Jacobins in Africa
The traditions of organized statehood in the countries of French West Africa stretch back for some fifteen centuries. During the past sixty years, writes Basil Davidson, French influence has greatly strengthened the feeling of federal community that inspires many of the newly evolving republics of the Western Sudan and the Guinea coast.
“God has drawn me to this fortunate city,” wrote a learned man of Djenne on the middle Niger a little more than three hundred years ago, “a certain number of learned and of pious men, strangers to the country, who have come here to live. They are of different peoples and countries.”
This comment from Abderrahman es-Sadi, who wrote the Tarikh es Sudan, is a useful introduction to all that part of sub-Saharan Africa which the French were to add to their empire towards the end of the nineteenth century; for it neatly illustrates the scope and liberality that these countries knew, and had long known, in former times.
Spread obscurely on the line of the middle and upper Niger and out across the far savannah country of its tributary lands, this civilization of the Western Sudan had known by Sadi’s time some five hundred years of literate tradition; had seen the rise and fall, and slow endurance, of states and federations of states and pastoral empires through twice as many centuries.
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