The Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), a Francophone Pan-Africanist movement founded in 1946, worked transnationally and trans-territorially to shape the terms of belonging for Black Africans in French Africa and other colonised people in the French overseas territories (les territoires d’outre-mer, TOM) towards liberatory anti/de-colonial political futures. The movement was committed to political organising in the territories of Black French Africa and campaigning in the national assembly of the French Fourth Republic to secure rights not only to uphold the dignity of colonised peoples in the French Union but also, critically, in a reparative justice perspective. In this seminar, I will explore the political significance of campaigning for rights by consolidating citizenship for nationals of French overseas territories. I will examine the importance and implications of the RDA’s founders’ and leaders’ commitment to securing civil rights in the French Union for the liberatory political projects and futures they envisioned and pursued.

Lyn Kouadio is an Ivorian scholar and Beacon Junior Research Fellow in Race and Postcolonial Studies at University College Oxford. Her research interests lie in the international politics of Black African (Francophone) worlds and their associated politics of knowledge production. She is currently working on two book manuscripts. The first builds on her doctoral thesis and examines the politics of Africanising transitional justice, and the second traces the RDA’s political history as a transnational civil rights movement in Black French Africa. Prior to her postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford, Lyn studied for her MPhil and PhD at the University of Cambridge and completed her undergraduate degree at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana.