“We cultivate to redistribute”: Struggles for Economic Justice in the 20th century Sahel (book project)

“We Cultivate to Redistribute”: Struggles for Economic Justice in the 20th century Sahel traces the history of movements for economic equity in Burkina Faso, and the Sahel. It demonstrates that social reformers, labor union leaders and rural activists sought to expand the social compact in postcolonial Burkina Faso (Upper-Volta until 1984) by seeking to regulate remittances and social transfer programs.

This project relies on unused archives, correspondence, government statistics and claimant petitions from five different countries in Mooré and French, based on 18 months research in Burkina Faso, Senegal, Ghana and France. It chooses Burkina Faso as an anchor point, because the country is the center of the region’s largest circular migration system.

Burkina Faso became a center for sustained development assistance, which Burkinabè trade unions and social workers warned risked naturalizing certain forms of inequality instead of combatting them. First, the project shows that redistribution became a central battleground for anticolonial demands and postcolonial legitimacy, through the advocacy work of key feminist thinkers, like Célestine Ouezzin Coulibaly and Jacqueline Ki-Zerbo. Second, it traces how politicians and trade union leaders redefined citizenship in a new Voltaic nation to break away from colonial categories in expanding access to social systems (family allowances, rural education) in the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, it explores counter-models to structural adjustment developed under Thomas Sankara that transformed the expectations of state social responsibilities and made the postcolonial state more accessible to many Burkinabè.