Modibo Keïta

This article deals with the former president. For other people with this name, see Modibo Keïta (disambiguation) .

Modibo Keïta (1961)

Modibo Keïta (born June 4, 1915 in Bamako , † May 16, 1977 in Kidal ) was President of Mali from 1960 to 1968 .

youth

Keïta came from the Coura district in Bamako, the capital of what was then French Sudan . The family belonged to the Malinke family . After attending school in his hometown, he attended the École normal William Ponty near Dakar in 1934 , where he was one of the best students. From 1936 he worked as a teacher in Bamako, Sikasso and Timbuktu . He was involved in theater and youth groups.

Politician

In 1937 he co-founded the syndicat des enseignants d'Afrique occidentale Française union with Ouezzin Coulibaly . In 1943 he founded the magazine L'œil de Kénédougou , in which he criticized the colonial administration. His demeanor later brought him briefly to La Santé prison in Paris . He became a member of the small communist Groupes d'Etudes Communistes . The group supported his unsuccessful candidacy for the Constituent Assembly for the IV Republic in Paris . In 1945, together with Mamadou Konaté, he founded the Bloc Soudanais , later Union Soudanais, of which he became general secretary in 1947. In 1946 the Bloc Soudanais merged with the Rassemblement Démocratique African (RDA), an interterritorial, radical nationalist party that was affiliated with the French Communist Party at the time.

After founding the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) party in Bamako, whose chairman was Félix Houphouët-Boigny , Keïta took over the post of General Secretary of the RDA for French Sudan in 1948.

Parliamentarians

In 1948 he became a member of the Territorial Assembly , in 1953 of the Council of the Union française and in 1956 he made the leap into the French National Assembly . He was the first African to become Vice President of the National Assembly. In the same year he also became mayor of Bamako. In 1957 he belonged to the governments of Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury and Félix Gaillard as State Secretary. From 1957 to 1959 he served as an advisor in the French West Africa Federation (AOF).

On January 17, 1959, he became President of the Constituent Assembly of the Fédération du Mali ( Mali Federation ). After Obervolta and Dahomeys left , French Sudan and Senegal were still part of it. After the Federation gained independence on June 20, 1960, the state collapsed on August 20, 1960 because of the differences between Keïta and Léopold Sédar Senghor . In the short-lived federation, Keïta had been head of government since April 4, 1959.

president

Keïta proclaimed the Republic of Mali on September 20, 1960 , named after the historic kingdom of Mali in medieval Africa, and became its first president. Based on the Unity Party Union soudanais he pursued a socialist policy. Relations with France cooled off considerably during his tenure. In 1962, Keïta abolished the CFA franc in Mali, which severely damaged the country's economy. When its economic policy failed, the French had to be devalued sharply in 1963 and 1967. In 1967 the economy of the republic was in crisis, forcing the Keitas government to sign an economic agreement with France on February 15, 1967. On August 22, 1967, Keita started the Maoist Cultural Revolution . This represented the radicalization of the government's policy, which from now on entrusted more power to the Comité National de Defense de la Revolution (CNDR / National Committee for the Defense of the Revolution) and the militarized part of the party, the people's militias . Their abuse of power and the arrest of opposition members upset large sections of the population and in some ways justified the military coup on November 19, which overthrew the Keita regime but led to twenty-three years of military rule. It wasn't until 1984 that the country returned to the franc zone under its political successors.

In terms of foreign policy, even after the failure of the Mali Federation, Keïta stood up for the unity of the African states and worked closely with the heads of state of Guinea , Ahmed Sékou Touré and Ghana , Kwame Nkrumah . He arranged for Mali to join the equally short-lived Ghana-Guinea-Mali Union (1961/62). In 1963 he participated in the charter of the Organization for African Unity and served successfully as mediator of the OAU in the Algerian-Moroccan border war in 1963 . Keita was also a well-known member of the short-lived, radically pan-African Casablanca group .

Fall

On November 19, 1968, Keïta was overthrown by a military coup under Colonel Moussa Traoré (see coup in Mali 1968 ). After he was ousted, he was sent to the remote town of Kidal in the north of the country for a while. Keïta spent the rest of his life as a prisoner and died on May 16, 1977 in unknown circumstances which led to riots in the country (see Mali riots in 1980 ).

Rehabilitation

After the fall of Traoré in 1991, he was officially rehabilitated a year later by the new President Amadou Toumani Touré . On June 6, 1999, the Memorial Modibo Keïta was inaugurated in Bamako . The Stade Modibo Keïta football stadium , also in Bamako, also bears his name.

Socialism in Mali

After the collapse of the short-lived Mali Federation and Mali's independence as an independent state, the extraordinary congress of the country's only party, the Union Soudanaise-RDA (US-RDA), decided to put Mali on a socialist growth and development course. Thereafter, the entirety of the political effort of the party and the country was concentrated on the economic and political development of the country. Mali's socialist period only lasted from September 1960 to November 1968.

Since the beginning of the socialist agenda, the priority of the political leadership of the US-RDA has been to establish a new Malian society as quickly as possible, which aims at the political, economic, social and cultural empowerment of the Malian people. The political leadership firmly believed that situational socialism, adapted to the specific conditions in Mali, was the most appropriate ideology to achieve this goal. Seydou Badian Kouyaté, leader of the party's ideological left wing and temporary development minister, identified three characteristics of Malian socialism: 1) Malian socialism is based on the peasants and farm workers rather than a non-existent proletariat; 2) a vibrant private sector is called to contribute to national development; 3) respect for Malian religious values ​​and practices.

In the socialist organization of the Malian state, Keita was heavily influenced by Leninist "democratic centralism", which institutionalized communication between the political leadership and the rest of the party, with final decision-making power remaining with the National Political Bureau ( Bureau Politique National) .

Web links

Commons : Modibo Keïta  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Biography at modibokeita.free.fr (French)
• Biography on the official website of the government of Mali (French)
• Memorial Modibo Keïta in Bamako (French)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Guy Martin: African Political Thought . Ed .: Springer. 2012, ISBN 978-1-137-06205-5 , pp. 97 .