Republic anti Community
pRESIDENT of the Republic, President of the Community, these two titles have so far buttressed one another. President de Gaulle could not be President of the Community if he was not President of the Republic, but as President of the Community he almost escapes from the trammels of the constitution, such as they are; be leads the ill-defined East African confederation in person, and not through the Government. His problems in the Community are of quite a different order from those in the Republic: how, to manage the dozen presidents and prime ministers from Mauretania to Madagascar. His critics on the Right would claim that this has so far been easy because be has been a Father Christmas distributing sovereignties. But now with the rupture of Mali he finds himself in quite a different situation. He can only satisfy Senegal at the expense of Mali's President, or Mali's President, who is also Prime Minister of Sudan, at the expense of Senegal.
The proposal to form the Confederation of Mali was not of French paternity. It\ was at least as Senegalese ' as it was Sudanese. The Senegalese leaders inherited in Dakar the old capital of French West Africa, and it was there- fore natural that they should seek to make of it something more than a capital of Senegal itself.
The towns of the Senegal coast have partici- pated in French political life since the Eighties. Their first tendency was to think in terms of integration into France, with Senegal a new province like Burgundy or Normandy. M. Leo- pold Senghor, now the leading political figure in Senegal, taught French composition in French /ycees (first Tours, then Paris) for ten years before he became a deputy for Senegal in 1945. Senegalese soldiers fought in France in the First World War and participated in the occupation of Germany. In the early Thirties the German nationalist press was protesting because a Senegalese held a junior ministerial post in a French government. The idea of integration de- clined in the Forties; it was replaced by that of the federation of the various territories of former French Africa and indeed ultimately of others. Dakar had a vocation to be a great capital. The original scheme for the Federation of Mali included Upper Volta and Dahomey, as well as Senegal and Sudan. But the Ivory Coast, whose capital, Abidjan, is the rising rival to Dakar, and whose leader M. Houphouet- Boigny was at Paris the rival in West African leadership to M. Leopold Senghor, successfully rallied the Upper Volta and Dahomey to his scheme of a looser association of African States, the 'Entente.' Mali remained as a federa- tion of only two, Senegal and Sudan, an ob- viously difficult proposition. The Sudan leader M. Modibo Keila had, like M. Senghor and M.
Houphouet, experience not only of French par- liamentarianism, but of French ministerial office. He is, however, less a participant in French in- tellectual life, nearer to the revolutionary cur- rents of Africa and at the head of a community which has far less experience of French political life and indeed the outer world than Senegal. From the start he probably thought the federal aspects of Mali a brief prelude to a unitary State with a single party and system of com- pulsory labour to put through a big economic programme—not at all the way the Senegalese saw things.
The Mali Federation was accepted unwill- ingly by President de Gaulle, but once accepted was made the basis for all the treaties of co- operation with France. It is Mali, not the Sudan or Senegal, that has granted France military, naval and air bases. It is to Mali that France has promised assistance for both external defence and, if need be, the maintenance of internal order. It is Mali and France that have committed themselves to solve their disputes within the French Community.
It is therefore an awkward situation for France, and particularly for the President, to have Senegal breaking from the federation which M. Modibo Keita claims to be still in existence. It is M. Modibo Keita, still claiming to be Prime Minister of Mali, who has a delegate in Paris, and who claims to have sole right to the obedience of the Mali troops, most of whom are Senegalese. But it is Senegal that has had three centuries of contact with France.
The mere fact of receiving M. Mamadou Dia, the Senegalese Prime Minister, the mere fact indeed of inviting M. Mamadou Dia and M. Keita to Paris, as if they had equal status in the quarrel, can be interpreted by angry Sudanese as an intervention of France in the internal affairs of Mali, although Mali as originally conceived has certainly come to an end.
M. Keita has' certainly not returned to an easy situation in the Sudan, where there were already critics who blamed him for not follow- ing the path of M. Sekou Toure, President of Guinea, to complete separation from France. He is therefore under pressure and temptation to revise his French Community policy. Sudan is an area of great importance to France, since it includes a large part of the southern Sahara and borders with Algeria from the south. M.
Modibo Keita, in his first telegram to President de Gaulle in reply to the invitation to come to Paris, has warned him that he still claims to speak for all Mali, that the Senegalese are rebels against an indissoluble union (eighteen months old) and that a step by 'Paris towards a recog- nition of Senegalese independence would have' grave international consequences.
But how can the President fail to recognise the independence of Senegal if its leaders, M.
Leopold Senghor, hitherto President of the Mali Assembly, and M. Mamadou Dia, the Prime Minister, have the country behind them? If the initiators of the Mali Federation have already torn it up?
This is the problem that President de Gaulle has to solve at the moment when he is trying once more to make a move towards peace in Algeria in a situation much less favourable than last June, with, indeed, all Africa slipping out of the Western sphere into the atmosphere of a market for mercenaries with East and West bidding against each other.
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