Traces of cocaine among the remains of a cargo plane recently discovered in West Africa suggest that large aircraft are increasingly being used to smuggle drugs and even weapons to the region, possibly benefiting terrorists, the U.N.’s anti-crime chief said Thursday.
The burned debris of a Boeing cargo plane was discovered on Nov. 2 in the Gao region of Mali, said Antonio Maria Costa, head of the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. It is assumed to have landed on a clandestine landing strip and either failed to take off again or was destroyed on purpose, he said, adding that ”ample traces of cocaine” were found on board.
While the origins of the plane are still unclear, Venezuelan and Colombian air traffic controllers in late October reported ‘’strange behavior” from a Boeing cargo plane that eventually went missing in southwest Venezuela, Costa said. Authorities in Mali, Interpol and the United Nations are investigating, he added.
Costa raised the possibility that the plane may also have been carrying weapons since the region was notorious not only for the smuggling of drugs, but also arms and even humans.
”The worrisome part is that it landed in an area which is in the hands of insurgents, so there’s a fear that there were probably also weapons in there,” Costa told The Associated Press. ”This is definitely … a structural change, a seismic change in the business of trafficking.”
Costa, when asked who could be involved, suggested that dangerous groups — even terrorists — might be playing a role.
”It could be even more sinister because of the region where it landed,” he said. ”Let’s not jump to conclusions, but we potentially have a situation where at least one aircraft, capable of carrying 10 tons of cocaine, makes a delivery into a region controlled by anti-government forces.”
Both Tuareg rebels and Al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa are known to be active in the area.
Air traffic controllers in Mali had noticed ‘’suspicious aerial activity” in the past, Costa said, suggesting this may not be the first aircraft with a possibly illegal load to end up in the region.
Costa made the comments in an interview after a Vienna meeting aimed at raising funds for a plan designed to reduce the vulnerability of West Africa to drugs and crime.
Last month, Costa said West Africa was on the verge of becoming a source for drugs as well as a transit point, telling the U.N. Security Council that, since July, his office and Interpol have been investigating numerous West African sites where they found large amounts of chemicals used to produce high grade cocaine and manufacture Ecstasy.
Richard Barrett is from the U.N. al-Qaida monitoring team. He says that while attacks by al-Qaida and its operatives are decreasing in many parts of the world, the situation is worsening in North Africa.
“The situation has got worse for countries like Mauritania, it may get worse for countries like Mali. In Mauritania there have been several attacks, if you go back there was an attack on the Israeli embassy there, an attack on government troops, troops have been killed, there were some French tourists who were killed,” he said.
In 2007, Four French tourists were killed as they picnicked by the side of a desert road, and a British hostage was beheaded after being kidnapped in Mali. Al-Qaida claimed responsibility.
In June, American Christopher Leggett was shot dead in Nouakchott. He was running a school there, with the backing of the American Christian aid group, Operation Blessing. Again, al-Qaida claimed responsibility.
Richard Barrett says al-Qaida is increasingly using local groups to take hostages.
“Their ambitions remain, even if their capabilities perhaps are a little bit less at the moment, but their ambitions will remain for the foreseeable future and their capabilities may well increase,” said Barrett. “And clearly what they are trying to do is to get people who can easily infiltrate into western countries and plot attacks or even do them on their own,” he said.
Barrett says it is difficult to track al-Qaida’s movements in countries like Mali and Mauritania, which have porous desert borders. He says the traditional approach of placing suspects on a list and following their movements does not always work.
“When an individual is placed on the list, their assets and bank accounts are frozen and their access to arms and any military training should cease as well. Clearly that is a little theoretical if you are listing somebody who is in a lawless area of the world,” said Barrett.
A Mauritanian official says the three Spanish aid workers kidnapped in the West African desert nation of Mauritania are being taken to neighboring Mali.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media on the subject, says the hostages are headed to a camp run by al-Qaida of the Islamic Maghreb.
The three Spanish aid workers, who work for a group called Barcelona Accion Solidaria, were abducted Sunday.
Spanish officials have said they fear the hostages were taken by al-Qaida of the Islamic Maghreb.
The group operates mainly in Algeria but is suspected of crossing the country’s porous desert borders to spread violence in the rest of northwestern Africa.
MADRID, Dec 1 (Reuters) – The Mauritanian armed forces have located three Spanish aid workers abducted on Sunday and are negotiating with their kidnappers, a report from news agency DPA posted on the internet site of Spanish newspaper El Mundo said on Tuesday.
No mention of AQIM? The press almost never passes on an opportunity to name drop them. Also… negotiating? Stay tuned.
It has been a very busy two weeks and I promise to have some posts about Thanksgiving, Tabaski, music, art, and politics in Mali over the next few days. Until then, here is another article about Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
Spain says al-Qaeda’s North African cell is likely to be responsible for the apparent kidnapping of three aid workers in Mauritania.
Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said “everything suggests” al-Qaeda in the Maghreb was involved.
Mauritanian police said the workers, from Barcelona Accion Solidaria, were attacked on a road linking the capital Nouakchott to the city of Nouadhibou.
Two men and a woman were snatched by armed men.
The three aid workers were in a four-wheel drive vehicle at the back of a convoy when they were attacked.
Julia Tabernejo, from Barcelona Accion Solidaria, told the Associated Press: “I think the others heard shooting, and when they stopped, the car was empty. Those three were no longer in it.”
They had reportedly been delivering aid to Nouadhibou and were also dropping off donations along the route.
Teacher killed
The kidnapping happened near the town of Chelkhett Legtouta.
“Though we can say absolutely nothing for sure at the moment, everything would seem to indicate that it was a kidnapping,” said Mr Rubalcaba.
“If that’s the case, as I fear it is, everything suggests that it is an AQIM [al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb] kidnapping.”
Analysts say Mauritania has generally been a peaceful country – but several attacks linked to the al-Qaeda cell have rocked the status quo.
An American teacher was killed in June, with al-Qaeda later claiming it had killed him for spreading Christianity.
In August a suicide bomber set off an explosion outside the French embassy in Nouakchott, injuring two guards.
And four French tourists were killed in December 2007.
Several humanitarian organisations including French group Action contre la faim (ACF) have pulled their expat employees from northern Mali for security reasons, sources said.
“We just learned that some expats have narrowly escaped an attempted kidnapping by armed Islamic militants in one of Mali’s neighbours. Therefore we are taking security measures and are pulling back to the south of Mali,” a source close to the ACF bureau in Gao, northern Mali, told AFP.
“Several European employees who are in Gao have been called back to Bamako as a security precaution,” Amadou Senou, a regional official confirmed.
The Gao region some thousand kilometres (600 miles) to the north east of Bamako in the Sahel region which has been the scene of trafficking and smuggling of all kinds by organised crime groups.
Tuareg rebels and Islamic militants — who claim to belong to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI) — roam freely between Mali and its neighbouring countries.
Several foreign nationals have also been kidnapped or detained in Mali and Niger in the last year in operations claimed by AQMI.
I guess this means I won’t be heading up north any time soon.
When I was in Gao, I heard stories of desert towns where ne’er-do-wells and “international entrepreneurs” gathered. Allegedly, these were places where local bandits rubbed elbows with gun runners, drug dealers, human traffickers and terrorists. Dollars and euros were the currency of choice and conversations were held in a mix of French, Arabic, Spanish and English.
Of course, it is nearly impossible to parse out the truth from the layers of myth that accompanied each story. I didn’t trust the sources who claimed to know what really goes on “up there”, and those who I did trust were the ones who claimed not to know anything. My general impression is that there is more going on than the average person realizes, but much less than those who won’t stop talking about ”up there” claim. With that in mind, there are two stories from the BBC today on drug trafficking and terrorism in Gao and Timbuktu:
The US and Britain are concerned about the threats posed by Islamic militants in North Africa. A group known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has mounted a string of attacks, mainly in Algeria, and there is talk of them moving into southern Sahara and becoming active in Mali. Andrew Harding has been travelling in the deserts of Mali to find out what the locals think.
I was standing in a blinding white patch of desert about four hours’ drive west of Timbuktu.
The air was shimmering appropriately in the heat. The camels were drifting by in their leisurely manner.
It all felt suitably remote. Then my mobile phone rang.
Modern Mali is a contradictory sort of place. Crumbling mud houses with satellite dishes on the roof. Turbaned Tuareg tribesmen, texting.
The small town of Timbuktu sits just above the sluggish brown Niger River, and just below the Sahara desert.
To stare out across the dusty rooftops towards the endless dunes, and the silence that rises from them is to feel somehow like you’re in the middle of an ocean, rather than a continent.
The streets here are made of sand and rubbish. There’s one local doctor. No sewage system, and on the western edge of town, Colonel Gaddafi is busy having a rather grand hotel built.
Officially this is one of the poorest places on Earth. But it doesn’t quite feel that way.
There’s a quiet pride here – a sense that Timbuktu has not entirely lost touch with its ancient, glorious past, when these same streets were packed with university students, and the first dehydrated European explorers had not yet crossed the desert.
Smuggling routes
Today, the salt caravans still arrive here from the mines to the north, just like they’ve done for centuries.
A hundred or more camels take three weeks to lurch between oases from the mines of Taoudenni, four huge slabs of crystallised salt strapped to each animal.
The miners spend the milder six months of the year scratching the surface of an ancient sea-bed with homemade axes. They live in salt huts, drink salt water, and die young.
Near the market in Timbuktu, I met a salt trader called Boujima Handak. He’s 49, but looked about 70.
Boujima told me he’d been waiting for a month for his latest consignment from the mines. Trouble with the camels? I asked. No, he said. The gearbox had broken.
Lorries have started to make the round trip to the mines. They do it in a quarter of the time. In a few short years they’ve taken over about half the trade.
As a young man, Boujima once came so close to dying of thirst in the desert that he had to kill a camel and drink the water still trapped in its body. He shook his head and smiled at the memory. These days the lorry drivers carry satellite phones for emergencies.
And now of course, it’s not just lorries criss-crossing the Sahara. Smugglers use four-wheel-drives to carry guns, drugs and people to and from Algeria and the Mediterranean coast.
The same smugglers’ routes are now used by Islamic militants – mostly Algerians at the moment. They hide in the desert, do a little training and increasingly, it seems, try to earn money from kidnapping.
As a result the American government is strongly urging its citizens to stay clear of the whole of northern Mali, including Timbuktu.
The British government says the town is OK, but not the desert.
‘Containable threat’
I had lunch the other day at the house of a local police colonel. The governor of Timbuktu and the imam of the town’s stunning 13th century mosque were also invited.
The three men argued respectfully about whether or not it would be a good thing if oil were to be discovered in Mali.
Colonel Ascofare, a rather grand 61-year-old, seemed to settle the matter.
“It would be a disaster,” he declared thoughtfully. “Name me one African country that has benefited from oil. It ruins them. In Nigeria, the petrol costs more than it does here.”
As for the terrorism threat, Col Ascofare nearly choked on his lamb stew. It was, all the men agreed, ridiculous, wildly exaggerated, and very bad for business.
The general view here is that the extremists, apparently now signed-up members of the al-Qaeda franchise, are a minor, containable threat.
They did assassinate an army officer in Timbuktu in June, but most people think that was something to do with money and internal score-settling.
Besides, most of the attacks have taken place in neighbouring countries, or at least deep in the desert.
Unsurprisingly though, the tourism industry has been badly hit. The Americans are staying way and numbers are down by nearly half on last year.
Halis, our guide and translator, shrugged and tinkered with his blue turban. He was born in the desert. He’s not sure exactly when or where. Over the years he has built up a successful tourism business, traded in salt, married an American woman, and stayed firmly put here in Timbuktu.
Last night, we all went out by camel to sleep in the desert. After dark, the sky fills up with an almost ridiculous number of stars.
Halis passed round some tumblers of mint tea. “When I am away from this place,” he said with a sudden rush of earnestness, “I think about the desert and I cry.”
Check out my sister’s wonderful blog, Dress For Sports. Two recent posts pertain to some of the challenges facing Sub-Saharan Africa today. The first describes a nifty little gadget designed by Hippo Water International which makes transporting water easier and in doing so, improves the status of women in the developing world. The second post discusses toilet sanitation , and comes courtesy of the World Toilet Organization. Happy readin’.
Last Wednesday, I attended a concert at the French Cultural Center that was part of a broader series on Tuareg culture. The first group, Tadiazt, I had seen before. They play traditional Tamashek music, relying on indigenous string instruments, non-pentatonic scales and customary song structures based on chant. They are worth checking out, if only to have a frame of reference when listening to the more contemporary genre to emerge from Tuareg society, often referred to as “guitar” (the second group of the evening, “guitar” up-and-comers, Tamakrist, were superb).
“Guitar” is the term used by the Kel Tamashek to differentiate from their traditional music. Whereas traditional Tamashek lyrics speak of the hardships that come with living in the desert, “guitar” is overtly political, and incorporates electric guitar and pentatonic/blues scales. The pioneers of this genre, Tinariwen, have become international symbols of Saharan culture and resistance, representing the rough edges that stubbornly evade the emery board of globalization.
Images of the desert-as-desolation are burned into our minds: the dune, a towering pile of sand, wrought wavy by the wind, and behind that another one, and another behind that, to the horizon. It’s an environment that man can’t permanently scar. Its tendency to shift keeps it trackless, and attempts to tame the desert with paved roads and machines have failed pathetically. Living in the desert is contingent on realizing that trying to tame it is useless in the long term, and that you must learn to live by the rules it imposes on you.
The Kel Tamashek people who call the vast, arid expanse of the west-central Sahara home have lived with the desert for millennia. They built their society around the camel and live as nomads– when your environment is impermanent, it follows that your home should be as well. In spite of our popular conception, the Sahara is not one big sea of dunes; much of it is rocky plateau, gravel plain, and salt flat, but these other regions are scarcely less harsh and can undergo quick changes based on the whims of the weather.
The world as we know it today would be quite different without Kel Tamashek, better known to the world at large as the Tuareg. It was they who facilitated the trans-Saharan caravan routes that kept the Arab and Berber traders of Africa’s Mediterranean coast in contact with the cities and empires of Sub-Saharan Africa, and this had a huge effect on the distribution of wealth in the world before the age of European dominance. (For many centuries, it also abetted an appalling slave trade.) But for all their centuries of mastering the Sahara in all its harshness and scarcity, today the Kel Tamashek are forced to navigate a post-colonial international system that frowns on nomads. Their homeland is split among Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Libya, and Algeria, and while it could be argued that the borders are simply lines on a map drawn at random by the French (that’s essentially the case, after all), those lines are still enforced by militaries and customs outposts.
The political realities of the last 100 years, from the colonialism to the post-colonial carve-up of Africa, have forced changes to Kel Tamashek culture and daily life, sparking a longing amongst the people for a homeland to call their own. Over the past century, theirs has been a history of rebellion, first against French invaders, and later against the governments those invaders left behind. If there is anything that can give a voice to rebellion and the collective longing of a people, it is music, and the past few years have seen profusion of desert guitar bands who together have created that voice through powerful songs and hypnotic rhythms.
In the early 1960s, Mali threw off the yoke of French colonial rule and became an independent country, ruled by a new African elite from the capital Bamako. A thousand miles away in the northern desert regions, the nomadic Touareg or Kel Tamashek (‘The Tamashek speaking people’) had trouble recognising the legitimacy of their new rulers or accepting their socialist laws and taxes, their alien ways and demands. In 1963 there was a Touareg uprising in a large remote part of the desert called The Adrar des Iforas, around the small outpost of Kidal with its old French Foreign Legion fort. It was brutally suppressed by the Malian army. The period still haunts the local population like a nightmare. Of the many stories of suffering and incidents of callousness that survive in the collective memory, there is one that is crucial to our story. It concerns a mason and trader by the name of Alhabib Ag Sidi who was arrested in front of his family in the village of Tessalit, taken to the barracks in Kidal and executed for aiding the rebels. The army then went and destroyed Alhabib’s herd of camels, cattle and goats. His young four-year old son Ibrahim witnessed this wanton act of destruction before travelling north into exile in Algeria with his family and their one remaining cow. By 1964 the uprising had been crushed, and the Adrar des Iforas was turned into a no-go zone, ruled by the Army.
Ibrahim Ag Alhabib grew up in refugee camps near Bordj Moktar or in the deserts around the southern Algerian city of Tamanrasset. He hated school and preferred running wild in the bush. One day he saw a film at a makeshift desert village cinema. It was a western and it featured a cowboy playing a guitar. The instrument made Ibrahim dream. He built his own guitar out of a tin can, a stick and bicycle brake wire. He started to play old Touareg melodies on it, and modern Arabic pop tunes. After a while, he became pretty good. He was a solitary kid anyway, who kept himself to himself and was known as ‘Abaraybone’ or ‘raggamuffin child’ by the other kids and adults.
At the age of 9 Ibrahim ran away from home in a cement truck, to earn some money and see the world. He grew up wandering around Algeria and Libya doing odd jobs – carpenter, builder, tailor, gardener. It was a precarious existence; made bearable by the companionship of many other young Touareg men who were living the same marginal life in exile. The northern desert regions of Mali had been struck by a catastrophic drought in 1973-4, which had almost wiped out the animal herds and the traditional nomadic way of life with it. Algeria and Libya were awash with errant exiled Touareg youth, jobless, paperless, surviving by any means necessary. They would gather together in groups and sleep rough on the outskirts of villages and towns, sharing food, cigarettes, songs and stories. The police would harass them mercilessly, shouting “Hey you! Les chomeurs! (‘unemployed’ in French).” In the age-old tradition of the underclass, this insult was turned into a badge of honour, and these young men became known as the ‘ishumar’ generation.
Towards the end of the 1970s, Ibrahim began to meet other Touareg of his age who shared his passion for music of all kinds, from traditional Touareg poetry and song to the radical chaabi protest music of Moroccan groups like Nass El Ghiwane and Jil Jilala, from Algerian pop rai to western rock and pop artists like Elvis Presley, Led Zeppelin, Carlos Santana, Dire Straits, Jimmy Hendrix, Boney M and Bob Marley. His most important early musical partners were Inteyeden Ag Ablil, his brother Liya, aka ‘Diarra’, Ag Ablil, and Hassan Ag Touhami aka ‘The Lion of the Desert’. This group of friends got together in Tamanrasset, and began to play at parties and weddings. They acquired their first real acoustic guitar in 1979, and their reputation grew. They were new and radical inasmuch as they wrote their own poems and songs – not the old Touareg verse of heroic deeds and fair maidens – but new lyrics about homesickness, longing, exile and political awakening. In order to keep out of trouble with the law, Ibrahim, Inteyeden and their friends would often just disappear off into the desert for a night or two, to drink tea, make music and sleep under the stars. People began to call them ‘Kel Tinariwen’, which translates literally as ‘The People of the Deserts’ or roughly and more accurately as ‘The Desert Boys’.
In 1980, Colonel Ghadaffi put out a decree inviting all young Touareg men, who were living illegally in Libya, to come and receive a full military training at a designated camp in the southern desert. It was an opportunistic move. The Touareg had long held a reputation as brilliant bushmen and desert fighters. Ghadaffi dreamed of forming a Saharan regiment, made of the best young Touareg fighters, to further his territorial ambitions in Chad, Niger and elsewhere.
Seeing it as a heaven-sent chance to learn how to be soldiers and take back their homeland by force, Ibrahim and most of his friends answered the call immediately. Their training was very tough, and lasted only nine months. Four years later, in 1985, they were invited back into a new camp near Tripoli. This time it was run by the leaders of the Touareg rebel movement, the MPA (Mouvement Populaire de l’Azawad). Ibrahim, Inteyeden, Diarra and Hassan were joined by a whole new group of aspiring musicians, including Keddou Ag Ossade aka ‘Hiwaj’, Mohammed Ag Itlale aka ‘Japonais’, Sweiloum, Abouhadid and the young Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni. They formed a collective and built their own make-shift rehearsal studios, equipping it with basic gear bought with the money from a communal chest into which all recruits paid contributions. Their job was to write songs about the rebellion, about the aspirations of the Touareg for political freedom, for education and development, and then to record these songs without payment for whoever turned up at their door with an empty cassette. It was a propaganda machine for a people without any other forms of media whatsoever. The cassettes were taken back to camps and villages throughout the Sahara, copied, and then copied again and again and again. It was a cassette-to-cassette grapevine and the sound quality was as atrocious as the message was powerful.
Ibrahim, Inteyeden, Japonais, Diarra, Hassan and their friends never saw themselves as one-dimensional propagandists however. They were musicians and poets. Their songs spoke of deep personal struggles and of their love of their desert home, as much as they raised the flag for the rebel movement. In 1989, frustrated by the lack of progress and by broken promises, the members of Tinariwen escaped from the Libyan camp and headed south into Mali. Ibrahim found himself back in Tessalit, the village of his birth, for the first time in 26 years. And then, in June 1990, the rebellion began.
It lasted about six months. The Malian government offered peace terms to the MPA in January 1991 and the Tamanrasset Accords were signed. The rebel movement split into different factions comprising those who were pro or contra the Accords. It was a confusing, desperate and often dispiriting time. Most of Tinariwen decided to leave the military life behind and go back to being musicians.
And that was it…six months of open combat in a story lasting three decades or more. No wonder the group are frustrated and bored by journalists who remain obsessed with the romantic myth of guns and guitars, of rebellion and war. In 1991, Ibrahim and his friends had no doubt that they were musicians first and foremost. They had become soldiers only out of necessity, for a brief and painful period. It was all over in a flicker.
The group headed home to Tessalit and Kidal, or went to seek work in Gao, Mopti and Bamako. Some, like Keddou, accepted posts in the army, the customs service or in education under a UN sponsored programme aimed at reintegrating rebels into civil society. In groups of two, three, four or more, they also began to play gigs openly. Touareg from all over the Sahara were delighted finally to encounter the group who had invented the modern Touareg guitar style, who had been the pied pipers of the rebellion and whose songs defined the story of a whole generation. Their secret was unveiled.
But it was a discreet success. In 1992 some of the members of Tinariwen went to Abidjan in Ivory Coast to record a cassette at the legendary JBZ studios. They played gigs for Touareg communities throughout north and West Africa, but not that often. They were nomads at heart, and the collective was often spread out over thousands of miles. But that was the group’s strength. Just two members could get together in a village with a guitar or two, a djembe or water can for percussion, and sing the songs of Tinariwen. It’s often said that every Touareg from Tamanrasset to Niamey and from Timbuktu to Ghat is a member of Tinariwen, so widely are their songs known and treasured. They are more of a social movement than a desert rock’n’roll band.
Tinariwen’s 2007 album, Iman Aman: Water is Life, received international acclaim and solidified the group as the voice of Saharan culture. Their most recent album, Imidiwan: Companions, recently won this year’s Uncut Music Award for best album, beating out the likes of Bob Dylan, Kings of Leon, Wilco, Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors.
Here is a promo for their new album, Imidiwan: Companions…
and a live cut of one of my favorite Tinariwen tunes, Matadjem Yinmixan:
Last names are very important in Mali. They denote your ethnicity and come fully loaded with stereotypes and predispositions. If I am taking a taxi and the driver is a Diallo, I might inquire about the location of his cows or tell him he smells like milk. Should the driver be a Coulibaly, I might joke that the car smelled like beans. These types of jokes are not only acceptable, they are encouraged.
For the Songrai ethnic group (of which I am an honorary member), there are only two last names. The stereotypes ascribed to those named Maiga are that they often attain positions of power (undeservedly), are not necessarily clever, and have a proclivity for theft. Those who are Touré, on the other hand, are very clever, love to eat and are the alleged descendents of Moroccan invaders. If a Maiga walks into a boutique owned by a Touré, the owner might joke that he is keeping a watchful eye. The Maiga might rebut that the Touré keeps a spoon in his pocket, just in case an opportunity to eat presents itself.
Those of you who follow this blog might know that my Malian name is Jafar Maiga. After much deliberation and some serious soul searching (not really), I have changed my last name to Touré. There are several reasons behind the change, but almost all of them stem from the fact that several Maiga owe me money and/or have tried to punk me recently. In hindsight, almost every unnecessary hardship endured over the last year is in some way associated with a Maiga. On the flip side, some of my favourite people, including my host family, are Tourés.
In Out of Africa Isak Dinesen writes of Kenya: “Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of the heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.” Of my five-hundred off mornings in the Togolese highlands I woke up hung over, bathed in sweat, hungry, blowing on an extinguished lamp instead of turning off my alarm, mildly at ease, or mildly anxious. But never where I ought to be.
- George Packer, The Village of Waiting
Last week I managed to score a free plane ride to the city of Sevaré. It goes without saying that it is better to fly than take the bus when traveling in the Republic of Mali. What would have normally been an eight to ten hour odyssey took an hour and fifteen minutes. To top things off, when I hopped off the plane and began hiking along the dirt road by the runway, a Belgian ex-pat on his way to the center of town let me hitch a ride.
I had apparently exhausted all my good karma by the time I reached the Peace Corps bureau in Sevaré. The internet was not working and I had left the book I wanted to read in Bamako. I had about 36 hours to kill, so I cranked out 300 pages of Martin Merideth’s The Fate of Africa (excellent), and watched the movie I Love You, Man (not excellent). The next morning, some friends who I hadn’t seen in a while showed up at the bureau. We caught up over coffee/lunch and in the late afternoon I got on the bus to go up north.
I was in Sevaré because I was heading up to Gao. Though Peace Corps removed all of its volunteers from the region, travel is still permitted to the city of Gao (though not south, east or north of the city). I have no specific insider information to confirm this, but various tidbits of conversations I have had with US embassy staff, NGO workers and various ex-pats have hinted that things are getting more contentious up north, and that the powers that be are getting increasingly finicky about letting Americans travel to Timbuktu, Kidal or Gao. I, however, had unfinished business up there.
In July, I said goodbye to my friends and family. Unfortunately, it was a “goodbye for now” not, “goodbye forever”. Last week, I realized that should something happen up North and Peace Corps Volunteers be barred from traveling to the region, I would not be able to make good on my promise to return. So with that in mind, I decided to take a week off from work and head up north.
The ride from Sevaré to Gao got off to a shaky start (we stopped for an hour only twenty minutes after leaving the bus station), but took an entirely reasonable twelve hours. The road, however, has deteriorated significantly in the last couple of months. The areas between Douentza and Gossi were particularly awful and I was not surprised to learn that two buses had tipped over in the last week.
I stayed in Gao for three days. I spent most of my days with my host brother Ibrahim, eating lunch in my old neighborhood and drinking more tea in three days than I have in the last three months. We talked soccer, northern politics and how, as Malian men tend to say, “les choses sont toujours compliqué avec les femmes”. In the evenings, I chatted after dinner with Ibrahim and Oumar Diallo (my friend and Joanna’s husband), over more tea.
I had mentioned to Ibrahim that I hoped to visit Fadi and her children, but that I had no idea where they lived. I wanted to greet them, and more importantly, see how they were doing. The next day, Ibrahim and I asked several bella women around town if they knew Fadi. The initial response was a blank stare. Ibrahim then elaborated that she used to work at the white people’s house, and that I was Jafar. They immediately lit up and started muttering to each other. Apparently, Fadi had been talking about me the night before. They continued on their route with instructions to tell Fadi that Jafar would come looking for her tomorrow.
Fifteen minutes later, Fadi came sprinting down the street with Aisha in hand. It was obviously great to see her, but the conversation was as stilted as ever (language barriers abound). Ibrahim translated for me and it was reassuring to know that Fadi had found a job working in a garden. That said, Aisha was clearly underweight and Fadi looked very skinny. Unsettled, I left her with a cadeau (see: money).
After three days in Gao, I was actually itching to leave. It was fun to visit friends and family, but there was something uncomfortable in the ether. I’d like to think it had something to do with the fact that I’ve become too Bamakois. But that’s just not true. I actually liked being dirty and sunburnt, hungry and dehydrated. So what, then, was the source of my discomfort? Shouldn’t I have felt back at home? The uneasiness, I think, stemmed from the fact that I kept asking myself the same question, one I never posed while I was living in Gao, but one that I couldn’t escape while visiting: what the hell was I ever doing here?
The US is preparing to give Mali’s army millions of dollars worth of military hardware to help them fight al-Qaeda’s North African branch.
Trucks, powerful communication devices and clothing are among $5m (£3m) of equipment being handed over.
Mali is already being helped to fight the Islamists by Algeria and Libya.
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb emerged in 2007 from an Algerian Islamist group and has since claimed responsibility for dozens of attacks in the region.
The US ambassador to Mali told the BBC’s Focus on Africa programme there was growing concern over the actions of the group.
“We applaud the fact that the government of Mali has taken a firm stance and wants to be as effective as possible in combating that problem,” Gillian Milovanovic said.
The military equipment is intended to ensure that the country can protect its own borders, she said.
‘Total war’
The Islamist group killed scores of people during 2007 and 2008 in suicide attacks and car bombings, mainly along Algeria’s Mediterranean coast.
Algeria has seen fewer attacks in 2009 but the group – thought to be made up of a few hundred fighters – appears intent on moving southwards.
They have claimed responsibility for killing a US citizen in Mauritania and a British hostage in Mali.
Mali’s President Amadou Toumani Toure promised a “total war” against the Islamists and has claimed several successes.
The government recruited members of the nomadic Tuareg people – themselves former insurgents – to battle the Islamists.
But the BBC’s Martin Vogl in the capital, Bamako, says there has been little action over the past few months.
He says the gift from the US and talk of co-operation with other countries in the region may mean the battle is about to begin in earnest.
Peace Corps evacuated the country of Guinea las week after some ugly scenes in the capital city of Conakry. As reported by the BBC.
At least 157 people were killed when Guinean troops opened fire on opposition protesters on Monday, a human rights group says.
But the country’s interior ministry has told the BBC that a total of 57 people have died in the protests.
Human rights groups say they have had reports of soldiers bayoneting people and women being stripped and raped in the streets during the protest.
Junta head Capt Moussa Dadis Camara denied knowledge of sexual assaults.
But he admitted that some of his security forces had lost control.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said France was suspending military ties with Guinea after the “savage and bloody” crackdown on opposition protesters, French news agency AFP reported.
Out of control
About 50,000 people were protesting over rumours that Capt Camara intends to run for president in an election scheduled for next January.
But soldiers moved in to quell the rally using tear gas and baton charges and firing live ammunition into the crowds.
The Guinean Organisation for Defence of Human Rights put the toll at 157 people killed and more than 1,200 wounded.
But the interior ministry told the BBC that a total of 57 people died during the violence.
The ministry source admitted that some soldiers had fired live rounds into the crowd, but said that only four people had died from gunshot wounds. The others, the ministry said, were trampled to death.
The opposition has accused the army of taking away some bodies to hide the scale of the violence.
Human rights groups said there were widespread reports of rape.
“The military is going into districts, looting goods and raping women,” Mamadi Kaba, the head of the Guinean branch of the African Encounter for the Defence of Human Rights (RADDHO), told AFP.
“We have similar reports from several sources, including police sources and some close to the military,” said Mr Kaba, from his office in Dakar, Senegal.
An eyewitness told Human Rights Watch: “I saw several women stripped and then put inside the military trucks and taken away. I don’t know what happened to them.”
“They were raping women publicly,” opposition activist Mouctar Diallon said in an interview with French radio station RFI.
Guinean human rights activist Souleymane Bah told Reuters news agency that people trying to escape from the shooting were “caught and finished off with bayonets”.
A doctor at a government hospital in Conakry said his wards looked like “a butchery”.
Threat of sanctions
The BBC’s Alhassan Sillah, in Conakry, says Capt Camara acknowledged that “uncontrollable soldiers” were responsible.
He told local radio stations that it was difficult to control the soldiers when there was tension in the country. The military strongman also said he was “immensely saddened” by the deaths.
Opposition leader Sidya Toure, who was arrested during the protests, told our correspondent that after his release he had returned home to find his home completely looted.
Mr Toure said he had witnessed women being sexually attacked with gun butts and added: “I don’t know whether I’m on earth or in hell”.
There has been worldwide condemnation of the violence.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the Guinean authorities to exercise maximum restraint, while the West African regional body Ecowas is reported to be pursuing sanctions against the military regime.
The African Union has now expressed grave concern over the latest violence, condemning the “indiscriminate firing on unarmed civilians”.
According to Africa analyst Paul Melly, the AU declared sanctions against the leading figures of the regime earlier this month in an attempt to dissuade Capt Camara running for president.
He said following the military’s capture of power after the death of long-time ruler Lansana Conte, it was hoped Guinea’s human rights record would improve.
“We were already getting signs that this wouldn’t in fact happen, but now we’ve seen a repetition of the army’s traditional resort to violence when facing protest,” he told the BBC’s Network Africa programme.
The military takeover initially had some popular support, but in recent weeks there have been several anti-government protests.
Guinean officials and former aides of Capt Camara have been accused of corruption and links to the drugs trade, including the son of former President Lansana Conte, who was shown confessing on TV to smuggling cocaine.
Guinea expert Gilles Yabi told the BBC’s Focus on Africa programme that the rally was “only the beginning” of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations that can be expected in the next few months.
Should Capt Camara stand for president, he said, it would be a violation of the tacit agreement between military and civil forces which has kept him in power.
And it would mark a perpetuation of the kind of rule that Guinea has seen for the past decade – which the military had promised to sweep away.
While I wasn’t evacuated, I can certainly relate to what the Guinea volunteers are going through. Though the circumstances under which I left Gao did not have this uncertainty and lack of closure, I do know what it is like to have something you have worked hard for suddenly cut short. To make matters more difficult for the PC Guinea “refugees”, they are ostensibly quarantined at the Peace Corps Mali training center, situated a couple of miles outside of Bamako.
Peace Corps has started shuttling the volunteers into Bamako, giving them a chance to relax and see the city. Last weekend, about 70 of us went to the 2010 World Cup qualifier between Mali and Sudan. I was surprised to see that the stadium was no where near full. Though both teams are mathematically out of World Cup contention, the match did have remifications for the 2010 African Cup in Angola this winter. Going into the match, a win would have put Mali in good shape for the match.
The match was pretty lopsided, save for the actual score. Despite an early red card for Sudan, and the presence of Mali’s stars (Seydou Keita and Frédéric Kanouté both played), Mali could not find the back of the net.
With ten minutes remaining, the Peace Corps drivers decided that it was best for us to leave. We needed to avoid the crowd and get all of the Guinea volunteers back in one piece. We left just in time, as the 80th minute is the time when the guards outside the stadium open the gates and allow those unable or unwilling to pay for tickets to flood the stadium. The dead sprint of hundreds of Malians toward a single entry ramp was quite a sight.
Predictably, Mali finally broke through and scored just as our bus pulled out of the parking lot. C’est la vie.
To be honest, I have nothing poignant to say. Most volunteers not based in Bamako have been at their sites. The training for newly arrived PCVs is over, and there is a ton of work to be done en brousse in the months that follow rain season. The relative serenity has been a welcome reprieve and afforded me time to catch up on reading. I have even managed to carve out a social life that deviates from the same four establishments (see: watering holes) frequented by Peace Corps Volunteers.
Bamako’s world renowned music scene, however, remains frustratingly elusive. Two weeks ago a couple of us found a dive bar with a killer live act. The amps were turned up to “eleven” and various singers howled their way into a cramped spotlight. The music didn’t really get going until 2am, but sticking around was well worth the lethargy, ringing ears and lung damage that accompanied the rest of the weekend.
Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea how to get back to this place and only a vague sense of its name or quartier. We were given a ride there by a well-to-do Malian and took a taxi back, and since most of Bamako looks the same at night (particularly at 4am), I am at a loss. The hunt shall continue.
One of the more enjoyable aspects of my new job is the opportunity to make small talk with my colleagues. Since we were in Sevaré for the week, I spent most of my meals in the company of my co-workers Kanté, Bréma Youssouf and Ami. The mealtime dynamic mirrored our meetings, with bravado and opinion in no short supply.
At no point in the last year have I felt deprived of conversation, but most conversations in Gao revolved around soccer, livestock, lack of rain, lack of food, fish farming and tea. Don’t get me wrong, I loved these conversations. They are the essence of cultural exchange and the oxygen of Peace Corps. But with my new colleagues, the topics are more varied.
Last week alone we discussed women’s rights in Mali, political Islam, security in northern Mali, the effectiveness of international aid in Africa and food security. All were fruitful debates and in many cases, my colleagues were personally involved in the topics of discussion. I tended to be a passive participant, trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of conversation.
Periodically, American politics comes up. Last week, someone brought up the US healthcare system.
One co-worker proposed that the situation was easy to explain: “The rich don’t want to help pay for the poor’s healthcare.”
If only this were actually the case. I tried to explain that the problem was more complex, but in reality, complex is not the right word. It’s not complex so much as it is bafflingly stupid.
I had to settle on the following: Americans pay a ton of money for a mediocre product that is going to get drastically more expensive in the near term, yet remain mediocre. Rather than having some people pay more now in order to control costs later AND get better healthcare in return, we’ve resorted to throwing tea and bringing guns to town-hall meetings. This didn’t make any sense to them, nor should it.
In the end, I just paraphrased John Stewart. We live in a country with mandatory car insurance, but not universal healthcare because “cars, unlike people, are important.”
I spent last week en mission in Sevaré, where the PGP2 team met with our partners from local NGOs to train field agents and receive feedback on the questionnaire and indices that we had been drafting for several weeks. It was an incredibly productive five days.
I have commented on this before, but the attention spans of Malians never cease to amaze me. In this case, most of our days started at 8am and lasted until sunset, with only a small break for those of us not fasting for Ramadan. Were it not for the religious requirement to break fast in the evening, meetings might have gone even later.
We sat shoulder to shoulder for hours, belaboring minutiae. After forty minutes of debating whether to label a column “domain of intervention” or “sector”, I had to excuse myself for a couple minutes, badly in need of caffeine and fresh air. Every sentence of every document was scrutinized and by the end of the week, I was running on empty.
I often attribute the remarkable Malian attention span to growing up in a culture in which an evening of entertainment is a packet of tea and a radio. In such a culture, there is no such thing as ADD. This was certainly the case in Gao and en brousse. But in the case of last week’s meetings, something more was at work.
The participants were more than merely “not bored”, they were engaged. The belaboring of minutiae was not histrionics, it was fervor. These agents, after all, are among the best and the brightest of Malian society, the cream of the crop that managed to rise through Mali’s Byzantine education system. Though they represent the tiny fraction of Malian society that has the education and skills to leave Mali, they have chosen a career devoted to improving the lives of their fellow citizens. Honestly, I can’t think of a more noble cause.
So yes, my attention span and the way in which I process information are very different from those of the average Malian. As I type this, I am downloading a podcast, listening to music and checking college football scores. I would be remiss, however, not to acknowledge that there is a slight difference in incentives and motivation. As committed as I am to sustainable development in Mali, I plan on leaving this country some day. For my colleagues, this is not the case. Perhaps this explains their zeal and my exhaustion.
At its core, promoting democracy and good governance in Mali is an exercise in peace-building. When a country is as poor and culturally diverse as Mali, peace is a precious commodity. Absent transparent, functioning institutions and participatory decision making processes, it is hard to imagine how a country like Mali could remain peaceful. At some point, the “have-nots” are going to hold the “haves” accountable. Inshallah, this reckoning will take place in the voting booth, not the streets.
Two terms that Peace Corps employs ad nauseam are “sustainable development” and “capacity building”. Presumably, this is to avoid being confused with the countless organizations committed to “ephemeral development” (sarcasm).
Anyway, there is plenty of capacity building going on at my new job, but I tend to be the recipient. Working long hours with experienced, highly educated colleagues has drastically improved my French vocabulary. In addition, I am learning a ton about USAID and the development industry as a whole.
My co-workers, all of whom possess a wealth of experience, are always sure to include me in decision-making processes and encourage me to attend meetings that do not pertain directly to my responsibilities so that I can be a more informed team-member. Thus far, it has been an incredibly rewarding experience and I am grateful for the opportunity. Inshallah, my capacity to build capacity will develop in a sustainable manner.
It’s been an interesting couple of weeks in Bamako. On Sunday August 23rd, tens of thousands of Malians gathered in Bamako to protest against a new family law. Several components of the law, which gives women equal rights in marriage and strengthens inheritance rights for women and children born out of wedlock, were controversial.
One of the most contentious issues in the new legislation is that women are no longer required to obey their husbands.
Hadja Sapiato Dembele of the National Union of Muslim Women’s Associations said the law goes against Islamic principles.
“We have to stick to the Koran,” Ms Dembele told the BBC’s Focus on Africa programme. “A man must protect his wife, a wife must obey her husband.”
“It’s a tiny minority of women here that wants this new law – the intellectuals. The poor and illiterate women of this country – the real Muslims – are against it,” she added.
By Thursday, the controversy had reached critical mass. Malian President Amadou Toumani Toure, a proponent of the law, folded under pressure:
For many people here the new law is an attack on their religion and traditions and there have been loud protests against it ever since it was adopted by parliamentarians at the start of August.
In some parts of the world, article 312 of the new family law would seem inoffensive enough.
The article says that, once married, husbands and wives owe each other “loyalty, protection, help and assistance”.
Mali’s current law specifically states that a wife must obey her husband, and that is the way things should stay says Mahmud Dicko, president of Mali’s High Islamic Council.
“We’re not trying to make women slaves. Not at all,” he says.
“It’s just the way our society is organised. The head of the family is the man, and everyone in the family has to obey him.
“It’s like that to create harmony.”
Equality
At most of the demonstrations against the new code, women have been present, although usually greatly outnumbered by men.
Hadja Safiatou Dembele, president of the National Union of Muslim Women’s Associations (NUMWA), says the Koran is clear that a wife has the obligation to listen to her husband.
“A man must protect his wife. A wife must obey her husband,” she says.
“It’s a tiny minority of woman here who want this new law; the intellectuals. The poor and illiterate women of this country, the real Muslims, are against it.”
Kane Nana Sanou, a women’s rights activist who is on the committee that has been lobbying for the new family law, says women across Mali should be overjoyed at the new code and disputes the idea that the majority of women are against it.
“How can people say that the majority of women in this country are against the code? Have they done a poll to find that out? They haven’t.”
“I believe this new law is good for Mali. It makes all citizens equal before the law.”
Ms Sanou says she understands why some women might argue that the law should contain a provision that they have to obey their husbands, even if that might mean less rights for them.
“Like me, these women have grown up in traditional families. They have always been told that it’s the right thing to do to obey your husband, so of course they believe that,” she says.
Modern age
There are other provisions in the new code that have also upset some Muslims.
Marriage is defined as a secular institution in the law and widows and children born outside wedlock are given greater inheritance rights.
The minimum age for girls to marry is raised to 18 – although it is possible to ask for permission for girls to be married younger – and rules on adoption are set out.
The law’s supporters say that Malian society has evolved and the new law is simply bringing the country into the modern age.
What is more, says Boya Dembele, an adviser to Mali’s justice minister, some of the things that Muslim organisations want – like making religious marriages official – are contrary to Mali’s constitution.
“In Muslim states it’s the Koran which applies. Mali is a majority Muslim country, but it’s a republic. It’s democratic and secular,” he says.
“So we can’t move away from being secular because if we did it would be attacking the very foundations of the state.”
Some of the angry protests across Mali since the law was passed have almost got out of control.
At one meeting at Bamako’s main mosque, religious leaders had to step in to stop young Muslims, opposed to the law, from attacking the parliament building.
Mali’s imams have been threatening to refuse to hold marriage or baptism ceremonies for members of parliament who voted for the law.
Mali’s High Islamic Council says mosques will start issuing their own wedding certificates and will tell people not to bother getting the official paperwork at the town hall.
If the law is not changed, Mr Dicko of the High Islamic Council says the country’s politicians will get a nasty shock at the next elections.
“We are trying to keep people calm. We don’t want them to do anything that is against the law.
“Instead we are telling people that they elect the parliament, so if their members of parliament don’t listen to them, they will have the power to vote them out of office.”
In the face of such pressure, President Toure has backed down and sent the law back to parliament to be reviewed.
I’m not sure where to begin. A lot of friends, colleagues and PCVs have made the argument that if the public is overwhelmingly against a particular legislative outcome, then the executive ought to veto it. In this case, it appears that a majority of Malians are adamantly opposed to the new law and since any healthy, vibrant, democracy is responsive to the needs and demands of the public, President Toure was right to return the bill to Parliament. If Malians aren’t ready for change, then their government should not impose it.
I find this argument entirely unconvincing. If we put everything to referendum, what is the point of representative democracy? Referenda are lauded as examples of pure, direct democracy. Yet one need not look further than California to find examples of public referenda undermining effective governance. They reward oversimplification, stack the deck in favor of short-sighted decision-making and discourage compromise.
In Mali, the case against following public opinion is even more substantial. Less than 40 percent of Malian women are literate, and the average Malian female attends less than five years of school. For males, the numbers are only slightly higher. As unappealing and condesending as it sounds, Mali is exactly the type of population in which representative democracy is ideal and referenda should be used sparingly.
Though I wish it were not the case, moral outrage and cocktail chatter are middle class luxuries. The average Malian (illiterate, under-educated, pregnant and unsure of her next meal) is better served by having an elected official (educated, financially secure and better equipped to grapple with complex issues) on her behalf. Those elected to parliament ought to represent their constituents, but that does not mean they should be representative of their constituents. Populism has its time and place, but when it crosses into the realm of anti-intellectualism it can have deleterious effects.
No matter where you stand, Toure’s cowardice is troubling. He sent the bill back to Parliament in the name of social harmony. In other words, people were threatening violence and Toure rewarded this misbehavior with capitulation. This is a dangerous precedent, because it encourages threatening violence in the wake of legislative defeat. Even if I did support this law, I would not be pleased with the means by which it was defeated. Unfortunately, opponents of the bill are conflating the success of their tactics with the merits of their argument.
Lastly, there was a significant enthusiasm gap between those who supported the law and those who were opposed. Proponents and opponents alike should have been rallying. Article 312 proposed more than just new phraseology, and at the risk of hyperbole, its implementation would have fundamentally changed the lot of women in Mali. Growing pains are no excuse for lack of progress, but those who warned of social upheaval were absolutely right.
Several months ago, I found myself in the position to help a Malian woman take hold of her economic fate. As a result, I have seen first hand the negative repercussions that accompany what in our society is such an unheroic act. She was ostracized, lost her support network and was threatened with violence. The initial fall-out was so disheartening that I wondered if she would have been better off condemned to the comforts of second-class status.
Proponents of women’s rights in Africa overlook this barrier all too often. It’s not that we shouldn’t work to empower women in Mali or that drastic change is not necessary. My point is that we need to acknowledge and be cognizant of the fact that when a woman asserts her rights in Mali, she is risking everything, literally. She could lose her friends, family, posessions and be subject to physical harm.
My first life as a Peace Corps Volunteer afforded me plenty of free time. Now that I am bamakois, grinding away at a 9-5, I find myself with more distractions and less time for reading. So, I figured now is as good a time as ever to provide my long overdue list of books and essays I have read within the last year that I found to be particularly noteworthy. Under each book, I offer my best self-important literary critic impression, served with extra braggadocio on top. Enjoy!
NON-FICTION
Tbe Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
Dated polemic. Thought provoking and thoroughly frustrating.
Guns of August, Barbara W. Tuchman
Tuchman is definitely from the David Halberstam School of storytelling, with individual actors standing on the precipice of history, bestriding the line between greatness and tragedy. Those who believe that history is not literature will hate this book. I liked it.
Ghost Wars, Steve Coll
Shortened attention spans and new media have killed journalism. Ghost Wars isn’t history; it’s a 600-page piece of long-form journalism and the best work of non-fiction I have ever read.
Orientalism, Edward Said
It is easy to see why this book is so influential. It offers a lot of interesting and original insight. As a work of scholarship, however, it is pretty flawed. The narrative is way too selective and as someone who thinks culture is intersubjective, his thesis didn’t add up for me.
King Leopold’s Ghosts, Adam Hochschild
It’s history that reads like fiction, with lots of villains, a handful of heroes and a bittersweet ending.
FICTION
Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
Great novel. Part political thriller, part character study, the book has incredible contemporary resonance. No one is incorruptible.
Atonement, Ian McEwan
I started this book with skepticism and couldn’t put it down. It is beautifully written, especially one particular scene that I won’t give away but if you’ve read it, you know the one to which I am referring. The ending is deeply unsettling and brings into question the very concept of atonement. So yeah, not the most creative title.
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
Historical fiction cloaked in a bizarre premise. Rushdie can certainly turn a phrase.
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
It takes a skilled storyteller to write a novel that follows a single person’s life from start to finish and is interesting every step of the way. Lahiri pulls it off with lucid, efficient prose. I read it in a day, and I never read a book in one sitting.
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
Call me sacrilegious but I just don’t enjoy Hemingway’s dialogue, and while everyone loves to identify with Robert Jordan, I found the personal stories of Pablo and El Sordo much more compelling. I loved the themes, didn’t love the prose.
ESSAYS
Riot Baby (Life In South Central Lost Angeles), Daniel Voll
The White Train, J. Malcom Garcia
Stuff, J.T. Leroy
What Sacagawea Means to Me, Sherman Alexie
“In the end, I wonder if colonization might somehow be magical. After all, Miles Davis is the direct descendant of slaves and slave owners. Hank Williams is the direct descendant of poor whites and poorer Indians. In 1876 Emily Dickinson was writing poems in an Amherst attic while Crazy Horse was killing Custer on the banks of the Little Big Horn. I remain stunned by these contradictions, by the successive generations of social, political, and artistic mutations that can be so beautiful and painful. How did we get there from here? This country somehow gave life to Maria Tallchief and Ted Bundy, to Geronimo and Joe McCarthy, to Nathan Bedford Forest and Toni Morrison, to the Declaration of Independence and Executive Order No. 1066, to Cesar Chavez and Richard Nixon, to theme parks and national parks, to smallpox and the vaccine for smallpox.
As a Native American, I want to hate this country and its contradictions. But this country exists, in whole and in part, because Sacagawea helped Lewis and Clark. In the land that came to be called Idaho, she acted as diplomat between her long-lost brother and the Lewis and Clark party. Why wouldn’t she ask her brother and her tribe to take revenge against the men who had enslaved her? Sacagawea is a contradiction. Here in Seattle, I exist, in whole and in part, because a half-white man named James Cox fell in love with a Spokane Indian named Etta Adams and gave birth to my mother. I am a contradiction; I am Sacagawea.”
How Susie Bayer’s T-Shirt Ended Up on Yusuf Mama’s Back, George Packer
“On balance, in spite of its problems, I have become a convert to used clothing. Africans want it. It gives them dignity and choice. But now that I have seen them prize so highly, and with such profound effects, what we throw away without a thought, the trail of Susie Bayer’s T-shirt only seems to tell one story, a very old one, about the unfairness of the world as it is.”
I travelled to Sevare last weekend for my friends’ wedding. Joanna is a PCV who is just finishing up her third year in Mali. I first met her several years ago, when we were both undergraduates volunteering for the Kerry campaign. Years later, we randomly ended up in Gao. Her fiancé, a Malian named Oumar Diallo, is also a good friend of mine.
I met Diallo through Joanna. Diallo is a doctor by training, but some years ago he decided to join the development community and work in the domain of public health and food security. Our mutual obsessions with Champion’s League Football, among other things, made us fast friends.
Predictably, the wedding was unique. Jo looked stunning in her mother’s wedding dress and Diallo’s Hugo Boss suit was razor sharp. True to Malian form, the festivities were in several locations, chaoatic and sweaty. While not a completely traditional Malian wedding, there was a nice mix of local and American custom. Highlights included the father-daughter dance, and the gathering at the Mayor’s office, where the marriage was made official.
Both bride and groom legally agreed to a monogamous marriage. Malian law allows for men to take up to four wives, so long as the wife “consents” to a polygamous marriage. To those of us who know Jo and Oumar, their decision in favor of monogamy was not a surprise. Some guests, who were apparently out of the loop, waited in anticipation and there was a bit of a stir when the decision was finalized. Agreeing to monogomy still baffles a lot of Malian men.
All in all, it was a great weekend. Congrats to Jo, Diallo and their family members.
In my last post, I neglected to mention what exactly my new job entails. So here ya go.
I am working at Programme de Gourvenance Partagée (PGP), a project funded and contracted through USAID and Management Systems International respectively.
It’s hard to understand PGP’s mission absent some context, so bear with me.
Title XI of the 1992 Malian Constitution includes a provision for territorial decentralization. In the Malian context, this means devolution of power and shared local governance.
The 1992 Constitution sets up a three-tiered system of Collectivités Territoriale, including:
- 8 regions (plus the district of Bamako)
- 49 cercle
- 703 urban and rural commune
Each sub national government is legally and financially distinct from the national government and each other.
There are three stated objectives of decentralization:
1. Consolidate and strengthen the democratization process
2. Reinforce stability and peace in the northern regions
3. Promote sustainable local development
The primary purpose of each sub national government is to conceptualize, plan and implement socioeconomic and cultural development at their respective levels.
Chapter XII of the 1992 Malian Constitution creates the Haut Conseil des Collectivités (HCC). The HCC is nominally devoted to acting as a liaison between local governments and the national government. With 75 members elected to five-year terms, it holds joint sessions with the National Assembly. The cabinet is required by law to seek the opinion of the HCC on all matters pertaining to sub national government.
The principal democratic governance problem facing Mali is the state’s inability to consolidate and institutionalize a system of decentralized governance so that local entities have access to the resources to match their new functions.
The USAID/PGP/MSI approach is based on the assumption that a strong civil society is an important prerequisite to any meaningful, vibrant, democratic and decentralized local governance system. As a result, PGP works to increase citizen interaction with local government in order to strengthen civil society. This includes working with and encouraging the broad participation of local NGO’s, women’s associations, water user associations, farmer’s cooperatives and a host of other stakeholders in society. It also requires PGP to work with Mayors, councilors and other functionaries so as to reinforce the importance of a participatory decision-making process.
The first phase of PGP concluded in late 2008. The new 5-year program, commonly referred to as PGP 2, just received funding and is ready for launch. Phase two will focus on consolidating the gains made by PGP 1, and expanding the program to new communes and municipalities.
The key word here is synergy. PGP works in the domain of resolving local conflict, bolstering the macro-political environment, increasing the participation of women in the communal decision making process, providing financial training, offering technical assistance on management and a host of other issues pertaining to good governance and civil society. With so many different actors, all of whom have an interest in efficacious local governance, PGP aims to create sustainable partnerships that bring together the relevant segments of society necessary for a robust civil society.
The views expressed on this site are those of the author, Peter Tinti, and do not necessarily reflect those of the Peace Corps or the United States government.
