Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 164
July 20, 2020
The mark of the former colonizer
Faidherbe���s statue in Saint-Louis in September 2017, via the Senegalese collective against the celebration of Faidherbe.
Since the assassination of George Floyd, statues celebrating slave-traders, colonialists and segregationists have been toppled all over the world. The Faidherbe Must Fall campaign has been calling for the removal of French colonial general Louis Faidherbe���s statues in Senegal and France. In this interview, Khadim Ndiaye (researcher in history and member of the Senegalese collective against the celebration of Faidherbe) and Salian Sylla, PhD, (an activist at Survie and the Faidherbe Must Fall collective) argue for the emancipation of public spaces from the glorification of a hideous past.
Florian Bobin
Khadim Ndiaye, in your recent article, ���The disturbing presence of the statue of Faidherbe in Saint-Louis,��� you write: ���Faidherbe laid the ideological foundations for the French occupation of Senegal and West Africa. He was the great actor in this colonial enterprise that ushered in an era of oppression and subjugation.��� What was Louis Faidherbe���s role in the French colonization of Africa?
Khadim Ndiaye
Faidherbe was a French colonial soldier sent to Guadeloupe and then to Algeria, where Marshal Thomas Bugeaud committed the worst atrocities, burning entire villages and killing resistance fighters, in defiance of all humanitarian rules. It was in Algeria that Faidherbe was introduced to violent repressive methods. He arrived in Senegal, where he was appointed battalion commander and then governor of the colony at the end of 1854. One of Faidherbe���s first actions was to put erudition at the service of colonial conquest. Knowledge of the men and the country was necessary to succeed in his mission. Faidherbe is also considered to be the ���true founder of the French Africanist school.��� History, ethnology, anthropology, linguistics, and topography were the instruments at the service of hegemony. This mass of knowledge also conveyed the worst racist ideas maintained at the time by the so-called scholars of the Paris School of Anthropology, of which Faidherbe was a correspondent. This is what President Senghor did not understand when he said that Faidherbe was a friend of the Senegalese, because he had got to know them and made himself Senegalese with the Senegalese. Of course, Faidherbe did not want to get to know them just to know them; he wanted to understand their living environment, habits, and customs to better subjugate the people.
Faidherbe organized the military conquest of the territory and established the principle of cultural assimilation. It was he who created the famous Hostage School in Saint-Louis where the sons of village chiefs and notables, brought back from tours in the interior of the country, were forcibly enrolled and ���civilized��� to the core. He created the corps of ���Senegalese tirailleurs��� in 1857, motivated mainly by racist ideas. Blacks make good soldiers, he said in 1859, ���because they don���t appreciate danger and have very poorly developed nervous systems.��� Faidherbe advocated union with indigenous women. Such a union, made without priests and with its share of illegitimate children, also served the colonial cause by re-motivating the soldiers who had come from the metropole and were threatened by loneliness and depression. Faidherbe made young Diokounda Sidib��, a 15-year-old girl, his ���country wife.��� Pinet-Laprade, his right-hand man, took Marie Peulh, whom he presented in France as his maid.
For Faidherbe and his collaborators, any action must serve the colonial cause. Nothing was done to please the people. And it was by the force of bayonets and gunboats that ���pacification��� was carried out by Faidherbe and his successors. Thousands of people were killed, and dozens of villages burned down. Faidherbe himself took part in several military expeditions. This ���pacification��� is a ���tranquility��� and a ���peace��� obtained at the price of a ferocious military conquest. It was the condition for the establishment of the trading economy, forced labor, colonial education, cultural assimilation, and the placing of the colony in dependence.
Florian Bobin
Until the end of the 1970s, a statue of Faidherbe still stood in Dakar���s presidential palace. His statue in Saint-Louis stands on a square that still bears his name, where French President Emmanuel Macron chose to deliver his speech during his official visit to Senegal in 2018. Already in 1978, director Sembene Ousmane wrote to President Senghor:
Is it not a provocation, an offence, an attack on the moral dignity of our national history to sing the Lat Joor anthem under the pedestal of Faidherbe���s statue? Why, since we have been independent for years in Saint-Louis, Kaolack, Thi��s, Ziguinchor, Rufisque, Dakar, etc., do our streets, our arteries, our boulevards, our avenues, our squares still bear the names of old and new colonialists?
After heavy rains in September 2017, Faidherbe���s statue in Saint-Louis fell, but the authorities sharply put it back up. What explains, to this day, this deep attachment to Faidherbe���s figure in Senegal?
Khadim Ndiaye
There is an attachment to Faidherbe because he was presented by colonial propaganda as a savior. For example, in Jaunet and Barry���s 1949 history textbook for schoolchildren in French West-Africa, Faidherbe is portrayed as an honest and upright man who loved to protect the weak, the poor, and who punished the oppressors. There are also, among the Senegalese authorities, some who presented him as a ���friend.��� For example, Senghor used to say: ���If I speak of Faidherbe, it is with the highest esteem, even friendship, because he got to know us.��� In an interview in 1981 with French diplomat Pierre Boisdeffre, who was passing through Senegal, Senghor insisted on the conqueror���s sympathy: ���Faidherbe became a Negro with the Negroes, as Father Liberman would later recommend. He thus became Senegalese with the Senegalese by studying the languages and civilizations of Senegal.���
The statue of Faidherbe, the bridge of Ndar and the streets that bear his name, reflect a certain ���Faidherbe myth��� that has long existed in Senegal. Some even place him in their filiation. One speaks of ���Maam Faidherbe��� (the Faidherbe ancestor). They have made him a kind of tutelary genius that must be commended at every entrance or exit of the city of Saint-Louis. But this myth is now shattered. Thanks to excellent awareness-raising work on social media, young people are aware of the negative impact of his actions. And they can���t believe it when they discover that the native of Lille has hands stained with the blood of their ancestors.
Florian Bobin
In the aforementioned letter, Sembene Ousmane goes on to ask: ���Has our country not given women and men who deserve the honor of occupying the pediments of our high schools, colleges, theatres, universities, streets and avenues, etc.?��� In fact, the Faidherbe High School of Saint-Louis was renamed Cheikh Omar Foutiyou Tall High School in 1984. You explain that ���Faidherbe���s statue in Saint-Louis means, for all of Senegal���s students, the torturer honored and glorified. Toppling such a statue is, therefore, to free oneself from the coloniality of the being and space.��� Many cities in Senegal, and more broadly in Africa, still bear the marks of glorification of the former colonizer. These street names, schools, avenues, or statues generally bear no clear inscription of the role of such characters in the history of the country. To ���free ourselves from the coloniality of the being and space,��� who should be celebrated in the public space in Senegal, in place of figures like Faidherbe?
Khadim Ndiaye
Sembene Ousmane is right, in my opinion. I think it���s important to celebrate the memory of the resistance. That was Algeria���s option after independence. The people of that country were terrified of someone whom Faidherbe considered to be his master. This is the opinion of the historian Roger Pasquier, who studied Faidherbe���s Algerian influence on the conquest of Senegal. Bugeaud killed thousands of Algerians and burned many villages. He is the initiator of the burning of Algerian resistance fighters. His statue, like that of Faidherbe in Senegal, was erected in Algiers by the colonizers to immortalize the memory of the conquest. After independence, the Algerians removed the statue and, instead, installed a statue of Emir Abdel Kader with the sword raised as a sign of resistance. The Algerians give their point of view on history with this demonstration, which serves to inculcate the memory of the resistance.
In Senegal, we cannot continue to give the point of view of the oppressors. Moreover, the Gor��e City Council, in response to citizen demand, understood what was at stake when deciding to rename the ���Europe Square��� as the ���Liberty and Human Dignity Square.��� It is important to respect the memory of the oppressed.
The colonizers did not erect the statue of Faidherbe in 1887 by chance. It was when the power of the gunboats defeated all the resistance fighters that Faidherbe���s statue was erected in the middle of Saint-Louis as a sign of rejoicing. Lat Dior was assassinated in 1886, and the statue was inaugurated on March 20, 1887, to celebrate the victory over the resistance fighters; to show the greatness of the metropole. This colonial statue is therefore a symbol. It is an attribute of domination. It is the consecration of a murderous ideology based on supremacy. For someone whose ancestors lived through the misdeeds of military conquest and the torments of the Code of the Indigenate, it is good to honor historical figures who reinvigorate lost pride and esteem. It is important to make decisive choices that give meaning to the present and the future when the time comes to celebrate historical figures in a former colony.
Florian Bobin
Khadim Ndiaye, thank you very much. At the call of the Faidherbe Must Fall collective, 200 people mobilized on June 20 in front of the Faidherbe monument in Lille to demand its removal. Salian Sylla, what does the figure of Louis Faidherbe represent to you?
Salian Sylla
At the time, in 2018, when this campaign was launched, it was to draw attention to the fact that Faidherbe occupied a special place in the public space in Lille. The city of Lille, which is twinned with the city of Saint-Louis, is a city where the figure of Faidherbe can be found in many aspects. There is a high school that bears his name, a very large avenue that goes to the very heart of the city, the Gunnery Museum where you have a number of figures, usually military men, who are on display and where Faidherbe occupies a central place. In Lille, you also have a site that is quite central, Republic Square, which is not an ordinary place in the collective memory in France. In front of this square, is a huge equestrian statue of Faidherbe. You can���t come to Lille without being confronted with this character.
At the time, there were many French personalities who distinguished themselves for their support to French colonialism. Jules Ferry, who marked the history of France having established compulsory schooling, notably declared that ���colonization was a daughter of the industrial revolution��� and that ���the superior races had the duty to civilize the inferior races.��� It was indeed a commercial project put forward to annex other territories and convert them to their way of life and economic system. It represents a whole aggregation of illustrated, documented, written thoughts throughout the years, which was very decisive in the perception that the French had of Africans at the time. There was also Joseph Gallieni, who distinguished himself in the massacres in Madagascar; and Hubert Lyautey, who was also Gallieni���s discipline.
Thomas Bugeaud, the invader of Algeria, declared that ���the aim is not to run after the Arabs, which is useless; it is to prevent the Arabs from sowing, harvesting, grazing, enjoying their fields. Go every year and burn their crops, or exterminate every last one of them.��� Detached in Algeria under his leadership at the beginning of his career in 1844, Faidherbe was a great admirer of Bugeaud. Having fought in Algeria, Faidherbe came to Senegal in the 1850s and did much of the same. ���You see a war of extermination, and unfortunately, it is impossible to do otherwise,��� he said when he was in Algeria, ���we are reduced to saying: one Arab killed is two fewer Frenchmen killed.��� So, there is a historical continuity in the work of these generals, which later earned them the tributes and honors of France, in defiance of all the massacres they committed in Africa.
Why the Faidherbe Must Fall campaign? There are several events that have taken place over the years. In 2015, in cities like Pretoria and Johannesburg, people continued to celebrate figures like Cecil Rhodes, the father of British colonization in South Africa, and the Rhodes Must Fall campaign decided to put an end to that and make his statues disappear in the country. Leopold II, also considered a great character, who did many things in terms of infrastructure in Belgium, has his dark, gloomy side; he was a bloodthirsty king. The massacres in Congo constitute one of the greatest genocides in Africa: we are talking about ten million people who lost their lives. It was in 2017 that statues of Leopold II were dismantled and toppled in Belgium. Also, in 2017, we have Charlottesville, USA, where there was a demonstration by right-wing extremists who refused to allow the statue of General Robert Lee, who led the Confederate troops during the Civil War, to be toppled by the town council. There was a counter-demonstration led by antifascists, which resulted in the tragic death of a lady, crushed by a far-right extremist who [drove a car] into the crowd.
It was during this period in 2018���there is a historical continuity���that the municipality of Berlin decided to rename a series of streets that bore the names of several personalities who distinguished themselves during German colonization in Africa. Namibia, in particular, resisted German colonization between 1904 and 1908, which led to what has been named ���the first genocide of the 20th century,��� i.e. the extermination of the Hereros. This Berlin municipality decided to give these streets the names of African resistance fighters, such as Rudolf Manga Bell and Anna Mungunda. It was the first time that, symbolically, a city decided to rename not to give the names of those who massacred African populations, but of those who resisted.
We get to 2020, with the assassination of George Floyd in the United States, which sparked chain reactions all over the world. This is what has revived Faidherbe Must Fall. Today, what we are told when we talk about Faidherbe is that: ���He is someone who defended Lille when the Prussians invaded us in 1870. While the whole of France was on its knees, he managed to stand up to them.��� That may be true. Except that Faidherbe���s resistance during this period lasted only three months, whereas what I���m telling you about him is a whole career during which he massacred without remorse, killed, exterminated, pillaged, and imposed an economic system through peanut cultivation, central to the colonizing project. In Africa, the specialization of the colonies (Senegal with groundnuts, what would become Ivory Coast with cocoa) and the gradual disappearance of food crops still pose a problem today because we have an economic system based on a model that was oriented towards the metropole. We still have the consequences of this phenomenon, i.e. an extraverted economy geared towards outside needs rather than self-sufficiency to meet local demand.
Florian Bobin
On several occasions already, the Faidherbe Must Fall collective has questioned the authorities about the Faidherbe statue in Lille. For the bicentenary of his birth, the city council decided to restore the monument erected in his memory. In an open letter to Mayor Martine Aubry in 2018, you called for ���the removal of the statue of Louis Faidherbe and all symbols glorifying colonialism from public spaces in Lille.��� Elsewhere in France, avenues, streets, and subway stations still celebrate him. In your opinion, what explains this reluctance to discuss the permanence of symbols honoring slave traders and colonialists in the public space, both in Lille and in the rest of France?
Salian Sylla
We had, at the time, written an open letter to Martine Aubry. We had asked for a reflection on the presence in Lille of figures who represent a racist and xenophobic vision of the world. Unfortunately, we did not find any interlocutor. That goes to show the ambiguity that part of the left in France has with regard to colonialism. And it���s a shame because if we are still, in 2020, talking about this subject, it���s because in 2018 we weren���t heard. We are still in a situation where the left, which has always been, at least in its principles, on the side of the dominated, has not lived up to its historical role.
It is difficult to establish a dialogue in France in 2020 on certain issues because, as soon as we start talking about colonization, we will immediately come to be the ���people who are enemies of France.��� We are perceived that way. When we were in the street demonstrating to demand that the local authorities remove the equestrian statue of Faidherbe, who was there against us? Right-wing demonstrators, protected by the police. That���s what the debate in France is all about; when you talk about certain subjects, they caricature you and throw stones at you.
Many people have been fighting for a while, particularly against police violence, against unequal policies, for social justice, and all these people have become, overnight, ���identitarians.��� They are the ones who have become the racists in the end! That���s the irony in France. As long as you���re talking about George Floyd, Michael Brown, police violence taking place in the United States; of course, everyone agrees in France; of course, this phenomenon exists in the United States; of course, the American system is deeply, systemically racist! But as soon as we start saying: ���Well, now, let���s sit down and look at things in France, what���s happening today,��� when we talk about Adama Traor��, and we start listing, we are told: ���Ah no no no, the French police is not racist!���
It is a matter of questioning a system that allows people to die. The colonial issue has not been settled. People have been taught to construct a whole imaginary, a whole bunch of representations about the descendants of those from the former colonies in Africa. As long as historical issues are not settled, as long as they are denied, as long as we keep avoiding them, it���s not going to solve the problem. You can���t bring the temperature down just by breaking the thermometer. That is the dynamic we are in today. As soon as questions are raised, people try to caricature, to discredit by using certain words: separatism, communitarianism, anti-white racism.
This Republic has always toppled, named, unnamed, baptized, debaptized; it has always been done. The proof is that one of Lille���s main arteries was called, a few years ago, Paris Road and now Pierre Mauroy Road, the city���s former socialist mayor. To say that we can���t get rid of Faidherbe���s statue is a lie. Because, until 1976, we had the statue of Napoleon III in the heart of the city; this statue was removed and is now in the Museum of Fine Arts. In 1945, the statue of General Oscar de N��grier, another colonizer, was taken down and mysteriously disappeared from the public space. And these are not the only examples.
Florian Bobin
On June 22, the Faidherbe Must Fall collective sent an open letter to the candidates of the Lille municipal election held on June 28. Recalling that ���the debate on the celebration of figures related to slavery, colonialism or segregationism has resurfaced in many countries,��� you write, ���for many demonstrators, including us, the racism (and particularly negrophobia) that runs through Western nations has its origins in the criminal history of the slave trade and colonial domination.��� According to you, who should be celebrated in the public space in France, in place of figures like Faidherbe?
Salian Sylla
This year, I learned from my daughter, who is in middle school, that the city of Lille is organizing a civic week, which consists of sending children to visit some historical sites that are part of its heritage to help them discover its history and ���heroes.��� And these ���heroes��� are, very often, soldiers. You have a guide who explains that Faidherbe was a great man, who built Senegal, built roads, built hospitals, dug a deep-water port, modernized Senegal and that all Senegalese children are grateful to him today. She reacted by telling one of her friends that she thought it was false. You can imagine; a 9-year-old girl questioning the words of an adult supposed to be a fine connoisseur of Faidherbe���s history. It was all the more shocking because I had been in the Faidherbe Must Fall campaign in 2018, and at the end of 2019, it came back to me through my daughter to send me the image of Faidherbe as a benefactor to Senegal. It was unbearable for me.
So, we programmed a visit to this Gunnery Museum. Even with the presence of a Black man, this guide reiterated the same words, saying that Faidherbe was a heroic figure, that he had built Senegal through roads and hospitals. We gave him our position, even if we found it difficult to get him to agree to hear us out. He���s in this same narrative; for years, he���s been doing just that, nobody has ever questioned his version of history.
That���s what we���re still presenting in France in 2020 to children who will certainly never, like my daughter, have the opportunity to have someone else say ���no, it���s not true,��� to have someone who is involved in a campaign to make such a sinister figure disappear from the public space, to have another perception of a part of France���s history in relation to its former colonies. Can you imagine the number of children who have gone through this, who have listened, who have drunk in the words of this gentleman, who have considered that Faidherbe was someone who really did good for the history of Lille, and left the museum enraptured by the fact that they heard he was a hero?
That���s why, measures like ���we���re going to sort it out, put up an explanatory plaque��� are minor for me. It is better to take our responsibility to entrust a problematic statue to museums that can take care of it, and, with historians, anchor it in a broader history to allow museum visitors to better understand its ins and outs. It is better to place it in a context where people will be able to analyze it and put it into context. As long as I see this equestrian statue representing women underneath, which Faidherbe seems to be despising with his eyes, celebrating the power of a heroized man, Martine Aubry will be able to say whatever she wants. Still, for me, she will always be at odds with the principles she claims to defend. And unfortunately, her environmentalist opponents aren���t doing any better.
A city that decides to give someone���s name to a street, an avenue, a statue is simply a political act. And only a political act can deal with it. This is what we have been working on for the past few years through this unprecedented mobilization to ensure that the darkest part of Faidherbe���s legacy, which remains unknown, is accessible to everyone.
The marks of the former colonizer
Faidherbe���s statue in Saint-Louis in September 2017, via the Senegalese collective against the celebration of Faidherbe.
Since the assassination of George Floyd, statues celebrating slave-traders, colonialists and segregationists have been toppled all over the world. The Faidherbe Must Fall campaign has been calling for the removal of French colonial general Louis Faidherbe���s statues in Senegal and France. In this interview, Khadim Ndiaye (researcher in history and member of the Senegalese collective against the celebration of Faidherbe) and Salian Sylla, PhD, (an activist at Survie and the Faidherbe Must Fall collective) argue for the emancipation of public spaces from the glorification of a hideous past.
Florian Bobin
Khadim Ndiaye, in your recent article, ���The disturbing presence of the statue of Faidherbe in Saint-Louis,��� you write: ���Faidherbe laid the ideological foundations for the French occupation of Senegal and West Africa. He was the great actor in this colonial enterprise that ushered in an era of oppression and subjugation.��� What was Louis Faidherbe���s role in the French colonization of Africa?
Khadim Ndiaye
Faidherbe was a French colonial soldier sent to Guadeloupe and then to Algeria, where Marshal Thomas Bugeaud committed the worst atrocities, burning entire villages and killing resistance fighters, in defiance of all humanitarian rules. It was in Algeria that Faidherbe was introduced to violent repressive methods. He arrived in Senegal, where he was appointed battalion commander and then governor of the colony at the end of 1854. One of Faidherbe���s first actions was to put erudition at the service of colonial conquest. Knowledge of the men and the country was necessary to succeed in his mission. Faidherbe is also considered to be the ���true founder of the French Africanist school.��� History, ethnology, anthropology, linguistics, and topography were the instruments at the service of hegemony. This mass of knowledge also conveyed the worst racist ideas maintained at the time by the so-called scholars of the Paris School of Anthropology, of which Faidherbe was a correspondent. This is what President Senghor did not understand when he said that Faidherbe was a friend of the Senegalese, because he had got to know them and made himself Senegalese with the Senegalese. Of course, Faidherbe did not want to get to know them just to know them; he wanted to understand their living environment, habits, and customs to better subjugate the people.
Faidherbe organized the military conquest of the territory and established the principle of cultural assimilation. It was he who created the famous Hostage School in Saint-Louis where the sons of village chiefs and notables, brought back from tours in the interior of the country, were forcibly enrolled and ���civilized��� to the core. He created the corps of ���Senegalese tirailleurs��� in 1857, motivated mainly by racist ideas. Blacks make good soldiers, he said in 1859, ���because they don���t appreciate danger and have very poorly developed nervous systems.��� Faidherbe advocated union with indigenous women. Such a union, made without priests and with its share of illegitimate children, also served the colonial cause by re-motivating the soldiers who had come from the metropole and were threatened by loneliness and depression. Faidherbe made young Diokounda Sidib��, a 15-year-old girl, his ���country wife.��� Pinet-Laprade, his right-hand man, took Marie Peulh, whom he presented in France as his maid.
For Faidherbe and his collaborators, any action must serve the colonial cause. Nothing was done to please the people. And it was by the force of bayonets and gunboats that ���pacification��� was carried out by Faidherbe and his successors. Thousands of people were killed, and dozens of villages burned down. Faidherbe himself took part in several military expeditions. This ���pacification��� is a ���tranquility��� and a ���peace��� obtained at the price of a ferocious military conquest. It was the condition for the establishment of the trading economy, forced labor, colonial education, cultural assimilation, and the placing of the colony in dependence.
Florian Bobin
Until the end of the 1970s, a statue of Faidherbe still stood in Dakar���s presidential palace. His statue in Saint-Louis stands on a square that still bears his name, where French President Emmanuel Macron chose to deliver his speech during his official visit to Senegal in 2018. Already in 1978, director Sembene Ousmane wrote to President Senghor:
Is it not a provocation, an offence, an attack on the moral dignity of our national history to sing the Lat Joor anthem under the pedestal of Faidherbe���s statue? Why, since we have been independent for years in Saint-Louis, Kaolack, Thi��s, Ziguinchor, Rufisque, Dakar, etc., do our streets, our arteries, our boulevards, our avenues, our squares still bear the names of old and new colonialists?
After heavy rains in September 2017, Faidherbe���s statue in Saint-Louis fell, but the authorities sharply put it back up. What explains, to this day, this deep attachment to Faidherbe���s figure in Senegal?
Khadim Ndiaye
There is an attachment to Faidherbe because he was presented by colonial propaganda as a savior. For example, in Jaunet and Barry���s 1949 history textbook for schoolchildren in French West-Africa, Faidherbe is portrayed as an honest and upright man who loved to protect the weak, the poor, and who punished the oppressors. There are also, among the Senegalese authorities, some who presented him as a ���friend.��� For example, Senghor used to say: ���If I speak of Faidherbe, it is with the highest esteem, even friendship, because he got to know us.��� In an interview in 1981 with French diplomat Pierre Boisdeffre, who was passing through Senegal, Senghor insisted on the conqueror���s sympathy: ���Faidherbe became a Negro with the Negroes, as Father Liberman would later recommend. He thus became Senegalese with the Senegalese by studying the languages and civilizations of Senegal.���
The statue of Faidherbe, the bridge of Ndar and the streets that bear his name, reflect a certain ���Faidherbe myth��� that has long existed in Senegal. Some even place him in their filiation. One speaks of ���Maam Faidherbe��� (the Faidherbe ancestor). They have made him a kind of tutelary genius that must be commended at every entrance or exit of the city of Saint-Louis. But this myth is now shattered. Thanks to excellent awareness-raising work on social media, young people are aware of the negative impact of his actions. And they can���t believe it when they discover that the native of Lille has hands stained with the blood of their ancestors.
Florian Bobin
In the aforementioned letter, Sembene Ousmane goes on to ask: ���Has our country not given women and men who deserve the honor of occupying the pediments of our high schools, colleges, theatres, universities, streets and avenues, etc.?��� In fact, the Faidherbe High School of Saint-Louis was renamed Cheikh Omar Foutiyou Tall High School in 1984. You explain that ���Faidherbe���s statue in Saint-Louis means, for all of Senegal���s students, the torturer honored and glorified. Toppling such a statue is, therefore, to free oneself from the coloniality of the being and space.��� Many cities in Senegal, and more broadly in Africa, still bear the marks of glorification of the former colonizer. These street names, schools, avenues, or statues generally bear no clear inscription of the role of such characters in the history of the country. To ���free ourselves from the coloniality of the being and space,��� who should be celebrated in the public space in Senegal, in place of figures like Faidherbe?
Khadim Ndiaye
Sembene Ousmane is right, in my opinion. I think it���s important to celebrate the memory of the resistance. That was Algeria���s option after independence. The people of that country were terrified of someone whom Faidherbe considered to be his master. This is the opinion of the historian Roger Pasquier, who studied Faidherbe���s Algerian influence on the conquest of Senegal. Bugeaud killed thousands of Algerians and burned many villages. He is the initiator of the burning of Algerian resistance fighters. His statue, like that of Faidherbe in Senegal, was erected in Algiers by the colonizers to immortalize the memory of the conquest. After independence, the Algerians removed the statue and, instead, installed a statue of Emir Abdel Kader with the sword raised as a sign of resistance. The Algerians give their point of view on history with this demonstration, which serves to inculcate the memory of the resistance.
In Senegal, we cannot continue to give the point of view of the oppressors. Moreover, the Gor��e City Council, in response to citizen demand, understood what was at stake when deciding to rename the ���Europe Square��� as the ���Liberty and Human Dignity Square.��� It is important to respect the memory of the oppressed.
The colonizers did not erect the statue of Faidherbe in 1887 by chance. It was when the power of the gunboats defeated all the resistance fighters that Faidherbe���s statue was erected in the middle of Saint-Louis as a sign of rejoicing. Lat Dior was assassinated in 1886, and the statue was inaugurated on March 20, 1887, to celebrate the victory over the resistance fighters; to show the greatness of the metropole. This colonial statue is therefore a symbol. It is an attribute of domination. It is the consecration of a murderous ideology based on supremacy. For someone whose ancestors lived through the misdeeds of military conquest and the torments of the Code of the Indigenate, it is good to honor historical figures who reinvigorate lost pride and esteem. It is important to make decisive choices that give meaning to the present and the future when the time comes to celebrate historical figures in a former colony.
Florian Bobin
Khadim Ndiaye, thank you very much. At the call of the Faidherbe Must Fall collective, 200 people mobilized on June 20 in front of the Faidherbe monument in Lille to demand its removal. Salian Sylla, what does the figure of Louis Faidherbe represent to you?
Salian Sylla
At the time, in 2018, when this campaign was launched, it was to draw attention to the fact that Faidherbe occupied a special place in the public space in Lille. The city of Lille, which is twinned with the city of Saint-Louis, is a city where the figure of Faidherbe can be found in many aspects. There is a high school that bears his name, a very large avenue that goes to the very heart of the city, the Gunnery Museum where you have a number of figures, usually military men, who are on display and where Faidherbe occupies a central place. In Lille, you also have a site that is quite central, Republic Square, which is not an ordinary place in the collective memory in France. In front of this square, is a huge equestrian statue of Faidherbe. You can���t come to Lille without being confronted with this character.
At the time, there were many French personalities who distinguished themselves for their support to French colonialism. Jules Ferry, who marked the history of France having established compulsory schooling, notably declared that ���colonization was a daughter of the industrial revolution��� and that ���the superior races had the duty to civilize the inferior races.��� It was indeed a commercial project put forward to annex other territories and convert them to their way of life and economic system. It represents a whole aggregation of illustrated, documented, written thoughts throughout the years, which was very decisive in the perception that the French had of Africans at the time. There was also Joseph Gallieni, who distinguished himself in the massacres in Madagascar; and Hubert Lyautey, who was also Gallieni���s discipline.
Thomas Bugeaud, the invader of Algeria, declared that ���the aim is not to run after the Arabs, which is useless; it is to prevent the Arabs from sowing, harvesting, grazing, enjoying their fields. Go every year and burn their crops, or exterminate every last one of them.��� Detached in Algeria under his leadership at the beginning of his career in 1844, Faidherbe was a great admirer of Bugeaud. Having fought in Algeria, Faidherbe came to Senegal in the 1850s and did much of the same. ���You see a war of extermination, and unfortunately, it is impossible to do otherwise,��� he said when he was in Algeria, ���we are reduced to saying: one Arab killed is two fewer Frenchmen killed.��� So, there is a historical continuity in the work of these generals, which later earned them the tributes and honors of France, in defiance of all the massacres they committed in Africa.
Why the Faidherbe Must Fall campaign? There are several events that have taken place over the years. In 2015, in cities like Pretoria and Johannesburg, people continued to celebrate figures like Cecil Rhodes, the father of British colonization in South Africa, and the Rhodes Must Fall campaign decided to put an end to that and make his statues disappear in the country. Leopold II, also considered a great character, who did many things in terms of infrastructure in Belgium, has his dark, gloomy side; he was a bloodthirsty king. The massacres in Congo constitute one of the greatest genocides in Africa: we are talking about ten million people who lost their lives. It was in 2017 that statues of Leopold II were dismantled and toppled in Belgium. Also, in 2017, we have Charlottesville, USA, where there was a demonstration by right-wing extremists who refused to allow the statue of General Robert Lee, who led the Confederate troops during the Civil War, to be toppled by the town council. There was a counter-demonstration led by antifascists, which resulted in the tragic death of a lady, crushed by a far-right extremist who [drove a car] into the crowd.
It was during this period in 2018���there is a historical continuity���that the municipality of Berlin decided to rename a series of streets that bore the names of several personalities who distinguished themselves during German colonization in Africa. Namibia, in particular, resisted German colonization between 1904 and 1908, which led to what has been named ���the first genocide of the 20th century,��� i.e. the extermination of the Hereros. This Berlin municipality decided to give these streets the names of African resistance fighters, such as Rudolf Manga Bell and Anna Mungunda. It was the first time that, symbolically, a city decided to rename not to give the names of those who massacred African populations, but of those who resisted.
We get to 2020, with the assassination of George Floyd in the United States, which sparked chain reactions all over the world. This is what has revived Faidherbe Must Fall. Today, what we are told when we talk about Faidherbe is that: ���He is someone who defended Lille when the Prussians invaded us in 1870. While the whole of France was on its knees, he managed to stand up to them.��� That may be true. Except that Faidherbe���s resistance during this period lasted only three months, whereas what I���m telling you about him is a whole career during which he massacred without remorse, killed, exterminated, pillaged, and imposed an economic system through peanut cultivation, central to the colonizing project. In Africa, the specialization of the colonies (Senegal with groundnuts, what would become Ivory Coast with cocoa) and the gradual disappearance of food crops still pose a problem today because we have an economic system based on a model that was oriented towards the metropole. We still have the consequences of this phenomenon, i.e. an extraverted economy geared towards outside needs rather than self-sufficiency to meet local demand.
Florian Bobin
On several occasions already, the Faidherbe Must Fall collective has questioned the authorities about the Faidherbe statue in Lille. For the bicentenary of his birth, the city council decided to restore the monument erected in his memory. In an open letter to Mayor Martine Aubry in 2018, you called for ���the removal of the statue of Louis Faidherbe and all symbols glorifying colonialism from public spaces in Lille.��� Elsewhere in France, avenues, streets, and subway stations still celebrate him. In your opinion, what explains this reluctance to discuss the permanence of symbols honoring slave traders and colonialists in the public space, both in Lille and in the rest of France?
Salian Sylla
We had, at the time, written an open letter to Martine Aubry. We had asked for a reflection on the presence in Lille of figures who represent a racist and xenophobic vision of the world. Unfortunately, we did not find any interlocutor. That goes to show the ambiguity that part of the left in France has with regard to colonialism. And it���s a shame because if we are still, in 2020, talking about this subject, it���s because in 2018 we weren���t heard. We are still in a situation where the left, which has always been, at least in its principles, on the side of the dominated, has not lived up to its historical role.
It is difficult to establish a dialogue in France in 2020 on certain issues because, as soon as we start talking about colonization, we will immediately come to be the ���people who are enemies of France.��� We are perceived that way. When we were in the street demonstrating to demand that the local authorities remove the equestrian statue of Faidherbe, who was there against us? Right-wing demonstrators, protected by the police. That���s what the debate in France is all about; when you talk about certain subjects, they caricature you and throw stones at you.
Many people have been fighting for a while, particularly against police violence, against unequal policies, for social justice, and all these people have become, overnight, ���identitarians.��� They are the ones who have become the racists in the end! That���s the irony in France. As long as you���re talking about George Floyd, Michael Brown, police violence taking place in the United States; of course, everyone agrees in France; of course, this phenomenon exists in the United States; of course, the American system is deeply, systemically racist! But as soon as we start saying: ���Well, now, let���s sit down and look at things in France, what���s happening today,��� when we talk about Adama Traor��, and we start listing, we are told: ���Ah no no no, the French police is not racist!���
It is a matter of questioning a system that allows people to die. The colonial issue has not been settled. People have been taught to construct a whole imaginary, a whole bunch of representations about the descendants of those from the former colonies in Africa. As long as historical issues are not settled, as long as they are denied, as long as we keep avoiding them, it���s not going to solve the problem. You can���t bring the temperature down just by breaking the thermometer. That is the dynamic we are in today. As soon as questions are raised, people try to caricature, to discredit by using certain words: separatism, communitarianism, anti-white racism.
This Republic has always toppled, named, unnamed, baptized, debaptized; it has always been done. The proof is that one of Lille���s main arteries was called, a few years ago, Paris Road and now Pierre Mauroy Road, the city���s former socialist mayor. To say that we can���t get rid of Faidherbe���s statue is a lie. Because, until 1976, we had the statue of Napoleon III in the heart of the city; this statue was removed and is now in the Museum of Fine Arts. In 1945, the statue of General Oscar de N��grier, another colonizer, was taken down and mysteriously disappeared from the public space. And these are not the only examples.
Florian Bobin
On June 22, the Faidherbe Must Fall collective sent an open letter to the candidates of the Lille municipal election held on June 28. Recalling that ���the debate on the celebration of figures related to slavery, colonialism or segregationism has resurfaced in many countries,��� you write, ���for many demonstrators, including us, the racism (and particularly negrophobia) that runs through Western nations has its origins in the criminal history of the slave trade and colonial domination.��� According to you, who should be celebrated in the public space in France, in place of figures like Faidherbe?
Salian Sylla
This year, I learned from my daughter, who is in middle school, that the city of Lille is organizing a civic week, which consists of sending children to visit some historical sites that are part of its heritage to help them discover its history and ���heroes.��� And these ���heroes��� are, very often, soldiers. You have a guide who explains that Faidherbe was a great man, who built Senegal, built roads, built hospitals, dug a deep-water port, modernized Senegal and that all Senegalese children are grateful to him today. She reacted by telling one of her friends that she thought it was false. You can imagine; a 9-year-old girl questioning the words of an adult supposed to be a fine connoisseur of Faidherbe���s history. It was all the more shocking because I had been in the Faidherbe Must Fall campaign in 2018, and at the end of 2019, it came back to me through my daughter to send me the image of Faidherbe as a benefactor to Senegal. It was unbearable for me.
So, we programmed a visit to this Gunnery Museum. Even with the presence of a Black man, this guide reiterated the same words, saying that Faidherbe was a heroic figure, that he had built Senegal through roads and hospitals. We gave him our position, even if we found it difficult to get him to agree to hear us out. He���s in this same narrative; for years, he���s been doing just that, nobody has ever questioned his version of history.
That���s what we���re still presenting in France in 2020 to children who will certainly never, like my daughter, have the opportunity to have someone else say ���no, it���s not true,��� to have someone who is involved in a campaign to make such a sinister figure disappear from the public space, to have another perception of a part of France���s history in relation to its former colonies. Can you imagine the number of children who have gone through this, who have listened, who have drunk in the words of this gentleman, who have considered that Faidherbe was someone who really did good for the history of Lille, and left the museum enraptured by the fact that they heard he was a hero?
That���s why, measures like ���we���re going to sort it out, put up an explanatory plaque��� are minor for me. It is better to take our responsibility to entrust a problematic statue to museums that can take care of it, and, with historians, anchor it in a broader history to allow museum visitors to better understand its ins and outs. It is better to place it in a context where people will be able to analyze it and put it into context. As long as I see this equestrian statue representing women underneath, which Faidherbe seems to be despising with his eyes, celebrating the power of a heroized man, Martine Aubry will be able to say whatever she wants. Still, for me, she will always be at odds with the principles she claims to defend. And unfortunately, her environmentalist opponents aren���t doing any better.
A city that decides to give someone���s name to a street, an avenue, a statue is simply a political act. And only a political act can deal with it. This is what we have been working on for the past few years through this unprecedented mobilization to ensure that the darkest part of Faidherbe���s legacy, which remains unknown, is accessible to everyone.
Gangs and activists
Image credit Suren Pillay.
In February 2020, the anti-crime group, PAGAD or People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, returned to the headlines in South Africa. They had torched the house of an alleged drug dealer in Ocean View, a largely working-class township on the southern edge of Cape Town. PAGAD blamed the occupants of the house for the murder of a seven-year-old boy days earlier. A few months earlier, PAGAD had made the headlines for celebrating the assassination of Rashied Staggie, a former gangster leader. PAGAD���s decision to comment brought up memories of an earlier period, in the mid-to-late 1990s, when PAGAD launched a campaign of terror against gangsters in Cape Town. It culminated in the shooting and burning alive of Rashied���s brother, Rashaad, in August 1996. Political theorist and anthropologist Suren Pillay, researches violence and grew up in Cape Town. He observed the rise of PAGAD up close in the 1990s. In 2002, Herman Wasserman and I asked Suren to write about PAGAD. The result was published in Shifting Selves: Post-Apartheid Essays on Media, Culture and Identity (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2003) as ���Experts, Terrorists, Gangsters: Problematizing Public Discourse on a Post-Apartheid Showdown.��� Three years later Suren published the essay below in Men of the Global South: A Reader, edited by Adam Jones (Zed Press).
A few years ago, I found myself among some youths who were familiar to me. I did not recognize them at first, because their faces were covered by the checkered scarves that we associate now with the Palestinians. It was in a community called Rylands, one of the two group areas designated by the apartheid state for so-called ���Indians��� in Cape Town. It was also the neighbourhood I grew up in. The last time I had seen youths covering their faces in this manner in the neighbourhood was about ten years earlier. And at that time I happened to be one of them. It was during the school boycotts of 1985. We used the scarves to protect our faces from identification by the police as we set up barricades of burning car-tires in the street, and when we hurled petrol bombs at the ubiquitous canary-yellow police vehicles that surrounded our schools.
This time the youths I met were participating in a march organized by a newly-formed group called PAGAD���People Against Gangsterism and Drugs. It was formed by local community leaders, particularly teachers, who were fed up with the proliferation of gang violence and the drug trade on the Cape Flats. Their unhappiness was framed within a particular religious-moral discourse. They were overwhelmingly Muslim, and it was to Islamic scripture and symbolism that they turned to articulate their desire to, in their words, ���rid the community��� of gangs and drugs. The strategy was to call public meetings, at the end of which a march would proceed to the house of a drug dealer. He or she would be given a 24-hour ultimatum to cease selling drugs, or face the consequences. Most people covered their faces during these marches for fear of retribution from the drug dealers and the gangs they were part of. Some did it, no doubt, because the drug dealers might recognize them as former clients.
Image credit Suren Pillay.The movement grew rapidly, but largely unnoticed by the mainstream press in Cape Town. That is, until one of these marches, to the house of Cape Town���s most feared and powerful gang leaders, became a spectacle. The Staggie twins, Rashied and Rashaad, were leaders of the Hard Living Kids���the HL���s, as they are known on the Cape Flats. By the mid-nineties, a turf war was unfolding between the Hard Livings and the other big gang on the Cape Flats, the ���Americans.��� As the marchers stood outside the house, one of the twins, Rashaad, arrived in his SUV. He drove into the thick of the crowd, jumped out of the vehicle, and started mocking those assembled. A scuffle broke out, and in the darkness, shots rang out. When the crowd surrounding Rashaad moved back in panic, he remained standing, shocked, with blood oozing from a gunshot wound. Within second, more shots penetrated his body, and he fell into the gutter. A petrol-bomb was flung at this limp body, bursting into flames upon impact. In a surreal moment, Staggie then stood erect and briefly walked, arms flailing, shrouded in flames, before finally collapsing on the tarred road. I can describe this event in detail, because it was recorded and photographed by the press contingent present. The image of the flame-shrouded Rashaad Staggie���s final steps were played over and over on the local news in the following days, and the pictures were similarly ubiquitous. Pagad was no longer just an organization that those of us from the Cape Flats knew about. It was now a national security concern���more so than the issues its members sought to address.
My concern at that time was with the representation of Pagad in academia and the media. Even though this was long before the hysteria post-9/11, all kinds of Orientalist phobias about Pagad were circulating, such as that it was instigated by the Iranians. In the months that followed, I went to Pagad marches, spoke with members, and attended their meetings. That���s when I realized that I knew some of the youths involved. They were part of what was called the G-Force���a group whose identity was closely guarded, because they were armed, and were most likely involved in a spate of pipe-bombings that ensued during this time. I had been to school with some of them; I knew others from around the neighbourhood. A number of key gang leaders were killed in drive-by shootings, all after having been warned by a Pagad march. When I asked some of them why they were resorting to violence, they said they felt that the new South Africa was not protecting them sufficiently, and they had to take the law into their own hands. Of course, the state could now allow its monopoly over the legitimate use of force to be threatened, and Pagad itself was quickly criminalized.
I had grown up in Rylands���a mostly middle-class, so-called ���Indian��� neighbourhood. It is more homogeneous in class than ethnic terms, however; and in racial and religious terms as well. Rylands is bordered by working-class communities, then designated for ���coloured��� people. Silvertown, Bridgetown, Mannenberg, Bonteheuewel, Heideveld: these neighbourhoods were also the product of the Group Areas Act, which dumped people into strictly-racialized neighbourhoods. They were also places where some of the most powerful gangs on the Cape Flats flourished. Our neighbourhoods were not sealed off; people moved among them, and many kids from surrounding areas attended the local schools in Rylands.
Between 1983 and 1984, when I was around twelve, my friends and I were passing through a painful process of male puberty and its attendant horrors. Some of this involved the opposite sex, of course, as well as cars. But we were also deeply fascinated and fearful of those older boys at school who belonged to the gangs. One character in particular, Youssy Eagle, filled us with awe. He was a member of a gang called the Five-Bob Kids, and was a few years older than us. He would challenge anyone to a fight, and was known to carry a knife longer than the palm of your hand in the inner pocket of his school blazer. We had all clamoured to see him beat the daylights out of some poor contender at the back of the school where the fights usually took place.
We found ourselves talking the gangster talk and walking the gangster walk. This meant using the colloquial phrases of gang language, which were unavoidable on the Cape Flats. It also involved wearing American-style clothing���not the hip-hop influences of today, but the zoot-suit look of button-down shirts, pleated slacks, Jack Purcell sneakers, or the really prized Florsheim shoes. And your pants had to hang down really low at the back, indicating that you were a veteran Mandrax smoker���because one of the side-effects of Mandrax was that your butt disappeared. Mandrax at that time was the most widely-used drug on the Cape Flats. You crushed up the tablet and smoked it with marijuana out of a bottleneck. And you had to carry a three-star Okappi, a pocket knife which you could buy at most corner shops, and which, after hours of practice, you could flick open in one single-handed rhythmic maneuver.
Image credit Suren Pillay.Like myself, most of my friends did not, strictly speaking, come from working-class families. Most of us did not have any traumatic family history. We mostly went to bed with a full stomach, slept on a comfortable bed, and had mothers intensely concerned with our well-being���a teenage boy���s nightmare, of course. Yet there we were, talking like gangsters, hanging out with gangsters, dressing like gangsters. If there was a hero at that time, other than the iconic Bruce Lee or Rambo, it was the local gang leader, whose recognition we craved. We were, in retrospect, wanna-bes. We didn���t aspire to a life of crime; rather, we dabbled in stealing apples from the local shop in order to establish our criminal credentials.
My own future as a gangster���not that, by all indications, it would have been a particularly successful one anyway���was disrupted by the intrusion of student politics in 1985. I grew attracted to a different vision of personhood, and a different vision of society. But it was also a vision that glorified the figure with a gun. This time, it wasn���t the gangster who was idolized, but the AK-47-wielding guerrilla fighter, operating in secret, striking at the state, and landing a blow for justice. This was violence that needed no justification: it was on the right side of history.
I became a member of the student representative council, chairing it for two years during the state of emergency. SRCs were banned under the state of emergency, so it was rough going. Some of the activities we organized were mass rallies, which brought together diverse schools on the Cape Flats. We would often walk to the neighbouring schools, and sometimes students would get robbed by gangsters along the way. I would have to negotiate with the gangsters to return what they had stolen. Perhaps I���m prone to nostalgia, but the gangsters would often return the goods. After all, we wielded greater violence than they did, and our form was condoned by large sections of the community. Some gangsters would tell us they thought we were crazy���they spent all their time evading the police, and we were fighting them in the streets. But they also grudgingly respected us.
There were schoolmates, or rather comrades, who were in charge of organizing this violence. At our school we called them the A-Team���the action team. Their faces were always covered when they went out to stone or petrol-bomb a police or army vehicle. By 1986, the army had been permanently installed in our areas, and there was an abundance of targets and battles to plan. Successfully blocking off a road for a few hours became a huge cause for celebration. For a few hours, it was a liberated zone. Without psychologizing, I do think some were better-disposed than others towards these kinds of activities. And some would probably have joined criminal gangs if they hadn���t been in our political gang. In fact, some gangsters, like the much-feared Johnny Laughing Boy, renounced their gang membership and became some of the bravest of the street-battlers. Skipping the country to become a guerrilla fighter was the ultimate status symbol for many. It was widely aspired to, but few of us summoned the courage to progress from stones, petrol-bombs, and militarist posturing to ���taking to the bush,��� as we called it. At the end of the day, I suspect that many of us found mother���s cooking and the girl we had a crush on more captivating!
Some of my school-friends did graduate from wanna-bes to hardened criminals; some are still in gangs, and some are drug-dealers. One is in jail for rape. The last time I heard, our lead gangster at school, Youssy Eagle, was in jail for murder. But others do more socially-accepted things, like being lawyers. Youssy���s brother is now a member of the ANC.
Image credit Suren Pillay.The violence of the gangs, and of the young students, had one thing in common. And it was not their common relation to the means of production, as Don Pinnock, for example, has argued in the most well-known text on the Cape Flats gangs. It was the image of heroic grandeur that was most captivating, and that provided something to aspire to. It is that grandeur that provides the ethical sensibility governing the self���s conduct in the everyday existence of the gangster, or the young political soldier who moves from the wanna-bes to the veteran, to���in the words of the criminologist���the ���hardened.��� A profound sense of one���s own conduct is required to be a gangster; it is not a condition of lawlessness. The ���skollie,��� as the gangster is derogatively called on the Cape Flats, is intensely governed by law. But it is not a law whose founding violence is legitimated by invocations of ���the nation,��� or ���the community,��� or of ���national security.��� The skollie is anti-social, if you view him as a member of one form of the social. But to the aunties, mothers, and supporters who lined the streets at recent trials of notorious gang leaders in Cape Town, who have spoken glowingly about the positive roles they play in the community, about how they pay rents, take care of school fees, resolve disputes���this is another account of the social. It is an account that sublimates its own founding violence, and the violence which keeps its own laws in place, to its own sublime objects of desire.
July 19, 2020
Mali: Les dieux sont tomb��s sur la t��te
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Bamako. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Last weekend, Bamako saw major protests. The death toll remains unclear. Official sources reported 11 killed while protesters mentioned 23 killed and 124 injured. The triggers for the protests were the disputed legislative elections and the severe insecurity in the country. Protesters demand the resignation of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita (popularly known as IBK), who is perceived as ineffective in dealing with the country���s major challenges. As the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is mediating the crisis, it is important to remember the origins of the conflict.
IBK, the decay of a myth
All started well. IBK was elected in 2013 with more than 77% of the vote. Elected with record turnout in a country where participation is generally low, IBK quickly became unpopular. A December 2019 opinion poll of residents of Bamako put his favorability rating at just 26.5%. Indeed, the ���Mande Massa��� has been incapable of dealing with the country���s main challenges. Criticisms include being overly beholden to France, ineffective and authoritarian.
During his tenure, the security condition has worsened. IBK’s campaign slogan, ���Mali First,��� quickly turned into ���My Family First��� as the president surrounded himself with family members for a clan management of power, setting up a system of widespread corruption. At the center of the system, his son Karim Keita was elected as a member of the National Assembly and Chairman of the National Defense, Security and Civil Protection Committee (he resigned from the Committee in the wake of the recent protests). The Military Guidance and Programming Act (LOPM) voted to maintain and improve the performance and equipment of the Malian Armed Forces (FAMAs) with an investment of 1.23 trillion francs CFA���1.91 billion euros over the period 2015-2019. These funds were allegedly largely diverted to the benefit of the presidential clan. The IBK era was thus marked by an extractive management of power, as in the darkest times of post-colonial Africa, such as the time of Mobutu and Bokassa.
Despite the LOPM, the reform of the security apparatus did not yield satisfactory results. FAMAS continued to record huge losses and humiliations on the ground in successive and increasingly deadly attacks. In 2019, several attacks were reported against the military camps of Indelimane (50 dead), Boulkessi and Mondoro (38 dead), and Dioura (23 dead). Soldiers killed were most often young men in the prime of their lives, sent on the field without adequate equipment or even complete military training.
Civilians are bearing the brunt
The state was unable to defeat jihadists exacerbating intercommunal violence. In central Mali, the Katiba Macina Jihadist insurgency lead by Amadou Koufa and other armed groups are capturing vast rural areas and expelling state officials. These movements have won large support in local communities by capitalizing on socio-economic and political grievances. The state���s weakness, abuses, and atrocities committed by security forces���combined with endemic poverty and food insecurity now worsened by the impact of COVID-19���are putting pressure on people all over the country. In rural areas, people have enlisted into armed groups creating self-defense militias to protect themselves. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), in total, 580 people were killed in the first half of 2019 in Central Mali. Several villages were attacked in 2019: Ogoussagou 1 (160 dead); Ogoussagou 2 (35 dead); Sobane-Da (35 dead including 22 children under 12 years); Gangafari and Yoro (at least 41 dead); and recently Bankass (30 dead and many missing). The modus operandi of these attacks always seems to be the same: armed groups surprise sleeping villages, burn everything, kill people, and take away livestock.
On the social front, the IBK regime has engaged in a conflict with various trade unions, teachers, doctors, and magistrates resulting in a long paralysis of basic social services in the country: education, health, and the judiciary. As a result, children were deprived of education for many months. Mali’s fragile progress towards sustainable development is now seriously compromised.
Mali has become a Wild West where the majority of the national territory is beyond the control of the state. In the extreme north of the country, Kidal is almost a de facto autonomous enclave. In the central region, AQIM affiliated groups, Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin, and the Islamic State of the Greater Sahara are fighting for control of these areas and trafficking routes, while civil administrators and other central state officials desert because of insecurity, leaving civilians with no protection or basic services.
The presence of international forces, notably the French operation Barkhane (5,000 troops) and the UN Stabilization mission (MINUSMA, around 12,000 armed troops) has attracted international terrorist groups. Their impact on the ground in terms of security gains is insufficient for Malians, who continue to suffer huge losses while Paris regularly claims “tactical gains.” France’s role is ambiguous in the conflict. Many demonstrations regularly call for the departure of French troops. The UN forces, as usual, are totally useless with an inadequate mandate to manage a conflict as is the case in Mali.
What are the options for a de-escalation?
There are three main options to consider.
First, a collective effort of three bodies (M5-RFP) is leading the protests, helmed by imam Mohamed Dicko. They are calling for the president’s resignation. Such an option is not unconstitutional as some international observers claim. Certain provisions of Article 36 of the constitution of Mali provide for the vacancy of power by the President. However, this option entails several issues. It brings together a religious leader, political party leaders, civil society, and a former army general. Imam Dicko has opposed social changes in the past, including reform of the code of persons and families. The rising of political Islam is worrisome and threatens the secularism of the state and the separation between power and religion and gender equality.�� However, it seems that most people are in favor of a political Islam due to widespread dissatisfaction toward political leaders.
Second, the presence of foreign forces makes a military coup unlikely. However, if the protests that have turned into urban guerrilla struggle continue, the already fragile country risks collapse, or the conflict could turn into a civil war. The takeover of parts of the country by armed groups is not excluded as was the case in 2012. If IBK accepts an honorary role, as proposed by the M5-RFP, which is unlikely, there would be a transition led by a prime minister. Elections would be held as scheduled in 2023.
The last option, which seems more likely, is that IBK will cling to power by proposing fa��ade reforms to save time. This would lead to a dangerous escalation and radicalization of dissent.
Mali is a resilient nation. Let us hope Malians long tradition of dialogue and multicultural understanding will prevail in the end.
July 16, 2020
Kenya’s electoral authoritarianism
Image credit Tavia Nyong'o via Flickr CC.
Three decades after Kenyans took to the streets demanding political and constitutional reforms during the first Saba Saba day protest on July 7, 1990 (the leaders were detained and brutalized, but it is credited for ushering in multiparty democracy there), the conditions that prompted this dissent remain. In this article, the former Chief Justice of Kenya, Willy Mutunga, arrested in an earlier crackdown by Moi’s regime and which led to his exile and then return Kenya after Saba Saba, reflects on this and tackles the following question: “Why after three major successful transitions over three decades���multipartyism, a power transition in
2002, and a new constitution in 2020���are we still being frustrated by our politics and economics?
This post is from our partnership between the Kenyan website The Elephant and Africa Is a Country. We will be publishing a post from their site every week, curated by our Contributing Editor Wangui Kimari.
Three decades ago, driven by a quest to reclaim their sovereignty and recalibrate the power relations between the state and society, the people of this country went to the streets to push for political and constitutional reforms, a major inflection point in the history of our nation. Through a protracted, peaceful struggle by Kenyans in the country and in the diaspora, the country finally transitioned into a multi-party democracy.
The struggle is not over; Kenya���s politics have taken a backward trajectory, moving towards dictatorship in the midst of an intra-elite succession struggle that could descend into violent conflict, chaos, and even civil war.
Kenya is a fake democracy where elections do not matter because the infrastructure of elections has been captured by the elites. There is a danger of normalizing electoral authoritarianism, where the vote neither counts nor gets counted. The judiciary is under constant attack and disparagement by the executive while parliament is contorted into a body increasingly unable to represent Kenyans and provide oversight over the executive���s actions. The security services are unleashed on the poor and the dispossessed as if they are not citizens but enemies to be hunted down and destroyed.
A range of constitutional commissions are in a state of contrived dysfunction while our media business model is failing, accelerated by political interference. Grand corruption���perpetrated by a handful of families and by the elites collectively���has been normalized and the fight against corruption has been politicized. In the creeping descent into dictatorship, civilian public services have been militarized and the 2010 Constitution that was in many ways a culmination of the struggle that started on July 7, 1990 when the late Kenneth Matiba and Charles Rubia called for a meeting at the Kamukunji grounds in Nairobi, is being deliberately undermined.
We have a duty and a responsibility to defend Kenya���s constitution; to resist efforts to undermine devolution in particular; to resist those determined to continue looting an economy already on its knees; to stand up against efforts to brutalize, dehumanize, and rent asunder the essential human dignity of Kenyans as a people.
Three decades is a generation. The generation that voted for the first time in 1992 is a venerated demographic that is 48 years old today. It is the generation of freedom (the South African equivalent of the ���born-frees���), and a significant part of the cohort that participated in the struggle as teens or young adults. It is the generation that bore the brunt of the struggle for freedom but which has been denied the opportunity for real political leadership. That part of its membership that has had access to state power is drawn from the reactionary wing of the group���the scions of the decadent YK���92 and drivers of the ���NO��� campaign against a new constitution.
Despite having successfully fought for a new constitution, three decades after Saba Saba, the frustration felt by this generation and its children runs deep. Why? Power is still largely imperial, exercised in a brutal and unaccountable manner, as institutions flail and falter. The country is still ethnically divided, the fabric of our nationhood is fraying and its stability remains remarkably and frighteningly fragile. Foreign domination, exploitation, and oppression is still with us. Poverty and inequality still reign as a tiny economic aristocracy consolidates wealth at the top, while a large pool of the poor underclass expands at the bottom. Why is this the case? Why, after three major successful transitions over three decades���multipartyism in 1992; power transition in 2002; and a new constitution in 2010���are we still being frustrated by our politics and economics? Why is our quest to advance Kenya as a prosperous, democratic and stable country floundering? I see five main reasons why Kenya���s democratization and development have been stymied.
First, and most importantly, is the moral bankruptcy of Kenya���s elite. It is the loyal facilitator of our continued colonization by the imperialism of the West and the East. We have a political elite who���together with their acolytes in the middle classes���view this constitution as inconvenient and who have in the last decade taken every step to undermine it, now even audaciously threatening to overhaul it. This mythmaking of how the constitution ���doesn���t work for us���; or how it is ���expensive��� (despite analytical evidence to the contrary), or how it ���does not promote inclusivity���, is basically political mischief-making that must be roundly denounced and firmly rejected.
But this hostile attitude by the political class towards the constitution should not surprise us. The constitution was imposed on them by the people through a people-driven process. And we must remember that they proposed more amendments to it on the floor of the House than there were articles in the constitution. To be sure, when the political class finds a constitution, a law or an institution to be an inconvenience, that is a clear indicator of success.
We must actively resist the schemes by the political class to hijack, mangle and wreck the constitution, and thus remove the checks that make the exercise of political power onerous. The constitutional product is only as good���and as secure���as the process that creates it. And whereas we must salute the decision of Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga to stop the grandstanding and step back from the brink to save lives, the framework for dealing with the issues that created the problem in the first place (such as electoral theft right from the party primaries to the general election, ethnicity, police brutality, and vigilante massacres) should have been broader, more structured, and more inclusive than the present process which is private, exclusionary, unstructured, and partisan.
The moral bankruptcy of the political elite is pushing us into a false choice between ���dynasties��� and ���hustlers������a very superficial and shallow narrative masquerading as a class-based political contest yet it is merely a joust between gangs. It is a (mis)-framing that obscures the underlying forces that create underdevelopment, instability and violence and those who benefit from the end result. We must not buy into this misframing of our political choices, whose guile in placing a confederacy of familiar surnames on one side, and a well-known economic rustler of public assets on the other, seeks to hide the common denominator of those two groups: the plutocrats within the state that are the beneficiaries. Both are extractive and extortionist, only distinguished by the differences in their predatory styles and their longevity in the enterprise of shaking down the Kenyan public. This is a club, a class of state-dependent ���accumulationists��� and state-created ���capitalists��� united by a history of plunder of public resources and unprincipled political posturing, and only divided by the revolving-door cycle of access to the public trough.
My second argument as to why, despite the many progressive political and constitutional transitions the country still feels restless and dissatisfied, has to do with the performance and the posture adopted by parliament. Whereas the judiciary has emerged as an effective and consequential arm of government since 2011, simultaneously playing defender and goalkeeper of the constitution, parliament, has since 2013, and even more so now, acquiesced as an adjunct to the executive. In a complete misreading of the presidential system, parliament sees itself as an extension rather than a check on the executive. The senate is even worse; instead of playing its constitutive role of protecting devolution against the excesses and encroachment of the national government, senators got into the most parochial contest of egos with the governors, bizarrely siding with the executive to stream-roll and undermine devolution. It took the judiciary, through a number of bold decisions, and the public, who rallied around devolution, including in the ruling party���s backyard, to save devolution from an early collapse.
Third is the suboptimal output from devolved governments. Devolution has been good but is not yet great. Because of a hostile national government and endemic corruption in the counties, devolved governments have not performed optimally although, compared to the central government���s record of the last 50 years, they have made a big difference in people���s daily lives. Although devolution has been revolutionary, a combination of frustration from the top (especially from the Treasury, the Devolution Ministry (particularly the first one) and the Provincial Administration) and the extremely poor and corrupt leadership of some governors have delayed the devolution dividends.
I dare say that without the strong backing of the judges���a raft of decisions by the High Court and two decisions by the Supreme Court on the Division of Revenue Bill���devolution would long have unraveled. These decisions are part of the reason for the animosity towards the judiciary that we have witnessed in the last decade.
Fourth, political parties have not been operating optimally. Political party primaries have been heavily rigged and violent, which has undermined people���s faith in the democratic process. Further, the Political Parties Fund is operated in an opaque manner, with the size of the allocations to some parties being equal to the allocations that are given to some counties. The disorganization and privatization of parties is nurturing a feeling of despondency and a lack of belief in parties, yet our constitution envisages a party-based constitutional democracy.
Fifth is the country���s economic collapse due to mismanagement. This economic failure preceded the COVID-19 pandemic. Never before has the country witnessed such a spectacular mismanagement of the economy. There is absolute incoherence and inconsistency in the public policy priorities. From a glitzy manifesto that has been honored more in the breach than in the observance, to the Big 4 Agenda, the Nairobi Regeneration Team, the Anti-Corruption, we are all over the place, and are now consumed by succession politics. We have a ballooning debt that is unprecedented in stock (over Sh6 trillion), in composition (much of it expensive commercial debt); and in impact (Eurobond monies are yet to be accounted for).
In this context, it would be extremely foolish to think that individuals who have been partners in this mismanagement could be plausible alternatives. The authors of the last seven years of corruption, debt, and underdevelopment are known and so, if the country is to stand a chance of realizing the benefits of the transitions that it has undergone, then it would be utter tomfoolery to consider parading any of these characters as the agents of that change.
Our constitution is not defective. The quality of our elite is���fatally so. The problem is not in the structure of power as expressed in our constitutional architecture, but in the exercise of power in the conduct, choice and decisions that leaders���and to some extent the masses���make. The structure of power does not command us to have a President, Speaker, Prime Minister (that is what the Majority Leader would be in a parliamentary system), Attorney General, Chief of Defense Forces, Director General of Intelligence, Head of Kenya Police, Director of Directorate of Criminal Investigations, Governor of Central Bank, Commissioner General of Kenya Revenue Authority, and Auditor General, all from one region.
It is the exercise of that power, both by the nominating and confirming authorities, that allows for this construction of an ethnic hegemony at the heart and in the commanding heights of state affairs. This is not to question the competence and patriotism of these compatriots; it is to question the effect of this apparent singular concentration of competence in one ethnic identity on the fabric of our nationhood. The absolute necessity for diversity and inclusion in public positions and policy cannot be gainsaid. That is how you create a strong and united nation. The argument that changing the constitution will, ipso facto, foster inclusivity is a false one. With an already expansive government of 22 ministers, over 40 Principal Secretaries, parastatal chiefs, and an expanded leadership in both Houses of Parliament, how come we are still not able to be inclusive?
Vuguvugu la Mageuzi (VUMA) or Kongomano la Mageuzi. These are possible names of a transformative movement made up of all the social movements that exist in the country and that, going forward, would tackle a number of issues.
First, the middle class civil society must reactivate its engagement and build strategic and effective alliances with grassroots movements and the over 40 social justice centers countrywide to keep both national and county governments in check and create a strong central defense for the constitution. Indeed, the countervailing power of the civil society must be strengthened.
VUMA should be the crucible for the development of alternative leaderships drawn from such movements as The Artist Movements of cartoonists, film makers, singers, poets, and song writers; 100 Days of the Citizens��� Assemblies; Congress for the Protection of the Constitution; DeCOALonise; Friends of Lake Turkana; Inuka Kenya Ni Sisi, Okoa Mombasa, Kenya Tuitakayo Movement, and SwitchOffKPLC. There are many others in formation: the movement to protect the rights of tea workers in Kericho; the movement to protect the cane farmers in western Kenya; the movement to protect devolution in the NFD; the movements that defend community land from commodification; farmers revolts against crony capitalism in the Rift Valley and central Kenya; and the movement to withdraw our troops from Somalia, among others.
Second, the movement must give voice to and support the Council of Governors��� demands for the arrears in development funds that the national government continues to refuse to disburse.
Third, this is a good moment for the emergence of an alternative leadership for Kenya. The political elites are in fear of each other and there is a hurting stalemate in their relationship and negotiations. We need to invest in the rupture of those negotiations.
Fourth, we need to support a principled and fair fight against corruption, both at the national and county levels, and establish whether public policy and the law have been used for public good or private gain.
Fifth, we also need to set up at least three judicial commissions of inquiry, the first one being on the public debt incurred since independence so that we can establish the rationale, basis, terms, impact, and beneficiaries of these debts. This includes Ken-Ren, Goldenberg, Anglo Leasing, SGR, Eurobond, and other scams. The second one should investigate all government technology projects from IFMIS to OT-Morpho, to Huduma Number to E-Citizen. The third should target police brutality and the vigilante and police massacres of 2017, especially in western Kenya and in the slums of Nairobi.
Sixth, we should revisit all the solutions devised by the Saitoti Report; the Akiwumi Ethnic Clashes Report; the Ndungu Land Report; the InterParty-Parliamentary Group Report (particularly its unfinished business); the Truth and Justice Commission Report; the Kreigler Report; the Kroll Report; Kofi Annan���s Agenda 4; the Waki Report and all the reports developed by the civil society as solutions to our societal problems. That rich and robust material should be debated and refined for implementation.
Seventh, we must undertake mass civic education on the contents of the 2010 Constitution with a view to triggering the citizenry to demand its implementation;
Eighth, we must form a united front with political parties that are against imperialism and baronial rule and their respective narratives.
Ninth, we must nurture a political party or political parties that will contest for political power in the interests of the motherland.
And lastly, we must ensure that the failure of the ruling elite to secure the social and economic rights of the Kenyan people as provided for under the constitution (the right to food, housing, water, education, health, social security, and employment) during the ongoing pandemic is an important lesson about the kind of leadership this country should not have.
The future of the constitution and our democracy will depend on the quality of leaders the country elects. That is when the full dividends of Saba Saba and 2010 will be fully realized. As the United States has shown, even constitutions, institutions, and customs that have been nurtured over hundreds of years can come easily undone by a rogue leadership and a pliant public.
Law and disorder
French regulars of the Colonial Infantry disembarking in Madagascar in 1895. Image credit the French Army Museum.
On June 2, 2020, tens of thousands gathered in front of the High Court of Paris to protest against police brutality and racism. Showing support to the family of Adama Traor��, a 24-year-old black man who died asphyxiated at the hands of the police in 2016, the crowd chanted, ���Justice for Adama! No justice, no peace!��� Reacting to the scope of mobilization, started in the United States and spread around the world following the murder of George Floyd, French pundits and politicians have tirelessly argued that ���France is not the United States,��� and that ���comparing both situations is appalling.���
Yet, recent studies from Human Rights Watch and the national ombudsman respectively conclude that the French police���s checks on minors are ���racist and abusive��� and that ���young men perceived as Black or Arab are twenty times more likely than others to be stopped by the police.��� This is not a new phenomenon. In fact, as many researchers and activists insist, modern French policing draws its roots from centuries of institutionalized racism; today���s repressive techniques���harassment, manhunt, capture, strangulation���partake in a long obsessive history of seeking to subjugate racialized bodies.
In a June 2018 conversation with Assa Traor��, Adama Traor�����s sister and founder of the Justice and Truth for Adama committee, activist and scholar Angela Davis declared: ���Police violence […] you are experiencing here in France as direct result of colonialism���the attacks on Black communities, Arab communities���is something that has continued unabated.���
Hence, President Emanuel Macron���s comments on the ���noble struggle��� against racism and discrimination being threatened by a ���hateful, false rewriting of the past,��� illustrate French authorities��� endorsement of inherently oppressive structures.
Indeed, France���s long history of violent, colonial policing toward Africans has structured the country���s police methods today. More than that, it is at the core of African states��� post-colonial relationship to dissent.
Structuring colonial policing
In March 1667, King Louis XIV signed an edict aiming at reforming the police institution, relatively scattered until then. ���Policing,��� the decree reads,�� ���consists in ensuring the safety of the public and of private individuals, purging the city from that which causes disorder, [and] providing abundance.��� Responsible for securing lucrative businesses as well as quelling writings and behaviors deemed seditious, the newly-appointed lieutenant of Paris, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, attained authority to call for the army���s support and authorize imprisonment, exile, or internment without trial.
The man behind this 1667 edict was Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a staunch defender of mercantilism���a policy based on state-regulated trade and maximization of exports. As Louis XIV���s minister of finance, trade, and industry, he oversaw the expansion of France���s colonial empire in North America and the Caribbean, and founded, in 1664, the French East India Company. Colbert later drafted the first version of the Code Noir (Black Code), a racist decree policing African enslaved captives, treated as ���chattel,��� officially enforced until 1848. Article 38 reads:
The fugitive slave who has been on the run for one month from the day his master reported him to the police, shall have his ears cut off and shall be branded with a fleur de lys [symbol of French monarchy] on one shoulder. If he commits the same infraction for another month, again counting from the day he is reported, he shall have his hamstring cut and be branded with a fleur de lys on the other shoulder. The third time, he shall be put to death.
Concerned about preserving the interests of wealthy capitalists and colonialists, both in the metropole and overseas, French monarchy, under King Louis XVI, expanded the policing of Africans and people of African descent within its empire. After two first pieces of legislation in 1716 and 1738, the minister of the marine, Antoine de Sartine, a former lieutenant of Paris, set up the Police des Noirs (Police for Blacks) in 1777. Unlike the Code Noir, this 32-page article edict prescribed actions not based on slave status but skin color alone. ���Especially in the capital city,��� the declaration affirms, ���[Blacks] cause the greatest disorders, and when they return to the colonies, they bring with them the spirit of independence, indocility, and become more harmful than useful.��� Article 3 states: ���[Blacks] who will have entered [France] will be [���] arrested and escorted to the nearest port to be deported to the colonies.���
At the turn of the 19th century, French sovereign Napoleon Bonaparte, who had re-established slavery after it had been abolished less than a decade earlier following the Haitian Revolution, further extended the policing of Black people in France. From 1807-1808, Napoleon mandated minister of police Joseph Fouch��, the architect of modern French policing, to organize a nation-wide census of ���Blacks, mulattos and other people of colour.��� Using the same denomination as de Sartine had for the Police des Noirs, this classification drew direct inspiration from Moreau de Saint-M��ry���s racial theories, which positioned white colonialists as ���the epidermis��� aristocracy.��� Openly pro-slavery, out of ���taste for trade,��� Fouch�� effectively institutionalized intricate methods of espionage on ���outside threats.��� Such monitoring was particularly emphasized in cities such as Bordeaux, one of France���s biggest slave-trading ports.
Following the invasion of Algiers in 1830 and the expansion of the French colonial empire in Africa after the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, the code de l���indig��nat (native code), a racially discriminatory set of laws creating an inferior legal status for colonial ���subjects,��� was thereafter applied to the vast majority of Africans. Under this ���legal monstrosity,��� implemented until the mid-1940s, colonial administrators regularly abused their powers, convicting Africans on arbitrary charges, such as ���[disrespecting] the administration and its civil servants��� or ���[disseminating] alarming and false rumours.��� Such lawlessness was openly endorsed by members of parliament, such as Etienne Flandin, who asserted: ���To [Africans], prison is not punishment but a reward, the supreme happiness to live in idleness.���
Administrating the empire
As French authorities tightened their rule of African colonies at the turn of the 20th century, the military and the police were initially the same. However, as urban centers grew, so did physical circulation and various forms of political mobilization. Structured police forces, based on that of the metropole, therefore appeared essential to safeguard the financial interests of colonialists. For the construction of the Congo-Oc��an Railway (1921-1934), armed forces captured countless young men, forcing them to work without protection day in day out. As a result, an estimated 15,000 to 30,000 perished.
In French West Africa, the service de suret�� g��n��rale (general security service) was founded in 1918 to reassert control in the context of growing post-war mobilization. More than 100,000 Africans had been enrolled to fight alongside the French, and were promised increased rights, yet the majority remained subject to arbitrariness. Drawing from the infamous Police des Noirs, the ministry of the colonies oversaw an independent secret service, the service de contr��le et d���assistance des indig��nes (natives��� control and assistance service), which employed undercover agents to monitor the political activities of Africans in France.
Among the first on public record was Senegalese activist Lamine Senghor. In 1924, a few years after Senghor had started working in Paris as a postman, the service de contr��le et d���assistance des indig��nes started following him. For the next three years, police and detective reports closely monitored him as both an ���anticolonial agitator��� and a ���communist, antimilitarist activist.��� Senghor had indeed joined the French Communist Party, but quickly expressed frustration at the grouping���s limited integration of Black activists, thereafter founding a separate organization championing African liberation.
Lamine Senghor represented the Comit�� de D��fence de la Race N��gre (Defense Committee of the Negro Race) at the founding conference of the League Against Imperialism in Brussels in 1927, forcefully proclaiming: ���It is capitalism which breeds imperialism in the peoples of the leading countries. […] Fight with the same weapons and destroy the scourge of the earth, world imperialism! It must be destroyed and replaced by an alliance of the free peoples.���
Senghor���s speech, relayed in newspapers around the world, alerted French authorities, who quickly arrested him, as he returned to France, for ���provocative statements toward a law enforcement authority.��� Until his death later that year, the Senegalese activist���s wish was to return to his home country, but he strongly suspected police forces to arrest him upon his arrival. Two decades later, an estimated 300 to 400 African war veterans who, just like him, fought in the French army were massacred in a Dakar suburb for standing up for their rights.
The mid-1920s also saw the creation, by former colonial administrator Andr��-Pierre Godin, of the Service d���assistance aux indig��nes nord-africains (North African natives��� assistance service) composed of a police force known as the brigade nord-africaine (North African brigade). Carefully regulating Algerians��� activities in France, this surveillance agency repeatedly threatened those known to frequent anticolonial circles, coercing employers to terminate their contracts. Abolished after World War II, the unit came back to life in the mid-1950s as the brigade des agressions et violences (aggression and violence brigade). As the Algerian war for independence grew, North African workers in France were systematically subject to abusive arrests and night raids.
Post-colonial disorder
By this point, racist policing had become the very fabric of French authorities��� relationship with Africans and people of African descent. By the early 1960s, many soldiers had returned from Algeria and integrated the police force in France. Among them was Maurice Papon, responsible for the deportation of more than 1,500 Jews under the Vichy regime, and for institutionalizing torture of anti-colonialists in Eastern Algeria. Becoming prefect of the Paris police in 1958, Papon set up the service de coordination des affaires alg��riennes (Algerian affairs coordination service), which oversaw the killing of hundreds of pro-National Liberation Front demonstrators in October 1961���beaten and thrown into the Seine River by police officers.
In need of workers after the end of World War II, the French state incentivized Africans to migrate and settle in low-income suburban housing complexes. Although the discourse had shifted from ���saving the empire from undisciplined native agitators��� to ���protecting the nation from dangerous criminal thugs,��� the police���s repressive methods lived on. In the early 1970s, the brigade anti-criminalit�� (anti-crime brigade) was established in the Paris area by a former colonial officer from Indochina and Algeria, Pierre Bolotte, who had also spearheaded the violent state response to a worker strike in Guadeloupe in 1967. As the island���s police prefect, Bolotte���s policy resulted in the deaths of an estimated 200 demonstrators.
In Africa, repressive policing culture persisted beyond the birth of nominally independent states in the 1960s, through ���technical assistance agreements,��� which guaranteed the continuity of French methods and structures. In 1959, the service de s��curit�� ext��rieure de la Communaut�� (French external security service) was set up to maintain strong ties between intelligence services in France and local police units in African colonies. Its founder, police official Pierre Lefuel, was the last director of national security in Upper-Volta (now Burkina Faso). He founded, in 1960, the service de coop��ration technique internationale de police (international technical police cooperation service), a unit mainly composed of former colonial officials mandated to train the new national police forces.
Although African politicians were now in command, coercive policing methods remained central to institutions supported by ���technical assistants��� and former colonial officials. Jean Collin, a French colonial administrator, who obtained Senegalese citizenship around independence, was particularly frowned upon in Senegal. As Minister of Interior to President Senghor, his uncle-in-law, Collin had control over the prison system and oversaw the police, supporting units such as the groupement d���intervention mobile (mobile intervention grouping)���notorious for its brutality. The repression of opposition movements was the highlight of his time in office���authorities proceeded to mass arrests, as in the 1975 Xare Bi case,�� and institutionalized torture toward contradicting voices. Some, such as Omar Blondin Diop, never returned from their prison cells.
Still today, violent colonial policing structures the ways African states react to dissent. From struggles for the betterment of working conditions and access to food and water, to mobilization for the end of rampant unemployment, rising inequality, political arbitrariness, and generalized corruption supported by neocolonial arrangements, public demonstrations are usually met with teargas and bullets. State responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have both amplified distrust toward authorities and absolved abuses of power. The recent toppling of statues of slave-traders and colonialists point us to the urgency of profound systemic restructuration. Because indeed, to quote M��koma wa Ng��g��, ���we cannot reform ourselves out of the times we are in.���
Remembering Levina Mukasa
Nkrumah Hall, University of Dar es Salaam. Image credit Nick Fraser via Wikimedia Commons.
In the early 1990s, the Tanzania Media Women���s Association (TAMWA), a civil society organization of women journalists, embarked on a major campaign against gender-based violence. They were ���jolted��� into action, to quote a special 1992 issue of TAMWA���s feminist Sauti ya Siti magazine, by the death of University of Dar es Salaam student Levina Mukasa on February 7, 1990.
Levina���s picture circulated widely in Tanzanian and Pan-African media in the early 1990s. In its 1992 special issue of Sauti ya Siti about gender-based violence, TAMWA published a drawing of Levina���s picture.
If the photograph symbolized Levina���s tragic death and the problem of violence against women in Tanzania, the illustration would come to symbolize her legacy as the impetus behind a national movement against gender-based violence and would serve as a reminder of the costs of sexual harassment in Tanzanian institutions of higher education.
What happened to Levina?
In an issue of Sauti ya Siti published in early 1990, journalist Chemi Che-Mponda outlined the University of Dar es Salaam���s failure to respond to Levina���s repeated complaints of sexual harassment and her subsequent death by suicide.
Levina���s aunt and university lecturer, Dr. V. K. Massanja, explained that her niece���s problems began when she refused to attend a ball at the Silver Sands Hotel with engineering student Mark Victor. Victor responded angrily and followed Levina back to her room. When Levina reported the incident to the student government, Victor claimed to have been drunk and apologized.
The next day, the incident at Silver Sands was publicized through a clandestine satirical literature group called PUNCH. PUNCH published dehumanizing, pornographic material about women who refused their sexual advances.
Members of PUNCH, including engineering student Omari Sarota, threatened to publish worse things about Levina if she continued to refuse their sexual advances. The group also threatened women students seen in the company of Levina, which led to her social isolation.
On February 3, 1990, Omari Sarota forced his way into Levina���s room. Levina escaped and knocked on the janitor���s door, who escorted her back to her room and waited outside to ensure her safety.
Levina reported the incident to her hall manager and the Dean���s office, to no avail.
Levina died on the evening of February 7, 1990.
The university���s response
In a special issue of Sauti ya Siti about gender-based violence published in November 1992, Chemi Che-Mponda chronicled an emergency meeting that was held by women students, lecturers, staff, and other university residents on February 9, 1990.
They declared that the entire university community was complicit in Levina���s death, and accused the administration of not taking appropriately punitive action in cases of sexual harassment and assault on campus.
They called on the university to suspend Victor and Sarota and to dismantle PUNCH. They also demanded that officials who were negligent in responding to Levina���s complaints resign from their posts.
Sarota was expelled from the university in 1990, but allowed to return in 1991. Despite an uproar among women���s groups, PUNCH continued until late 1990, when it was banned for publishing demeaning material about then-president Ali Hassan Mwinyi.
Sexual harassment in Tanzanian higher education
On November 27, 2018, lecturer Vicensia Shule controversially spoke out against sexual harassment at the University of Dar es Salaam on Twitter.
Shule appealed to President John Magufuli, who was on campus to open a new library:
Father Magufuli, you have entered the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) to inaugurate a modern library. Sexual harassment is happening at an alarming rate at UDSM. I wish that you would have accepted my invitation to meet with you, but your security disregarded me. I am waiting to hear from you, because I believe that the people whom you���ve surrounded yourself with are righteous and will tell you the truth.
According to an article in The Citizen, Shule���s tweet ���raised a major debate on social media over the impact of sexual violence in higher learning institutions in the country.���
In response to Shule���s tweet, a disciplinary committee at the University of Dar es Salaam summoned her. She also faced backlash on Twitter from Frey Edward Cosseny, a prominent member of Tanzania���s ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (Party of the Revolution):
There is a prostitute named @vicensiashule who has decided to dirty the image of the University of Dar es Salaam through an accusation that it has abused women students who have been asked by male lecturers to provide sexual favors. It is my belief that UDSM will not remain quiet in responding to her.
Responding to Cosseny���s demeaning response to Shule, Ally Saleh, a prominent member of Tanzania���s opposition Alliance for Transparency and Change-Wazalendo (Patriots) party, reminded him of Levina Mukasa:
Maybe you haven���t reached the level of university to know, but sexual harassment is ubiquitous. When I was at the University of Dar es Salaam, a woman student, Levina Mukasa, decided to take her own life. There should be accountability. Congratulations, Vicensia Shule.
An updated sexual harassment policy
The Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Dar es Salaam released an updated anti-sexual harassment policy on October 18, 2019, which describes itself as ���more elaborate on reporting procedures and accountability mechanisms for preventing and supporting victims of sexual harassment.���
The 2019 policy mentions an unnamed woman who died by ���suicide following sexual harassment by PUNCH pipelining her following a scuffle between two male students over her misinterpreted relationships with them.���
The policy is concerning in its attribution of an ���unnamed��� Levina���s repeated experiences of sexual harassment to her own misinterpretations, rather than to the men who sexually harassed her or to the university���s enabling of an environment of sexual harassment and failure to respond to her complaints.
Vicensia Shule and others are continuing to discuss publicly the issue of sexual harassment in Tanzanian institutions of higher education, even participating in a Zoom meeting on June 19, 2020, that has since been published on YouTube.
The lingering problem of sexual harassment in higher education highlights the urgency of remembering Levina Mukasa, and heeding the written plea of women who gathered at the University of Dar es Salaam on February 9, 1990: ���Let Levina not die in vain.���
July 15, 2020
The mechanism of contagion in racism
South Africa's Minister of Social Development, Lindiwe Zulu, during a COVID-19 briefing. Image via Government of South Africa on Flickr CC.
The COVID-19 crisis has led to extensive discussion on the consequences of contagion���the spread of disease through physical contact. A virus is what Slavoj Zizek describes as a ���stupid, self-replicating mechanism.��� In the case of COVID-19, its replication represents a troubling possibility that contraction may result in the suffering or death of the host. This phenomenon has proven to be vexing, not only from a biological perspective, but also from economic, social, political, and geographical perspectives. Humanity���s attempt to control the detrimental effects of this viral outbreak entail various strategies, including country-wide or regional lock downs, calls for social distancing, mask-wearing, and other public health measures. It is increasingly clear that different strategies entail different trade-offs.
Certainly, it seems as though all viable strategies imply some price that must be paid, whether in lives or livelihoods. The politically contentious concern of the spread of biological contagion is now accompanied by an anti-racist movement sparked by the abhorrent killing of George Floyd. These events are more than just temporally concurrent. Racism can be thought with contagion, insofar as it represents the workings of another form of contagion���contagion as analogy employed in racist thought and practice. Considering the trade-off of lives and livelihoods during the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside the killings and assaults of Black people at the hands of the American police, reveals the way in which race functions to fuel an exploitative economic system.
How did racism get here?
The legacy of evolutionary biology is the promotion of the belief in significant biological difference between races, present in arguments defending . Although support for the biological justification of racism wanes, racism has not died out. Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the architects of South African apartheid (and Prime Minister from 1956 to 1966), promoted such an understanding, evidenced by his speeches. This social reading of racism advanced the notion of ���separate destinies��� for different races���a smokescreen of rational reason used to justify racial separation. Socially constructed forms of racism manifested during apartheid, clearly through the analogy of contagion. The novelist J.M. Coetzee describes this mechanism by drawing attention to the apartheid government���s obsessive prohibition of miscegenation (so-called ���race-mixing���), apparent in the Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act. Coetzee points out the relation between viral epidemic and racism, ���from being a carrier who is black ��� blackness itself becomes the infection.��� This mechanism has played out during the current pandemic in the social victimization of people of Chinese descent���or, generally, East Asian descent���and also in the racism against people of African descent in China. Together, these are exemplary of the way biological contagion is employed in racism.
The workings of the racist analogy of contagion continue to drive both explicit and implicit forms of racism. Let us consider how this might (and possibly does) play out. Actual contagion involves the exposure of people to the possibility of death (some more than others, often depending on social circumstances). Metaphorical contagion employs this line of reasoning to justify exposing black lives to the threat of death in the US (and elsewhere), as with Palestinians in occupied Palestine and Israel. In the case of a virus, death occurs because of the failure of an immune system to fight it off. When the analogy of contagion functions in relation to race, blackness (or otherness), although conceived of as sickness, cannot kill the black person. If immunity is impossible, and so is recovery, the duty of killing becomes externalized���a task taken on by murderous white supremacists. And so we see how the analogy functions as an explanatory device for understanding the disproportionate use of excessive force and/or killing employed against Black people by police in the US.
How the analogy of contagion is sacrificed under exploitative capitalism
The absurdity of a mentality fueled by the analogy of contagion is evidenced by the dependence of white apartheid on black labor, in which this analogy undermines itself insofar as economic outcomes are concerned. As an example, during apartheid, white people were not willing to forgo their dependence on black labor to clean their houses, wash their laundry, and look after their children���while simultaneously having them eat and drink from a designated set of crockery and make use of separate ablution facilities. Verwoerd and others explicitly acknowledged the dependence on black labor as a necessity standing in the way of so-called ���total separation.��� Beyond just domestic employment, other industries during South African apartheid also depended greatly on cheap black labor. The apartheid arrangement, premised greatly on disgust for black people, justified their presence in industry insofar as it helped white owners of capital to carry out their economic objectives. Lives were spared so that labor could be exploited, at the expense of consistency underlying the analogy of contagion, despite it working to defend killings as it saw fit. The apartheid obsession with preventing miscegenation along with building the economy on the backs of black workers, highlights the crucial and inextricable linkages between racial oppression and economic injustice.
This phenomenon is also apparent in the contemporary context during the COVID-19 crisis. While some countries lock down the economy and allow the health care sector to get its affairs in order, minimum wage workers in the US are forced to risk their lives in order to keep their financial lives from falling apart. The US political economy is proving to be one that is unwilling to consider a situation in which this trade-off would not have to occur.
Thinking through the present moment
The lesson to be drawn from such a comparison is that racism is more than just this (albeit present) fear of race mixing. It includes the economic oppression of working class black people and other racial groups. The current economic setup depends on an underclass so desperate that exploitation looks to them like security. In striving against racism, naivety about this fact results in action which deals blows that fail to land as hard as they could. To resist racism should involve simultaneously addressing systemic factors which prevent financial security. The high cost of tertiary education, for example, is one way in which the already poor either become deeply indebted or remain subject to the labor exploitation that is minimum wage work. If a battle against racism ignores this aspect, it may for example define freedom as equal access to economic activities. If it does this, it submits to already-present economic exploitation which functions together with racism. Both the deep implicit workings of racist beliefs, as well as the economic system that incentivizes such implicit beliefs, must be chipped away.
In mourning the unjust deaths of our black brothers and sisters, we must try with resilience and strategic action to create a more just future, while taking heed of the inextricable intertwinement of the social and the economic. This means actively reconsidering the concepts of equality and retribution, and holding neoliberal institutions responsible for their role in incentivizing racism.
��a chauffe �� Bamako de
Photo: Marc Tkach, via Flickr Creative Commons.
Mali���s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita is under increasing pressure to resign���or to do something���to break the country���s political stalemate. Thousands have been in the streets on Fridays, after prayers, to demand an end to this regime. On Friday July 10, WhatsApp was buzzing with reports that the planned march against Keita���s government had birthed three smaller phalanxes���one aimed at the national broadcaster���s headquarters, another at the presidential palace at Kuluba, and a third in the opposite direction, towards the airport, to prevent Keita and his family from fleeing. The National Assembly burned (again). Things have only degraded in the days since: protestors shot, with an unknown number dead; elite anti-terrorist forces deployed in the streets; and opposition leaders ���kidnapped��� and detained for two days, only to be released. Keita has offered tepid concessions, like dissolving the constitutional court, that seem to ignore the depth of the rage. The anti-Keita coalition, known as M5, had been willing to negotiate a resolution that would have kept Keita in power. That offer no longer seems to be on the table. The neighbors, in the form of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), are clearly worried, but Keita���universally known as IBK, less universally as��bwa��(���daddy���)���seems determined to weather the storm. It���s not at all clear that it���s up to him.
Here���s an impressionistic backgrounder on the current situation. From the outside, you might think that the key issue is the ���security situation��� in a country that has effectively lost control of its vast north and its historic center. But the phrase ���security situation��� translates visceral, gut-wrenching fear and anger into anodyne foreign policy talk. Many are armed: some out of cynicism, some with the rational realization that the ���security forces��� cannot protect you (and might not want to, or worse), some out of a dangerous admixture of rage and worry. And those are just the civilians; never mind the governments��� own ���security forces,��� the UN ���peace-keeping��� mission, or the French-led ���counter-terrorism��� force. The anger directed at France may be greater than it���s ever been, after the terrible losses the Malian army���not to mention too many civilians���have endured in recent months. Rumors fly that French forces aid ���jihadist��� attacks on Malian bases, offering reconnaissance and withholding air support. It doesn���t matter if I believe this is true (I don���t); it matters a great deal that many Malians believe it, very firmly. That the former gendarme now stands accused of being the pyromaniac fireman is not surprising. That fact doesn���t in and of itself explain the depth of people���s anger. Here���s what does: they hold Keita responsible for enabling French treachery and betraying the Malian army (the FAMA). Meanwhile the ���security situation��� degrades across much of the country.
Bamako has always been another story, which is part of the problem. Life goes on. And on and on and on. Just as there���s no resolution in sight to a nested set of conflicts that have bedeviled the country and its neighbors, there seems to be no end to the appetites of the Keita government, and especially his family. While people are working to get by, the political class always seems to be getting over.
The proximate cause of the biggest protest movement Keita has yet faced are the recent, failed legislative elections held in March and April (in two rounds). At first blush, these looked better organized than comparable and contemporary elections in Wisconsin (where people were forced to vote in person in a pandemic and, to the chagrin of Republicans, did) or Georgia (where the lesson from the recent governor���s race stolen in 2018 seems to be that the road to victory for Republicans is to keep people, especially black and brown, from voting at all). So, hats off to all those who lined up in places like Niono, with their masks on. The problem came with the counting of the ballots more than the casting of them. The ruling party appeared at first to have lost seats, then (following a ruling by the Constitutional Court) won them back in a disputed recount. The short-term result was that Keita���s party continued to control the National Assembly. Even the current president of the Assembly had his electoral defeat transformed into victory like water into wine at the hands of the Court. Spoiler alert: if Keita were to resign���which he seems determined not to do, although many are calling for it���the president of the Assembly would be his legal successor. Let���s just say that this did not go down well last time (see: Dioncounda Traore, 2012).
The deeper background to the political logjam goes beyond the Assembly, and who���s in it.
Virtually the whole political class is widely considered corrupt, as is the game of politics itself. Keita himself has no small part in this. A proud, exacting and fiercely intelligent septuagenarian, IBK excels at immobilizing his political opponents by pulling them close. This includes the most competent of them. Moussa Mara, former mayor of one of Bamako���s districts? Make him Prime Minister, let him burn his own fingers by grabbing for Kidal, nominal capital of the rebellious North. Ti��bele Dram��, long-time critic, early human rights activist, man taken seriously in diplomatic circles? Make him Foreign Minister, inside the tent pissing out, as LBJ would have said, but into one of Mali���s torrential rainstorms. The effect of this strategy in the long-term is to clip the wings of contenders and to try to shred their legitimacy. Put differently, one rotten peanut and you���ll spit out the mouthful.
Keita���s own weaknesses go beyond his taste for fine tailoring and things aged in oak, and beyond his famously short temper. He indulges his son Karim so much that the younger Keita has become a major political problem for the old man. He���s just been forced to resign from a key post on the defense committee in the Assembly. Will that satisfy people building barricades and burning tires in the streets? What���s the point of resigning from a committee if the whole Assembly is considered illegitimate? Karim might be the most hated man in Mali, and that says a lot. Nothing new here���see Karim Wade, T��odoro Nguema Obiang, and all the trash named Trump���but Karim has played a Kushner-esque role as ���the person in charge of everything [that fails]��� while starring in innumerable clips on Facebook and WhatsApp that put all his appetites on unwholesome display.
Amidst all this, in one of the twists in a political plot that looks more and more like the fevered dream of a show-runner from��24��(popular in Mali as��24 heures chrono), Keita���s most prominent political opponent was taken off the stage when he was kidnapped, apparently by jihadists, while campaigning for the legislatives in March. Souma��la Ciss�� has not been seen since���although he is said to be alive���and the government insists that it is working arduously to secure his release (at the very least, this will be very expensive). The most surprising thing about Ciss�����s kidnapping was not that it happened, but that he was so imprudent in the first place, apparently refusing UN protection (and a helicopter) in order to campaign in a zone well-known for its poor roads and insecurity. Ironically, Ciss�����s absence might only heighten tension in what appears to be a political deadlock between Keita (and his party) and a swelling opposition coalition that has one foot in the world of formal politics, particularly the anti-globalization left, and another in the world of popular Muslim leadership.
Here, Keita might have met his match. Because, while his presidency began with a lot of lip service, bismillahi���s, and general pandering to the High Islamic Council, then led by the influential imam Mahmoud Dicko, Keita���s willingness to corrode the secular nature of the state has ended up weakening his own position. Dicko, meanwhile, might no longer head the Council, but his independence gives him a certain authority. While the coalition against Keita is broad, composed of his sworn enemies and his former allies alike, Dicko as a religious figure hovers slightly above it all. A cynical interpretation would have him in the catbird seat, above the fray but with an eye on the prey.
Who knows what will happen? But there are at least two things to consider. First, it���s worth remembering that IBK cut his political teeth and earned his reputation as the Prime Minister who was able to break an entrenched and intransigent opposition movement in the mid-1990s. It���s part of the reason that he was first elected in 2013, when he seemed to many to be the man for the moment. He quickly squandered whatever political capital he had���you���d risk wrinkling your bespoke suits in anything other than a top of the line Boeing���but that doesn���t mean he won���t survive. Since the Boeing, he���s been through mass protests, notably in 2017 when he found himself squeezed between outside powers pushing him to effect a peace accord with Northern rebels that he should never have signed and citizens in the street telling him that, no, they would not revise the constitution to allow him to implement it. He backed down then, and has retreated on other issues since.
This moment may be different. He has made inadequate concessions, while the hard line he has drawn is very hard indeed. Some of this weekend���s shootings���and the funerals���happened in Badalabougou, around Dicko���s domicile and the neighborhood���s important mosque. That is under the nose of the intelligentsia, the journalists, and the diplomats. The victims are on film. The killers were in uniform. This won���t be easy to back away from. Keita, the strong man, might have cut off his room for retreat. Second, Mahmoud Dicko is undoubtedly intelligent, respected, and by all accounts sincere (even if he���s diplomatic enough to adjust his message for his audience). He���s the man of the hour. Dicko is also the man who���a decade ago���killed the revision to Mali���s family law. He wasn���t alone in that���see Mountaga Tall, and thousands in the streets���but neither were Mali���s feminists alone: they had worked together for that revision for years. The defeat was bitter. In Mali���s tumultuous political history that seems like a lifetime ago; for a woman in an unjust marriage, it might as well be. Malians look to be searching, blindfolded but barefoot, for a path out of the current morass and towards some kind of social justice. We can all hope they find that path���they could show it to the rest of us���but it may pay to be a little leery of those who seem to stand above it all, and to ask what they���re standing on. The simple question Malians are confronting is the same one that tore up tonw (associations) in Harlem before Keita���s re-election in 2018������Should ���daddy��� stay or should he go (bwa b���a bila, bwa t���a bila)?��� The real question might be, how high a price will the Malian people pay���or tolerate���either way?
July 14, 2020
Black Atlantic Lives Matter
Conakry, Guinea. Image credit Jeff Attaway via Flickr CC.
Last month, the brother of George Floyd appealed to the UN Human Rights Council to stop racist violence and the killing of black people in the US. While the current US administration continues to ignore and amplify systemic racism, Philonise Floyd looked well beyond his national borders for help. As he declared, ���Black lives do not matter in the United States of America.��� Floyd���s statement comes alongside weeks of anti-racist protests in cities across the world, with activists and ordinary citizens mobilized and enraged by events in the US. However, this ���global conversation��� on American racial injustice is not a new one. Movements for solidarity across the black Atlantic have a long history, accelerated in the mid-20th century by struggles for decolonization and civil rights. The example of a small country like Guinea shows how intimately black Atlantic lives are connected through shared pain, protest, and hope.
Guinean people have long had an ambivalent relationship with the US. The country has a proud history of anti-colonial politics, launching a socialist cultural revolution in the 1960s, and developing close ties with China and the USSR. Yet, Guinea also maintained friendly relations with the US throughout the Cold War and thereafter. Although the newly independent nation approached the US as a strategically useful ally, it also actively supported dissident black politics and culture, in line with its own commitments to pan-Africanism. Stokely Carmichael and Miriam Makeba fled the US for exile in Guinea in the 1960s, where they were warmly welcomed by the ruling regime. Makeba even went on to deliver Guinea���s annual address to the UN General Assembly in 1976.
Older Guinean artists and audiences reveled in the message of Black Power and the sounds of jazz, funk, and soul���translating these genres into local sounds. At the same time, black audiences in the US admired Guinea���s cultural politics and even adopted the regime���s slogan, ���Ready for the Revolution!��� These ties have continued over the subsequent decades through dance and music���from the Ballets Africains to Y��k�� Y��k�� to hip hop���and through the crisscrossing of people, styles, and ideas. In this process, Guineans have not entirely separated Black and white America. American leaders, from JFK to George Bush and Bill Clinton, have also been celebrated in the country. Guinea���s capital, Conakry, is dotted with posters of Barack Obama as well as places like the Hillary Clinton literacy center.
Guinean people know that US foreign policy is steeped in paternalistic views about the rest of the world. As political commentator Tafi Mhaka recently stressed, America cannot lecture Africa on human rights. However, Guineans also admire many aspects of American political and popular culture. Even as they keenly follow stories of election hacking and interference in the US, they also discuss the merits of its system, its open discourse, and its laws.
Guinea is also the home country of Amadou Diallo. Diallo was a 23-year old man from the small highland town of L��louma in central Guinea, who eventually moved to New York City to build a life for himself and his family. On February 4, 1999, as he stood outside his apartment building in the Bronx on his way home after dinner, Diallo was senselessly murdered by four officers of the New York City Police Department. They fired 41 shots, killing Diallo in a tsunami of bullets. The police claimed to have seen Diallo holding a gun, when he was, in fact, holding his wallet. The policemen were indicted for second-degree murder and ultimately acquitted on all charges. Their bullets not only killed a young man, but also the hopes of an entire family and a community, who looked to a successful son as a symbol of inspiration and support for others. Amadou Diallo represented a collective dream that was forever extinguished by racist and militarized policing.
Many Americans know of Diallo as ���a West African immigrant,��� but people in Guinea are deeply aware of his national roots. He was a Guinean man who had looked to the US for his future. Local musicians recorded songs about his killing, and how it was linked to racism. Last year, a Guinean newspaper interviewed his mother, Kadiatou Diallo on the 20th anniversary of his murder. As an advocate for criminal justice reform and the head of a foundation named after her son, she is still fighting for justice and said that almost nothing has changed in the US since her son was killed.
Over the past few weeks, Guinean activists and commentators have used the airwaves and social media to remember Amadou Diallo, and to denounce police brutality in the US, just as they have for years protested against police and military violence in Guinea. On the country���s most popular news program, one of the presenters described the US as ���a hotspot for crime,��� while another remarked that with these ���atrocities ��� the state is committing violence.��� As the Guinean sociologist, Dr. Alpha Amadou Bano Barry, tells us, ���America was born in violence. Violence against black people is a fundamental trait of its existence and has always been normalized.��� Barry, along with many of his compatriots, also believes that the swell of protest shows that political reform and cultural change away from the reflex of violence are, finally, now at hand.
This is the view from Guinea. Although the current US President insults countries in Africa, Guinean people see, clearly, what the US is���both good and bad. In speaking out against racist violence, they are speaking directly to Philonise Floyd and his fellow American activists. They signal that the world is watching and listening, and not looking for leadership from the US, but pushing in solidarity for change.
Let us remember Amadou Diallo and say his name, and let us collectively continue the history of struggle and solidarity.
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