The first Independence leaders of Senegal and Mali faced the formidable task of visually embodying the inspiration that would galvanize their people to build national cultures and economies from the ruins of colonialism. They began their governments in the early 1960s, at a time when John Kennedy's Hollywood presidency and Mao Tse Tung's spectacular Cult of Personality ushered in a new era of dazzling mass mediated political imagery. Without the material resources of these powerful nations, Presidents Léopold Senghor of Senegal and Modibo Keïta of Mali used the twin expressive forms of fashion and photography to inspire enthusiasm and participation in the precarious and ambitious projects of decolonization. An eloquent symbol of both mental and physical colonial subjugation was Western dress. 
Pre-Independence West African writers describe it as inscribing in and on the body a multiple rupture: a rift within the self, separation from one’s community, and loss of continuity with the ancestors. Rather than abandon Western dress, Independence leaders changed its meaning as they incorporated it into a fluid process of image construction. In this process, they engaged West African photographers to transform the colonial practice of political photo reportage. In serial photos of official ceremonies, state visits, and development campaigns, the Western suit becomes an element in a larger signifying network that includes boubous, caftans, and a creative array of bush suit styles. In this network of dress, Independence leaders are represented as harmoniously embodying the disparate concepts of cosmopolitanism, continuity with unbroken tradition, revolution, a modern future, fidelity to ancestors, national culture, pan-African culture, and their own stature as avatars of their people’s destiny. The fashions that contributed to building heroic images depended not so much on a hybrid outfit, as on an ability to glide effortlessly and gracefully among radically different styles and cultural vocabularies of dress. Mastering this sartorial circuit as a whole is all the more remarkable – and all the more ambiguous -- during a period when Western leaders rigidly conformed to a very limited wardrobe. This paper focuses especially on the images of Modibo Keïta and Léopold Sedar Senghor, along with Senegalese Regional Governor Ibrahima Faye and Caroline Faye Diop, first woman parliamentarian and first woman minister of Senegal.