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CREATING MALI 31sions. 17 More importantly, it neglects the inchoate, ad hoc character of bothdecolonisation in French West Africa and the gradual construction of the postcolonialstates-to-be through the workings of party politics.The attention of historians to the process of decolonisation, and especiallyfor its ambiguities and diversity, has been growing in the past decade. AlthoughTony Chafer stresses the collaboration of French and colonial political elites, henevertheless stresses the difficulty these elites had to form a collective identity.18 Gregory Mann has effectively shown that the African veterans of theFrench colonial wars, often presented as a homogenous interest group dedicatedto the cause of independence, were in fact a very heterogeneous constituencyprone to first defend its own interests, and whose collective political language,if any existed, lay in ties of debt and claims with France that never ceded,despite claims to national belonging and citizenship in either the French Unionor the independent states of the 1960s. 19 Jean-Hervé Jezequel argues that theteachers, and in extenso the French educated West Africans, formed ‘un ensembledéchiré’. 20 He shows that the idea of a common political expressionamong this class, even the notion of this group as a class, is highly problematic.I fully endorse these visions on the heterogeneity of all politically activegroups in AOF, a heterogeneity that finds it expression exactly in the politicallandscape of the late colonial period, which saw the creation of many politicalformations in strong competition with each other. Probably, the vision of thesegroups as homogenous and fighting for the common goal of independence thatwas presented by researchers in the 1960s, has been shaped by the total dominanceof the political field which the largest political formations in AOF hadobtained by the early 1960s in single party states. In many former AOF states,these single parties in power were former RDA branches. In Guinée the PDG-RDA had ruled since 1958. In Côte d’Ivoire the PDCI-RDA ruled since 1960,crushing all potential political opposition. In Mali, the US-RDA dominatedpolitics since 1958 and it would effectively create a single party state in 1960.The common origin of these single parties obscured their politically diversestances, from Marxist to Liberal, and the fact that they had either absorbed orcrushed their opponents without totally smoothing out the political differenceswith these coopted politicians.However, despite the heterogeneity of all politically active groups, thecentrality of French education in the creation of both a new class of partypoliticians, and the transformation of the ship of state by this class, cannot be17181920On the role of merchants and small professionals, see Amselle, J-L. 1977; Kaba, L.1974.Chafer, T. 2002.Mann, G. 2006.Jezequel, J-H. 2005.