IDEP had organized one of its seminars in Bamako in 1972. This was an important event since we discussed both the experience of Modibo’s government and the policies implemented after his fall in 1968, without making any concessions in criticizing either the past or the Moussa Traoré government. The seminar took place in the famous motel of that era, a rudimentary establishment near the old airport on the banks of the Niger. At the request of our partners, we (willingly) held additional lectures every evening, attended by most of the old and new leadership.
I regularly saw former leaders Mamadou Gologo and Madeira Keita after their release from prison. From time to time, Keita came to Dakar for medical treatment and contacted me on each of these occasions. Although he was the type of person who forgot nothing and learned little, I always enjoyed our conversations immensely. He was a man of remarkable honesty and courage, endowed with great warmth. He never forgot his old friends. His death pained me a lot. He is the uncle of Ibrahima Keita, one of the leaders of the youth revolt against the dictatorship, who became prime minister in the Konaré government. One day, Ibrahima said to me, in the presence of Madeira: “My uncle asks me why I am not a member of the Union Soudanaise, but rather a supporter of ADEMA” (the new democratic movement); “I believe he thinks that the Union Soudanaise genes are indestructible!” Beyond the older generation, I became acquainted with the new generation of militants from ADEMA, CNID, and the feminist movement (Aminata Traoré), and with many other youth who were mobilized during this time. This generation was certainly more promising than the “young cadres” of the first wave from the early 1960s, whom I criticized rather severely, on the whole. Amadou Toumani Touré, who was the astute and open democratic-minded soldier who oversaw a remarkable transition and who received me after the fall of Moussa Traoré, convinced me that the “Marxist” education given to the army during the Modibo era, despite all of its outrageous dogmatic simplifications, had some good effects, since it produced a military corps that did not behave with the usual savagery found in most Third World armies. I saw Amadou Toumani Touré again behind the scenes in Cairo on the occasion of the Euro-African Summit in 2000. He developed a coherent viewpoint on security questions, conscious both of the ravages of the depoliticization resulting from the neoliberal social disaster, and the dangers of the imperialists using this situation. He believed that geostrategy and geopolitics are dimensions of reality that we are always wrong to ignore. That is also my view.
The victory won by the Malian people, which succeeded through its courage alone, without external support—on the contrary, the Western powers lined up behind the dictator, despite their “democratic” pretensions—had, naturally, aroused the enthusiasm of the working classes and even the majority of the middle classes and intellectuals. We expected, among other things, that the new president, Alpha Konaré, would listen to the strong democratic movement that had mobilized the Malian people and begin a new style of leadership and management in the country. These hopes were disappointed. Beyond the possible responsibility of individuals, I attribute the failure to the overwhelming force the world system brought to bear on Bamako’s choices, compelling unconditional submission to the neoliberal diktat. Once more, the combination of democracy and neoliberal choices produced only social disaster and, in the end, turned out to be essentially anti-democratic. The crisis that hit Argentina in 2002 is the most convincing and dazzling example of this. The social disaster is visible to the naked eye. When I visited Bamako for the African Social Forum in January 2002, I saw that it had become a miserable metropolis, its center devastated by widespread “informal” employment, which is the only means of survival that capitalism now offers to people.
Nevertheless, there are glimmers of hope on the horizon that foreshadow the appearance of new struggles in the future. The birth of a peasant movement independent from the government and opportunist “parties” is a change that would have been difficult to imagine ten years ago. “Control” of the peasantry by national liberation movements and the subsequent state administrations was widespread in Africa, and appeared unshakeable. In all the Francophone countries of West Africa—and particularly in Burkina Faso (which was behind this change, the heritage of Thomas Sankara), Senegal, and Mali—the peasantry began its emancipation from this supervision. In Mali, the first peasant strike—refusing to cultivate cotton—forced negotiations on the government and foreign capital (French, in this case), which controls the “cotton sector” and imposes its conditions, including paltry prices.
The organization of a session of the Social Forum in Bamako in 2006 confirmed my hopes. The enthusiastic support of all the popular forces that have again emerged in Mali guaranteed the success of the undertaking. Here I would like to extend a sincere thank-you to all the militants of the Comité Malien and to Aminata Traoré. The Bamako Appeal, which came out of this session, opens new horizons for the development of a worldwide movement to challenge the imperialist liberal order. Africa has once again found its place in the globalization of struggles for an alternative.
Sahelistan: Whose Interests Does This Project Serve?
My repeated visits to Bamako beginning in 2005 allowed me to follow with my own eyes the continual deterioration in the social conditions of the Malian people, subjected by the Western powers, Europe and France in particular, to an austerity regime more severe than what was imposed under Moussa Traoré’s dictatorship. The cuts in an already pitiful budget ended in the abandonment of the northern part of the country. In these conditions, the conquest of democracy lost its meaning, opening the way to the rise of political Islam, financed by the Gulf countries. Respectable intellectuals, whom I had known as fighters for democracy and progress, passed over to Wahhabism. I discussed all that with my numerous Malian friends, the marvelous Aminata Traoré, always available to facilitate my visits, Issaka Bagayogo, Mamadou Goita, and Assétou Samaké, as well as the leadership of the political parties that had honored me by inviting me to their grand commemorative celebration on the 1960–65 Malian Plan. I continued these discussions with my friends from Niger, Abdou Ibro in particular. My growing unease was reinforced even further when the Malian army was chased out of the north in 2013 by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, which did not surprise me.
I then immediately drafted the following text. Welcomed by some, violently rejected (occasionally with insults) not only by those who had joined the Islamic opposition (not surprising), but also by others who went no further than the simple principle that the French intervention served Paris’s colonial interests. I was not unaware of this. Yet these critics ignored the impact of the Sahelistan project and acted as if this project only challenged French colonial interests. In short, they ignored the fact that the success of this project would quite simply lead to the destruction of Mali on the model of Somalia.
I reproduce this text here.
De Gaulle had entertained the idea of a “Grand French Sahara.” But the tenacity of the Algerian FLN and the radicalization of Mali under the Union Soudanaise of Modibo Keita put an end to the project for good in 1962–63. Today, the Sahelistan project is not French—even if Nicolas Sarkozy did come to support it. It is a plan formulated by a loose nexus of political Islamist groups and benefits from the possibly favorable view of the United States, followed by its European Union lieutenants.
“Islamic” Sahelistan would allow for the creation of a large state covering a good part of the Sahara found in Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Algeria, an area endowed with important mineral resources: uranium, oil, and gas. These resources would not be available mainly to France, but primarily to the dominant powers of the triad (the United States, Europe, and Japan). This “kingdom,” modeled on Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates, could easily buy the support of its scattered population, and its emirs could transform the fraction of the rent left to them into vast personal fortunes. The Gulf remains, for the triad powers, the model of the best ally/useful servant, in spite of the fiercely archaic nature of its social system, based in part on slavery. The established governments in Sahelistan would refrain from supporting acts of terrorism on their territory, without necessarily refraining from possibly supporting them elsewhere. France, which had succeeded in preserving out of its abandoned “Grand Sahara” project control over Niger and its uranium resources, would have only a secondary
