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Accepted Paper:
Political mobilisation out of the legacies of slavery: the pasts, presents and futures of late colonial Upper Casamance (Southern Senegal, 1946-1960).
Alice Bellagamba
(University of Milan-Bicocca)
In the Upper Casamance of the late colonial period, the emerging time-space of decolonization resonated, politically and affectedly, with earlier experiences of freedom and slavery. Rural political mobilization drew on different scales of pasts, presents, and futures.
Paper Abstract:
Unexpected turns and dead-ends marked French West Africa decolonization process. When it ended in 1960, the metropolis and the former colonies found themselves entrapped into an unanticipated form of political organization, the nation-state. Both archives and oral history provide clues to the socio-political and cultural effervescence of this historical period. Hopes of change characterized disadvantaged social categories: youths, women, unskilled labourers, peasants as much as freed slaves and people of slave ancestry who expected the end of colonial rule to finish also the discrimination, exploitation and socio-political vulnerability that followed the abolition of slavery in the early part of the twentieth century. At variance with geographies and histories, the emerging time-space of decolonization thus resonated, politically and affectedly, with earlier experiences of freedom and slavery. The case study is the Upper Casamance of the late colonial period, where rural political mobilisation drew on living memories of late nineteenth century emancipatory struggles. Onto the corners of world- history, and through forgotten histories of hope and anticipation, historical ethnography follows the echoes of people’s dreams for the world-to-be.