“chimerical people”—as one of their finest sons, Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh, sociologist and friend, describes them. Invited on several occasions by teachers and students in this country, I came to appreciate their lively intelligence and generous hospitality. I carefully preserve the beautiful chests and bubus that were given to me on these occasions.
I verified the accuracy of what Caillé had written on these astonishing tribes. Having arrived at Boutilimit at sunset, ready to sleep, one of the local marabouts welcomed us to his large tent and ordered that a sheep be made ready for our meal. Obviously, that meant that the barbecued sheep would not be ready until two o’clock in the morning! But of course it was impossible to refuse the gesture of hospitality. While waiting, stretched out on the carpets, we attempted to sleep a little. A Maure woman, who saw to our needs, woke me up by pinching my big toe to ask me this astonishing question, in good Hassaniya Arabic: “You know the world, can you tell me how it is?” I no longer know what I tried to splutter in an attempt to satisfy her curiosity—unsuccessfully. In the Maure tribes, there is strict monogamy (the Koran is not interpreted as authorizing polygamy since the condition of equal affection is impossible) and it is the women who are literate—and who transmit knowledge and poetry—while the illiterate men (except for the marabouts) are only there to wield the sword.
At Mederdra, we stopped to drink tea at an administrative camp. The man who prepared it did not have the demeanor of a servant. He was dignified and elegant. Isabelle asked him straight out if he were a servant. No, he said, I am not the servant for this camp. He was an army officer who had participated in a minor attempted coup d’état at Néma (in eastern Mauritania) in 1961. We had heard echoes of this event in Mali. Some officers, who considered the government to be neocolonial, had attempted to seize the fort at Néma to trigger a general revolt in the country. They resorted to limited means and a naive approach that condemned them to failure. This officer was condemned to death—a sentence commuted, after several years of solitary confinement, to exile in this camp, lost in the sands. We offered to help him escape. “We can take you along in our jeep. We cross the Senegal River in a canoe to a village and then you are free.” He was tempted, but upon reflection said, “No, I shall remain in my country.” On leaving, we drove very slowly, exchanging repeated gestures of farewell with him, if, by any chance, he was tempted, until he closed the gate to the camp.
Mauritania is not the paradise of the desert. It is, like Sudan, the link and frontier of confrontation between the Arab and black African peoples. The Maure society is slaveholding. This must be said and it must not be accepted. Half of the population is made up of Haratins, descendants of slaves captured in the raids to the south. Brutalized, condemned to perform the hardest labor, despised, and insulted, their fate in no way reflects the soothing rhetoric on “domestic slavery” by which the leaders of the modern state and the intellectuals at their service attempt to justify the supposed “vestiges.”
Life in the border region is not as idyllic as the calm countryside of the Senegal River and its Toucouleur and Soninke villages suggest. The river here, as is often the case, is not the border between peoples, but a means of communication. The region is populated on both banks by non-Arab peoples, although highly Islamized for almost ten centuries (unlike Sudan). The Toucouleurs, who in the seventeenth century created their “Islamic republic” (and who themselves practiced slavery within their society, but refused to participate in the slave trade outside it), had centuries earlier produced the glorious Moroccan dynasty of the Almoravids. The ruling classes of the old Moorish country and those of the Senegal River country frequently warred with one another, but they mutually respected each other in their own way. The new “Arab-Berber” (in fact, almost completely Arabic-speaking) ruling classes of modern Mauritania are quite simply racist. This sad reality can be verified over and over. At Boutilimit, the Divisional Commander was Toucouleur (the Mauritanian administration offers a few gestures of concession of this kind for external use). “You are not going to pay a visit to this Negro!” the Maures said to us. “Yes, we are going to do this.” And it was at his house that we slept, like it should be. There are principles with which we do not compromise. The Maures accompanied us to the bottom of the sand hill, on top of which the administrative center had been built. But they refused to go any further. We took our luggage and carried it ourselves. Disillusioned, the Commandant said upon receiving us: “How can I carry out my duties in this country?”
The coexistence of the two peoples has been seriously called into question since the serious events of 1988, which led to ethnic massacres in Mauritania and Senegal, and the flight of tens of thousands of peasants from the north bank of the river. Who was behind these massacres? As almost always, they were not “spontaneous,” and different peoples forced to live side by side do not generally hate each other to the point of killing each other, even when they harbor serious prejudices that sustain strong barriers in their everyday relationships. The shops of the Maure artisans and merchants, found everywhere in Senegal, were pillaged; their owners were often massacred, not by the “crowd,” but by well-organized groups, transported by trucks from elsewhere to the places where the violent incidents took place. A lot of the Senegalese I know protected these unfortunate victims. In Mauritania, well-organized groups massacred the Senegalese and blacks of the river region. Who was behind these organizations? If it were not the established authorities, it could very well have been the segments of the ruling classes, hoping in this way to destabilize the governments and force them to share the advantages of rule, or maybe even replace them. As the African proverb says: “The fish rots from the head down.” Fratricidal conflicts are rarely the spontaneous result of unrest among the people. It is almost always the ruling classes, or their segments, that organize such conflicts. That they are exploiting objective realities, more or less poorly managed by established authorities, should never lead us to overlook the strategies of those who are directly responsible for these conflicts. It is true in this case, just as elsewhere in Africa, Asia, or, of course, Europe. In any case, the flight of peasants from the river served well the interests of a new class benefiting from irrigated land, which they seized and wanted to empty of its population to develop agribusiness supported by foreign lenders and the World Bank. These beneficiaries, of course, are all from the Maure (all Arabs) and Senegalese (not necessarily originally from the region) bureaucracies. In some respects, they are as thick as thieves.
The Sudan
A similar tragedy, but on an altogether different scale, has bathed Sudan in blood for thirty years.
I did not visit Sudan, unfortunately, but was only in Khartoum three or four times after 1973, when the situation permitted during one of the short interludes between two dictators. This was always at the invitation of the Sudanese left, the Communist Party and the Popular Front—all were very active at the University, and also in trade unions and other working-class organizations. But they were always victims of the electoral democracy advocated by the popular uprisings they had led. Control of the electoral majorities by the traditional leadership of the Ansar Mahdists inevitably led to the same people in government and then the same chaos led to a coup d’état, be it military, Islamist, or a combination of the two. But what can be done? How can these traditional authorities be abolished and, at the same time, the norms of democracy, even a revolutionary one, still be respected? This was always the unending topic of my very long discussion sessions—the Sudanese can spend the entire night talking—with a large number of the country’s militants. I must confess that Sudan exerts an irresistible attraction over me because of its completely successful mixture of Arab (particularly Egyptian) and African cultures.
The question of the civil war was also always at the center of our discussions. And when the circumstances—that is, in moments when a democratic government was in power at Khartoum—allowed the opening of negotiations with the rebels from the south (which often took place in Addis Ababa), I did not hesitate to respond to the confidence the two parties placed in me, not to participate (in what capacity?), but to monitor their progress. The peoples of the south obviously not only have the right, but also have reason to revolt. Democrats in the north share their views. Consequently, the two parties, when they met, really got on well and agreement was sincere. But no agreement could ever be
