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DISSIDENCE, DICTATORSHIP, AND DEMOCRACY: THE STRUGGLES OF MALIAN EXILES IN AFRICA AND BEYOND, 1968–91

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2020

Jean-Philippe Dedieu Open the ORCID record for Jean-Philippe Dedieu [Opens in a new window]
Jean-Philippe Dedieu*
Affiliation:
New York University, NYU-Paris
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Abstract

In contrast with the imperial period, historians have overlooked African exile politics during the subsequent decades of one-party and military rule. Focusing on the Malian case, this article proceeds in three parts. The first section explores the creation in Africa, in particular in Ivory Coast and Senegal, of clandestine opposition movements to Moussa Traoré's regime. The second section focuses on Europe, particularly France, where dissidents benefitted from an unparalleled openness of the political system compared to that seen in African countries. The final section investigates the influence of these networks spanning Africa and Europe on the formation of pro-democracy organizations in Mali and the final overthrow of the Traoré regime in 1991. Theorizing exile as a process which enabled activists to operate in abeyance despite repression – before being able to emerge more openly – refines our understanding of political transitions which were driven by the juncture of internal and external dynamics.

Keywords

Africademocratizationdiaspora politicsdictatorshipEuropeexileMalipolitical transitions

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Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , July 2020 , pp. 241 - 261
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Uncovering the extent and plurality of the ‘African exile experience’ has proved crucial for a ‘critical rereading of colonial and postcolonial oppression’, as argued by Nathan Riley Carpenter and Benjamin N. Lawrance.Footnote 1 In the case of francophone Africa, historians of the imperial period have explored the deportation of leading opponents by European powers as a disciplinary strategy and, conversely, the escape of anticolonial leaders to flee repression and reconstruct or strengthen their political organizations from abroad.Footnote 2 In contrast, the self-imposed exile of dissidents and the forced flight of activists through fear of persecution during the subsequent decades of one-party and military rule have been overlooked. This crucial lacuna in the literature may even convey the sense that the granting of independence surreptitiously reduced the diaspora to a mere ‘bare life’ existence deprived of political agency, given the wreckage of livelihoods in the wake of the Sahel droughts and the imposition of structural adjustment programs on societies ruled by ‘developmental dictatorships’.Footnote 3

Mali represents one of the best case studies through which we can examine the politics forged in exile before the wave of political transitions that swept across Africa after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. On the one hand, Mali remained under dictatorial rule from 1968 until 1991. Under the aegis of General Moussa Traoré, who participated in the 1968 coup against independence leader and first president Modibo Keïta, the regime shifted from a junta, the Military Committee of National Liberation (CMLN), to a one-party state following a constitutional referendum in 1974 and the foundation of the Malian People's Democratic Union (UDPM) in 1979.Footnote 4 On the other hand, Malians have a long history of migrations in Africa and increasingly beyond the continent after the achievement of independence.Footnote 5 According to government estimates three million Malians resided around the world in 1991, mostly living in Africa and Europe but also forming a progressively noticeable presence in Asia, the Middle East, and North America.Footnote 6

Drawing on an analysis of archival sources and readings of the African press, this article focuses on dissident networks abroad comprised of exiles from Bamako and Southern Mali during the regime of Moussa Traoré. It proceeds in three parts. The first section explores the creation in Africa, in particular in Ivory Coast and Senegal, of clandestine movements opposed to the Traoré regime. These were mostly of a covert nature due to the host regime either consisting of authoritarian one-party rule in the former case, or being in the process of a gradual and conflictual move back to multipartyism in the latter. The second section focuses on France, where dissidents benefitted from an unparalleled openness of the political system compared to that seen in African countries. Adopting multiple vantage points from Africa and Europe allows us to circumvent the conceptual Eurocentrism of African studies in order to engage in ‘reciprocal comparisons’ between these nodal arenas of engagements shaped by different political cultures, state policies, and shifting bilateral and multilateral relationships.Footnote 7 This conceptualization paves the way to further explore the place of the continent in the last decades of the Cold War, a period characterized by the rise of the human rights movement and the promotion of neoliberal policies. The final section investigates the influence of these fragmented networks spanning African and European countries on the formation of pro-democracy organizations in Mali and the final overthrow of Moussa Traoré's regime in 1991.

Theorizing exile as a process which enabled activists and dissidents to organize, despite surveillance, and fight against dictatorship before being able to emerge more formally and openly refines our understanding of African political transitions, which were driven by the juncture of internal and external dynamics. This article thus highlights not only the need for a more sustained political history, but also the necessity for scholars of democratization in Africa to pay attention to historical knowledge in order to fully illuminate a defining moment which, at the time, carried the hope of a ‘second independence’ for the continent.Footnote 8

AFRICAN ARCHIPELAGOS OF PRECARIOUS HAVENS

Even though the first decades of decolonization witnessed a significant shift in West African migrations, which after having long been mainly intercontinental became gradually international, the African continent remained, and still remains to this day, the main destination region for migrants and refugees impelled by socioeconomic and political forces.Footnote 9 Two neighbouring countries, Senegal and to a lesser extent Ivory Coast, each with a central role in the region's political economy, were the main temporary or permanent havens for dissidents despite migration restrictions imposed by Malian authorities since independence.Footnote 10 According to the French Embassy in Mali, the ‘imprecise borders’ of the country as well as the overlapping of ‘ethnic groups’ and ‘kinship solidarities’ permitted ‘everyone to find shelter or help almost everywhere’ up to the point that it was ‘impossible to evaluate the number of political refugees inside Mali and of Malian political exiles outside the country’.Footnote 11 Beyond these vital connections, opponents followed the tracks travelled over generations by migrant labourers and anticolonial activists. ‘History matters profoundly to refugees’, as Peter Gatrell pointed out, for it delineates ‘the routes taken by refugees at times of crisis’. Their trajectories seldom have ‘a random character’ but are ‘instead associated with historic ties, journeys and diasporic formations, literally a kind of “path dependency”’.Footnote 12

During the Traoré regime, the exit, transit, and resettlement of Malian opponents was enabled by the lasting ties that African militants had forged across colonial territories during the imperial era. Created after the Second World War, the main African political parties spanned the entire federation of French West Africa (AOF). Outpacing the group of Overseas Independents (IOM) founded by Léopold Sédar Senghor, the African Democratic Rally (Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, or RDA) was the most important of these new parties. Created in Bamako in 1946 under the aegis of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the RDA had branches in most territories, including the Sudanese Union-African Democratic Rally (US-RDA) founded by Modibo Keïta and Mamadou Konaté in French Sudan, which was renamed Mali after the proclamation of independence.Footnote 13 Furthermore, the influential Black African Students Federation in France (FEANF), established in Paris in 1951, politically socialized many African militants through its network of territorial affiliates.Footnote 14 These ties, anchored in imperial history, contributed to the cross-border engagement of opponents and the linking of clandestine organizations from one African country to another.

Despite the historical depth of these transnational networks, the construction of an ‘exile polity’ was nevertheless a daunting process.Footnote 15 First, Malian activists had to tackle the contested legacy of Modibo Keïta under whom Mali had become a socialist one-party state headed by the US-RDA. His policy, drawn on Soviet development models, relied on trade regulations and collectivization programs that alienated most of the population, from merchants to peasants. In addition to the rise of social tensions, the US-RDA became increasingly split between a moderate wing concerned about the collapse of public finances and a radical wing tethered to the preservation of Malian socialism. The last years of the regime were marked by an ‘active revolution’ led by Marxist hardliners inspired by the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Exactions during this period long remained a dark memory within the Malian population.Footnote 16 Second, exiles faced the shifting domestic and international agendas of the one-party states where they had found precarious havens. Their fate was most often left hanging in the grey area of bilateral relations between their origin and receiving countries, whose governments celebrated their past common struggles against colonial oppression during official visits while embracing repression against dissent. Finally, activists who had been granted refugee status by African regional offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had to ‘abstain from any subversive activities’ against their home country according to the 1969 Organization of African Unity Refugee Convention. Drafted in the aftermath of African decolonization, this provision reflected concerns of the Organization of African Unity for ‘securing stability for the recently independent countries’.Footnote 17 It allowed African states to take ‘highly discretionary’ measures against refugees’ activities and even to deter their ‘basic political rights’.Footnote 18

Senegal

Heralding onto the world stage President Léopold Sédar Senghor's ‘ideological triangle’ of African socialism, negritude, and francophonie, Senegal, which was a de facto one-party state under the rule of the Senegalese Progressive Union (UPS), pursued diplomatic relations with Mali.Footnote 19 These had gradually been restored after the 1960 breakup of the Mali Federation and the Modibo Keïta government's mid-1960s promise to expel leaders of Senegal's banned Marxist-Leninist African Party of Independence (PAI), who, mostly exiled to Mali, were contesting the UPS regime.Footnote 20 Senegal's foreign policy towards Traoré's military regime reflected its objectives to preserve political leadership over its neighbours and to propel regional cooperation against the backdrop of the Cold War.Footnote 21

In the aftermath of the ‘global 1968’ and revolutionary Third-Worldist utopias embraced by African youth, Mali and Senegal engaged in security cooperation aimed at extending their surveillance and arrest of opponents beyond their respective territorial jurisdictions. On the Malian side, the CMLN tightened its grip on trade unionists and student associations. Many of their members joined the US-RDA loyalists arrested during the coup and imprisoned in prisons scattered in the midst of the Saharan desert, such as the old garrison of Kidal or the salt mine of Taoudeni, which the CMLN transformed into a ‘special center for re-education’.Footnote 22 In 1971, Senghor and Traoré forged agreements that allowed the deportation of more than thirty female and male Malian students from Senegal.Footnote 23 One of them, Cheikh Oumar Tangara, died as a result of injuries sustained after being tortured in a paratroopers’ camp near Bamako.Footnote 24 Conversely, on the Senegalese side, the regime continued to face contestation from students.Footnote 25 During an official visit to Dakar in 1972, Tiécoro Bagayoko, head of the Malian national security services, pledged to his Senegalese counterpart that Mali would collaborate ‘openly and loyally’ with Senegal and support the latter ‘anywhere and anytime on Malian territory’.Footnote 26 Evidence of this security cooperation can be seen in the fate of Senegalese Maoist activist and student Omar Blondin Diop. Diop, who had been expelled from France for his political activities in the aftermath of 1968, was arrested in Mali for plotting the escape from prison of his brothers, who had been accused of an attempted attack against French President Georges Pompidou during his official visit to Dakar in 1971.Footnote 27 Extradited from Mali, Diop died in detention under suspicious circumstances in 1973 on Dakar's Gorée Island.Footnote 28

From the mid-1970s onwards, the Senegalese government, which was strengthening its regional cooperation with Mali in the background of a serious Sahel drought and internal relief effort, showed a seemingly greater tolerance towards Malian dissenters.Footnote 29 This tolerance must be read as the outcome of significant domestic political shifts in both Mali and Senegal.

The Malian military regime subsequently engaged in a highly contradictory process of returning to civilian rule. Traoré announced in early 1974 the organization of a referendum intended to approve a new constitution, which would ultimately lead to the establishment of presidential elections and a single-party system. Its holding was contested: the circulation of pamphlets denouncing this ‘electoral farce’ led to hundreds of arrests and the deportation of opponents to Taoudeni.Footnote 30 The constitution was nevertheless ‘overwhelmingly approved’.Footnote 31 Strengthened by this success, the regime even took the decision in 1975 to release some former members of Modibo Keïta's regime imprisoned since the coup, including former President of the National Assembly Mahamane Alassane Haïdara as well as former minister and US-RDA hardliner Seydou Badian Kouyaté.Footnote 32 This decision, which was taken on the ‘strong insistence’ of the Soviet authorities, was carefully calculated.Footnote 33 Only former dignitaries who posed no risk to the regime were liberated. According to the French diplomatic service, ‘the freed prisoners were carefully chosen from those who no longer had much influence in the population, whether because their family and friends no longer had such influence, or their age or health forced them to withdraw from public life for the time being’.Footnote 34

As far as Senegal was concerned, domestic politics were marked by the gradual introduction of a multi-party regime. In order to divide clandestine opposition groups, Senghor engineered a ‘passive revolution’.Footnote 35 In 1976 he ushered in a tripartite political system, ending the one-party era. It was comprised of the ruling UPS, renamed the Socialist Party (PS), as well as the liberal-leaning Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS) and the formerly outlawed Marxist-Leninist African Party of Independence (PAI). In 1981 this unprecedented process of political liberalization in West Africa was finalized by Senghor's statutory succession by Abdou Diouf, who was deemed better-equipped to face the economic crisis following the oil crisis of 1973–4 and implement the austerity measures advocated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.Footnote 36

Benefiting from this context, some freed detainees of Malian camps and prisons settled in Senegal during this period thanks to governmental channels. Senghor invited Seydou Badian Kouyaté to establish himself in Dakar.Footnote 37 Later, the physicist and writer Ibrahima Ly, who had been jailed for circulating tracts in Bamako protesting the constitutional referendum, settled there as well thanks to the Senegalese Minister of Education Kader Fall, whom he had befriended at the FEANF before decolonization.Footnote 38

The centrality of Senegal in the West African higher education market helped to provide a link for dispersed fronts of opposition to the Traoré regime. Due to the paucity of university structures in their home country, many Malian students enrolled in Senegalese higher education institutions, in particular Dakar University, which had long been a site of political mobilization.Footnote 39 Organized within the Association of Malian Students in Dakar (ASMD), Malian students followed the intensifying state repression in their home country of the National Union of Pupils and Students of Mali (UNEEM), founded in the early 1970s.Footnote 40 In 1977, the death in detention of Modibo Keïta triggered the political engagement of a new generation of students.Footnote 41 Conciliatory moves were made by Traoré in order to draw a ‘rapprochement with the youth’ ahead of the first presidential election and the formation of the single-party UDPM.Footnote 42 In 1978, the ‘most feared’ members of the CMLN were arrested.Footnote 43 A cabinet reshuffle later led to the appointment as Minister of Youth, Culture, and Arts of Alpha Oumar Konaré, a civilian historian who was a former secretary general of the youth wing of the US-RDA and had been arrested after the coup.Footnote 44 Finally, the government which Traoré formed after his uncontested election to the presidency in 1979 comprised ‘no member of the CMLN’.Footnote 45 These concessions did not soothe student protesters, whose claims were as much political as social and economic. The UNEEM called for an ‘end to political control over recruitment to the civil service’, as well as ‘improvements in living standards’.Footnote 46 The Union was ultimately banned in January 1980 after a bloody crackdown marked by the forced military conscription of many protesters, the reported rape and death of female student Rokya Kouyaté, and the arrest of leading unionists such as the teachers Tiébilé Dramé and Victor Sy.Footnote 47 Malian students in Senegal echoed the demonstrations led in Bamako and Paris in March of the same year.Footnote 48 They occupied their embassy in Dakar after the torture and death of the Union's general secretary, Abdoul Karim Camara (known as Cabral), who had been arrested at the Guinean border by Malian security forces.Footnote 49 The aftermath of the repression led other students and teachers to exile themselves to Senegal and other countries, taking with them the memory of one of the most significant social movements against the Traoré regime.Footnote 50

Malian dissidents in Senegal benefitted from the vibrant leftist political networks forged during the last decades of the decolonization process as well as from their relationships with far-left Senegalese militants exiled in Keïta's Mali. Mohamed Lamine Gakou, an economist trained in France, was a member of the Marxist-Leninist Malian Party of Labour (PMT), the former Sudanese branch of the African Party of Independence (PAI) during the colonial era. He settled in Senegal thanks to Egyptian exile and dependency theorist Samir Amin, a former adviser for the Malian Ministry of Planning under Keïta, who was then director of the African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP) established in Dakar.Footnote 51 Gakou edited the clandestine journal Bulletin du Peuple in the Senegalese capital from 1978 to 1985. The journal's covert circulation in Mali contributed to the ‘junction between opposition forces inside and outside the country’.Footnote 52 Ibrahima Ly, who taught at various higher education institutions after his liberation, participated in the creation of the National Democratic and Popular Front (FNDP) in the outskirts of Dakar.Footnote 53

Malian activists based in and outside their homeland gathered together in 1986 for a meeting hosted by far-left Senegalese political parties born out of the PAI.Footnote 54 A year after the re-election of Traoré for a second presidential mandate, they devised strategies aimed at contesting a regime that was being denounced for its dictatorial rule and increasingly vilified for having ‘auctioned’ the country to international donors since signing up to the first structural adjustment program in 1982.Footnote 55 Traoré's opponents acknowledged that his hold on power was not only due to his ‘repression’ of dissenters but also to the ‘extreme division’ of the opposition.Footnote 56 They therefore forged a unified front, gathering various underground left-wing movements including the PMT, the Malian Party for Revolution and Democracy (PMRD), the France-based Democratic Front of Mali Patriots (FDPM) and, a few years later, the US-RDA in order to navigate the very uncertain future of Malian pro-democracy forces.Footnote 57

Despite Senegal's tacit policy of accommodating Malian dissenters, cross-border engagements had to be confined to a limited audience of core activists and to clandestine forms of collective action. The deportation of the Senegalese student Seydou Diarrah offers perhaps the clearest example of the high-risk nature of such activity. Diarrah, the son of a US-RDA leader, Mamadou Diarrah, who reportedly died in Taoudeni in 1977, had been granted refugee status in 1980 by the Senegalese regional office of the UNHCR.Footnote 58 In March 1988, the re-election of Diouf was contested by opposition leaders and disenfranchised youth, leading to the declaration of a state of emergency.Footnote 59 A few days later, Malian students in Dakar commemorated Abdoul Karim Camara's death. One association circulated a leaflet against Moussa Traoré. Diarrah, who was enrolled at Dakar University, active in campus political life, and close to the Senegalese far-left, was suspected of having written it. A decree was issued ordering his deportation for having breached public order.Footnote 60 Diouf declared that ‘when a student, as for any man, has refugee status in a country, he has to respect the convention relating to refugees; he should not interfere with certain political activities’.Footnote 61 Beyond the conspicuous risks taken by activists settled in Dakar, this event testifies to the contradictions of a Senegalese state that prided itself on its democratic exceptionalism within a region dominated by one-party states with which it had nevertheless developed strong bilateral and multilateral relationships.

Ivory Coast

Ivory Coast, ‘an island of liberalism in a sea of statist and socialist regimes’, was the second West African country where Malian dissenters were able to exile themselves.Footnote 62 The exiles there joined the thousands of Malian migrants working on cocoa and coffee plantations, contributing their labour to the much vaunted ‘Ivorian miracle’ supported by both France and the United States.Footnote 63 President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, leader of the Democratic Party of the Ivory Coast (PDCI-RDA), the ruling party in Ivory Coast's single-party state, was certainly largely defiant towards his socialist neighbors (Ghana, Guinea, and Mali) in the early 1960s. However the connections established during colonial times proved to yet again be valuable for Malian political contenders. The family of Mamadou Konaté, the co-founder of the US-RDA, benefited from the president's protection.Footnote 64 His son Tiéoulé Konaté, director of the Development Bank of Mali until the coup and Minister of Finance under Moussa Traoré, had a close relationship with Houphouët-Boigny.Footnote 65 Another personal friend of the Ivorian president, the ethnographer and writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ, who was the Malian ambassador to Ivory Coast during the Keïta regime, settled permanently in Abidjan after his retirement from UNESCO's Executive Council.Footnote 66 Former minister Jean-Marie Koné and Mahamane Alassane Haïdara, after his liberation, also exiled themselves to Ivory Coast.Footnote 67

Compared to the activism of Malian dissidents in Senegal, which was marked by its vibrant left-wing networks and gradual political liberalization, the exiles’ activities and influence in Ivory Coast were limited. Tolerance for open criticism of the military regime was constrained by the strong diplomatic ties between Ivory Coast and Mali.Footnote 68 In the aftermath of the crackdown on UNEEM, Bâ and a group of Malian diplomats helped students on the run enroll in Abidjan University despite extradition requests sent by Malian authorities and the ‘ban on students’ and teachers’ travel during June through September 1980’.Footnote 69 Notwithstanding his international prestige, Bâ seems to have been cautious in avoiding openly addressing the military oligarchy in his own writings. Like those of other Malian writers of the time, the narratives in his novels were strategically entrenched in the sole portrayal of colonial era.Footnote 70 Moreover, the foundation of a political line unified around a coherent agenda was difficult. Exiles not only belonged to distinct generations but had varied political sensibilities and governmental experience. Tensions arose between a ‘left wing’ refusing any compromise with the regime and a ‘right wing’ comprised of supporters who had cooperated with it.Footnote 71 Finally, the geographical dispersion of Malians across this vast country, combined with the stark differences of social status between formerly high-ranking political exiles and migrant labourers exposed to menial working conditions and rampant xenophobia, thwarted the emergence of a thriving underground opposition in this one-party state.Footnote 72

However, Ivory Coast indirectly contributed to the institutional re-emergence of the US-RDA alongside the progressive rehabilitation of its co-founder, Modibo Keïta, in Malian public memory.Footnote 73 The conference organized in Yamoussoukro in 1986 to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the RDA testifies to the enduring networks developed over time by one of West Africa's oldest parties. The celebration, which was first and foremost a plebiscite to Houphouët-Boigny's historical stature, permitted the reunification of many former RDA members. US-RDA militants scattered among Mali, France, Gabon, and Senegal gathered for the occasion. According to the typology adopted in the proceedings of the conference, 19 ‘political figures’ were present, including former ministers under Keïta, such as Mamadou El Béchir Gologo and Madeira Keita, who were survivors of the Traoré regime's camps and prisons. Five ‘teachers and researchers’ were also present, Alpha Oumar Konaré among them.Footnote 74 After resigning from his position as Minister of Youth, Culture, and Arts in 1980, Konaré had become a professor of history at École Normale Supérieure (ENSup) in Bamako and founded the cultural cooperative Jamana in 1983 which edited an eponymous journal that heralded the beginning of an independent press. The conference was covered by Ivorian state media.Footnote 75 In Mali, Jamana also published several articles, illustrated with pictures of Modibo Keïta and Mamadou Konaté, that represented a vibrant eulogy of anticolonial African militants’ struggles against imperial rule and defiance towards French political parties.Footnote 76

EUROPEAN CROSSROADS OF POLITICAL PLURALISM

Having deeply resented Modibo Keïta's socialist policies, French policymakers backed the Malian military oligarchy after the coup. The regime increasingly embraced state capitalism and sought Western development assistance while continuing to court China and the Soviet Union, thus manipulating the superpower rivalry at the height of the Cold War for the allocation of foreign aid in order to fund local patronage politics.Footnote 77

While regularly attending annual Franco-African summits held from the early 1970s onwards, Moussa Traoré made several official visits to France in 1972 and in 1979, the year of his first plebiscitary election as president. French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing travelled in 1977 to Mali where he primarily discussed financial aid with government officials.Footnote 78 This visit also allowed him to court the ‘French diaspora’ in Africa.Footnote 79 After consultations with foreign governments led by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the diaspora had just been granted the right to vote from abroad, whether in French embassies or consulates.Footnote 80 In the late 1970s, Malians used to ‘observe the course of French political life on a day-to-day basis with keen interest’.Footnote 81 In particular, the government feared the possible electoral success of the Socialist Party (PS) and the French Communist Party (PCF). United around a Common Program, the two parties promised the expansion of the public sector and the development of civic liberties on the domestic front. They also pledged the end of neo-colonialism in development policy and the democratization of Franco-African relations on the international front.Footnote 82 According to the French Embassy, Malian ruling elites considered their defeat in the 1978 parliamentary election as ‘a success not only for France but also for its friends and therefore for themselves. Only a few students and a handful of officials or journalists who are committed to Marxist doctrines regret the failure of the parties of the Common Program, but they are careful not to show it’.Footnote 83

Despite the sustained ties between the French and Malian governments, Malians who had settled in France enjoyed an unparalleled political pluralism compared to those living in African countries. This enabled the creation of new Malian associations, as well as the perpetuation of associations founded during the colonial era, such as the left-leaning FEANF.Footnote 84 In addition to organizations created by the Malian regime to monitor its citizens abroad, associations with a more radical stance also emerged.Footnote 85 These reflected the politicization of postcolonial workers and students in France within French leftist groups in the wake of the global 1960s. As Gregory Mann has observed, their activism was not only ignited by the impact of May 1968 in France but also by the dire political situation in their homelands.Footnote 86 Some Malians joined Révolution Afrique, which was linked to the Trotskyist organization Révolution!Footnote 87 This organization, which gathered French activists as well as African students and workers in order to bring together opposition movements on both sides of the Mediterranean, regularly denounced the Traoré regime in its journal.Footnote 88

During this period, groupings exclusively focused on Malian issues were also founded with the support of exiles such as Moussa Keïta, the Minister of Youth, Sports and Culture and the brother of Modibo Keïta.Footnote 89 Present in France during the coup, Moussa Keïta had been granted refugee status in 1971 by the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (OFPRA), which had been created to implement international conventions concerning the protection of refugees in France, most specifically the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol.Footnote 90 The group Solidarity of Malian Workers in France (STMF), which had close ties with the Malian Party of Labour (PMT), was aimed at tackling the dire working and living conditions of Malian migrants.Footnote 91 The Committee to Defend the Democratic Liberties of Mali (CDLDM) fought to promote civic liberties in Mali and to demand the liberation of political prisoners with the support of French and Senegalese lawyers. The CDLDM had relationships with the French Association of Friendship and Solidarity with the People of Africa (AFASPA), founded by members of the PCF. Some of the latter had been engaged in the Communist Study Groups (GEC), which had worked to strengthen the political training of African militants in West Africa during the colonial era.Footnote 92 The CDLDM also had ties to Amnesty International and provided the information upon which its European chapters launched international campaigns against the violations of rights committed by the Malian regime.Footnote 93 These groupings thus alerted established left-wing political parties and human rights organizations to human rights abuses in Mali and pushed them to initiate campaigns strongly resented by the Malian regime.Footnote 94

The limited mobilization of migrants in these organizations throws light on the social dilemma of opposition movements themselves. Workers’ material lives were becoming more precarious than ever due to the global economic crisis in the aftermath of the oil shock and the French government's official suspension of foreign labour immigration in 1974. They also faced the deepening poverty of their families left behind who, in the wake of the droughts, depended more than ever on their remittances. Students who tried to mount actions or stage demonstrations, in particular during Traoré's visits to France, were subject to surveillance by French police and appeared ‘to fear reprisals’. Not only could their increasingly meagre state scholarships be cut in cases of dissent, but they could also be ‘deported and sent back to their country where they would either be automatically incorporated into the Malian army or placed under house arrest’.Footnote 95

Furthermore, the tightening of restrictive laws on migration had a dramatic impact on migrant political organizations. The Ministry of the Interior, which waged an administrative struggle over the management of postcolonial migrations with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, increasingly considered the political engagement of migrants to be a breach of public order.Footnote 96 In 1974 the Ministry of the Interior issued a circular requiring political refugees to sign a document reminding them of ‘their duties of political neutrality’.Footnote 97 In 1976 it issued a second circular that put an end to the freedom of association which had been granted to citizens from former French colonies in the aftermath of decolonization. The most radical organizations, including not only the FEANF but also Révolution Afrique and STMF, were dissolved.Footnote 98 The CDLDM was not targeted, likely due to its close ties with established French political parties and international human rights organizations, which placed it outside of the immediate reach of French state power.Footnote 99

The victory of French Socialist Party candidate François Mitterrand in the 1981 presidential election aroused hopes, both in France and on the African continent, of fundamental change. In terms of migration policy, the first years of his presidency brought the regularization of more than 130,000 undocumented migrants and an end to the limitations on the freedom of association for foreign nationals.Footnote 100 In terms of foreign affairs, Jean-Pierre Cot, who had been nominated Deputy Minister in charge of Cooperation and Development, radically shifted from his predecessors’ stance. He requested a ‘presidential pardon’ for Malian political prisoners, which was granted.Footnote 101 More broadly, he advocated a ‘graduated defence of human rights’ on the entire continent.Footnote 102

The great expectations of African dissidents were however soon dashed. Cot resigned in late 1982 under pressure from rival bureaucrats and African leaders who felt ‘threatened’ by his reforms.Footnote 103 In 1985 France re-launched its military assistance to Mali.Footnote 104 The support given to Traoré's regime illustrates French opposition to the political conditionality endorsed at the time by the American administration with the aim of promoting democracy among aid-recipient countries. France, which supported economic conditionalities attached to structural adjustment programs, refused to incorporate political conditionalities into its bilateral aid in order to keep francophone Africa within its ‘own domaine reservé’.Footnote 105

Revealing a broad agreement across party lines, continuity ultimately prevailed over change. The French government implemented deterrent measures that resulted in the rejection of an increasing number of asylum claims.Footnote 106 Repressive immigration legislation was introduced that facilitated the expulsion of undocumented foreigners, as exemplified by the deportation of 101 Malian migrants in 1986.Footnote 107 This expulsion ordered by the former colonial power eclipsed in political importance expulsions of Malians from Algeria, Libya, and Nigeria which were much larger in scale.Footnote 108 It also provoked tensions between France and Mali that were only eased a few months later by Mitterrand's official visit to Bamako.Footnote 109 The French government reportedly pledged that future expulsions would be carried out ‘in a more humane manner’.Footnote 110

For both countries, the portrayal of Malians as untruthful asylum seekers was most convenient. It allowed the French government to pursue its depoliticization of asylum rights and the Malian government to enhance its legitimacy. During his visit to France in 1989, Traoré used the recent closure of the Taoudeni camp and his becoming chairperson of the OAU ‘to launch himself as an international statesman’.Footnote 111 At a lunch given in his honour, the French Minister for Foreign Affairs Roland Dumas condemned ‘these alleged political refugees in search of asylum’ who ‘give a false image of their country’, for he claimed ‘no one [was] harassed in Mali because of their opinions or convictions’.Footnote 112

During this decade, Malian opposition movements in France were bolstered by new waves of exiles, in particular student militants and unionists from Africa and increasingly from the Soviet Bloc. Yet they faced complex challenges. Beyond the still active CDLDM, new structures were formalized or emerged. In the wake of the meeting held in Thiaroye in 1986, the FNDP formally established the FDPM as its external branch under the aegis of Moussa Keïta and Bassirou Diarra. Born in the Kayes region, Diarra was a former worker hired by the communist newspaper L'Humanité who had developed extensive contacts within African and French far-left and Communist networks during his militant years in France.Footnote 113 In 1988, Keïta and Diarra also launched the Modibo Keïta Foundation with its headquarters in Montreuil, a Parisian suburb with a significant Malian migrant population. For this endeavour, they received the support of the widow of former President Modibo Keïta as well as the endorsement of Mamadou El Béchir Gologo and Madeira Keita.Footnote 114

Yet the ability of these political groups to mobilize beyond their core members was probably no greater than it had been during the previous decade.Footnote 115 Opposition groups were undeniably revitalized by the arrival in France of a younger generation of unionists on the run who had led the UNEEM strikes of the late 1970s and early 1980s.Footnote 116 Their arrival was however gradual, taking place over several years. For instance, Tiébilé Dramé settled in France in 1981 before being hired by Amnesty International in London, while Seydou Diarrah did not arrive until 1988 after his expulsion from Senegal.Footnote 117 The burden of obtaining legal status, the necessity of surviving economically in a new country, and the loss of social capital due to resettlements from different asylum countries affected the ability of this generation to fully engage in activism in France. In addition, the ideological incentives of these political groups decreased in relevance compared to those of the previous decade. With the demise of the Third-Worldist utopias, the French left, which had long supported struggles led by postcolonial migrants in the global south, shifted from radical activism to a professional humanitarianism marked by the rise of non-governmental organizations and their incorporation in development policies that were increasingly aimed at tackling migration flows or encouraging migrants to return.Footnote 118 Finally, the material incentives of opposition groups were scarce compared to hometown associations, which, set up by Malian migrants since the colonial era, were given an unprecedented legitimacy at the time by the French and Malian states.

Long wary of migrants, the Malian regime's aim was no longer solely to monitor their political activities but to ensure their participation in ‘the effort of national development’ and to ‘mobilize emigrants’ savings and promote their rich experience’.Footnote 119 The growing weight of migrants’ remittances in the local economy allowed the regime to alleviate the impact of controversial austerity measures and to prevent outbreaks of major political discontent.Footnote 120 Against this backdrop, migrants came to embrace these increasingly institutionalized forms of civic engagement, rewarding in terms of social status and crucial for kin and communities left behind.Footnote 121 At the same time, they turned away from a political activism that pursued the elusive task of challenging the Traoré regime which had been fully normalized by African and Western states.

TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL JUNCTURES IN THE REGIME'S FALL

The collapse of European communist regimes and the release of Nelson Mandela, both of which reverberated across the African continent, legitimized further claims for democratic reforms.Footnote 122 In Senegal, opposition parties intensified their pressure on Diouf for a new electoral code in order to break the monopoly of the Socialist Party.Footnote 123 In the wake of the collapse of the ‘Ivoirian miracle’, Houphouët-Boigny legalized opposition parties in the Ivory Coast to defuse mounting protest against the social costs of adjustment programs.Footnote 124 In the most consequential event of this period, a national conference was convened in Benin in February 1990 which stripped the incumbent President Kérékou of his executive powers and set the stage for the holding of free elections.Footnote 125 This event, which received considerable regional and international media coverage, represented an institutional example for all of francophone Africa.

The intensifying pace of social protest and political liberalization forced France to officially acknowledge this shift. At the Franco-African Summit of La Baule in June 1990, President Mitterrand finally joined in the chorus of Western countries pressing for political conditionality regarding recipient countries under authoritarian rule. ‘French aid’, he stated, ‘will be lukewarm towards authoritarian regimes and more enthusiastic for those initiating a democratic transition’.Footnote 126 However, the new French doctrine did not provoke a major shift from Moussa Traoré. A few weeks later, he declared to the French Ambassador in Mali to have been ‘pleased’ that ‘a topic as current as the democratic evolution in Africa was approached without false pretences’ at the summit. Nevertheless, he made clear that he rejected any ‘decreed democracy’, ‘imported democracy’, or ‘imposed model’ advocating for a ‘mindset change’ rather than a ‘free consultation’ of Malian people.Footnote 127

The regime appears to have overlooked the ‘enormous psychological impact’ on the Malian public of social protests in Eastern Europe due to the enduring ties forged with the Communist bloc.Footnote 128 Against this background, popular discontent mounted further against official corruption practices, worsening economic conditions, and the social costs of structural adjustment programs.Footnote 129 Debates on the potential ‘exercise of democracy’ were opened within the UDPM itself in August 1990. Yet a majority of militants expressed their ‘support for the continuation of the single party with corrective measures’, according to Traoré's statement.Footnote 130 The extent and nature of these ‘corrective measures’ remained all the more vague at a time during which the crackdown on dissidents continued.Footnote 131 For instance, Bassirou Diarra, who was travelling in summer 1990 to Mali for development projects, was arrested in Kayes.Footnote 132 Diarra was accused of having made ‘hostile statements’ in France against the Malian government on the occasion of the La Baule summit and of having brought ‘seditious’ documents to Mali, including copies of the journal Faso published by the PMRD.Footnote 133 His detention, denounced by Amnesty International, and his release one week later prompted numerous press articles in Mali and in France.Footnote 134 The extent of this media coverage provoked the anger of the Malian authorities who castigated the French media for their ‘encirclement of single-party countries’.Footnote 135

Triggered by local discontent, political transitions in other West African countries, and international pressures, the main organizations that emerged in October 1990 in Mali to openly call for a return to democracy were created around militants or parties inside and outside the country who were able to coalesce at this turning point. The most prominent of these, the Alliance for Malian Democracy (ADEMA), gathered together the same organizations that were present in the Front, namely the FDPM, the PMT, the PMDR, and the US-RDA under the leadership of the former director of the ENSup and historical leader of the PMT, Abderhamane Baba Touré, who had been ‘arrested’ during the coup in 1968 and ‘sentenced to 18 months in jail’.Footnote 136 The emergence of ADEMA highlights how formative the years of underground engagement at home and abroad, in Africa and beyond, were in terms of cooperation and collaboration.Footnote 137 Led by the general secretary of the Malian bar, Mountaga Tall (who graduated from Dakar University), the National Congress for a Democratic Initiative (CNID) comprised a significant number of militants who had studied abroad.Footnote 138

From October 1990 until March 1991, these associations orchestrated mass demonstrations which were joined by a growing number of other organizations such as the National Union of Malian Workers (UNTM) and the Association of Malian Pupils and Students (AEEM), the latter led by Oumar Mariko. The popular strength of these protests, transformed into riots due to the state's lethal repression, resulted in the overthrow of Traoré by Lieutenant Colonel Amadou Toumani Touré on 26 March.Footnote 139

During this defining moment, collective actions ranging from demonstrations and meetings to the gathering of petitions and the issuing of press releases were taken by opposition groups abroad.Footnote 140 The influence of these actions might appear limited at first sight. The Gulf War, which stretched from August 1990 to February 1991, coincided with the height of the upheaval in Mali and thus occluded reports by foreign mass media on the massive anti-regime demonstrations and bloody repression inside the country, as well as the scattered protests launched by long-marginalized exile groups in France, Gabon, and Senegal. Furthermore, the fluidity and the uncertainty of the situation on the ground, compounded by the limitations of pre-digital communications technology, made it difficult for Malian dissidents abroad to coordinate protests with those in their homeland.

However, the impact of these actions on this decisive cycle of mobilization should not be underestimated. Focusing exclusively on the definitive yet short time frame of the upheaval may lead observers to neglect the fact that exile and migration have to be understood in times of dictatorial rule as abeyance processes. Such processes allow, in other words, opposition movements to scale back in order to overcome hostile environments whilst sowing the seeds of future mobilization.Footnote 141 First, exile helped banned and clandestine political organizations such as the PMT, the UNEEM, and the US-RDA sustain themselves over time and ensure the survival of their networks. It enabled connections to be made between various political generations, such as the anticolonial movements of the imperial age and the youth protests of the postcolonial era, which helped establish pro-democracy movements. Second, in addition to the continuity with earlier activism facilitated by exile, migration enabled the creation of a new generation of militants. Socializing in more open political environments, migrants were able to either channel upon their return the ‘repertoire of contention’ acquired abroad or support from afar struggles in their homeland to bring about the fall of the regime.Footnote 142 Finally, this period of clandestine activism at home and abroad paved the way for the foundation of chapters in destination countries by political parties that emerged in Mali in late 1990. These subsequently played a significant role in mobilizing Malians abroad to vote in the first free elections in 1992, after the convening of a National Conference in Bamako, which brought to an end the dictatorship's long succession of non-competitive plebiscitary elections.

CONCLUSION

The history of the voluntary resettlement of dissidents and the forced flight of activists through fear of persecution across African and European countries allows us to ‘resituate exile within the longue durée of African mobilities’.Footnote 143 The accounts of their struggles are central not only in highlighting the coercive power of the Malian state but also in drawing attention to the influence of these dissidents and activists on regime change. This historical analysis indirectly sheds light on the shortcomings of the highly specialized field of democratization studies, developed by political scientists who have certainly illuminated political transitions but have very often been prone to ‘ahistorical approaches’, as noted by Giovanni Capoccia and Daniel Ziblatt.Footnote 144 After having long emphasized the decisive character of internal dynamics on regime changes, political scientists came to question the international and transnational dimensions of democratization processes.Footnote 145 Notwithstanding several studies illustrating the impact of advocacy campaigns led by non-governmental organizations and democratic assistance deployed by donor agencies, the significance of exile politics anchored in colonial and post-colonial history has not been thoroughly assessed. Further historical research should be conducted in order to refine our understanding of the ‘most far-reaching shifts’ in the continent's political life since decolonization three decades earlier.Footnote 146

Beyond the study of exile politics, this article also underlines the need for a more sustained and fine-grained political history of the postcolonial period, a history which currently appears to be at best uneven, at worst pointillist. Compared to the extensive literature devoted to the First Republic and, to a lesser extent, the Third Republic, monographs exploring the long decades of the Traoré regime are still extremely scarce despite an emerging scholarship.Footnote 147 This gap in the literature hinders our ability to discern the temporalities of Malian history and to question the discontinuities and continuities between these distinct political periods in terms of ideologies, institutions, and parties. More importantly, it impedes our investigation of the coalitions which were formed from various political figures and organizations, in particular the ADEMA which came to govern Mali after the political transition and whose trajectory digs deep into the history of previous regimes. The call launched by Stephen Ellis almost twenty years ago in this journal thus remains just as appropriate today, namely to engage with a reading of contemporary Africa ‘sensitive to the depth of time’ in order to prevent the illusion that the haunting events of the postcolonial period amount to an ‘age of nihilism’.Footnote 148

Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, The Journal of African History's editors, in particular Gregory Mann, and two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article. All translations of quoted material are my own.

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110 ‘Mali’, Africa Contemporary Record, 19 (1988), B84.

111 ‘Mali: Moussa and Sam’, Africa Confidential, 29:25 (1988), 8; CADN 62PO/1/268, French Embassy in Mali, ‘Organisation de l'Unité Africaine: présidence malienne’, 17 Mar. 1989.

112 BDIC F2014/2(105), ‘France-Mali: allocution du Ministre d’État Roland Dumas à l'occasion du déjeuner offert en l'honneur du Général Moussa Traoré, Président de la République du Mali, Paris, 7 April 1989’.

113 S. Maro, ‘Au Mali, les populations mobilisées’, Le Monde Diplomatique, (May 2013), ii-iii.

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115 According to a note from the French Ministry of Interior, these organizations had no more than two dozen members. OFPRA DIR3/67, French Ministry of Interior, ‘Document sur la communauté malienne du 11 octobre 1990’, 15 Oct. 1990.

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117 CADN 62PO/1/266, French Embassy in Mali, biographical note on Tiébilé Dramé, Apr. 1991; Diarrah, Le mouvement.

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131 ‘Mali’, Africa Contemporary Record, 22 (1991), B76.

132 Interview with Bassirou Diarra, Bamako, 24 June 2013.

133 ‘Détenu à Bamako’, L'Humanité, 13 July 1990, 12; A. S. Diarra, ‘Exclusif. Bassirou Diarra: “Je ne détenais aucun document séditieux”’, Les Echos, 3–17 Aug. 1990, 3.

134 ‘Index Index’, Index on Censorship, 19:8 (1990), 37.

135 CADN 62PO/1/245, telegram, French Ambassador in Mali, 4 Aug. 1990, 2.

136 CADN 62PO/1/266, French Embassy in Mali, biographical note on Abderhamane Baba Touré, Mar. 1991.

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