structures in fundamental ways. Levirate marriage was on the way out, the family itself had lost its cohesion, and women of all social classes were waging a “patient, stubborn” campaign against polygyny. That campaign, he wagered presciently, would be a long one.Footnote 52
These were observations made without real method. Still, as had Keita's first published work in 1938,Footnote 53 they testified to a particular way of seeing the world and their subject matter was to prove more than pertinent to Keita's political and administrative career. In the absence of direct evidence, one can only wonder if he found the time to revisit his notes on secrecy when, a few years later, he became minister of information for the République Soudanaise. By the same token, if it seems unlikely that his mind turned toward the pages of Etudes Guinéennes when the Union Soudanaise-RDA (US-RDA, Soudan's branch of the inter-territorial party) debated its new marriage code a decade later, he would have been one of the few people in the room to have thought systematically about the issue from both within and beyond a social scientific frame of analysis still then moving beyond the frames of ethnicity and custom.
Another journal was just beginning to appear at the same time. Présence Africaine is rather better known than Etudes Guinéennes, but Balandier had a role in creating both.Footnote 54 Both he and Keita published in its pages, although the latter not until 1960.Footnote 55 In addition to holding a place on the editorial committee of the new review, Balandier published a set of quite distinct articles in its first numbers. “Femmes possédées et leurs chants” would have been at home in Etudes Guinéennes, were it not for its setting in the Lébu villages between Dakar and Rufisque, where Balandier had conducted his first research on the continent. However, “l'Or de la Guinée Française,” “Erreurs noires,” and “Le Noir est un homme” reveal another side of Balandier's emerging perspective.Footnote 56 They both echo and go beyond what Balandier had published in Etudes Guinéenes—not for the last time, his work published in France reassembled and refined his work published in Africa. “Erreurs noires” and “Le Noir est un homme” argue for what might now be termed a critical anti-racialism, and the latter article, which appeared in the first number of Présence Africaine, resonates strongly with Balandier's editorial foreword to the first number of Etudes Guinéennes. “Erreurs noires” is even more striking, since Balandier states bluntly the anti-colonialists’ antagonism towards the canton chiefs, yet dissimulates the identity of his interlocutor, who is clearly Keita. Keita accuses the chiefs of “collaboration,” and Balandier ponders this word, still a powerful one in the wake of the war, coming to it as an existentialist. “On whom do scorn and the blow of the whip fall,” the article asks? “On the Negro (nègre), on the Jew, on you who accept it.”Footnote 57 Even if Keita's name was obscured, the links between a specific anti-colonial politics and the intellectual world of the new journal could not have been more evident.
Following Balandier's own injunction, let us continue to privilege the concrete. A brief, empirical article, “l'Or de la Guinée Française,” offers a tantalizing hint of the links between fieldwork and political activism.Footnote 58 A study of “artisanal” gold mining around Siguiri—the region bordering those Keita studied in “Aperçu sommaire…” and “le Noir et le secret”—“l'Or” is the product of fieldwork possibly conducted with Madeira Keita, including translations of several terms from Malinké into French.Footnote 59 In the article, Balandier reports visiting a site along the road to Bamako where as many as ten thousand people were at work; he notes that other sites supported populations twice as large.Footnote 60 These were not industrial sites; they were smallholdings worked by hand. The limited roles industrial technology and capital played in the process of mining, as well as the diminished presence of political institutions, rendered the mines a productive yet inchoate space, one in which “the ethnic community … breaks apart in favor of the cosmopolitan society that is established at the placer mine. This becomes, for a good half of the year, the real living [social] unit, to the detriment of the village. It demonstrates, in its political and ritual aspects, flexibility and eclecticism.”Footnote 61 In short, social life was regenerated beyond the confines of the village in innovative and improvised sites that resembled cities less than they did camps, but in which markets structured social relations.
While for Balandier the mines were dynamic sites to be analyzed scientifically, Keita and his comrades sought to mobilize Siguiri politically. In other words, what Balandier saw—a new, non-ethnically bound community coming into being—the RDA sought to realize as a political party organized around a common cause, rather than ethnic or regional affinities. Keita's own traces in Siguiri are unclear, but the sequence is suggestive. In the first number of Etudes Guinéennes in 1947, Keita reported that Balandier had undertaken fieldwork there; this was clearly the trip from which the Présence Africaine article was drawn.Footnote 62 A year later, in Phare de Guinée, an RDA newspaper that both Touré and Keita helped to edit, one of the party's allies, the ethnic and regionalist Union du Mandé, published an editorial opposing plans by the colonial administration to establish a cooperative structure in the gold mines.Footnote 63 The administration's move was portrayed as a naked attempt to stabilize the mines and control the market in gold while keeping prices artificially low. Itinerant miners would thereby be pushed out of a market that they had created and away from sites that they had opened up. Meanwhile, implied the article, African gold traders and middlemen would be cut out of the formal sector and forced into smuggling. Better to invest in modern methods of production and regulate conditions of labor than to regulate the market itself, it was argued.Footnote 64 The Union's actions had echoes in Paris, where Guinea's Mamba Sano and other RDA representatives proposed legislation liberalizing the West African gold market.Footnote 65 In doing so, the party hoped to secure the patronage of Dioula traders and the support of the Union du Mandé. In the end, it lost the latter.
In any case, the article is not Keita's. His traces can be found elsewhere. He and his long-time ally Dr. Koniba Pléah, who was stationed in Siguiri, established an RDA section in the town in November 1948, thereby bringing competition between the Union du Mandé and the RDA into the open.Footnote 66 Originally from Soudan, Pléah had only arrived in Guinea the year before. He had quickly fallen into the orbit of Keita—his “koro” or elder—lodging with him in Conakry and following his evening courses on Marxism.Footnote 67 Pléah was posted to Siguiri by the colonial medical service in June 1948, but only lasted six months there, having incurred the enmity of both the colonial administrator, a strong Gaullist with whom Keita had clashed, and the Union du Mandé.Footnote 68 By the time he was transferred elsewhere, Pléah's organizational work had already been done, but the biggest political question remained the mines: who had the right to work them, who set the prices, and to whom did the subsoil belong? With Pléah gone, and the alliance between the RDA and the Union du Mandé broken—but before the RDA split with the French Communist Party—the administration was to give the Union what it sought: a free market in gold and assurance that the mineral wealth of the Siguiri region would constitute a “reserve indigène” closed to European mining companies.Footnote 69
From the mines around Siguiri, questions emerge. Was the kind of political work Keita engaged in merely incidental to the work of social scientific research? Did this climate of anti-colonial activism and political maneuvering influence Balandier's study of Guinea's gold fields, or his later diagnosis of the “Colonial Situation”? Did anti-colonial politics and engaged social science go hand-in-hand, or did they simply happen to run on parallel tracks? In any case, even before Siguiri, the paths of Keita and Balandier had already diverged. Keita was soon to endure persecution, repression, and unemployment. Balandier, having in his telling been hustled out of Guinea in August 1947, had been reassigned to French Equatorial Africa, a posting considered one of the least desirable in the empire.Footnote 70
THE “COLONIAL SITUATION” IN WEST AND CENTRAL AFRICA
Marie Albert de Suremain refers to Balandier's experience in Conakry with Keita, and particularly earlier in Dakar with the intellectual-political milieu of Alioune Diop, Léopold Sedar Senghor, and Lamine Guèye, as “a moment of intellectual conversion.”Footnote 71 In such dynamic company, it must have been so. Balandier's pre-departure memoir, published as a novel, makes it clear that such a moment was ripe. In the immediate wake of the Liberation, Balandier, inspired in part by a film about the abolitionist martyr Reverend Père Charles de Foucauld, studied ethnography in Paris. There he worked at the Musée de l'Homme under Michel Leiris, who had great influence on him.Footnote 72 Balandier wrote the first of several autobiographical tomes—but the only one thinly veiled as a novel—as he prepared to leave for Africa with the ambition to help “the Blacks—the poor Blacks—to assert themselves next to (or if necessary, against) the Whites—the great wicked Whites.”Footnote 73 Although he has recently referred to the text as an “autobiographie arrangée [et] cachée,” his contemporary reflection on it was perhaps more revealing; he referred to the book as a “monographie” based on an explicitly scientific study of himself.Footnote 74 Over the course of the next year, the political possibilities of such “scientific” self-reflection began to emerge in Présence Africaine. Later still, after his encounters with the rich intellectual life of Dakar, the political world of Conakry, and the embattled hinterlands of Guinea and Gabon—rather than with “the poor Blacks” of his metropolitan imagination—Balandier published “La Situation Coloniale.” In short, the article represents a substantial intellectual and political conversion, signposted by “Erreurs Noires” and “Le Noir est un homme.”
In “La Situation Coloniale,” Balandier argued that contemporary Africa represented a particular situation in which colonized society—African societies— and colonial society—that for which empire was a condition of its existence and reproduction—formed an ensemble or system that had to be studied in its concrete manifestations and as a totality (“en tant que totalité… [ou] un complexe”).Footnote 75 Anthropology had failed to capture the dynamism of colonized societies because it was caught between theorists in search of purity and applied anthropologists slavishly devoted to empiricism.Footnote 76 Sociology was the best instrument for such a study, he argued. Yet Balandier's eschewal of anthropology for sociology was both tactical and strategic. Quite apart from his intellectual motivations lay an emergent competition with Claude Lévi-Strauss.Footnote 77 Anthropology, American-style, was then associated with Lévi-Strauss, who had just returned from the United States after the war. If Lévi-Strauss’ anthropology was structuralist, Balandier's sociology would be “dynamist,” a discipline suited to a “new Africa.”Footnote 78 Balandier retained an attachment to “sociology” for several years, until, chafing under the methodological constraints the discipline imposed, he reconciled himself with anthropology once again.Footnote 79 Whatever his motivations, the fact is that Balandier's preference for sociology harmonized with that of a nascent African intelligentsia which rejected with increasing vehemence the traditionalist, even “folkloric,” ethnographic approach that seemed to them, and to him, to characterize the discipline of anthropology.Footnote 80
Yet Balandier's early sociological work in equatorial Africa is precisely the work that most represents an applied, even colonial social scientific inquiry.Footnote 81 Balandier himself trumpeted the fact that his work was applied, although he preferred the term “engaged.” For him, that was part of its value. Although he had begun to express these ideas in Guinea, he made them concrete in Gabon.Footnote 82 From January to March 1949, and in the company of Jean-Claude Pauvert over the same period in 1950, Balandier studied Fang villages in the northern Gabonese region of Woleu-N'Tem.Footnote 83 The article he drew from his first period of research both suggested concrete policies towards the Fang population and provided some of the material that later informed his analysis of the colonial situation.Footnote 84 Fang communities were small, mobile, and widely dispersed, he observed. Labor recruitment for colonial enterprises in interwar years had fractured them even further, leaving an imbalance between the sexes, particularly among active adults. The entire economy of Woleu-N'Tem had been “turned upside down by colonization,” new monetized systems of exchange, and the fact that the region was “literally pulled apart: oriented naturally towards Cameroun, accidentally towards Spanish Guinea, and administratively towards Libreville.”Footnote 85 Fang society was in crisis, and the biggest problem for both the colony and the colonized society was labor. Even though colonial administrators had opposed the initiative, Balandier argued that a Fang experiment in creating “work societies” (sociétés de travail) to parallel the administration's inefficient “provident societies” (sociétés de prévoyance) should be supported.Footnote 86 African-organized collective labor, performed locally, represented a vast improvement over forced labor on state projects and private concessions, the disastrous long-term effects of which his analysis revealed. Such labor had been banned across the French empire in 1946, but the program itself was still being phased out in 1950. Drawing on the ideas of the colonial thinker Robert Delavignette, who was considered a progressive, Balandier forecast the development of a “true Fang peasantry.”Footnote 87 More revealing than the article itself was its postscript. Noting that the text, written in 1949, was some eighteen months old by the time of its publication, Balandier pointed out that the High Commissioner for the AEF (Afrique Equatoriale Francaise, French Equatorial Africa), Bernard Cornut-Gentille, had taken on the social and economic problems of Gabon. A conference had been held, and Pauvert was leading a team to develop a “villagization” program.Footnote 88 This, Balandier wrote, demonstrated the effectiveness of “a sociology that is resolutely ‘engaged’ (engagée).”Footnote 89
“Engaged in what?” one might ask. Was this work complicit with the colonial administration? Yes, in a sense, but this question is badly posed. The work echoes the assertions of the leaders of Gabon's emerging political opposition. Three broad concerns framed the colony's politics: centralizing disparate villages, establishing a stable (if subordinate) political structure, and making the transition from an economy based on forced labor and migration to one grounded in peasant production, notably of coffee and cocoa.Footnote 90 Balandier's approach was to herald the possibilities of the peasantry. He promoted a moderate villagization policy intended to group existing communities into cooperative units buttressed by work and provident societies; such a policy would allow greater integration of the “European economy and the rural native economy … two elements which colonization had created (mis en presence).”Footnote 91
This may have been a tepid, reformist politics, but it was a politics in keeping with the tenor of the times. And it was not far removed from proposals the Fang elite had proposed at a “Fang [Pahouin] Congress” which the administration had convened in 1947 in the town of Mitzic, in Woleu-N'Tem. Indeed, Balandier had pushed these proposals in an early report destined for the colonial administration, and he went on to reproduce them in his article as evidence of a Fang political awakening.Footnote 92 Yet Mitzic was not Siguiri. This was politics at one step's remove. The Mitzic conference had fallen under the informal and unexpected leadership of Léon M'ba, a French-educated man from Libreville with an exceptionally complex and contradictory character.Footnote 93 Like Keita, M'ba was deeply engaged in political life, and he was a sometime ethnographer, having published an important text on Fang customary law.Footnote 94 Nonetheless, he and Balandier kept their distance. Had the young Frenchman drawn a lesson from his precipitous ejection from Conakry? Whatever the case may be, Balandier's work in Gabon consciously wove together the political programs of M'ba and Jean Aubame, the colony's two primary African politicians, and presented them to the government as conclusions reached scientifically. Rivals in spite of a close family connection, M'ba and Aubame both argued for greater integration of the “European” and “Native” economies,Footnote 95 and Balandier concurred. If Fang society was in crisis, that crisis was produced by the colonial situation. In 1950, that argument had moved from embryonic form in the Bulletin of the Institut d'Etudes Centrafricains in Brazzaville to an article on “Aspects de l’évolution sociale chez les Fang du Gabon” in Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie. The next year it achieved its mature expression in the same pages as “La Situation Coloniale.” It would also animate his work in the years to come, including his 1955 Sociologie des Brazzavilles noires (note the plural). There, Balandier insisted that the city and the rural areas were interdependent, a relationship in which the role of the colonial state could not be discounted.Footnote 96 Among francophone social scientists, Balandier's work was innovative in that he significantly modified the long-prevalent thesis that Africans experienced urbanization as a form of “uprootedness” (déracinement) in which their static or primitive societies were transformed.Footnote 97 He recognized that the future of the city in Africa was neither colonial nor “White,” and he never ignored the intensity or rapidity of the transformations that mid-twentieth century African societies were experiencing.
SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT AND “SOCIOLOGY”
Keita and Balandier would not experience that transformation together. While Balandier observed it, Keita attempted to master it. In 1956, in the wake of the loi cadre (framework law) that established territorial autonomy by dissolving the federal government in Dakar, Keita returned from his political exile in Dahomey to his home territory of Soudan Français. There he worked as an archivist and served as interim director of the IFAN center.Footnote 98 As that colony became an internally governed territory, and then a Republic within the French Community, he rose in the ranks of government as well as within the US-RDA.Footnote 99 Keita's roots in Guinea's radical politics, the Groupe d’études communistes, and the trans-territorial RDA meant that his presence in Soudan strengthened the hand of the US-RDA's more militant wing—figures like Awa Keita, Seydou Badian Kouyate, and Mamadou Gologo—against the more moderate party leader Mamadou Konaté and his allies, such as Jean-Marie Kone. In fact, Madeira Keita almost certainly served to stiffen the politics of the US-RDA in the wake of Konaté's sudden death from hepatitis in 1956. In May 1957, Keita was named minister of the interior of the Territory of Soudan. It was his signature as minister—not that of Modibo Keita, head of government, US-RDA secretary general, and future president (1960–1968)—that authorized the strongest single move against the colonial system made before independence, namely the dismantling of the chieftaincy and the gradual dismissal of the chefs de canton, beginning late in 1957.Footnote 100 He remained in government through independence in 1960, acting as a leader of the delegation that negotiated the Mali Federation's emergence within the French Community and as a key figure in establishing the Republic of Mali in the wake of the Federation's collapse in August.Footnote 101 That same year, the editors of Présence Africaine claimed that Keita was “as popular in Guinea as Sékou Touré himself,” even though he had left the country nearly a decade earlier.Footnote 102
In Mali, Madeira Keita was more powerful than popular.Footnote 103 Under the socialist government of Modibo Keita from 1960 to 1968, he occupied various ministerial posts, changing one portfolio for another, but never leaving the government. Madeira Keita's political influence waxed and waned, but his ministerial positions served as a barometer or bellwether of “radical” influence within the politburo, or Bureau Politique Nationale.Footnote 104 A well-informed French ambassador considered him both the most pro-Soviet and the most “xenophobic,” meaning anti-Western, of the Malian leadership.Footnote 105 Keita consistently held hard-line positions. For instance, in the wake of a high profile treason case in 1962, he argued that, were it up to him, death sentences handed down by Popular Tribunals would be carried out expeditiously.Footnote 106 Although he lost that particular battle, the CIA recognized him as a leader of the “younger militants” within the Party and one of the most powerful voices in the Bureau Politique Nationale, which was the heart of government under the US-RDA.Footnote 107 Within what had become a single-party state,Footnote 108 Keita served as a member of the party's ruling bodies, the Bureau, and the Comité National pour la Défense de la Révolution (CNDR) that superseded it until the coup d’état of 19 November 1968. Along with the US-RDA leadership and a few stalwarts like Pléah, he was then imprisoned in infamously poor conditions in the Sahara.Footnote 109 In November 1977, after the death of Modibo Keita, he was the last surviving member of the US-RDA government to be released. He went to Guinea to recuperate, where Sékou Touré welcomed him.Footnote 110 An active behind-the-scenes figure in Mali's tumultuous move from thinly veiled military rule towards multi-party democracy in the early 1990s, Madeira Keita died in 1997.Footnote 111
Keita's politics had influenced Balandier greatly at a key moment in his “intellectual conversion.” Did Balandier's analyses of African social life influence Keita's vision of the societies he came to play such an important role in governing? I argue that they did, but the line is no more taut than that which ties “La Situation Coloniale” to postcolonial studies. After independence, social scientific knowledge was both produced and consumed in West African capitals like Conakry and Bamako. However, Guinea and Mali never developed social scientific traditions that were as simultaneously “nationalist” and programmatic as was the case in, for example, Nasser's Egypt.Footnote 112 Still, echoes of the type of social scientific discourse and analyses that emerged from the work Balandier and Keita conducted together can be found in the governing rhetoric of the US-RDA and in the party's theoretical debates on the structure of Malian society. Furthermore, as the “theoretician” of the US-RDA regime, Madeira Keita seemed to draw on sociology to define an African socialism.Footnote 113 Like that of other newly independent African governments, and perhaps more directly, the US-RDA leadership looked to sociology to provide the tools of analysis for a society experiencing rapid urban and demographic change. Yet even as newly independent African governments considered the social sciences necessary tools for controlled social transformation, in practice reference to them was often simply rhetorical.Footnote 114 Sociology, in particular, served a kind of talismanic function as the inverse of anthropology, that sometime tool of colonial governance premised on difference. If anthropology seemed to look to the past,Footnote 115 sociology emphasized the possibility of a transformative future, one in which the US-RDA leadership was deeply invested.
In the 1960s, that future seemed imminent, and “the Colonial Situation” no longer captured it. By the time Madeira Keita and his colleagues were coming into power—or at least into government—in 1956, the moment that inspired it was already fading. The situation then in question was Algerian. There, studying colonial society as a totality or complex entailed the recognition that it was a system bound by violence.Footnote 116 Mali's independence in 1960 was framed differently. In Bamako the “key idea of the era,”Footnote 117 modernization, was influential, although not consensual, as the territory proudly left the fold of the empire for the ranks of “the Third World.” The latter phrase, too, was tied to Balandier, who had not invented it but had promoted it, thereby providing at least part of the intellectual scaffolding for constructing a new world of independent nation-states and dismantling empires.Footnote 118 The flaw laid not so much with the scaffolding, but with the blueprint. Modernization theory seemed to provide either a plan of action for the new nation-states or a means to measure their progress. Unlike the colonial situation, however—rooted and concrete as it was—modernization described not a present moment but a distant horizon. Its value was diminished less by its optimism than by its universalism. Easily lost in this new analytic language was attention to the historically specific workings of particular forms of oppression, above all the colonial racism that had been front and center in the colonial situation. The rhetoric of modernization “occluded the colonial.”Footnote 119 Race was nowhere in the mix. This moment coincides roughly with the beginning of Mbembe's “long, imperial winter,” a period during which, he argues, French thought, apart from “the export of intellectual luxury items,” became provincial, bound to the Hexagon and its place in the world, and limited by a feigned ignorance of the imperial past.Footnote 120 It may be, as Foucher and others argue, that such a winter never began. Yet accepting only the last charge as accurate—that the imperial became marginal—I suggest that if that winter did begin, its arrival coincided with that of the green shoots of African independence, in a season that looked like spring.
CONCLUSION
By that time, years after George Balandier and Madeira Keita had met at the foot of the gangplank, and nearly a decade after the publication of Balandier's canonical article, the link between the two men had long waned through force of circumstance. In 1968, on one of his last official trips to Paris, Keita visited Balandier briefly, but the two men lost touch entirely after Keita was imprisoned.Footnote 121 Balandier suggests that his old friend died in prison, while in fact Keita lived another twenty years after his release.Footnote 122 The relationship between a particular anti-colonial politics and an engaged sociology had waned as well, and eventually took other forms. Yet it is much easier to recognize what happened to the political vision of Keita and the US-RDA than it is to capture the process by which a social science attuned to colonial difference, and to racism in particular, faded. That process was aleatory and conditioned by political struggle. It was, above all, historical, and that history is one of broken ties. Keita and Balandier, West Africa and France, engaged social science and emancipatory politics: in every pair, one conditioned the other. All their histories are histories of divergence, only one of which was absolute.
