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Mali’s mission civilisatrice3In his influential work The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective,Merwin Crawford Young describes the late colonial phase of the 1950s inAfrica as gilded years, in which the colonial governments, for the first timeconfronted with a question of legitimation towards their colonial subjects,created the rudimentary basis of a welfare state – education, public health andother infrastructures – to the benefit of the local population. 1 For the first time,African subjects reaped some benefits from the colonial system. Especially incomparison with later post-independence regimes, so Crawford Young argues,Africans who witnessed that period tend to look back in favour. I will not try torefute or defend the idea that the late colonial period can be justifiably gilded.Although many of the nomad inhabitants of Soudan Français now indeed lookupon the late colonial period as a golden age, the interview I close this chapterwith shows another sentiment toward the French, one of abandonment andtreason. I do however hope to make clear that, in the 1960s, the Kel Tamasheqwere in a situation to compare colonial rule to the new US-RDA regime andthat this comparison then did not fall in favour of the new rulers.As has been discussed in the first chapter, the new regime was essentiallypositive about Mali’s political and economic future. This positivist high modernistbelief in the national capacity stood contrary to social and economicrealities in Northern Mali at the moment of independence. Of course, most ofNorthern Mali’s desert region is very difficult to develop when development isnot based on mining or industry. But as far as the new regime was concerned,the colonial regime simply had done nothing to improve economic or socialconditions in their Saharan territories, where this could have been done. Thiswould certainly change under the new regime, which was determined to bring1Crawford Young, M. 1994: 211.