ASC-075287668-2887-01

CREATING MALI 43One problem in the debates about administrative unification was how todelimit the French Sahara. 52 To the west, north and east, this problem was easilysolved. The French Sahara started in the west at the border with the SpanishSahara. It ended to the north at the Moroccan border and the non-SaharanAlgerian Départements and in the east at the border between Chad and theRepublic of Sudan. Problems arose in the South. First, the leaders of Chad,Niger and Soudan Français did not relish the prospect of losing part of theirfuture national territory, and the potential mineral riches it might conceal. TheSoudanese leaders in particular fiercely opposed any territorial and politicalreorganisation that could be detrimental to their national territory.A second problem was on what criteria the border between Sahara and Sahelshould be drawn. On one side of the argument, the supporters of the Saharanunification believed the Sahara ended where the Soudan started. Here Soudanmeant the original Arabic Bilâd as-Sudân – the ‘Land of the Blacks’. Both theBidân and the Kel Tamasheq were seen as racially ‘white’. Accordingly, it wasfelt that those areas inhabited by the Bidân and the Kel Tamasheq were Saharan,and areas inhabited by the black population were not. The French oppositionto territorial restructuring countered this argument. They stated that manyBidân and Kel Tamasheq were black, that the majority of the Kel Tamasheqlived as far south as the Niger Bend and Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), whichcould hardly be called Saharan, and that these populations were socially andeconomically interwoven with the populations surrounding them. Therefore, theidea of creating a new administratively unified Saharan territory including theAOF parts of the Sahara would end in chaos and problems for the nomad populations.Eventually, the project to unify the Sahara was put in the trusted hands of theIvorian RDA leader and French Minister of State Felix Houphouët-Boigny, whomanaged to remove all the political angles. His focus was on the creation of anOrganisation Commune des Régions Sahariennes (OCRS), in which no mentionwas made of any political or territorial reorganisation, or of the delimiting ofSaharan borders. All Boigny proposed to do was to create an umbrella structureto coordinate economic and social developments in the Sahara, regardless ofterritory or state. Nevertheless, he had to defend his project against the Soudaneseleaders who still looked suspiciously on the OCRS as a French plan toannex their Saharan territory. Even in the final debates on Houphouët-Boigny's52Based on: Affaires politiques, Sahara, administration générale 1947-1958. ANSOM– 1affpol/2207/1; Affaires politiques, Sahara, administration générale, 1951-1958.OCRS, correspondance, débats, études (militaire, sociale linguistique etc...).ANSOM – 1affpol/2208/1, under embargo until 2019.