The Long Revolution of the Global South. Samir Amin
of the Algerian system after Boumedienne’s death, which had maintained the appearances of a solid construction, but was in fact rotten to the core. Chadli Bendjedid and his senseless opportunist opening to compradors and vulgar excesses prepared the worst: the illusory riposte of the FIS’s electoral victory and the criminal excesses of the 1990s. This is a suspect confrontation between two partners who are only competing for comprador government and to be alone in benefiting from it: the old FLN without legitimacy and its generals on one side, and the FIS on the other. The latter was initially able to capitalize on the anger of the working classes and mobilize its minions recruited from among the young hittistes (the name given in Algeria to unemployed youth without any prospects). Favored by depoliticization—the usual crime of populist regimes—and supervised by the “Afghans” (the criminals trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan in CIA camps financed by Saudi Arabia), the “Islamists” wreaked the havoc with which we are all familiar. Yasmina Khadra’s crime novels are, from this point of view, the best analysis of Algeria’s tragedy. Are the Islamists now worn down by the resistance to the former FLN system and the successive maneuvers of Liamine Zéroual (after the elimination of Mohamed Boudiaf—we are still not sure who assassinated him, undoubtedly with the complicity of unknown local and foreign intelligence services) and, today, Abdelaziz Bouteflika? Undoubtedly, putting an end to the killings has become the first priority. But what should be done after that? Here again the historical Algerian left and its intellectuals have a large responsibility. An objective terrain existed, and still exists, to form a “third force” that rejects the Mafia-style management of the former FLN apparatus and the identical one of the Islamists. But this third force has never succeeded in forming. Leadership infighting has probably played a role in this miserable failure. I nevertheless believe that, behind this, there are more fundamental weaknesses, among others the absence of an approach that is able to incorporate the need for democratization of society into the requirements of a socialist renewal. Here again the ideological confusion of nationalist-populist circles, impressed with the Soviet model and their later absurd support for “liberal” solutions, are behind this powerlessness.
I met President Ahmed Ben Bella and his spouse only after his release from prison, rejuvenated by his active participation in the movement to revive worldwide struggle for “another world” freed from globalized imperialist capitalism.
Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco are quite different in all kinds of ways. And yet, the three systems do converge in a certain way. At least, that was the conclusion of the book I wrote based on my Maghrebi experiences.16
Mauritania
I particularly like the Sahara—its expanses are more varied than those who do not know it imagine it to be; the aridity of its climate; and the elegance, pride, and hospitality of its peoples. I am lucky that my wife, Isabelle, shares these tastes. We thus never passed up the opportunity to travel through these spaces in Mauritania, Algeria, Niger, and Egypt.
Our first travels through the great desert led us from Saint Louis in Senegal to Atar and Chinguetti in the north of Mauritania. There we became acquainted with this “chimerical people”—as one of their finest sons, Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh, sociologist and friend, describes them. Invited on several occasions by teachers and students in this country, I came to appreciate their lively intelligence and generous hospitality. I carefully preserve the beautiful chests and bubus that were given to me on these occasions.
I verified the accuracy of what Caillé had written on these astonishing tribes. Having arrived at Boutilimit at sunset, ready to sleep, one of the local marabouts welcomed us to his large tent and ordered that a sheep be made ready for our meal. Obviously, that meant that the barbecued sheep would not be ready until two o’clock in the morning! But of course it was impossible to refuse the gesture of hospitality. While waiting, stretched out on the carpets, we attempted to sleep a little. A Maure woman, who saw to our needs, woke me up by pinching my big toe to ask me this astonishing question, in good Hassaniya Arabic: “You know the world, can you tell me how it is?” I no longer know what I tried to splutter in an attempt to satisfy her curiosity—unsuccessfully. In the Maure tribes, there is strict monogamy (the Koran is not interpreted as authorizing polygamy since the condition of equal affection is impossible) and it is the women who are literate—and who transmit knowledge and poetry—while the illiterate men (except for the marabouts) are only there to wield the sword.
At Mederdra, we stopped to drink tea at an administrative camp. The man who prepared it did not have the demeanor of a servant. He was dignified and elegant. Isabelle asked him straight out if he were a servant. No, he said, I am not the servant for this camp. He was an army officer who had participated in a minor attempted coup d’état at Néma (in eastern Mauritania) in 1961. We had heard echoes of this event in Mali. Some officers, who considered the government to be neocolonial, had attempted to seize the fort at Néma to trigger a general revolt in the country. They resorted to limited means and a naive approach that condemned them to failure. This officer was condemned to death—a sentence commuted, after several years of solitary confinement, to exile in this camp, lost in the sands. We offered to help him escape. “We can take you along in our jeep. We cross the Senegal River in a canoe to a village and then you are free.” He was tempted, but upon reflection said, “No, I shall remain in my country.” On leaving, we drove very slowly, exchanging repeated gestures of farewell with him, if, by any chance, he was tempted, until he closed the gate to the camp.
Mauritania is not the paradise of the desert. It is, like Sudan, the link and frontier of confrontation between the Arab and black African peoples. The Maure society is slaveholding. This must be said and it must not be accepted. Half of the population is made up of Haratins, descendants of slaves captured in the raids to the south. Brutalized, condemned to perform the hardest labor, despised, and insulted, their fate in no way reflects the soothing rhetoric on “domestic slavery” by which the leaders of the modern state and the intellectuals at their service attempt to justify the supposed “vestiges.”
Life in the border region is not as idyllic as the calm countryside of the Senegal River and its Toucouleur and Soninke villages suggest. The river here, as is often the case, is not the border between peoples, but a means of communication. The region is populated on both banks by non-Arab peoples, although highly Islamized for almost ten centuries (unlike Sudan). The Toucouleurs, who in the seventeenth century created their “Islamic republic” (and who themselves practiced slavery within their society, but refused to participate in the slave trade outside it), had centuries earlier produced the glorious Moroccan dynasty of the Almoravids. The ruling classes of the old Moorish country and those of the Senegal River country frequently warred with one another, but they mutually respected each other in their own way. The new “Arab-Berber” (in fact, almost completely Arabic-speaking) ruling classes of modern Mauritania are quite simply racist. This sad reality can be verified over and over. At Boutilimit, the Divisional Commander was Toucouleur (the Mauritanian administration offers a few gestures of concession of this kind for external use). “You are not going to pay a visit to this Negro!” the Maures said to us. “Yes, we are going to do this.” And it was at his house that we slept, like it should be. There are principles with which we do not compromise. The Maures accompanied us to the bottom of the sand hill, on top of which the administrative center had been built. But they refused to go any further. We took our luggage and carried it ourselves. Disillusioned, the Commandant said upon receiving us: “How can I carry out my duties in this country?”
The coexistence of the two peoples has been seriously called into question since the serious events of 1988, which led to ethnic massacres in Mauritania and Senegal, and the flight of tens of thousands of peasants from the north bank of the river. Who was behind these massacres? As almost always, they were not “spontaneous,” and different peoples forced to live side by side do not generally hate each other to the point of killing each other, even when they harbor serious prejudices that sustain strong barriers in their everyday relationships. The shops of the Maure artisans and merchants, found everywhere in Senegal, were pillaged; their owners were often massacred, not by the “crowd,” but by well-organized groups, transported by trucks from elsewhere to the places where the violent incidents took place. A lot of the Senegalese I know protected these unfortunate victims. In Mauritania, well-organized groups massacred the Senegalese and blacks of