Abstract This article traces the union career of Abdoulaye Diallo, born in French West Africa in 1917, from the united World Federation of Trade Unions’ (WFTU) 1947 Pan-African Trade Union Conference in Dakar to the founding of the Union Générale des Travailleurs d’Afrique Noire (UGTAN) in 1957. The Dakar conference was a turning point: African delegates, including Diallo, compelled the WFTU to address colonial labour exploitation, thereby unsettling representatives of empire. Following the 1949 split, the WFTU increasingly amplified and promoted leaders from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and Diallo was appointed vice-president. Our analysis of Diallo’s publications reveals his fierce anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. It also shows how, following the split, the WFTU provided a platform for Africans to express their anti-colonial views to a wider audience through newspapers and WFTU publications. His interventions at meetings of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in the early 1950s exposed forced labour and repression to representatives of international organizations while offering unwavering, uncritical support for the Soviet Union. At the WFTU’s Third World Congress in Vienna (1953), Diallo stood out as the leading African delegate, urging workers to organize for liberation. Regionally, he mobilized Francophone West African workers against wage discrimination and colonial coercion, navigating tensions between communist internationalism and emerging nationalist priorities. This study reimagines the WFTU as an anti-colonial arena, shaped by African agency during the early Cold War period.
Harisch et al. (Fri,) studied this question.