In recent years political changes in Mali have opened up new research opportunities for historians and other social scientists interested in the country's colonial and post-colonial past. With the new government has come a change in administrative attitudes regarding access to local archives, in other words those held at the level of the cercle. Although these archives can be in terrible condition, they contain precious information unique to each cercle. In the course of my own research I have been able to gain access to two such archives in southern Mali, in the summer of 1996 and again in 1998. Using these two archives as an example and drawing on the anecdotal evidence of colleagues, the following comments offer a rough appraisal of the nature of cercle archives in Mali. The paper covers the type of documentation available, the condition of the collections, and my own experiences in using them. Although my experience is limited to southern Mali, local administrations across francophone West Africa are likely to have similar holdings, given the essential uniformity of French administrative structures in colonial West Africa.

In addition to providing otherwise scarce documentary evidence on local events, these archives contain a good deal of correspondence which passed from one commandant de cercle to another, bypassing the central administration in the colony's capital. The information contained in this correspondence is therefore difficult to find in national archives, and I suspect that most of it is absent altogether. The volume of such correspondence is surprising. For example, regarding a religious movement based in one of these towns in the late 1940s, I found fifty-odd letters and telegrams addressed to the local administrator by his colleagues, asking him for information and keeping him abreast of local manifestations of the movement in their own regions. None of these messages had been routed through the central administration, and the commandant had sent his superiors no more than a digest of events in which much detail was suppressed.