The book “Fabricating the Sahel” by Jean-Loup Amselle discusses contemporary French post-colonial traditions and perceptions regarding the region between the Sahara Desert and the African savannah, addressing the biases and stereotypes affixed to the ethnicities and nationalities inhabiting this area. It explores the intertwined relationships between intellectuals from this region and the French cultural elite, examining how this connection influences the rhythm of novelistic and cinematic production by these intellectuals within frameworks pre-shaped and prepared by France.
The Overarching Concern of France with the Sahel
France did not return to the Sahel in early 2013 merely with “Rafale” fighter jets and “Panhard” armored vehicles to end the control of armed groups over major cities in Azawad. Instead, it brought, as it did during the construction of its colonial empire centuries ago, its theoretical apparatus and colonial intellectual arsenal. The initial phases of this military intervention witnessed a media discourse that reveled in what was perceived as the salvation of Mali from unraveling, particularly through channels like “France 24,” newly established to reinforce its agendas and policies in its French-speaking sphere inherited from colonial times. French academia was not far behind in embracing the narrative constructed around Paris’s roles in stabilizing Mali, framing it as part of a long-standing mission France had pursued to rescue independent Africa from bloodshed through military operations like “Artemis” in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and “Licorne” in Côte d’Ivoire. The official military establishment in France and NATO were also intertwined with the emergence of these academic endeavors.
Taking an example from early works addressing “Operation Serval,” Amselle notes that the “Saint-Cyr” Academy, one of the oldest military training institutions in France, and the Academy of Overseas Sciences (formerly the Colonial Sciences Academy) were at the heart of research and reflection on the Sahel region and the struggles for power, land, and influence within it. The first substantial treatise addressing the Sahel’s predicaments was published roughly two months post France’s intervention under the title “Operation Serval in Mali: An Analysis of the French Intervention,” expressing optimism about the French intervention and Paris’s leading role in stabilizing the region, buoyed by over a century’s worth of experience, against an American reticence for direct involvement. Historians and military scholars from the “Saint-Cyr” Academy contributed to this work, viewing “Operation Serval” as a manifestation of the revitalization of French military power.
Another work published at the end of 2014, titled “Mali: A Peace to Be Earned… Analyses and Testimonies Regarding Operation Serval,” closely examines the French military’s ability to navigate the Sahel and Sahara regions while employing awareness and a geo-cultural approach to the conflict and the challenges in the area, presenting testimonies from eight officers about battles and efforts to defeat “jihadists.”
In the coming years, a wide spectrum of journalists and researchers will accompany Paris and its allies’ directions in the region (especially Mauritania and Chad), shedding light on the importance of regional cooperation, bolstered by financial and diplomatic Western support, through the “Group of Five Sahel States,” launched in 2014 from Nouakchott, which became a strong bet for some regional leaders like former Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz. In this context, various approaches praised what was deemed a blend of social-developmental tactics in counterterrorism efforts.
As French influence wanes and French forces begin a gradual withdrawal from Sahel countries, the media and academic landscape in France will be rife with readings attempting to grasp this pivotal moment in Paris’s relationship with Sahel nations, especially in light of the rising visibility of Russian flags during protests against ruling regimes in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, coupled with the subsequent evolution of relations between Moscow and these nations’ capitals. These works will criticize French policies, particularly Emmanuel Macron’s approach to the Sahel crisis and his inability to engage competently with African counterparts.
However, what if the French approach to the Sahel and the crises it faces was fundamentally constructed on erroneous perceptions and biased classifications from the beginning? What if it carried with it the seeds of failure and disillusionment? What if the Sahel itself were a rebellion against geography and the web of relationships that the region’s ethnic groups and tribes have woven throughout history?
In this vein, by posing these questions along with the issues surrounding the lifestyles of Sahelian ethnic groups and their means of livelihood, along with interrogating what has become taken for granted in terms of phrases and classifications, Amselle, a professor of anthropology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, takes the reader on a journey through the genealogy of the concept of the Sahel, examining the cultural structures and intellectual connections between Paris and French-speaking Africa and the role of these frameworks in solidifying and entrenching the envisioned and desired French perspective of the Sahel. He also touches on the French imaginary and its structuring of Sahelian ethnicities like the Tuareg, the white Moors, the Fulani, and the Manding, along with an Arabization of French perspectives and approaches regarding emerging conflicts in the region.
The Sahel: The French Colonial Narrative in Search of Roots and Manifestations
After a brief introduction, Amselle opens the first chapter by stating that the term “Sahel” is commonly used in French traditions; it has Arabic origins and denotes the area where land meets water, synonymous with terms like “bank,” “shore,” and “coast.” He supports this notion by referencing another word from the same root, “sawahili,” a widely spoken language along the eastern African shores. Amselle does not substantiate this proposition with any canonical Arabic sources but rather elaborates on Arab historians and travelers’ reliance on the term “land of Sudan,” appearing in the works of Ibn Fadlan and Ibn Battuta. He also absolves local languages and classifications within Mali from designating the region with a term synonymous with “Sahel.”
By scrutinizing the early writings of French colonizers, Amselle asserts that the term “Sahel” first appeared in the context of French colonialism through botanist Auguste Chevalier at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, used to describe certain climatic and environmental zones, delineating it with specific types of vegetation governed by fixed rainfall patterns. Chevalier refers to the coastal climate found in the vicinity of Timbuktu, contrasting it with the Sudanese and Guinean climates lying to its south.
The author also references prominent French researchers such as Raymond Mauny, Théodore Monod, and Jean Gallais and their efforts to define this space climatologically, environmentally, ethnically, and concerning its lifestyles. While Mauny, a notable historian of Africa, delineates two Sahels bordering the Sahara to the north and south, Monod, an expert naturalist on the desert, depicts the Sahel as a zone that abuts the desert southward, stretching from the Atlantic shores to the banks of the Red Sea. Monod characterizes this area as relatively arid and resembling aridity, where annual rainfall averages between 100 to 250 mm in its northern reaches, escalating to between 400 to 500 mm at its southern end.
Amselle traces the vulnerabilities that have plagued the Sahel, leading to insurgencies by the Tuareg, the ascendance of jihadist groups in Azawad, subsequent French intervention, and rising concerns over the Fulani. He elaborates on the drought of the 1970s, which produced early climate refugees, impoverishment due to the expansion of commercial agriculture, structural reform programs in the 1980s, and privatization of state companies, emphasizing the ramifications of neglecting the connections between the north and south and the disintegration of cross-West African networks that traverse the Sahel.
In its struggle to quell the flames of conflict in the Sahel, France overlooked these realities, merely recycling its outdated colonial intellectual apparatus, brimming with oversimplified ethnocentric portrayals of the region’s peoples.
The Settling of the French-Speaking Intellectual in the Sahel
After taking an extensive foray into the Sahel in the first chapter, Amselle journeys to France in the second chapter to observe how publishing houses and cinemas in Paris shape the coastal intellectuals’ perceptions of their region, heritages, and modes of religious expression, how they internalize Western values in various forms, defend them against local rejections, and how they look down upon critical social science approaches that aim to understand and analyze the phenomena of armed groups operating in the Sahel, often “demonizing” them and depicting them as embodiments of absolute evil.
The author perceives this production as a response to pre-established conditions and frameworks that France has erected through its cultural institutions, media outlets, literary awards, and publishing houses, which dedicate considerable efforts to the “creations” of writers and thinkers of African descent maintaining close relationships with established cultural and scientific elites in Paris. He draws attention to this cultural symbiosis between France and certain intellectuals originating from its former African colonies, which he describes as the French culturally “feeding off” Africa (Françafriche), where the creative outpourings of the black continent’s sons filled with promise and vitality, according to the concept of African futurism, serves as a fertile source for the aging continent, rejuvenating its modes of thought and creativity.
Through five prominent novelist names shining in African French literature, Amselle seeks to weave together the threads binding the award-winning novels and their inherent critique of “Islamism” or fear of Islam, the echoes of these works, and the tears shed in various corners of France over the fates of their characters, who are victims of patriarchy and “Islamism” and the extremism counter to “genuine African values.”
Starting with the most recent awards garnered by African writers, particularly the prestigious “Goncourt Prize” awarded to Senegalese author Mohamed Mbougar Sarr in 2021, Amselle acknowledges this “nonconformist” author, praising his novel “The Most Secret Memory of Men” as a “masterfully crafted multi-faceted piece reminiscent of One Thousand and One Nights, quickly shifting from one scene to another, elusive in nature, captivating to minds, enriched with literary references,” highlighting the author’s high linguistic skills. However, this narrative attempts to rehabilitate a bygone African author, Yambo Ouologuem, who was accused during his lifetime of plagiarism, defending literature as merely a “footprint on a footprint” or “simple imitation of imitation,” transporting the reader through various trajectories, across worlds and literatures, with “the scents of Africa steeped in the national culture of the Sirir” subtly interwoven throughout. According to Amselle, the text seeks to legitimize or embrace Ouologuem’s claims exonerating colonialism from Africa’s wars, corruption, and loss, directing blame instead at pre-colonial conditions.
Perhaps what captivated the Goncourt prize judges in “The Most Secret Memory of Men” was the implicit opposition to “Islamism” or fear of Islam that resonated in two previous works by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, one of which is “The Bounded Land” (2014), as Amselle indicates. This novel set against the backdrop of armed groups seizing northern Mali captures the ongoing conflict between “radical Islam” and a more “moderate, Sufi” version, or Islam in a revivalist style, laden with a “series of anti-Islamist stereotypes” and dialogue surrounding “foreign intervention seeking to curb jihadist control in the north,” alluding to the French operation Barkhane.
From the Wolof and Serer societies in Senegal present in Mbougar Sarr’s writings, Amselle takes the reader along pathways and narratives of girls and women who, as depicted by writer Dila Amadou Amal in her novel “The Impatient Ones,” have been governed by the Fulani traditions in northern Cameroon, compelling them to patience and spousal submission. Here, Amselle also investigates the tools and discourses employed by the Cameroonian writer to garner the resonance that led to her winning this award, through “amplifying the patriarchal oppression under which African women are increasingly veiled and wrapped in dark-colored fabrics.” He notes her use of certain stereotypes attributing this masculine tyranny to “wealthy merchants bearing the title of Hajji” and men steeped in Arabic Islamic traditions with Wahhabi influences.
Alongside African or African-descended laureates, Amselle speaks of those he describes as “the distinguished and the standouts awaiting distinction.” Among the former is Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne, who has notable media presence in French outlets, advocating for moderate Suufi Islam and African humanism as embodied by the Manding charter in the Kingdom of Mali, and the notion of Ubuntu among Bantu-speaking peoples in southern Africa. Amselle describes this Senegalese thinker, whom he has often clashed with through writing and speaking, as “an eclectic intellectual far from evoking controversy, attentive to power holders, keen to remain aloof from any sharp political positions.”
Similar to Bachir Diagne, the book presents another model it calls the “globalized elite of the Sahel who traverse the world and sail back and forth across the Atlantic,” comprising Senegalese novelist and economist Felwine Sarr, author of “Where Dreams Dwell,” who provides “everything readers want to know about the rituals, wizardry, and witchcraft of the Serer community,” along with two economics books offering an anti-Western neoliberal critique and presenting “African concepts” as alternatives and means for “communities” to regain control over their economies, like Ubuntu (humanity in Bantu languages), tigringa (hospitality in Wolof), and sanankouya (kinship through teasing), which serve as rituals for joking between ethnicities and tribes, reinforcing and deepening relationships and affection among them while mitigating the risk of conflict, or so some African heritage scholars present them.
The author also examines another significant work that granted its author wide acclaim, “The Genocide Veiled.” In this historical study, Senegalese Tidiane N’Diaye posits, as the title suggests, that the slave trade across the desert and to the Islamic East was more brutal and severe than the Atlantic slave trade. Amselle believes that N’Diaye adopts an anti-Islamic stance in this book, overlooking the roots of slavery within African peoples themselves and disregarding the actions of certain anti-colonial leaders regarding this phenomenon, such as Samori Toure in Mali, while seeking to underscore a racial and religious “split” between “white” Muslim Arabs and “black” Africans.
In terms of cinema, Amselle reviews the film “Timbuktu” by Abderrahmane Sissako, comparing it to a previous film by this Franco-Mauritanian director, “Bamako.” While the film “Bamako” holds Western powers and Bretton Woods institutions responsible for the continent’s tragedies, “Timbuktu” contrasts local Tuareg or black Africa with foreign Arab “Islamist” forces that have tightened their grip on this area, subjecting its inhabitants to severe suffering, according to the film’s narrative.
Racializing the Conflict in the Sahel: How France Perceived the Peoples and Ethnicities of Mali and the Region
In the third chapter, titled “Racializing the Conflict in the Sahel,” Amselle analyzes the colonial perceptions that essentialized the peoples, ethnicities, and nations inhabiting Africa and the Sahel, narrowing his research focus to Mali. He discusses what he terms “racial illusions” that haunt the imaginations of national and military actors in Mali, including Western forces and international organizations. He begins with the “Tuareg illusion,” which he believes was first propagated by French colonial authorities in Algeria “to distinguish between the wicked and the virtuous,” or to establish a barrier between “the wicked dark Muslim Arabs” and “the good democratic Berbers who converted to Islam but did not truly believe,” according to their assessments. Under this view passed down from French colonial governor Louis Faidherbe to West Africa, the Tuaregs, along with their vast white landscape that fascinated missionaries like Charles de Foucauld and naturalist Théodore Monod, held a special place in the French imaginary, which led to France supporting them or adding ambiguity to its stances regarding their actions and revolts as well as their affiliations with jihadist groups. Amselle criticizes this essentialized perception of the Tuareg as oversimplifying their diversity and the amalgamation of outsiders into their ranks, as well as the reality of marginalized groups that walked alongside them.
In Mali, beyond its borders, and not far from the Tuareg on the southern bank of their desert lies what Amselle terms the “Fulani illusion,” which continually fuels Western fantasies, particularly the “Wodaabe” community that prides itself on exemplifying the best aspects of traditional Fulani culture while glorifying their men’s beauty over women’s in special festivities. The author highlights the significant attention some scholars have devoted to the Fulani ethical code of “Pulaaku,” meaning freedom, connecting this attention to a stereotype that ignores the mixed ancestries of the Fulani and their intermingling with various ethnicities, attributing qualities to various segments of the Fulani community—some of whom do not even speak the Fulani language (Fulfulde)—that apply solely to those at the top of the social hierarchy, such as the descendants of Cheikh Amadou, founder of the Massina Empire in the 18th century. He warns that the generalization of these cultural values and the assumption of their universality among all contribute to obscuring the manifestations of dominance experienced by lower classes subjected to the power of Fulani aristocracy.
According to Amselle’s analysis, this stereotypical ethnic perception falls short of probing deeply into the conflict raging in central Mali. The Malian government and external interveners view it as the “third wave of Fulani jihad” following the campaigns of Sheikh Oumar Foutiyou Tall and Cheikh Amadou, while Fulani elites in Bamako and the diaspora see the conflict as a genocide against the Fulani. Amadou Koufa, commander of the Massina Brigade, hails from a socially modest background but resonates with former slaves and impoverished Fulani herders, sometimes directing his “jihad” against the shrines of the founder of the Fulani Islamic Massina Empire in the city of Hamdallaye.
In discussing the genocide against the Fulani, the author alludes to the implicit invocation of the Tutsi tragedy in Rwanda, through parallels drawn between the traits that Belgian colonial perceptions attributed to this population in comparison to the Hutu, carrying similar thematic elements that ascribe to the Fulani certain protective characteristics and physical traits in contrast to the locals, who were seen as the “land’s lords and the keepers of sacred rites.”
Further south of the Fulani, Amselle examines colonial perceptions of the “Manding bloc” from southern Mali, which includes the Dogon. Early French colonizers viewed them favorably and “imagined” their form of Islam as a “black Islam” retaining traces of revitalism, a view some elites of this ethnicity continue to embrace, with all Malian presidents except Alpha Oumar Konaré being Manding, from whose ranks most soldiers are recruited.
The author attributes Konaré’s unleashing of ethnic and regional associations and the celebration of traditional values of the Manding people, such as humanity (maya), hospitality (diatiguiya), and kinship (sanankouya), to rising tensions. Amselle notes that these codified relationships within the Mali Empire pertain only to the ethnicities in the south (Dogon, Bambara) and some in the center (Dogon, Buzukuru). However, the ethnic groups waging conflict against one another (Fulani and Tuareg against Bambara and Dogon) have historically not been linked to such customs and traditions that some promote as tools for extinguishing tensions between different African ethnicities and peoples.
He reviews interpretations attempting to clarify the conflict in central Mali, also confirming the limitations of racial viewpoints that restrict it to a struggle between pastoralists (Fulani) and fishers (Dogon). Some fishermen in the region are of Fulani descent, pointing out the repercussions of armed groups’ withdrawal (Ansar Dine, Al-Qaeda, the Movement for Unity and Jihad) to the center following French intervention in the north and the Malian army’s recruitment of Dogon (Donzo fishermen) as auxiliary forces, making their villages susceptible to attacks by both Fulani and non-Fulani.
The author emphasizes the presence of religious factors and economic motivations in this conflict between Fulani jihadist traditions and the southerly peoples while underlining the extensive and cross-border mobilization between both sides, where Fulani in central Mali receive ethnic support from countries like Niger, Guinea-Conakry, and Nigeria, while the fishers draw attention from prospective recruits in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire. However, all this should not lead us to perceive this conflict as purely religious; not all Fulani are “jihadists,” nor are all Dogon pagans, as Amselle affirms.
Regarding narratives that insist on emphasizing coexistence experiences between fishermen, farmers, and pastoralists, the author acknowledges its aspirational nature while disregarding the alterations accompanying the establishment of the two Fulani Islamic states led by Cheikh Amadou and Elhadj Umar. He posits that the rising prominence of Manding identity and its convergence with the current Malian national narrative is key to fueling the conflict between the Manding south and the Fulani center—a rise driven by a powerful resurgence and African-centered reclaiming of the traditions and customs established by the Mali Empire in the 13th century, notably the Kouroukan Fouga Declaration that African-centered intellectuals celebrate akin to the British Magna Carta and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in France, both preceding it.
Amselle does not conclude the third chapter without addressing the roles played by colonialism and national state mechanisms (ethnic-based census, civil status) in crystallizing identities and affiliations that have historically been subject to change, crossing, and reformation.
The Rhetoric of Power in Mali: Presenting the Sahel through its Past
Mali, or more specifically the Manding people in southern Mali, has its lost Andalusia, its lost paradise which they reminisce about every time the arrows of loss and disintegration penetrate their essence. As the days inflict bloodshed and strife on this nation, Malians invoke the collective memory of economic prosperity and cultural-scientific radiance illuminating the great empires of the transitional Sudan (Ghana, Mali, Songhay).
In seeking the philosophy underpinning contemporary visions of governance amidst the ascendancy of Manding identity juxtaposed against Malian nationalism, Amselle delves into manifestations of authority within these great Sudanese empires and other states founded on Malian soil (the Massina, Elhadj Umar, Samori empires, and Segou Kingdom), extracting words and meanings emanating from their power practices that either establish hierarchical order or tend toward proclaiming the equality of all human beings.
From the Kouroukan Fouga charter laid out by Sundiata Keita, the founder of the Mali Empire in the 13th century, which purportedly entrenches “kinship” relations (sanankouya) throughout this society, the writer traces pathways for the rise and firm establishment of a hierarchical model within Manding society. According to Amselle, this model predominantly embodies the contrast within Manding itself and across the aforementioned political structures, separating nobility (free warriors, or Tontigi Horon) from slaves (or riquets, or John), alongside the less significant presence of religious figures (marabouts) and closed artisan classes (castes). This hierarchical model bestows paramount significance on coercive ownership, or “fanga,” meaning oppression as depicted in the legend of the serpent in various epics of empires and states that emerged in Mali, with the violence of the sultan and the subjugation and absorption of rivals occupying a central place in it.
By contrast, the model of equality emerges—according to Amselle—through the invocation of anti-slavery sentiments in Manding heritage, albeit with some contradictions between those asserting Sundiata Keita’s adoption of this path in his war against the Samanhura Kante, the preceding Emperor of the Sosso Empire, and those who claim the latter campaigned against Sundiata Keita’s practices.
In readings seeking the roots of equality within Manding heritage, a crucial reference is made to the so-called “oath of the hunters” among those within hunting brotherhoods, as well as the Kouroukan Fouga charter, which some African thinkers, including Senegalese Souleymane Bachir Diagne, invoke to demonstrate that the concept of the individual emerged first within African cultures.
Yet, according to Amselle, this deep dive into the equitable or democratic foundations of governance trends carries with it a tendency toward local essentialism that renders oppression and injustice matters pertaining uniquely to foreign invaders—whom, in the context of the current strife, are the Fulani who are embroiled in wars with “locals” like the Dogon.
Secularism of the State: Battleground for Religious Currents and the Ruling Elite
In the final chapter of the book, the researcher discusses the tussle between Islamic currents and civil institutions over key issues, including the secularism of the state and female circumcision, emphasizing his discourse on these topics with an anthropological scientific perspective, eschewing political commitments that typically accompany condemning this or that behavior. The author interrogates the nature of the inherited secularism from the former colonizers, asserting the pronounced presence of Islam in political and social life. He points out that Islam is recognized as the state religion, although secularism manages to maintain some vestiges of presence and rooting in the state apparatus, along with voices attempting to defend its fundamental pillars by exploiting political strife.
The author traces manifestations of the conflict between “religious currents” and these voices advocating for state secularism, seizing pivotal moments in this struggle and the contentious topics that illustrate the widening gap between the two sides, which exploit arrangements that have become political stakes, using this as a battleground to vie for power. Among these moments, Amselle recounts statements from the Minister of Justice under the administration of Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta regarding passing a law criminalizing circumcision in 2017, which led to responses from the President of the High Council for Islamic Affairs, Mohamed Dicko, during a meeting about peaceful coexistence, wherein he blamed Western nations for creating these contentious issues and inciting conflict among Mali’s various ethnicities, threatening public mobilization across Mali against any governmental attempts in this regard.
Amselle argues that religious leader Mohamed Dicko, who played a prominent role in protests leading to the ousting of Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, has aligned power dynamics by redrawing boundaries between the community he represents and a secular group that he accuses of being Western puppets. However, the conflict between this leader and the existing authorities shouldn’t be viewed—as the author critiques—as a barrier to collaboration between the two parties in certain areas. He sees this oscillation between declaring state secularism and the simultaneous presence of religious factors merely as a tactic from Bamako to calibrate its relations with Western nations to garner funding while maintaining good terms with Islamic countries, especially Gulf states, for similar purposes. He notes that international organizations and human rights associations exacerbate issues raised against certain social phenomena like circumcision, possibly laying the groundwork for religious leaders to attract additional followers and mobilize them by invoking the dangers represented by the West and its values toward Malian society.
Amselle concludes this chapter by discussing the dilemma both parties find themselves in, cooperating with one another or ostensibly ignoring inherent contradictions in their behavior. While secular elites may conform to prevailing Western liberal ideologies related to public liberties and combating “negative” practices and positions to maintain their authority, they simultaneously do not shy away from cultivating favorable relations with highly popular religious leaders. Similarly, religious leaders, while adopting nationalistic stances against Western influences, may at times not hesitate to collaborate with existing political authorities. For resolving this predicament, Amselle proposes that both parties transcend their stated political discourses and ethical principles and regard the matter as a shared allocation of power, popularity, and tools of influence.
In the book’s concise conclusion, Amselle confirms the hybridity and diversity present in what is referred to as the Sahel, emphasizing the racialization of geography established by colonialism, which introduced an ambiguous hierarchy among the region’s peoples, casting doubt on the “red” Fulani while endowing the Tuareg and white Moors with a “civilized” label juxtaposed against “black ruralites” portrayed as culturally “stunted,” though deemed more peaceful. He alludes to the caution Mali harbors towards French actions, particularly regarding its stance on the demands for Azawad’s independence, as well as the symbolism of the names assigned to its military operations in the Sahel, such as “Takuba,” meaning sword in the Tuareg language.
Information about the Book
Title: Fabricating the Sahel (L’invention du Sahel)
Author: Jean-Loup Amselle
Publisher: Éditions du croquant
Publication Date: 2022
Language: French
Edition: First
Number of Pages: 174
