Much of West Africa (and particularly the Sahel) may be once falling again under military government. This essay asks what, if anything, historians of Africa can contribute to an understanding of this phenomenon. I argue that writing the history and understanding the memory of military government will entail a renewed approach to political history and social theory. It will also entail confronting - just as so many citizens are currently doing - the peculiar failures of democracy in Africa's neoliberal era.

Recensé : Thomas Borrel, Amzat Boukari Yabara, Benoît Collombat, Thomas Deltombe, L’Empire qui ne veut pas mourir. Une histoire de la Françafrique, Paris, Seuil, 2021, 1008 p. Traduction : Louise Barré et Camille Evrard.

Le Projet Archives des femmes du Mali (PAF), initié en 2016, comprend deux volets. Il s’agit, d’une part, de l’élaboration d’une archive digitale de milliers de documents appartenant à des femmes maliennes engagées dans diverses luttes sociales, de 1950 à nos jours ; et d’autre part, du mentorat d’étudiantes maliennes et de leur formation à la recherche au sein de l’archive PAF, dans le but d’encourager son utilisation par le public et de vulgariser ses contenus. Cet article dresse un bilan du projet, en revenant sur sa genèse et les progrès accomplis, ainsi que les défis rencontrés et les questionnements soulevés.

Two texts have recently been hailed as examples of an autochthonous tradition of Human Rights and constitutional government in West Africa. Associated with thirteenth-century Mali empire, both the “Hunters’ Oath” and the better-known “Kurukan Fuga” have been referred to as “the Mande Charter.” Focused on the Hunters’ Oath, this article offers the first full translation of it from the original into English. It recounts the history of the Oath in print, highlighting the work of two late Malian intellectuals, Youssouf Tata Cissé and Wâ Kamissoko. It argues the Oath merits recognition as an emancipatory text, irrespective of its age.

French colonial rule played an important but not determinative role in making the modern Sahel. By the 1950s, the region was more integrated politically and infrastructurally than it would be in the decades that followed. At independence, the new governments of the Sahel featured identical, if parallel, political institutions modeled on those of the French Fifth Republic (1958–). They also shared a secular character, a military culture, a history of slavery, entrenched inequality, and labor migration, and the subordination—without integration—of Saharan societies to their southern neighbors. Yet, if colonialism contributed to making the modern Sahel in an institutional sense, it did not represent a profound epistemological break. Rather, longue durée internal dynamics continued to prevail. If any single event or phenomenon “made” the modern Sahel, it was postcolonial drought and its political effects rather than imperial domination.

Abstract The Republic of Mali comprises a very diverse population spread over a vast territory composed of a large part of the southern Sahara, the Sahel, and the savannah. One of the world’s great rivers, the Niger, runs through much of the national territory, reaching its northern apex near Timbuktu. For over a millennium, this territory has allowed empires and kingdoms to flourish alongside decentralized societies. These include the empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhay, as well as any number of smaller states, trading diasporas, and nomadic and semi-nomadic communities. The territory of Mali has long been a hub in African commercial and intellectual circuits, notably those linking the societies of the Maghreb (or North Africa) to those bordering the Atlantic. In the 19th century, as elsewhere in Muslim Africa, new and explicitly Islamic states emerged in western and central Mali. They did not endure more than a few decades, as the territory was colonized by France in the late 19th century. The Republic of Mali claimed its independence in 1960 and rapidly developed greater autonomy from French neo-colonialism than did most of its neighbors. Mali has maintained an out-sized diplomatic and cultural role on the African continent and beyond under a socialist government from 1960 to 1968, military government through 1991, and a vibrant democracy in the decades since. However, since 2011, the country has been increasingly beset by violent conflicts between nonstate actors, the national government, and foreign forces including the French. Thus, in historical perspective, Mali’s geographic position and its environment have proven conducive to the production of expansive, diverse, and mutually dependent communities that have produced radically distinct and often fragile states.

After analytic training, graduates position their newly acquired identity as "psychoanalyst" in the context of their broader career, contemplating whether to start new analytic cases, adapting their new knowledge base to psychotherapy practice, and deciding how to focus their professional and personal interests going forward. Using questionnaires and interviews, the Columbia Postgraduate Analytic Practice Study (CPAPS) has prospectively tracked the career trajectory of 69 of 76 graduates (91%) from the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research since 2003. In this paper grounded theory is used to identify developmental themes in interviews with analysts who have been followed for at least ten years. Recent graduates are negotiating the following challenges: developing a sense of competence, navigating relationships with colleagues and former supervisors as situations change and roles shift, transitioning into becoming mentors, and balancing the competing responsibilities of professional and personal life. Disillusionment about aspects of training, analytic practice, analysis as a treatment, institute politics, and the field in general emerges as a stark reality, despite a high level of career satisfaction. Educational recommendations include making career development opportunities available and providing a realistic view of both practice realities and expectations of analytic treatment outcome.

Although much has been written about the training and supervising analyst system (TSA), its role in analysts' professional development has not been empirically studied. The Columbia Psychoanalytic Practice Study (CPAPS) is a longitudinal study of the careers of graduates from the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Interviews with 29/37 (78%) analysts graduating from 2003-2009 were analyzed using grounded theory. Our research question was: Are Columbia Center graduates interested in becoming TSAs and what factors influence their success in reaching this goal?Many analysts express interest in pursuing TSA appointment (22/29, 76%), however, a vast majority (26/29, 90%) experience challenges with finding cases, finances, and the work involved at a life stage with competing priorities. Fewer graduates become TSAs than express initial interest, suggesting that graduates find alternate pathways for professional development. While it is vital that institutes mentor graduates to take on a variety of postgraduate roles as educators, researchers, clinicians and scholars, our findings suggest that if the TSA qualification process were more user-friendly (less time-consuming, financially viable, and in step with current practice norms) more graduate analysts would sustain their interest in this career path.

In her short and lively Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa, Kathleen Keller offers a tightly framed account of the efforts of the French imperial state to maintain surveillance of individuals deemed suspicious in French West Africa between the world wars. These colonial suspects represent a motley crew. Some were well-known dissidents and activists, like Louis Hunkanrin of Dahomey. Others, like the sailors who circulated dissident journals on the docks in Dakar, were and remain more obscure. French West Africa also saw its fair share of European grifters, deadbeats, conmen, and charlatans of various stripes—in addition to the ones who worked for the colonial administration!—and Keller devotes a chapter to them. Particularly if they passed through Dakar—the primary port of the French West African federation, as well as its capital—such figures often attracted the interest of the General Security Service (the Service de Sûreté Générale), and particularly its second division, the Renseignements Généraux. Both were created in the early 1920s as the colonial state’s concerns gradually shifted from a fear of armed revolt to a desire to curtail the spread of imported anticolonial ideologies. Keller argues that policemen in Dakar mimicked what they had learned in the metropole, preferring to keep tabs on potential political critics rather than to oppose them with a heavier hand in this exceptional legal enclave within France’s African empire. French agents placed suspicious persons under what they termed “discreet surveillance” by following them through the bars, cafés, and hotels of the colonial but cosmopolitan Plateau district—where the state was most present—but rarely if ever venturing into the Medina, which was almost exclusively African.

Abstract:This short essay introduces a set of five papers that examine the place Frederick Cooper’s scholarship occupies in the historiography of Africa.

Abstract:The article argues that the concept of “claims-making” has been an important and influential thread in the work of Frederick Cooper. It explores the utility and advantages – as well as the characteristic rigor – of this theory of social change and what it implies. It then turns to the potential limits of its adoption within Africanist historiography and African Studies more broadly.

Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 is, as its author Frederick Cooper tells us, a book about politics. It is equally a book about process. Both the politics and the process prove remarkably fluid, and restoring that fluidity to what has come to be seen as a static scenario is one of the book's key achievements. Cooper's story opens with France and its empire in shambles in the last years of World War II. By the time it comes to a close in 1960, France and formerly French sub-Saharan Africa have been remade in ways that none of the key actors of the time desired or even foresaw. The story of how that happened—of how an unwanted set of new nation-states emerged from an overextended and war-racked empire—provides the narrative arc of this dense, closely argued, and singular work.

A MAN OF HIS AND OUR OWN TIMES - Yves Person, un historien de l'Afrique engagé dans son temps. Edited by Charles Becker , Roland Colin , Liliane Daronian , and Claude Hélène Parrot . Paris: IMAF/Éditions Karthala, 2015. Pp. 520. Paperback, no price given (ISBN 978-2-8111-1412-1). - Volume 58 Issue 1

Ruth Ginio. The French Army and Its African Soldiers: The Years of Decolonization. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. xxviii + 250 pp. Photographs. Maps. Bibliography. Index. Price not reported. ISBN: 978-0-832-5339-1. - Volume 60 Issue 2

1. Knowing the post-colony 2. A new republic 3. 'French' Muslims in Sudan 4. West Africans as foreigners in postimperial France 5. Governing famine 6. Human rights and Saharan prisons.

Journal Article Andrew Arsan. Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa. Get access Andrew Arsan. Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii, 341. $50.00. Gregory Mann Gregory Mann Columbia University gm522@columbia.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 120, Issue 3, June 2015, Pages 1152–1153, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.3.1152a Published: 01 June 2015