French Colonialism and The Making of the Modern Sahel

Abstract

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.