In the mid-1970s, a political group made up of members of the West African diaspora in Paris decided to turn their back on factory work,
to become apprentices of French farmers; later founding the coop- erative “Somankidi Coura” in Mali. The Mauritanian director Sidney Sokhona based his feature Safrana ou le droit a la parole (1978) on them. It is a collective work in which the protagonists of the diaspora play themselves in central roles.
Sowing Somankidi Coura. A Generative Archive is a long-term research endeavor by Raphaël Grisey in collaboration with Bouba Touré around the permacultures and archives of Somankidi Coura, a self-organized cooperative along the Senegal river founded by a group of former African migrant workers and activists in France in 1977 after the Sahel drought of 1973. The book assembles texts, voices, images, takes, retakes and research around the Pan-African history of the cooperative of Somankidi Coura, the liberation struggles of migrant workers and farmers in France and West Africa.