Which Way Mali?
GOOD, ROBERT C.
Though cooperation with France seems assured, the new country is looking to Africa, not the Continent WHICH WAY MALI? By Robert C. Good IN DAKAR, on the westernmost tip of Africa, General Charles...
...Nor is Mali going to be content to have its economy remain a string on the French fiddle...
...Eighty-five per cent of Senegal's and 65 per cent of Soudan's exports are peanuts...
...More important, Mali will represent France's first attempt to alter fundamentally its relationship to its African Community, and to establish that relationship on the basis of juridical independence and equality...
...Negro Africans from Senegal have occupied seats in the French Parliament since World War I. Her present leaders, men like Lamine Gueye, Leopold Senghor, Leon-Louis Bois-sier-Palun and Gabriel D'Arboussier, have grown influential and prosperous in the service of France and French Africa...
...His views were underscored emphatically by numerous students I talked with at the University of Dakar, who, perhaps over-dramatically, dismissed the present leadership as passe, more French than African in outlook...
...Soudan, on the other hand, was never colonized...
...There is also the Dakar military base...
...in our view nothing remains static...
...Senegal, relatively wealthier than Soudan, pays most of Mali's bills...
...Soudan is a more authoritarian state, impatient with the lack of party discipline and the easygoing corruption of Senegalese political life...
...It will try to reduce as far as possible its dependence on France...
...Yet the Senegalese are aware that it is in their long-term interest to create a larger economic unit as an attraction to foreign investors who will be more impressed with the possibilities presented by Mali's six million inhabitants than by Senegal's 2.2 million...
...All surface indications are that this harmony will persist...
...Soudanese are inclined to be slightly suspicious of the Senegalese, who in effect became the colleagues of France in the pacification and administration of French West Africa...
...But as one labor leader told me, "We are Africans...
...Mali will control its own foreign currency earnings and will be free to conclude commercial accords with third parties, though it must inform a mixed Franco-Mali commission of its actions...
...Senegal's President, Mamadou Dia, said last October, "Everything leads to the conclusion that after nominal independence [has been achieved] we will be exposed to a terrible dependence...
...Soudan would like to see Mali move towards a tight federation, or even a unitary state...
...The Mali minister may be right who told me that the Federation would result in a healthy equilibrium between Soudanese and Senegalese tendencies...
...These arrangements presuppose an intimate association between France and its former colony, which is further emphasized by the economic facts of Mali's life...
...Soudan's President, now President of the Federation of Mali, Modibo Keita, spent 12 years in opposition to France and was twice imprisoned...
...The Soudanese are the Prussians of West Africa...
...diplomatic skill will have to be addressed to France with consummate care in order to ease the strains of the transition period that has now begun...
...There are other differences...
...The time is not far off when the Mali delegation to the UN will confront issues sensitive to its senior partner, France—the Algerian war and A-bomb tests, for example...
...Senegal is not so sure...
...In Soudan, the spirit of independence is fiercer, the sense of identity more distinct, than in Senegal...
...Mali without doubt, therefore, is going to seek a diversification of foreign enterprise...
...France is investing close to $15 million a year in what amounts to subsidies of Government personnel...
...we look toward Africa, not toward France...
...There may not be trouble ahead in relations between France and Mali, but without question there will be cause for considerable tension...
...It was Soudan, not Senegal, which was the heart of the Mali "empire" of antiquity, from which the present Federation derives its name and its historical legitimacy (though there is more story than history in many of the resurrected legends...
...But within five years, most of these posts will have been filled by Africans...
...we think as Africans...
...The influential University of Dakar will become a Mali institution, but its administration will remain in French hands...
...In Morocco, the by-word is "absolute independence" and relations between Morocco and France are seriously strained...
...If Eur-Africa is a viable concept today, it need not remain so tomorrow...
...The same dynamic will be set in motion as Mali seeks to establish a place for itself among the new nations of Africa who wonder if it is at all possible to negotiate real independence with the French...
...influence of France for 300 years: residents of her four major communes have enjoyed French citizenship since the French Revolution...
...And the question is larger than that: How will Europe and America react...
...At present Mali is a loose union, more a confederation than a federal state...
...Significantly, most of the top civil service posts in the Mali Government are held by Soudanese...
...Its members, the Republics of Senegal and Soudan, successfully cooperated in the drive for independence...
...In the more distant future, there is the Sahara issue...
...He referred to the danger of being a psuedo-nation, an economic satellite of foreign powers, a position which could easily degenerate, he added, into that of becoming a political satellite...
...The negotiations have ended...
...Foreign trade for Mali is, literally, peanuts...
...If Soudanese influence is ascendant in Mali, Dakar may become for French-Mali relations the thorn that the Bizerte base has been for French-Tunisian relations...
...The tighter the union between the two, the more Senegal's resources will have to be divided with her partner...
...Despite their good will and their good works, Frenchmen may be in danger of fooling themselves once again in Mali...
...Referring to the vulnerable economic position of his country...
...In Mali, as key members of the Government, the party and the labor movement all pointed out, the slogan is: "Absolute independence does not exist...
...Six million people, in an area twice as large as France, will now be referred to as Malians, however meaningless the name may be to many of Mali's tribal citizens...
...At any rate...
...The Senegalese pocket-book instinct may moderate the nationalist elan of Soudan, while Soudanese national self-assertion may quicken Senegal's dawning sense of African identity...
...There may be economic reasons for these differences...
...But France will have to understand that 300 years of relations with West Africa may not count for a thing...
...Mali's struggle to define itself and its future during the coming months will bear careful watching...
...It was pacified only about 50 years ago...
...Cordiality is the keynote...
...Referring to Mali's future relations with France, with Europe and with the West as a whole, the Secretary General of Mali's controlling party concluded with genuine candor: "We are men of action...
...Mali will have its own small army trained by France, though France will retain title to military bases— the naval and air installations at Dakar being the most important...
...The time has come to start thinking about Mali's future and I recently spent 10 days in Dakar asking questions of ministers in the Mali Government and of careful observers of the Mali scene...
...Mali will turn to the United States for economic and technical assistance...
...We have the same ideals...
...What de Gaulle promised de Gaulle has done...
...France will continue to give financial aid to Mali, not in lumpsum subsidies of Mali's budget, but, like our International Cooperation Administration, in support of specific development projects...
...Mali may coin its own money, but will remain in the franc zone...
...One out of 10 Mali functionaries is still French...
...Inefficient French industries now depending on Mali "protected" markets may find themselves in a stiff race with foreign competitors...
...If France insists on exclusive sovereignty in that oil- and mineral-rich region on Mali's northern frontier, we may expect that Mali's claims will one day be added to Moroccan, Tunisian and Libyan claims to part of the desert's wealth...
...To contain the "young Turks" within its cadres, the Government of Mali will find it increasingly necessary to affirm its real independence of France, if need be by protesting against France...
...Mali has just finished celebrating its independence, which it gained officially June 20, and will join the United Nations next fall...
...Mali, he said, would represent neither the soft assimilationist attitude found in the Ivory Coast, nor the hard separatism of Guinea which is breaking clean its relations with France and is en route to a centralized, even authoritarian society...
...The accords just signed award Mali the right to establish its own diplomatic representation abroad, though France and Mali have agreed to "harmonize" their foreign policies...
...Leopold Senghor, President of the Mali Assembly, talks of the "renovated" French Community as a "Commonwealth a la francaise...
...It is astonishing to come to Mali by way of Morocco, where economic dependence upon France is equally apparent...
...How will France react...
...Senegal has known the ROBERT C. GOOD, a research associate of the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research, has just returned from an extensive tour of West Africa...
...But Senegal and Soudan are far from being of one mind...
...Mali will not be looking to the past, but to the present and the future...
...Now, two weeks after independence, relations between the former colony and its former metropole, to which it is linked so tightly, are extremely good...
...France, if it acts wisely, will remain closely linked to Mali, which is as it ought to be...
...Meanwhile, the Africanization of the Soudanese, Senegalese and Malian civil service is hastened...
...Cooperation seems assured...
...By Robert C. Good IN DAKAR, on the westernmost tip of Africa, General Charles de Gaulle promised last December that the Federation of Mali would accede to independence "with the support, the approval, and the assistance of France...
...It is true that Africans of exceptional quality have participated in French political and governmental life...
...Mali may abstain the first time round, but will finally have to vote against France to establish its legitimacy as a truly independent African state...
...Almost all of them go to French protected markets where they are sold at least 25 to 30 per cent above world market levels...
...It is true that the impact of France on much of West Africa has been as impressive as the Roman impact on Gaul, or the British impact on America—which assures very little concerning future relations...
...You can count on France," General de Gaulle said in Dakar last December...
Vol. 43 • July 1960 • No. 27
