Please select one of the five chapters in the history of Mali

(Slavery did exist in Africa prior to the arrival of the Europeans, however, the Europeans turned it into a commercial enterprise.  In most West African societies, slaves enjoyed the rights of marriage, property ownership, and the ability to purchase their own freedom.  In addition, beatings were a rarity and they were treated essentially as servants.  Such luxuries did not exist in the European model.  Nobody can know if the West Africans knew they were condemning their rivals to lives of pain and misery.  They may have fooled themselves into thinking they were sending people into a system similar to their own.)

    When the international slave trade was banned in 1815, the Europeans had to look for other sources of revenue.  The French continued their encroachments into West Africa in search of palm oil, ivory, cotton, and other agricultural products.  Their advance was assisted, in part, by smaller chiefdoms and vassal nations.  By promising to remove the dominant kings from the territory, the French were able to gain the assistance of smaller African states (in exchange for land, of course).  Still, major exploration of the West African interior was curbed by disease and the influence of powerful Muslim kingdoms.

    Throughout this period, the French had focused their commercial efforts on the coastal regions.  Using treaties of questionable legitimacy, however, they claimed large tracts of land in the interior.  Cotton plantations and other farms popped up to compliment the trade in gold, ivory, palm oil and other products.  By the time of the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, the French claimed most of Northwest Africa.

    In French West Africa, Mali was regarded as little more than a source of labor and agricultural products.  Other than a few small Christian missions, no effort was made to improve conditions in the country.  The Africans were acutely aware of what was happening, and resisted.  Led by Samori Toure, the Mandinka empire fought the French during the 1880s and 1890s without success.  Mahmadou Lane also resisted French colonial rule in modern Senegal.  The Ibo and Tiv peoples also mounted resistance movements whenever possible, but failed in their efforts to remove their colonial rulers.

    When World War I broke out, an interesting irony surfaced: fighting in the name of freedom, many Africans joined their colonial rulers against the Germans.  The same situation occurred in World War II.  In both instances, large populations who suffered decades of indignities and oppressive, brutal rule, were fighting for their ruler' sense of personal freedom.  The French, insulted by Fascism and religious persecution, labeled their enemies as violent monsters who had to be stopped.  In reality, however, life under the fascists would not have been much worse for the Africans than it was under French rule.   It did not take long for the Africans to realize that they were being oppressed by the very people for whom they had fought.  The situation reached critical mass when things returned to "normal" after the war.  By 1950, major independence movements were mounting throughout French West Africa.

    Sekou Toure of Guinea was among the first to declare independence from the French in 1958.  The unstoppable tide continued until virtually all of French West Africa was clamoring for independence.  They achieved their goal in 1960.  The independence debate was lead by Houphouet-Boigny of Cote d'Ivoire, who pushed for the independence of each individual colony in French West Africa.  Conversely, other leaders wanted French West Africa to unite as a single nation.  Houphouet-Boigny won the debate and the countries of Cote d'Ivoire, Niger, Chad, Mali, Senegal, Mauritania were formed from the remnants of French West Afria.  

Please select one of the five chapters in the history of Mali