In the historical context of colonial Indonesia, Coolie as a way of designating labour has been associated primarily with indentured, migrant, plantation workers in the so-called Outer Islands, principally Sumatra, where coolies from Java and southern China were the mainstay of the workforce on the island's tobacco, rubber and palm oil ‘estates’ from the 1880s through to the end of the colonial era more than half a century later.

Just before the end of the first decade of the eighteenth century a Brazilian Jesuit priest went through the streets of Lisbon announcing the invention of a flying apparatus, which used the rudimentary techniques of the first airship.

The historiography of the decolonisation of the French overseas empire offers its students a highly mixed picture. While the atrocities committed during the independence wars in Indochina and Algeria belong to the black pages of contemporary French history, the decolonisation of the French sub-Saharan territories is presented in a much more positive light. In 1960, France ‘gracefully’ agreed to the independence of fourteen of its African territories, after which close relations with the regimes of nearly all those states were nurtured until at least the 1980s. This smooth transfer of power is all the more remarkable when one compares it to the much more problematic British and Portuguese decolonisations in black Africa. How did the French do it? Or should one say: how did the Africans in the French territories do it? In this paper, I will attempt to unveil some of the critical political processes that took place in Senegal at the end of the 1940s, because this period was crucial in the formulation of die relation between French policymakers and an upcoming African political elite. In many ways, die processes that took place in Senegal during this period would determine die course of French policy towards all of its African possessions. A study of this period seems therefore more than justified.