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CREATING MALI 33colonial administration and the chiefs was enough to ensure the PSP's primacyin Soudanese politics against its only rival, the US-RDA.Mamadou Konaté, another schoolteacher, also from Bafoulabé was key inthe creation of one of the ancestor parties to the US-RDA: the Bloc Soudanais.This party fused in October 1946 with the PDS, created by Pierre Morlet andJacques Fayette, two French communists in colonial service (as schoolteacherand P.T.T. inspector respectively) to form the Union Soudanaise. 22 The Unionthen immediately joined the AOF-wide Rassemblement Démocratique Africain(RDA) at its founding conference in Bamako, in October 1946. Originally initiatedby the Ivoirian leader Houphouët-Boigny to coordinate the actions of theAfrican delegates to the constitutional assembly in 1945, the party now soughtto promote West African interests in the metropolitan Assemblée of the UnionFrançaise. Thus, in October 1946 the Union Soudanaise – RassemblementDémocratique Africain (US-RDA) was born. Some of its main leaders, likeMamadou Konaté and Modibo Keita, had been schoolteachers. Others, such asMadeira Keita, were civil servants in the colonial administration. Again others,far less influential at first but growing in importance after independence, werearmy veterans such as Diby Sillas Diarra. Their political education took place inthe 1930s when, during the rule of the Front Populaire in France, Africanintellectuals were encouraged to organise cultural associations. After the War,so called GECs – Groupes d’Etudes Communistes – were created under theguidance of French communist volunteers, which started the strongly pronouncedMarxist orientation in the later ranks of the US-RDA. 23 Although most ofits active members were intellectuals, and most of its early following came fromthe urban population, the US-RDA profiled itself as a ‘people's party’ or a‘party for the masses’, whose rights they advocated. This position gained it thesuspicion of a colonial administration that, in the heydays of the Cold War, sawthe machinations of the Soviet Union in every strong anti-colonial stance.To gain political prominence over its adversary the PSP, the US-RDA wasfaced with a multiple challenge. It had to enlarge its following in the countryside.To do so, it had to oppose the chiefs who controlled the votes of theirsubjects. Besides this struggle for internal political support, it had to deal withthe colonial administration, which backed the chiefs and their party. Accordingto Snyder, the answer to all these problems was threefold. Through tight organisationand by adherence to strict party discipline, high-ranking memberswere allowed to tour the countryside, where they spoke to the people in alanguage they understood, listened to their complaints, and actually managed to2223Campmas, P. 1978.Snyder, F. 1965.