A parting of the ways: Colonial Africa and South Africa, 1946–48

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. Marius Moutet, testimony, in transcript of Meeting of Commission de la France d'Outre-Mer, Assemblée Nationale Constituante, 10 April 1946, Archives Nationales, Paris, C//15293.

2. Minister to Governor General, 14 June 1946, 17G 152, Archives du Sénégal (AS). This section of the chapter is based on ongoing research on citizenship in France and French West Africa, 1945–61.

3. AOF, Directeur Général des Affaires Politiques, Administratives et Sociales, note, July 1946, 17G 152, Archives du Sénégal (AS).

4. The British-French distinction needs to be qualified by reference to the British nationalities act of 1948, which – in light of the role of colonies and dominions in the war effort – created a second-tier citizenship of empire, permitting among other things entry into the British isles of people from dominions and colonies.

5. I borrow this distinction from James Ferguson, who uses it in his book of essays (forthcoming) in the reverse order to point to the effect of neo-liberal critiques of development initiatives: modernisation ceases to be a project and becomes a classification of countries into superior (‘developed’) and inferior.

6. The manifestos may be found in 20G 24, AS.

7. Renseignements, 29 May 1946, K 352 (26), AS.

8. Inspecteur Général du Travail to Deputy Dumas, 6 January 1948, in IGT, Report, 24 January 1948, IGT 13/2, Archives d'Outre-Mer (AOM).

9. In an interview in 1994, a strike veteran used the phrase “our strike” to distinguish his memories from the version of the novelist Ousmanne Sembene, who subsumed it under an anti-colonial rubric in God's Bits of Wood.

10. “La vie syndicale en A.O.F. au cour de l'année 1948”, 31 January 1949, AP 3406/1, AOM.

11. On the continuing controversies over memory and responsibility in the repression of the insurrection, see Le Monde, 23 July 2005, p 4.

12. Malagasy deputies submitted a bill to this effect, not entirely inconsistent with conceptions of the French Union as an assemblage of diverse political entities with different degrees of sovereignty, but too close to independence for the comfort of many deputies. Commission de la France d'Outre-Mer of the Assemblée Nationale Constituante, 3, 10, 16 April 1946, C//15293, Archives Nationales.

13. Report of the Committee on the Conference of African Governors, Agenda Committee, Appendix III, “Constitutional Development in Africa”, 22 May 1947 CO 847/36, Public Record Office (PRO); “Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in the Gold Coast, 1948”. Colonial No. 231 (1948), hereafter Watson Commission.

14. Report by the Colonial Secretary of the Gold Coast, incl. Governor to Secretary of State, 5 March 1948, CO 96/795/31312/2, PRO; Creech Jones to Governor Creasy, 9 April 1948, CO 537/3558, PRO; Watson Commission, 12–13, 24, 30–31, 62–68.