With the newfound attention of his cotton in France, Mademba visited France to participate in the 1906 colonial exposition in Marseille and the Association Cotonnière Coloniale banquet in Paris. While in Paris, Mademba met with journalists and planted a narrative of his life and career that highlighted his progressive and benevolent rule. Mademba returned to his kingdom only to find that his large labor force of prisoners of war had secured their own freedom. Without this labor, Mademba no longer produced sufficient cotton to interest metropolitan textile industrialists. He also returned to a wave of militant Islamic revival. Mademba suffered from ill health and died in 1918. His death stimulated significant debates about the succession to his kingdom and the distribution of his estate among his many wives and children. His son, Abd-el-Kader Mademba, sought unsuccessfully to succeed his father, but instead published the only existing book on Mademba’s life during a period of intense commemoration of the conquest of the French Soudan and the role of African soldiers in World War I.