The general was scandalized! Talking about the autonomy of the Casamance! Who did this woman think she was? “This is a topic that really gets General Mamadou Mansour Seck off his rocker,” claimed one journalist.Footnote ¹ The former ambassador to the United States had proven his Senegalese patriotism time and again, including while serving as the Senegalese armed forces chief of staff during some of the heaviest fighting of the Casamance separatist conflict in the early 1990s.Footnote ² The air force general, known for his tough approach to “the Casamance question,” could not tolerate any limit to Senegalese sovereignty or any destabilization of Senegalese unity.Footnote ³ And certainly not coming from some French woman!

The French woman in question, Séverine Awenengo Dalberto, sparked this controversy over the 24 October 2024 release of her new book, L’idée de la Casamance autonome: Possibles et dettes morales de la situation coloniale au Sénégal (The Idea of an Autonomous Casamance: Possibilities and Moral Debts of the Colonial Situation in Senegal). Karthala published the book one week before the Senegalese legislative elections of 1 November 2024. The French publisher had also planned a release ceremony and book signing for 26 October in Dakar, but fears of violence led Karthala to cancel the ceremony.Footnote ⁴ Other prominent Senegalese voices joined General Seck’s in calling for the book to be banned. These calls for book banning reminded many of similar calls to ban French author Jean-Claude Marut’s Le conflit de Casamance: Ce que disent les armes (The Casamance Conflict: What the Guns Say) after its publication in 2010.Footnote ⁵ The controversy over Awenengo Dalberto’s book quickly took on political ramifications for Senegal’s young new president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, and his political ally from the Casamance, Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko.Footnote ⁶ Some Senegalese thought that the pair were too slow to condemn the book and to defend Senegalese unity. Hence, Sonko strongly denounced the book at a rally in Ziguinchor on 1 November. He declared that the book “will not be sold in Senegal,” referring to it as “a destabilization project.”Footnote ⁷ In spite of these appeals from Senegalese leaders, L’idée de la Casamance autonome was never banned.

These calls for book banning have resulted not only from the contents of the books as much as the national and racial identities of the authors. African scholars have made similar arguments in French without anyone calling for their books to be banned.Footnote ⁸ Other Western scholars (like me) have also made similar arguments, but because they did so in English or another European language, few Senegalese took notice.Footnote ⁹ In fact, Awenengo Dalberto herself made the same argument in a journal article printed (in English) in The Journal of African History in 2021.Footnote ¹⁰ This important article, in which Awenengo Dalberto made the same argument in miniature that she makes in the recent book, was a game changer for the history of the Casamance and Senegal and perhaps the entire postcolonial Francophone African world. However, this article certainly did not achieve the infamy in some quarters that L’idee de la Casamance has seen. The controversy over the works of Marut and Awenengo Dalberto emerges partly from their authors being French (the identity of the former colonizer) and from their being written in French so that Senegalese elites like General Seck can read, understand, analyze, and critique them. More than that, by demonstrating the contingency of the historical and social construction of the Casamance, these books have called into question how “natural” is what Senegalese leaders have often referred to as “the natural region of Casamance.”Footnote ¹¹ They therefore became perceived as threats to the geographical, political, and social order of Senegal.

With this book, Awenengo Dalberto has joined a rapidly growing historiography questioning the consensus of African nationalist leaders at the 1963 inaugural summit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to leave the colonial borders intact for fear of conflict that could erupt if they started tinkering with them (27 and 213).Footnote ¹² Certainly, these discussions go back further than the last decade-and-a-half, but in 2010, Maano Ramutsindela proposed both subnational and subregional configurations as possible alternatives to the current system of postcolonial nation-states in Africa.Footnote ¹³ In 2014 and 2015, Fred Cooper and Gary Wilder pointed to the contingencies and possibilities of federation among the independent states that resulted from the decolonization of French West Africa.Footnote ¹⁴ They captured the uncertain and contingent nature of late colonial and early postcolonial border-making in Africa, as nationalist leaders like Léopold Senghor and Félix Houphouët-Boigny discussed how to maintain a connection to the French Union while forming their own federation of Black (therefore excluding North Africa), French-speaking, West African countries.

In 2017, Africanists at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado conducted a panel in honor of Boubacar Barry, the author of Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, originally published in French in 1988.Footnote ¹⁵ Echoing Barry, and to an extent Ramutsindela, the scholars on the panel discussed the possibilities of renewing attempts at reconfiguring African states along regional lines based on past experiences elsewhere in West Africa.Footnote ¹⁶ Barry’s book provided a useful framework for analyzing and re-thinking federation in West Africa. After alluding to the extensive list of regional and subregional organizations that have tried to overcome the colonial legacy, Barry, writing in the 1980s while the Senegambian Confederation was in effect, decried Senegambia’s underdevelopment and political divisiveness and called for a regional approach to deal with the legacies of slavery and colonialism in the region:

To facilitate such an approach and to realize such a vision, Barry defined the “Greater Senegambia” as the territory encompassed by the modern nation-states of Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and parts of Mauritania, Mali, and Guinea-Conakry. He refined this definition by referring to the “vast stretch of territory covering the two great river basins, the Senegal and the Gambia River valleys, understood as an inclusive region beginning at the sources of the two rivers high on the Futa Jallon plateau, and ending at their mouths on the Atlantic coast.”Footnote ¹⁸ Based on the region so defined, Judith Byfield asserts that Barry examines “the twin themes of unification and fragmentation that characterized Senegambia’s history between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.”Footnote ¹⁹ These twin themes of unification and fragmentation form the crux of efforts to redefine the legacy of the colonial partition in Africa.

More recently, on this idea of “correcting” the errors of colonial partition, Howard French published an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that it may now be time to bring Kwame Nkrumah’s vision of a “United States of Africa” to fruition. French asserts, “Driven by his belief in Pan-Africanism, Mr. Nkrumah worked tirelessly to overcome the Balkanizing impact of colonial rule across Africa. As the world’s powers turn away from the continent, it’s a vision that may hold the key to realizing Africa’s potential today.”Footnote ²⁰ French claims that imperial powers like the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, and China have finally been withdrawing from the continent, leaving Africa’s leaders freer than ever, since the start of colonial rule, to chart their own destiny.Footnote ²¹

Awenengo Dalberto’s book builds on this wider historiography to show the ambiguities, the possibilities, the contingencies, and the roads not taken in the decolonial moment of 1945–60 in the Casamance. She does not advocate for a separatist position; rather, she demonstrates the “possibilities” that Senegambian and other African leaders viewed as possible futures. She argues neither that “fate” dictated nationalist mobilization nor that colonial history justified Casamançais separatist mobilization in the years leading up to the December 1982 march and the subsequent violence in and around Ziguinchor.Footnote ²² Awenengo Dalberto asserts instead:

Awenengo Dalberto does not seek to propose a random and counterfactual history but rather “a history of possibilities” (20).Footnote ²⁴ She proposes taking autonomist statements and projects as “givens,” of accepting that “the futures they foresee,” even if they have not come to pass, “have an existence of their own” (21). According to Awenengo Dalberto, these envisaged futures “do not evaporate” when they do not take place, but on the contrary, they “construct possibilities, memories and affects—disappointment, bitterness, hope—which form grids of intelligibility, re-makings of meaning of events at different moments in the past” (21). In short, this is not counterfactual history; this is a history of possible roads not taken.

This book is an intellectual history of the idea of Casamance autonomy (so the book is appropriately titled) and difference from Senegal. It traces this idea from its earliest colonial roots in the nineteenth century to its working-out among the nationalist generation to, finally, its realization in the modern separatist movement of the MFDC (the French acronym for the Movement of Democratic Forces of the Casamance, what Awenengo Dalberto calls the “MFDC-1982” to distinguish it from an earlier nationalist political party that went by the same name from 1949–54). After setting the foundation in the first three chapters with the colonial history of how the idea of the Casamance came to exist, Awenengo Dalberto gets to the heart of the argument in the remaining four chapters and the conclusion, which deal with the postwar mobilization of various nationalist leaders across French West Africa but especially, in this case, in the Casamance region of Senegal. Awenengo Dalberto shows that it was not clear or certain in the late 1940s and the 1950s that the Casamance would emerge from colonialism as a part of Senegal. The point of the colonial history in the first three chapters is to show that the Casamance was always viewed, even by the French, as something “other” or “down there” (from the viewpoint of Saint-Louis or Dakar) and perhaps better aligned—having more in common, culturally—with the other countries of les Rivières du Sud (the Southern Rivers area) found in French Guinea, Portuguese Guinea, and the rest of the Upper Guinea coast (61–62). Senegalese leaders thought of the Casamance as more “African” and less “civilized,” adopting some of the denigrating discourse of the colonizer to establish national domination from Dakar.

Like most human conflicts, the Casamance conflict has always been an argument over history. For modern Casamançais separatists, the postwar history of decolonization is important to establish the continuity between the MFDC-1982 and the “original MFDC” of 1949–54—the Casamançais political party formed by schoolteachers Emile Badiane (from a village near Bignona) and Ibou Diallo (from Sédhiou) to represent the interests of the Casamance in the unfolding nationalist mobilization (146–49). Awenengo Dalberto demonstrates how Léopold S. Senghor masterfully played the game to build his postwar coalition for representing his vision of a Black, French-speaking West African federation within the larger Union Française (French Union) through his new political party, the Bloc Démocratique Sénégalais (BDS, Senegalese Democratic Bloc) (30–31). Senghor had formed the BDS in 1948 after leaving his political mentor, Lamine Guèye, of the French Socialist Party (SFIO), to chart his own path with the indigènes or non-originaires, that is, the colonial subjects outside of the French “Four Communes” (Gorée, Dakar, Rufisque, and Saint-Louis) where the originaires received French education and exercised certain rights as citizens—not just subjects—of a “French imperial nation-state.”Footnote ²⁵ Though another Casamançais party—the Mouvement Autonome Casamançais (MAC)—tried to take up the mantle of Casamançais leadership under Assane Seck (see Fig. 1, below) with a friendlier approach to the SFIO, the MFDC and the MAC both eventually dissolved and joined Senghor’s coalition to march into the postcolonial era with the Casamance as a vital part of Senegal, as demonstrated by Casamançais loyalty to vote “oui” (yes) in the 1958 referendum on whether to remain with the French Union under Senghor’s leadership. These events are detailed in Chapter 5.

Figure 1.

Assane Seck and Emile Badiane.

Source: Library of the University of Assane Seck at Ziguinchor.

Awenengo Dalberto makes it clear that one cannot overstate the importance of this 1958 moment in Casamançais history. Indeed, it became the “debt of recognition” (the title of Chapter 7 and the final chapter of the book) that Senghor owed the Casamance—a “moral debt,” according to Casamançais leaders like Badiane (see Fig. 1, above), Diallo, and Yoro Kandé. In their minds, Senghor owed them for “the firm resolve of the Casamance” (the title of Chapter 6) to support Senghor’s coalition in voting “oui.” It was this 1958 moment that separatists later claimed led to Senghor’s “betrayal” of the Casamance for not granting the Casamance its own independence, as agreed upon (according to the separatists) after twenty years of union with Senegal. Though no written evidence of such an agreement exists, separatist leaders have cited it repeatedly as justification for their separatist claims.Footnote ²⁶

In any case, Awenengo Dalberto makes it clear that original MFDC leaders like Kandé knew they could blame no one for the outcome of the referendum but themselves. Kandé concluded, “We were disappointed… it was us who welded the Casamance to Senegal… I have no remorse for having contributed to this unification. We were against what northern Senegal was doing to us, but we were also for unity” (240). Awenengo Dalberto concludes that these Casamançais elites did not really question the “weight” of the colonial partition; in fact, “they had the profound conviction that the attachment of the Casamance to Senegal was the result of their own action—and ultimately, the product of a series of their own choices.” These elites had, perhaps wittingly, perhaps not, “‘welded’ the Casamance to Senegal in accepting the coalition [shifting of the early 1950s], the fusion in the following years [especially to Senghor and the BDS], and the results of the referendum [in 1958]” (241). In other words, they had hooked their wagon to Senghor’s, for better or worse. Awenengo Dalberto expertly traces this kind of ambiguity from the earliest days of the colonial period, through colonialism, into the final postcolonial dispensation, and up to the present. The alternating rhythms of continuity and change over time in this book have resulted in a comprehensive yet detailed masterpiece of Casamançais history.

On the whole, Awenengo Dalberto skillfully demonstrates, based on a thick and detailed government and personal archive (especially that of former “original MFDC” member Paul Ignace Coly), in addition to cultural sources like theater and poetry and numerous oral history interviews in Senegal and France, that “the idea of the Casamance”—of an “autonomous” Casamance, in fact—resonated and reverberated over time as a real possibility, a real potential outcome—with French colonial officials and traders, with Senegalese nationalist politicians, and with modern separatists and national politicians—to leave us with a powerful legacy of the most naturally beautiful yet politically tragic territory of modern Senegal.

Fortunately, this story of the reception of L’idee de la Casamance does not end with the calls for banning the book. Instead, Awenengo Dalberto’s Senegalese colleagues rushed to defend her. In a lucid defense of the professionalism of Awenengo Dalberto and of, in fact, the discipline of history writ large, Kalidou Diallo and Ibrahima Thioub, the two respected History faculty at the Cheikh Anta Diop University (UCAD) in Dakar, asserted that the authors of a statement by the National Executive Secretariat (SEN) of the Alliance for the Republic (APR) attacking Awenengo Dalberto’s work in L’idee de la Casamance could have at least started by actually reading the book. Barring that, they could have visited the publisher’s website to read a summary of it. They did neither. But if they had, they would realize that Awenengo Dalberto does not call for “irredentism” in the Casamance. Instead, she joins others since the 1940s in imagining a possible future not weighed down by the chains of the legacy of the colonial partition. Diallo and Thioub list the litany of regional parties that emerged in the 1940s around the same time as the MFDC and assert that these parties represent the attempts of Africans, many ultimately frustrated or neutralized in one way or another, to establish alternative forms of social organization and self-governance. They claim that the construction of independent African nation-states “modeled after Europe within the boundaries established by colonial intrusion, represents the future that emerged from the past.”Footnote ²⁷ The authors aptly conclude with Awenengo Dalberto’s own words in the final paragraph of the book:

Diallo and Thioub then conclude with a question: “Can the author of this conclusion, in good faith, be condemned by the inquisitorial tribunal of the SEN of the APR, accused of alleged involvement in a conspiracy against Senegal?”Footnote ²⁸ Indeed, I think not. And I remain proud to be counted among the colleagues of historians like Diallo, Thioub, and Awenengo Dalberto—who fear not what the past can tell us about the present and the future, if we listen.