For Malians, the French-led intervention has been an emotional roller-coaster. At times critical of their former colonizer in the past, many are now cheering French troops.
A French soldier secures a perimeter on the outskirts of Diabaly, Mali, some 320 miles north of the capital Bamako Monday Jan. 21. French and Malian troops were in the city whose capture by radical Islamists prompted the French military intervention.
Jerome Delay/AP
EnlargeThe first casualty named in the two-week old fight to liberate northern Mali from Islamists militants was a Frenchman. Damien Boiteux, a lieutenant, was reported killed while flying his helicopter into battle near the city of Konna.
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For Younouss Dicko, a Malian political party leader, the story of Lt. Boiteux inspires a mix of sorrow, gratitude ??and a certain watchfulness.
?It?s valorous of France to come aid Mali,? he says. ?But the French know there are limits. I think that with friendship and brotherhood, they won?t stay longer than necessary or interfere too much in our internal affairs.?
France never sought this battle. After decades of meddling in Africa, it says it wants former colonies to look after themselves. For Malians, French-led intervention has been an emotional roller-coaster. At times critical of their former colonizer in the past, many are now cheering French troops.
The drama is playing out against a backdrop of colonial history and human ties that still link French and Malian society ??sometimes complicated by old wounds, sometimes transcending them. For now, smiles abound. But a misstep by Paris could swiftly sour things.
?There?s never been a moment in French-Malian relations when people have supported France this much,? says Gregory Mann, an associate history professor and Mali specialist at Columbia University in New York.???But France could make just one or two mistakes, and lose goodwill quickly.?
French Sudan
France first came to Mali amid the 19th-century Scramble for Africa, as European powers gobbled up the continent in a race to build empires and extract resources. By mid-century, French colonialists in Senegal were eyeing the territory that would eventually become modern Mali.
In the words of Louis Faidherbe, a colonial administrator and an architect of France?s African empire, writing in 1863, ?if?you use the Senegal River to gain a route to the Sudan and the banks of the Niger, you will create a French colony that will count among the most beautiful in the world.?
It was in that colony, called French Sudan but is present-day Mali, that Mr. Dicko grew up. His family lived in Zaman, a town east of Timbuktu, and as a boy he was sent to the French school in nearby city of Gourma Rharous. In what he regards as a tactful nod to local sensibilities, French authorities brought in Quranic scholars to provide Islamic study.
Dicko earned a doctorate at the University of Montpellier, in France, and taught quantum mechanics at the University of Bamako. Today he heads the Rally for Development and Solidarity party, as well as COPAM, a coalition of parties and other groups critical of Mali?s current government.
?I don?t have any personal grievances from colonization, save that it?s a form of subjugation,? he says. ?Even if you don?t register a precise act against you, you know that you have a master. You have a boss. And that hurts.?
Poor, but free
After the Second World War, an exhausted France began shedding colonies. With some exceptions ??notably Algeria, which France fought a bloody and unsuccessful war to retain ? French Africa was disassembled in orderly fashion. Mali gained independence in 1960.
One day in 1972, Dicko went home on vacation from teaching in Bamako, and overheard a group of men debating the merits of independence. Some said Mali had become a poorer, hungrier place under its strongman presidents, Modibo Keita and Moussa Traour?.
?Then one of the men leapt up and said, ?You like slavery? Me, today I?m hungry and poor, but I?m free?,? recalls Dicko.
Between them, Mr. Keita and Mr. Traour? ? who toppled his predecessor ??ran Mali until 1991, when Traour? was himself overthrown in a coup that established democracy and free elections. Along the way, the country has tended to forge an independent path from its former colonizer.
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