with the need for African deputies by the main French political parties, many African leaders believed that the pathway to improved conditions for the colonies lay largely in working with the French government rather than leading revolutionary movements. The result was a marriage of convenience linking the French political parties with newly elected African deputies. While the SFIO had the most institutionalized linkages to African political leaders prior to 1946, many leaders felt that the assimilation pathway which the SFIO had helped write into the constitution of the Fourth Republic did not provide enough for the African colonies. More globally, the issue of independence from colonial rule had become a prominent topic throughout Africa and Asia. Many British and UN Trusteeship colonies in Africa had begun the process towards independence in the mid-1940s. Ghana constantly served as an example giving rise to demands by political movements in French West Africa throughout the 1950s. During the same period, violent anti-colonial struggles reached significant levels in many other French colonies: including the Malagasy Uprising in Madagascar and violence in the First Indochina War in Vietnam. Formation: 1946 Within the context of a realignment between France and the colonies, one of the elected deputies pushing most significantly for increased autonomy of the colonies was Félix Houphouët-Boigny of the Ivory Coast colony. Houphouët-Boigny had spent a brief period as a delegate in the French National Assembly, where he had aligned most closely with the French Communist Party and had taken an active role in trying to get the recall of André-Jean-Gaston Latrille, the French governor of the Ivory Coast. Following the collapse of the National Assembly elected in July 1946 and wanting to establish a pan-African party in the National Assembly, Houphouët-Boigny convinced Lamine Guèye of Senegal (and the most prominent socialist in Africa at the time) to work towards establishing a wider political movement with the goal of autonomy for the colonies of Africa. These two leaders then brought together many of the other African delegates in the National Assembly to sign a manifesto calling for all leaders to come to Bamako (today the capital of Mali) for a meeting to establish a regional political party. In addition to Houphouët-Boigny and Guèye, the leaders who signed this manifesto were: Jean-Félix Tchicaya from French Congo, Sourou-Migan Apithy from French Dahomey, Fily Dabo Sissoko from French Sudan, Yacine Diallo from Guinea, and Gabriel d'Arboussier from