“It must not be forgotten that the leading figures of the New Africa Sékou Touré, Kwame Nkrumah and some Mali and Congolese revolutionary democrats were…shaped and tempered politically and ideologically in circles close to the progressive forces of the metropolises.

And this left an enormous imprint on their world view. There is much testimony to this from revolutionary democrats themselves. ‘It was through the French progressive democratic movement,’ Madeira Keita, a member of the Politburo of the Sudanese Union of Mali, has emphasized,

‘that we in West Africa learned indirectly about the ideas of the October Revolution.... We learned much from the French General Confederation of Labor, the Secours populaire français and the French Commu­nist Party, which helped us to form Marxist circles.

These taught Marxism to our trade unionists and leaders of mass organizations and political parties...’”

OK this is officially a Mamadou Madeira Keita thread. Keita was an anticolonial activist throughout "french" West Africa & had important positions in the government of Mali in the years immediately following flag independence https://twitter.com/no_slave_coasts/status/1296101681361555458

“In May 1957, [Keita] was named Minister of the Interior of the Territory of Soudan. It was his signature as minister – not that of head of government and US-RDA [Sudanese Union—African Democratic Rally] Secretary General Modibo Keita –

that authorized the strongest single move against the colonial system made before independence, namely the dismantling of the chieftaincy and the gradual dismissal of the chefs de canton beginning late in 1957.

He would remain in government through independence in 1960, acting as a leader of the delegation that negotiated the Mali Federation’s emergence within the French Community & as a key figure in establishing the Republic of Mali in the wake of the Federation’s collapse in August.

That same year, the editors of Présence Africaine claimed that he was ‘as popular in Guinea as Sékou Touré himself’ even though he had left the country nearly a decade earlier.

…Under the socialist government of Modibo Keita from 1960 to 1968, he occupied various ministerial posts, changing one portfolio for another, but never leaving government.

Madeira Keita’s political influence would wax and wane, but his ministerial positions served as a barometer or bellwether of ‘radical’ influence within the politburo, or Bureau Politique Nationale (BPN).

A well-informed French ambassador considered him both the most pro-Soviet and the most ‘xenophobic,’ meaning anti-Western, of the Malian leadership.”

“In May 1968, over a year after his last public speech, Madeira Keita delivered another on ‘la Révolution et son contenu au Mali,’ at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Badalabougou (Bamako).

There, Keita found himself confronted by forceful arguments from skeptical students who rejected the government’s vision of the Active Revolution, Keita’s justification for the creation of the Malian franc and its 1967 devaluation, and his analysis of Malian society.

…Keita was obviously not the only government minister to be interpolated by angry students around the world in that rebellious spring of 1968, but Bamako was not Paris, or even Dakar. In this case, Keita took several dozen questions in a marathon seven-hour meeting.”

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