With the rise of information technology, an increasing proportion of public African archives are being digitized and made accessible on the internet. The same is being done to a certain extent with private archives too. As much as the new technologies are raising enthusiasm, they have prompted discussion among researchers and archivists, on subjects ranging from matters of intellectual property to sovereignty and governance. Digital archiving disrupts archival norms and practices, opening up a field of reflection relatively little explored by historians. This article therefore seeks to reflect on the digital turn of African archives as a subject for study in its own right, located at the crossroads of political and economic interests.

This article examines concepts of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ for migrants and citizens in the twilight of empire. It focuses on the ‘cheminots refoulés’, railway workers with origins in the former French Sudan (today's Republic of Mali) who were expelled from Senegal shortly after both territories declared independence, and other ‘Sudanese’ settled in Senegal, sometimes for several generations. Using newly available archives in France, Mali and Senegal, and interviews with former cheminots and ‘Sudanese migrants’ on both sides of the border, this article seeks to historicize memories of autochthony and allochthony that have been constructed and contested in postcolonial nation-building projects. The Mali Federation carried the lingering memory of federalist political projects, but it proved untenable only months after the Federation's June 1960 independence from France. When member states declared independence from each other, the internal boundary between Senegal and the Sudanese Republic became an international border between Senegal and the Republic of Mali. In the wake of the collapse, politicians in Bamako and Dakar clamoured to redefine the ‘nation’ and its ‘nationals’ through selective remembering. Thousands of cheminots and ‘Sudanese migrants’ who had moved to Senegal from Sudan years (or decades) earlier were suddenly labelled ‘foreigners’ and ‘expatriates’ and faced two governments eager to see them ‘return’ to a hastily proclaimed nation state. This ‘repatriation’ allowed Republic of Mali officials to ‘perform the nation’ by (re)integrating and (re)membering the migrants in a nascent ‘homeland’. But, having circulated between Senegal and Sudan/Mali for decades, ‘Sudanese migrants’ in both states retained and invoked memories of older political communities, upsetting new national priorities. The loss of the Mali Federation raises questions about local, national and international citizenship and movement in mid-century West Africa. Examining the histories invoked to imagine postcolonial political communities, this article offers an insight into the role that memory has played in constructing and contesting the nation's central place in migration histories within Africa and beyond.

In this article I analyze how African gender categories have interacted with those produced and imposed by French colonization and how these forced interactions may have given rise to specific kinds of resistance from local populations. Using the case study of forced recruitment for the private agricultural firm Société Anonyme des Cultures de Diakandapé (SACD) in the region of Kayes in Mali from 1919 to 1946, I examine the complexities of resistance to forced labor from a gender perspective, with a special focus on how resistance was shaped by struggles around (re)construction and (re)definition of local and colonial masculinities.