The Sahel in which state?

For anyone interested in politics in postcolonial Africa, one question always comes up: why have so many African states found themselves, at different times and in very different contexts, weakened or even threatened with disappearance? In some cases, as in Angola and Algeria, a brutal war of independence left deep fractures; in other cases, as in Côte d’Ivoire and DRCthe neoliberal policies of democratization and structural adjustment of the 1990s have torn apart what remained of the structures of the State. More recently, jihadist Islamism has destabilized States as diverse as Algeria, Egypt, Kenya and Mali, while others – Guinea-Bissau comes to mind – have become hubs of the global drug trafficking market. With such a track record, Africa seems to have suffered the worst injustices with no prospect of escape.

But the fact that contemporary Africa has been the scene of deadly wars, exploitation of raw materials, and rampant capitalism does not suffice to explain the chronic weakness of the state. How is it that African states have repeatedly failed (or sometimes unwilling) to protect their citizens? And what have been the consequences of this poor governance for a fragmented continent? American historian Gregory Mann’s complex book offers no definitive answers, but the reader will nevertheless find some paths to follow and relevant arguments. Taking the Sahel as a case study, the author traces the history of a region from the violence of French colonization in the 1940s to a strange mix of international interventionism and neo-traditional politics in the 1990s.

The concept of “non-governmentality” serves as the guiding thread of the book. The term refers to the practice, since decolonization, of African states delegating their responsibilities to extra-state bodies and non-governmental organizations (NGO). As G. Mann says:

(…) it was not during the period of neoliberal reforms launched at the end and aftermath of the Cold War, but rather just after independence, when African sovereignty was most valuable, that some of the people who had worked to establish it began to mortgage it (p. 6)

Focusing on the notion of sovereignty in the 1950s and 1960s allows Mann to explain the origins of the weakness of the African state. The neoliberal reforms of the 1990s and jihadism came to embed themselves on precarious structures, but the Sahel states had already begun their self-destruction.

From colony to post-colony

The Sahel is a multifaceted space, but G. Mann focuses mainly on the territories of French Sudan during the colonial era and on postcolonial Mali. Her book is divided into three parts. The first analyzes the idea of ​​sovereignty in Mali before and after independence. The author relates the story of actors, such as Madeira Keita, who played a crucial role in the development of the postcolonial state, and analyzes the abolition of modes of government from the colonial era, such as the code de l’indigénat and the power of local chiefs. The second turns to the question of migration, both on an east-west axis, between West Africa and Mecca (for the pilgrimage to Mecca), and on a north-south axis, between Mali and France. G. Mann shows how the postcolonial state attempted to monitor and control the movement of its citizens often more assiduously than the colonial authorities had done before independence. In the third part, G. Mann examines the increasingly significant penetration of NGO French, American and African in the structures of the Malian state. Driven by the emerging discourse on the defense of human rights in the 1970s, the author shows how the NGO took over the functions of the postcolonial state in order to establish their legitimacy. Little by little, they precipitated the dismantling of the postcolonial state and facilitated international intervention. The book ends with a reference to the military action against the jihadist movement in the north of the country in 2013: in a highly symbolic reversal from the point of view of sovereignty, the Malian government felt compelled to invite the former colonial power of France to take the lead in the offensive.

This long chronological perspective allows G. Mann to highlight the continuities between the colonial and postcolonial eras. This significantly changes our view of the moment of decolonization. As he clearly shows, the very idea of ​​sovereignty was highly contested by the intellectual and political elite of the Sahel. Whether at the time of the anti-colonial struggle in the 1950s or during the construction of the postcolonial state in the 1960s, there was little consensus on what the structure of the state and its capacity to act should be; there was not even territorial stability until Mali was formally created by the dissolution of the Republic of Sudan at the end of 1960. It was not until the 1970s that a new conception of sovereignty began to emerge – one that the author calls “non-governmentality.” Rather than viewing independence as a turning point in the history of the Sahel, Mann suggests, it would be better to look more closely at the end of the 1970s. It was at this time that this new conception of sovereignty began to spread across the Sahel and more broadly across sub-Saharan Africa.

The argument is convincing. There is now an increasingly extensive historiography on the 1970s that agrees that this decade of transition inaugurated a new way of thinking about politics. G. Mann’s analysis allows us to see how this influenced the Sahel. He shows how Malian elites began to integrate a globalized discourse on human rights and how they used the NGO to fill the gaps in the State. We then understand better how

humanitarian aid (…) and the militant fight for human rights, have become established in the Sahel, contributing to a redefinition of what the State was – and what it could be. (p. 169)

From the 1970s onwards, the Sahel therefore became a privileged site for political experimentation and the crucible of “non-governmentality”: this is the logical consequence of the weakness of the State, which can be easily exploited.

Migration and surveillance

The two chapters of the book that best illustrate the multiple stakes of the transition between governmentality and non-governmentality are those that deal with migration. Through a stimulating analysis, G. Mann shows very well the gap between the theoretical intentions of the postcolonial state and a much more complex reality. In the chapter on migrations linked to the pilgrimage to Mecca, we see for example that the colonial administrations had neither the means nor the desire to monitor the movement of populations. But with the development of the colonial state in the 1940s and 1950s – and the ever-increasing number of pilgrims – the British and the French were obliged to create a system of passes in order to identify the origin of the pilgrims. Subsequently, postcolonial states such as Mali have only strengthened this system in order to quantify and precisely monitor the number of their nationals crossing the Sahara. In this area, it is therefore not the postcolonial state that has liberated its people; On the contrary, it has tried to monitor and limit the individual mobility of its members.

G. Mann makes the same observation about north-south migrations between Mali and France. Here again, it was the Malian administration rather than the French administration that was concerned with migratory flows. After independence in 1960, Mali pressed the French government to provide it with the names and contact details of all Malian nationals on French territory, in order to ensure that these people intended to return to Mali to “serve” their country. The French, not having specifically looked into the case, did not have precise data on the Malian population residing in France. The Malian state then took matters into its own hands: in the 1960s, it tried to cut off the networks of people smugglers and false papers, and cancelled the visas of Malian students during their holidays. This image of a relatively incompetent and carefree French state regarding migration stands in stark contrast to the Foucauldian-inspired historiography of Algerian immigration, which emphasizes the state’s desire to monitor Algerians in metropolitan France. The author reminds us that, despite its claims, vast areas remained beyond the reach of the French state in the 1960s.

Before immigration became a political issue in Europe, it was therefore the postcolonial state that saw it as a problem. It was only with the mobilization of Malians in France in the 1970s, against atrocious working and housing conditions, that the French state began to be concerned about their fate. For G. Mann, this awareness is decisive because it shows to what extent the turning point of the 1970s took place both in Paris and in Bamako. Indeed, it was at this time that the double discourse of anti-racism (in France) and humanitarianism (in Mali) took precedence over the notions of class solidarity and national sovereignty. Subsequent political changes in Mali would confirm this analysis: the first incarnation of the postcolonial state collapsed with the coup d’état of 1968 and the arrest of Modibo Keita; In a climate of violence and police repression, the ideals of the decolonization generation crumbled throughout the 1970s. From the 1980s, a new political configuration emerged in Mali, more fragmented and dominated by competitive interaction between governmental and non-governmental organizations.

This unraveling is further highlighted by the last two chapters, devoted to the involvement of NGO American institutions in managing the famines of the 1970s and the role played by international organizations (such as Amnesty International) in the fight for human rights in Mali. By showing how it develops on the ground, these chapters further enrich the notion of “non-governmentality” and open the way to promising future research. One criticism can nevertheless be leveled at the author on his analytical framework. While he brilliantly dissects the way in which the postcolonial state lost its legitimacy, he leaves aside the question of the exercise of power. His arguments help us to understand how the sovereignty of the Malian state has been defeated and its authority undermined since 1960, but the way in which power functions in the Sahel remains much more mysterious. How have the populations of the region reacted to the “non-governmentality” that has spread across the Sahel and elsewhere in Africa? Do Western political discourses on human rights resonate today with a population tormented by political instability and environmental crisis? It is not surprising that in a historical and empirical book, one does not find a more general theory of power, even if the author offers some reflections on the current situation in Mali in his conclusion with ethnographic overtones. However, the question that G. Mann poses at the end of his book – “what is governing?” – would have deserved a more in-depth treatment. The life and death of the Sahel and its inhabitants depend on the answer to this question.