The starting point for political movements in French Africa at the end of World War II was not an idealized model of the independent nation-state but a conception of the world they actually lived in as both interconnected and highly unequal, in short a world of empires. This talk is both a reflection on the nature of colonial empire in the 20th century and a study of how one set of African political leaders explored different pathways that led out of empire but not necessarily to the nation-state.