Long before its socialist experiment had come to an abrupt end, Mali, like its neighbors, had been dubbed a republic twice over: in 1958, still within the French Community, as Soudan and in 1960 as Mali. Setting the new republic in its West African and French imperial context, this chapter measures its emergence via two transformations that came largely from without – the end of the indigénat and the enfranchisement of women (first as mothers, later as female citizens, but always as women) – and one that came from within, the abolition of the canton chiefs and the sketching out of an unfinished blueprint for rural democracy. Those transformations gave meaning to the idea of a republic of citizens in the postcolonial Sahel, an idea whose potential remains unrealized and whose value the catastrophe of 2012–13 has only accentuated. Like so many others, that story begins with an ending.

What Was the Indigénat?

The question of the republic begins where the indigénat ends. Structuring political life until its abolition in 1946, the indigénat was not particular to the territories of the Sahel. Rather, it represented the obscure core of the French colonial state. Throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, an ever-expanding and contracting spectrum of political statuses, exemptions, and privileged categories developed around the indigénat in both meanings of that term: the regime of sanctions and the status of the native (indigène). This spectrum is potentially more revealing and surely no less significant than one of its poles taken alone, namely the narrow category of colonial citizens on which a rich literature exists. Indeed, until the creation of an imperial citizenship within the French Union in 1946, susceptibility to or exemption from the indigénat represented both marker and motive for the proliferation of political statuses in French colonial Africa.