SAHARAN SOUL-SEARCHING: Expressions of jubilation were palpable as the plane of French President François Hollande landed on the tarmac in Timbuktu. The vanquishing infidel emerged from the presidential jet triumphant to be greeted in traditional African fashion by much exultation and jubilation, song and dance. He was the hero of the hour. The ignoble militant Islamists were in full retreat. Hollande won widespread admiration in Mali for his skill at navigating controversy. Malians, overwhelmingly Muslim, have become increasingly sceptical towards Islamists of all stripes. Girls hurled their hated hijabs in the dirty alleyways. Fear and frustration were simmering beneath the sandy surface of the ancient city. The level of anger and despair at the Islamists was reaching boiling point. The irony was that the French infidel were viewed as saviours. Girls as young as 10 were obliged to don the Islamic headgear of modesty. It is a very open game in the desolate Malian Sahara. Ruling over a sea of disaffected citizens proved impossible in the legendary mediaeval Malian cities of Timbuktu and Gao. These bastions of Islamic civilisation in West Africa rejected the rigid strictures of contemporary militant Islam. The fragile manuscripts of Timbuktu, most more than a 1,000 years old, are widely regarded as a repository of Islamic cultural heritage in West Africa — one of the oldest examples of the literary legacy of the African continent south of the Sahara with treasure troves of topics as diverse as astronomy, zoology, cultural history, geography and Islamic law. Hollande paraded before the cameras inspecting the salvaged plethora of hoarded cultural heritage. His Malian hosts looked on in awe. The French air strikes that commenced in earnest on 11 January saved them and their cherished king's ransom from the Salafis and their uncompromising strand of Wahhabist Islam. Malians are Muslim, but they are not fanatical zealots. The carnage of northern Mali that erupted in the wake of the Salafist takeover and the prospect of a militant Islamist state led to ideological and religious repositioning in the entire West African region.
NEO-COLONIAL CONSPIRACY: Malians have been told, in no uncertain terms, that it pays to listen to Paris. Should we, as Africans, connect the dots between the genuine jubilation of the Malian populace with the French military presence in their predominantly Muslim country on the one hand and the increasing assertiveness of the former colonial powers such as the French and the British in the West African region on the other? Are African leaders serious about displacing the French troops as the dominant military power in Mali? The French, after all, insist that their sojourn in Mali is temporary. In public statements French politicians downplay the advantages French military prowess begets. French President Hollande, hailed as a redeemer, was handed a faltering dabbe, a baby camel, as a token of the gratitude of the Malian people for French military intervention. However, Hollande reminded his hosts that “the terrorists have been weakened, but have not disappeared.” Paris is playing a long game driven by a compelling vision of grandeur. “We cannot tolerate what happened in Timbuktu,” Hollande insisted on referring to the inferno ignited by the militant Islamist Ansar Dine that set some 2,000 of Timbuktu's invaluable historical manuscripts afire. France is now set to use force, as well as diplomacy, as an instrument of foreign policy in Africa. Of course, such a belligerent strategy will be carried out in conjunction with regional powers such as Algeria and regional groupings such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and its armed wing ECOMOG. A searing resentment of Salafis and all sorts of militant Islamists has radiated from all corners of West Africa.
SALAFIS VERSUS SECULARISTS: One of the solipsisms of secularists is to attribute Salafism to the Arab Gulf, and especially Saudi Arabia, as a byproduct of petro-dollar diplomacy. In an age of rage, jobless and politically disfranchised youth are the most fertile quarry for Salafist groups in West Africa. The militant Islamists imagined that they had discombobulated the established secularist political establishment in West Africa, or at least were about to do so. Whatever the sneers, secularism is a perfectly respectable tradition in West Africa. Senegal's first president, the late Leopold Senghor, was a devout Roman Catholic and a secularist even though he ruled over a predominantly Muslim nation. Senegal and Mali were once administered as one country. And, Senghor was reputed to consult Muslim marabouts. It was logical for Senghor to cultivate the friendship of West Africa's Muslim clerics and the venerated leaders of the diverse Sufi orders. This was secularism's redeeming feature — an accommodation of the Other. These policies may still be right, even imperative in this day and age. It makes sense, therefore, for Hollande and his West African counterparts to pursue such accommodating policies. The problem, however, is that such a live-and-let-live ideal is anathema as far as the militant Islamists are concerned. The Salafis of West Africa are chasing a mass of disgruntled poverty-stricken citizens of failed states with eye-wateringly tough attitudes on issues as mundane as moral and dress codes as well as cultural values and social mores as an integral part of their proselytising pitch.
WEST GAINS GROUND: The moderate Muslims of West Africa are yearning for the middle ground. The militant Islamists, in sharp contrast, have demonstrated that their strategies for social engineering and social control are deeply flawed. In Mali, a centralised authority in the capital Bamako is necessary to address issues of underdevelopment, illiteracy, poverty and political peripheralisation of the impoverished masses. But, Bamako desperately needs money to carry out its functions if it is to avoid the ignominious fate of being relegated to a failed state. The poor are largely ignored by public opinion in the West and in particular in the corridors of power in Paris and among France's own cohorts in West Africa. It is against this backdrop that France is widely seen as a force for good. In the rough-and-tumble of real politics in Africa, African leaders are subservient to their Western paymasters. Hollande charmed the Malian crowds. By contrast, the dashing Malian President Dioncounda Traore received a cool reception in his own country. It is France that counts. That much was abundantly clear. For all the complacency of the neo-colonial lackeys, the masses in the neo-colonies understand that the spread of capitalism, democracy, and development depends on Western largesse. The West can easily insulate West Africa's leaders from what is going on in their own countries. The epitome of Africa's neo-colonial strongman in the 1970s and 1980s was Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire. Dioncounda Traore is a far more low key player than Mobutu was in his heyday. The Malian president is content to walk in the shadows of his French counterpart. France and Europe suffer from economic hubris, but Africa is faced with utter despair. The golden years of Arab petro-dollar diplomacy in Africa are over. The nail in the coffin was the demise of the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The most obvious question that Africans ask themselves is whether Arabs can still deliver prosperity. The simple answer is no. Despite the often justified cynicism that Arabs provoke in Africa, there are those who cling to a nostalgic and surreal notion of a Salafist state in the Sahara. The West will not tolerate such an outrage. Western powers will not give up the uranium of Niger, a country that provides 40 per cent of France's nuclear power. Nor will the West contemplate the loss of control of Algeria's and Libya's fabulous oil wealth. British Prime minister David Cameron played good cop when he paid a surprise visit to Libya after a short sojourn in Algiers. “The British people want to stand with you and help you deliver the greater security that Libya needs,” Cameron told his Libyan hosts. “So we have offered training and support from our police and our military. We look forward to working together in the years ahead,” Cameron hinted at a long-term relationship.
THE PULL OF PAGANISM: Today the top of the West African Islamic religious establishment is wearing belt and braces. The rules of the religious games have radically changed. Malians are Muslim, but luring them to the mosques means stopping the militant Islamists from heckling from behind the pulpit. Many Malians, and not just the elite, see French military intervention as a strong start to reforming the country's Islamic culture. The results of the incursions of militant Islamists in Mali were beyond dismal. For more than a millennium Mali has had a robust code of Islamic conduct. Relations between the various ethnic groups were grounded on traditional values of trust. The Malian people did not have to wait long to understand how the militant Islamists function. But the problem does not start and end with the Salafis. The ideas promoted by the militant Islamists have lost public confidence and support. French military presence in Mali has led to a discernible rise in optimism among the Malian population. Culture is difficult at times to define. However, the comeback of pre-Islamic cultural vestiges is tangible. Christianity never took root in Mali, partly because the French colonialist themselves were indifferent to religion. Nevertheless, the contemporary French neo-colonialists should not count on a clean victory over the Salafis of the Sahara. The Malian Salafist groups are invariably offshoots of the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), the organisation that launched the Algerian civil war in the “Lost Decade” of the 1990s and that led to the loss of 250,000 Algerians. Other Malian militant Islamist groups emerged from its ashes, including the blood-curdling and gruesome sounding Signed-in-Blood Battalion. Others are the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa and the Islamic Movement for Azawad, a Tuareg Salafist militia. Of course, Iyad Ag Ghaly, the ethnic Tuareg leader of the dreaded Ansar Dine — a militia responsible for much of the atrocities committed during the Salafist occupation of northern Mali — has unfortunately hardened the attitudes of non-Arab and non-Tuareg Malians against these two ethnic groups easily recognisable by their lighter skin tones. Darker complexioned Malians have promised retributions. Nobody is quite sure how much sway they hold at home. For now, they are dispersed in the desert. The Malians are telling the militant Islamists: “If you don't like our cultural values get out.” And, they did. Or so say the French and their henchmen.
RACIAL REPRISALS: Intrinsic evidence of racial tension in Mali is an alarming index of a downward spiral into social and political chaos in the country on a scale never seen there before. A sterile racial struggle raged since Mali's independence from France in 1960. The Tuareg have periodically sought an independent and exclusively Azawad state in northern Mali. Neighbouring Mauritania and Senegal witnessed racial clashes in the 1990s. It may be, alas, Mali's turn now. Yet Bamako has consistently failed to articulate an alternative and there are signs that some politicians in the south of Mali are riding the backlash against Arabs and Tuaregs aided and abetted by France. What do we expect with the departure of the French? As tensions mount over competing claims for contested mineral-rich desert territories, should we expect the militant Islamists to emerge from their mountain hideouts to use military force against the central Malian government in Bamako? Instead of focussing on the psychological weaknesses of its adversaries in the Malian desolate wastelands in the northern half of the country, Malian civil society should be strengthened and enabled to buttress democracy in the country so that neither the secularist Tuareg nor the militant Islamists will be tempted to rise again against Bamako. What has emerged as a pivotal guide to Mali's political future is that if both camps — Arabs and Tuaregs on the one hand and indigenous African on the other — cannot build a consensus, not only will they both go down together, but Mali will surely surface on the African political scene as yet another failed state.
