Between a single set of covers, Daouda Gary-Tounkara offers us two fine and intertwined studies. The first is an in-depth historical and sociological account of Soudanais/Malian migration to Côte d'Ivoire since the late nineteenth century, a topic surprisingly little treated in the scholarly literature.Footnote ¹ The second study is a thoughtful and nuanced exploration of the origins of the contemporary conflict in Côte d'Ivoire and how the presence of migrants – in this case mainly from the French colony of Soudan, but also from other French colonies such as Upper Volta (today's Burkina Faso), Dahomey (today's Benin), and Togo – contributed to the creation of an increasingly exclusionary Ivoirian national identity in the long twentieth century. Along the way, the author includes a short history of Malian government policy on migration since independence.

Following the introduction, the three parts of the study treat successive historical periods, each of which is divided into chapters. A conclusion very usefully summarizes the successive phases in Malian migration to Côte d'Ivoire and the emergence of today's sense of Ivoirian identity or ivoirité. The introduction sets the theoretical stage for the volume by taking on the concept of ethnic identity. Gary-Tounkara concurs with Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch that what the social sciences commonly call ‘ethnicity’ is but a modern stand-in for the essentialist notion of ‘tribe’ in the colonial era. An operational and more useful concept is rather ‘ethnic sentiment’, which is constructed and varies through time (p. 11). More concretely, he submits that migrants from the regions that make up today's Mali were crucial, if inadvertent, players in the creation of an Ivoirian ‘ethnic sentiment’ or identity.

The author opens with two explicit hypotheses: first, that after 1930 the Côte d'Ivoire supplanted Senegal as the most important destination for migration from French Soudan owing to the rise of cocoa production. Gary-Tounkara argues that, after 1950, when the deep-water port opened in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire became the most important destination for Soudanais migrants, even serving as a transit point for migration to Central Africa and Europe. The second hypothesis holds that Ivoirian unity was ‘constructed’ in opposition to the presence of ‘foreigners’, laying the groundwork for resisting the colonial administration and the independence-era government of Houphouët-Boigny, both of whom had encouraged immigration (p. 22).

Part One (pp. 29–93) focuses on migration between Soudan and Côte d'Ivoire in 1903–28, mobility that the author submits was ‘both spontaneous and provoked’ (p. 29). He reminds us that people from the desert edge or Sahel had long migrated towards the forest regions in the south – as traders seeking cola nuts, salt, and other goods, or as slave-raiders. Whereas traders in the precolonial era had made their way fairly easily into the wooded savanna, the forest peoples farther south held them at bay. Early in the colonial era, however, migrants from the north returned as auxiliaries of the French colonial army. This time they moved into the forests, and traders from the Soudan followed them. Supported by colonial interests, other migrants came south to work on railroads and in the emerging forestry industry. Very soon, southern peoples came to identify these migrants with the colonial administration. They found some unity in opposition to both.

The second part of the book (pp. 95–193) explores immigration from Soudan and other French colonies in the remainder of the colonial period (1928–60). After 1930, cocoa plantations supplanted railroad construction and forestry industry as the major draw for migrants from Soudan. With economic expansion came development of public and private infrastructure, and increased demand for second-echelon clerks and teachers. Migrants from Dahomey and Togo, who had benefited from more developed educational systems, made their way to Côte d'Ivoire. Still increasing numbers of Soudanais came to work for Ivoirian cocoa farmers, while others sought fallow lands in the south-west to raise cocoa as independent producers. The small educated class of Ivoirians felt threatened by the Dahomeans and Togolese, while the increasing numbers of migrants from the north ratcheted up resentment among farmers in the south; both contributed to the creation of an Ivoirian ‘ethnic sentiment’. In 1938, this contentious environment produced the first explicitly ‘nationalist’ organization, the Association de Défense des Intérêts des Autochtones de la Côte d'Ivoire (ADIACI), which demanded that the administration limit the employment of Dahomeans and Togolese (pp. 116–17). Other organizations, and violence, followed in the 1940s.

Gary-Tounkara charts the twists and turns of this emerging ‘national’ identity, pairing it with the growing conviction among Ivoirian nationalists in the 1940s that the other colonies of the federation of French West Africa were a drain on its resources. These combined feelings of injustice eventually brought the effective dissolution of the federation in 1956. The author shows quite clearly that the seeds of this break-up were planted by events much earlier in the history of Côte d'Ivoire. He also points out contravening and contradictory trends, perhaps illustrated best in the ways in which Houphouët-Boigny called on migrant labor to develop the colony often by working on his own plantations or those of his fellow Baoule, or in the ways that he manipulated migrants to shore up his political base when faced with internal competition.

The third part of Migrants soudanais/maliens (pp. 195–251) deals with the independence era, up to the decade before the death of President Houphouët-Boigny. Although the leader was now Ivoirian, the contradictions of the later colonial era continued. Desiring to accelerate economic development, the president continued to encourage immigration of agricultural labor from Mali and Upper Volta. He also invited French advisors and technical assistance personnel to stay on, and even expanded their numbers. In an effort to expand his political base, he proposed laws that would extend citizenship and naturalization to residents whose forebears came from the north, and even presented a proposal to naturalize immigrants both of whose parents came from Mali, Upper Volta, and elsewhere. When faced with rising xenophobia among Ivoirians in the south, however, he promptly reversed himself.

As time passed, those in the south who opposed those from the north had to contend increasingly with ‘Malians’ and ‘Voltaïcs’ or ‘Burkinabè’ who were, in reality, native-born Ivoirians. Among them were leaders who were now part of the fabric of Ivoirian political life. As Gary-Tounkara illustrates very well, the old dance that alternated between the outstretched arms of inclusiveness and the folded arms of rejection set groups of people against each other whose personal and social histories – and ‘ethnic sentiments’ – were the products of Ivoirian soil. The president managed to dance this contorted choreography until he died in 1993. His successors, plagued by a weakened economy and a more competitive political environment, reaped what migration policies and politics in the colonial and independence eras had sown: civil war broke out. Gary-Tounkara's knowledgeable and careful historical analysis opens a large window through which we may see much more clearly just how all of this came to be.

Migrants soudanais/maliens is supported by a very rich array of sources, ranging from the conventional monographs and scholarly articles to a particularly exhaustive bibliography of documents from national and local archives in Mali, and national archives in Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, and France. To this catalog should be added 35 interviews with informants, almost exclusively in Mali and Côte d'Ivoire; photographs; and information extracted from newspapers and periodicals published in the colonial and independence periods. Excerpts in text boxes and the appendices offer salient examples of this documentation.