Marie Rodet

Centré sur la région de Kayes au Mali, l'ouvrage de Marie Rodet s'attache à analyser les formes de mobilité féminine au sein du pays et vers le Sénégal à l'époque coloniale (1900-1946). En élargissant le concept de migration, l'ouvrage met en évidence que les migrations féminines dans la région de Kayes ont été nombreuses, et ce dès les débuts de la colonisation.
Ce livre montre en particulier que les femmes esclaves étaient majoritaires dans les mouvements migratoires que connaît la région au début du XXème siècle, qu'elles furent les premières migrantes dans la ville de Kayes.
A partir d'une étude précise de sources coloniales a priori peu loquaces mais ingénieusement confrontées à des enquêtes de terrain, Marie Rodet resitue donc ici l'histoire des migrations de la région de Kayes à l'époque coloniale dans une dynamique de recherche genrée. Cet ouvrage constitue un outil essentiel pour repenser la question des migrations féminines en Afrique et déconstruire le discours androcentrique ambiant sur les migrations.

In 2008 I started an oral history project on slavery in the Kayes region. It is how I heard of ‘rebel villages’ for the first time, which led me onto the tracks of the village of Bouillagui.
Bouillagui is a Soninke village of Western Mali. It is located next to the Mauritanian border. At first sight, it appears indistinguishable from other villages in the region. Yet, its exceptional history of fighting against slavery makes it a unique village
Its inhabitants liberated themselves from slavery at the beginning of the twentieth century. They rebelled against their masters and founded Bouillagui where they lived freely.
The people of Bouillagui are very proud of their history. It is in stark contrast with the rest of Mali. Indeed, there is usually a taboo towards internal slavery. People are unwilling to speak about it. It is considered shameful to have had enslaved ancestors.

"African slavery was officially abolished in French Sudan (present day Mali) by the colonial administration in 1905, but effective emancipation of former slaves was in fact a lengthy process, the repercussions of which were still felt long after Mali’s independence in 1960.
This documentary tells the story of those who resisted slavery by escaping their masters and founding new independent and free communities in the district of Kayes in the first half of the twentieth century. The film presents a unique audiovisual archive of slave emancipation in Mali."

"Beyond the Postcolonial: Video Art from Africa.
By Marie Rodet
Lecturer in African History, Convenor MA Film and History, SOAS London

This set of video art from Africa offers to the spectator a crucial entry key into a new historical atmosphere, in which the cultural legacies of postcolonialism no longer seem to matter much. Indeed, while many African contemporary artists have been much concerned, in the past three decades, by responding to European modernity and cultural neocolonialism, this new generation of African video artists proposes a different stand deeply anchored in their intimate – sometimes violent – daily experiences of globalization and displacement. They are very much preoccupied with being within their time, sharing their own everyday life and their responses to constantly moving environments, more than responding to a (post)colonial past which appears henceforth far from their immediate concerns.

If the globalization process sometimes left us with the impression of dissolution of geographical territories or the disappearing of old landscapes of power, these video artists remind us that it was far from being a uniform process, that globalization has often affected the global South differently. In the same way as their predecessors experienced a hangover of the African independences, this new generation of African artists seems to have experienced a hangover of the false promises of a globalised cosmopolitan world in which boundaries of race, ethnicity, class or religion were no longer important. Despite the tremendous hopes sparked by the 1990s’ democratization process on the continent, many Africans continue to be confronted with economic and political distress on a daily basis.

The life of African artists is not the one of the Afropolitan that the Western world would like to believe. Their mobility is still constrained by the rules of the market and the increasing fears built in our Western fortresses. The videos convey these often-traumatic experiences of migration and exile, and dislocated identities in the face of the delusion of globalization. They are therefore powerful political denunciations of the fault lines of our systems and definitely offer alternative and more complex views of the world.


These videos certainly belong to the globalised world of incessant flows of materials, information, and images. But their intrinsic ubiquity, their simultaneous negotiation of multiple cultural systems and temporalities defy the structures of the contemporary art market which long ignored African art production and then started catching up in a clear attempt to control its internationalisation. Indeed, video art is a very astute arm of resistance against these market structures. It offers its own modes of production and reception. It can be easily transferred, downloaded. Not surprisingly, at the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London last year, there was a complete absence of video art. Artistic videos from Africa do not need to be put on the market to be accessed and valued. They simply need a virtual platform to be visible, as the one in motion masterfully deployed by Kisito Assangni. As such, this exhibition materializes the internationalisation and democratization of arts and information networks of the past decade, but also denounces their fault lines. No one should wonder that the new generation of African artists increasingly favour the video medium to fight against ignorance and intellectual perfidy in the interconnected world that we all live in.

African slavery was officially abolished in Mali by the French colonial authorities in 1905, but effective emancipation of formerly enslaved was a lengthy process, the repercussions of which were still felt long after Mali's independence in 1960.

The exhibition presents photographs of archival documents testifying to the history of slavery and emancipation in Kayes (Mali), as well as photographs by French visual artist Fanny Challier of the present-day village of Bouyagui, which was created in 1914 by populations escaping slavery.

The exhibition accompanies the documentary film 'The Diambourou: Slavery and Emancipation in Kayes - Mali' (2014) directed by Dr Marie Rodet (SOAS), which tells the story of those communities escaping slavery in the region of Kayes in the first half of the twentieth century.

For more info about the film, please contact Dr Marie Rodet (mr28@soas.ac.uk) or subscribe to the mailing list: http://eepurl.com/OVFEz

Exhibition organized with the support of the Centre of African Studies at SOAS and the Royal African Society (London).

In 2010 I filmed descendants of formerly enslaved populations in Kayes narrating the history of their ancestors and the realities of internal slavery in West Africa. The result was a 23-minute documentary film entitled "The Diambourou: Slavery and Emancipation in Kayes-Mali," which was released in 2014. The film was as much responding to specific historiographical questions in the field as a tool of research action to raise awareness among younger generations and to fight legacies of social discrimination today. With the exactions perpetuated against descendants of formerly enslaved populations in the Kayes region since 2018, the film, via its access-free online version, has experienced a second life as an anti-slavery activist medium, helping to bridge the gap between endogenous historical fighting against slavery and contemporary anti-slavery activism in the Soninke diaspora.

Despite the scarcity of sources, the history of African slavery has fostered vivid debates over the nature of the institution and the ways in which gender produced different experiences of slavery. Studying the diversity of women’s experiences of slavery since the advent of Islam in West Africa from an intersectional perspective is a crucial step in order to better assess slave women’s agency in shaping the institution.

West Africa experienced extensive warfare and enslavement in the second half of the nineteenth century. Populations were scattered along the main slave trade routes in Western Sudan. This article analyzes how formerly enslaved populations used migration and diasporic practices to rebuild autonomous communities and social networks, and to overcome legacies of slavery away from their region of origin. This entailed renegotiations of kinship, marriage and religious practices in the Kayes region (Mali) and the Siin (Senegal) where stigmatization and vulnerability were deeply rooted in the history of slavery.

In this article, the author argues that migration scholars can gain a wider understanding of historical African migration through the examination of marriage migration in particular. These specific migrations, which are especially visible in civil legal records of the Kayes region (Mali) from 1905 to 1925, shed light on women’s mobility (social and geographical) in and out of marriage. These documents also show the gradual restriction of this mobility by colonial and local authorities. The circumventing strategies used by some women to counter these restrictions relied mainly upon historical family migration networks. But these strategies would gradually become obsolete owing to patrilinear family networks proving ultimately to be much stronger thanks in particular to the colonial authorities’ support.

In this article I analyze how African gender categories have interacted with those produced and imposed by French colonization and how these forced interactions may have given rise to specific kinds of resistance from local populations. Using the case study of forced recruitment for the private agricultural firm Société Anonyme des Cultures de Diakandapé (SACD) in the region of Kayes in Mali from 1919 to 1946, I examine the complexities of resistance to forced labor from a gender perspective, with a special focus on how resistance was shaped by struggles around (re)construction and (re)definition of local and colonial masculinities.

On connaît encore mal les processus d’affranchissement au sein des sociétés africaines avant la fin du XIXème siècle en Afrique de l’Ouest. L’esclavage fut officiellement aboli en Afrique occidentale française (AOF) en 1905 mais certaines émancipations personnelles et collectives eurent lieu bien avant cette abolition coloniale. Elles prirent dans certains cas la forme de révoltes qui sont encore rapportées aujourd’hui par quelques sources orales. Ces informations restent cependant difficiles d’accès et les archives coloniales sont souvent pauvres à ce titre (Rodet, 2010). Cependant, certaines trajectoires d’émancipation de la deuxième moitié du XIXème siècle peuvent nous permettre d’amorcer une réflexion sur des processus d’émancipation s’inscrivant dans la longue durée. C’est à ces formes de résistances, de révoltes et de rébellions contre l’esclavage dans la région de Kayes au Mali avant la fin officielle de l’esclavage que cet article s’intéresse.

French Soudan was a former French colony now known as Mali. From the end of the nineteenth century onward, with the gradual abolition of slavery in this part of West Africa, newly emancipated slaves began to leave their former masters. Some of them left for their region of origin. Others went to colonial towns or founded new villages. It is estimated that after the introduction of legislation permitting them to do so, an average of one-third of the French Soudan slaves left their masters. Some scholars have argued that it was easier for men than for women to leave their former master, as female slaves often had children born in the community, and were there- fore said to be more socially attached. A closer examination of the colonial archives shows, however, that former female slaves in the region of Kayes, alone or with their family, even if they were the wives or the concubines of their masters, did participate in the migra- tory movements spurred by the abolition of slavery.

Mots-clefs: Mali, Kayes, fin de l'esclavage, droit de tutelle, main-d'oeuvre enfantine, enfants confié-e-s, petites bonnes, mise en gage


Keywords: Mali, Kayes, end of slavery, custody rights, children workforce, fostered children, pawnship

In this chapter I examine to what extent certain forms of colonial inventions of tradition contributed to the persistence of violence and to new forms of violence against women in colonial Mali, from domestic and intimate violence to violence structured by the colonial state.