The Illusion of the Post-Colonial State by Fawole W. Alade;

Author:Fawole, W. Alade;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Chapter 8

Mali

From Instability to Insurgency and Near Obliteration

Before its summary decapitation by armed northern-based Tuareg separatists and their jihadist supporters in 2012, the vast but sparsely populated, landlocked West African country of Mali had a rather checkered history. From the time of its colonization by France, it was never a territory that was even remotely destined for united existence. As was common with balkanization of colonized Africa into individual territorial possessions of the respective metropolitan powers, French colonization also forcibly corralled several disparate ethnic, linguistic and racial groups, with distinctive cultures and sometimes without previous history of close interactions, into a single territorial compact for the sole purpose of plunder. Mali is geographically vast, a cavernous country more than twice the size of France itself, with large swathes of its territory either uninhabited or sparsely populated by nomadic peoples, especially the large northern portion that is home to the Tuaregs, a distinct racial group from the blacks in the south. About 90 percent of Mali’s population, which is predominantly black, occupies the southern portion around the capital city of Bamako. As a colonial territory it was administered by force rather than consent, and France did practically nothing to integrate especially the nomadic Tuaregs in the north of the country into the mainstream of its colonial administration. It preferred instead to hold them in subjection by military force largely because of their early resistance to foreign influence. This colonial style invariably created disunity within the territory that lasted until France’s exit in 1960. This disunity that France’s colonial policy had deliberately embedded in the country’s political architecture survived and has remained to haunt and hobble the country since its independence in 1960.

Today’s Mali was originally only a portion of the vast French colonial possessions stretching across West Africa, then known generally as “French Soudan.” Toward the end of colonial rule, it became an integral part of what the French called “the Mali Federation” that joined together today’s Senegal and Mali, until independence was granted in 1960 when the federation broke acrimoniously into two separate nation-states. French colonial rule was largely imposed and sustained by military force, especially in northern Mali whose inhabitants severely resisted the imposition of foreign rule and fought a series of devastating pitched battles with French forces in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, it was not until the early part of the twentieth century before the largely nomadic Tuaregs could be brought under French rule as part of today’s Mali. This mode of colonization invariably left a deep-seated schism in the country, a schism which would come to haunt and hobble the country’s domestic politics after independence.

Mali was subjected to France’s characteristic iron-fisted rule even as France was trying to sustain the same pretense that its colonial enterprise was a civilizing mission intended to bring the benefits of modern European civilization to primitive natives of the colony. The reality of course was that no one but France itself was fooled, as all its colonial policies in Mali purposely discriminated against the same natives and hampered their development.

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