The Mali of the Mind
The American Conservative · R · trust 41/100
The troubles of the Sahel reveal the dysfunctions not only of Africa, but of the West.
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... When recently I learned that the Russian mercenaries who prop up the military regime in Mali had been driven out of the town of Kidal, I was very pleased, for defeat could not have been inflicted on people more deserving of it. The only fly in the ointment was that the victors were allies of the Islamists who are quite likely to overrun the Sahel and even some of the coastal countries of West Africa.
Of course, Mali will not mean much to most readers, even if they have heard of Timbuktu. But Mali has played a small part in my life and, if this is not too grand a word, my development.
Forty years ago, I arrived at the border of Mali with Niger: one of those lines drawn on a map by a colonial administrator. I was on my way across Africa from Zanzibar by public transport, a journey far too dangerous to carry out now. The very fact that I was able to do it 40 years ago without feeling in the slightest endangered (except, perhaps, in Equatorial Guinea, where I was told that if the authorities learned I was a journalist, they might kill me and I would never be heard of again, a possibility that I found quite bracing), but could not do it now, even were I 40 years younger, suggests to me that progress in history is not like time’s arrow, which flies in one direction only. There can be regress as well as progress.
Both Mali and Niger were about twice as large in area as the former colonial power, France, each with a sparse population of around 7 million, which 40 years later have increased to more than 26 million each, with a growth rate today of between 3 and 4 per cent annually. Here, if anywhere, was a location for a Malthusian crisis, given that two-thirds of both countries are desert and they were deeply impoverished to start with, but it has not happened. Malthus, then, was wrong, at least up to now—albeit that one of the controls of overpopulation that he suggested were inevitable, namely war, is now well implanted in both.
It wasn’t implanted then, however, when I arrived at the border in a small bus that was overburdened with passengers, chickens, a goat, and items of impoverished commerce piled precariously on the roof, to which a passenger or two also precariously hung. In those days, China was still the purveyor of items such as cheap printed cottons and plastic and enamelled tin bowls to the Third World, which I wrongly, and ignorantly, supposed it would remain. It is a constant source of human error to suppose that the present moment is the final destination of mankind, and I have partaken of this error as much as anyone.
Under its burden, the bus seemed to go forward under protest, a little crabwise, making noises like a wounded ox.
All was, or at least seemed, peaceful in the two countries, where the governments, far from ideal from any possible point of view, were still in control. To sleep under the stars, as I did, near the banks of the River Niger and a mud-built village, having heard the low murmurings of night-time conversations, with the odd glimmer of a candle somewhere, lent an impression of peaceability that I have rarely encountered elsewhere.
Though the two neighbouring countries were not at war, passing between them was not easy. On the Malian side, the passengers were examined by the police, the army, and the customs officials. This took three days and three nights.
Perhaps “examination” was not quite the word. “Shakedown” would be more appropriate. On each occasion, I was asked politely to step aside, for the corruption was an internal matter, so to speak, and did not concern me. (At the time, there was a saying in Africa that the death of one white man will give you more trouble than the death of a thousand black men.)
Payment was demanded of the passengers by each of the three forces before they were granted permission to continue their journey. The more recalcitrant among the passengers were held overnight in a mud prison to encourage their co-operation. I had with me a copy of Moby-Dick (I possess it still, and it bears the stigmata of passage through the Sahel), and I think being held up like this was the only way I could have read through it.
I was much struck by the good humour, the lack of protest, of the passengers. Even the overnight imprisonment seemed more a formality or a game than a cruel punishment. It was not just that the situation was a re-run by different people of that described by Hilaire Belloc in 1898, at the high tide of European colonialism in Africa—
—and that therefore any protest would have been dangerous for the passengers. Rather, I had the impression that they regarded the situation as perfectly normal, only to be expected, and that, had the boot been on any other foot, it would have kicked in precisely the same way. Corruption was as inevitable as the weather.
For a long time, I took my cue from the other passengers and remained patient, reading Moby-Dick in the sand (it was lucky that it was so long). But after the third night on the border, I suddenly lost my temper, despite the fact that I had no schedule to keep. Seized by sudden outrage, I strode down the unrepaired road shouting “ Pots de vin! Pots de vin! Pots de vin! ” (“Bribes! Bribes! Bribes!)
A soldier approached me and took me aside gently.
“What you have to remember, monsieur ,” he said, “is that we haven’t been paid for three months.”
I at once felt very foolish, not to say priggish. What he said was obviously true. Bribes for them were wages, and bribery was a form of taxation. It was all very informal, of course, and it was impossible to say whether the amount raised by bribery was greater or less than a proper, regular wage would have been—and, indeed, whether a proper, regular wage would have reduced the scope of bribery.
My attitude to bribery changed thereafter. I realized that bribery is often the oil…
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