The world is always in flux, but it seems to be more so now than usual. Eyes dart to the United States, China, Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan, and many other places, but the African continent as a whole seems to be largely left out of the conversation. Even Sudan, the only African country listed above, receives much less media coverage than other active warzones. 

West African states such as Senegal are paid relatively little attention to, both from the United States and Europe and from the Middle East. The focus of MENA countries is currently on the Sahel, owing to geographical constants and political developments. However, people all around the world would do well to look at the political and economic dynamics on the continent’s other side as well, including countries such as Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso, which formed the Alliance of Sahel States (ASS).

As part of their ongoing conversation on West African history, questions of identity, and the future of the nation-state in Africa, Cairo Review editor Omar Auf invited historian of West Africa and American University in Cairo history professor Mark Deets to a discussion on recent developments in the region. 

Deets is the author of A Country of Defiance: Mapping the Casamance in Senegal. The following transcript has been edited for clarity. 

Last time we talked about the Senegalese elections and [Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye’s] project and the political dynamics in Senegal vis-à-vis the West African region, Africa at large, and the West and the international sphere.

What developments have been taking place in Senegal that reflect these issues, and what’s been going on since Diomaye became president?

Well, one of the sort of interesting things that has come to my attention is the very recent publication of a new book by my fellow historian and Casamance specialist, Séverine Awenengo Dalberto, who is a French researcher with the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique. She recently published a book called L’idée de la Casamance. In other words, the idea of the Casamance. It’s basically tracing the development of the Casamance as a political idea. And unfortunately, she’s come under a lot of fire on social media, especially from various, I guess you could call them Senegalese nationalists, who view the publication of this book at this time as kind of like a ploy from the Diomaye administration and [Prime Minister of Senegal Ousmane] Sonko, coming from the Casamance, that this is something that is somehow government-directed. And so Severine has apparently come under some pressure for that, which is completely unfounded.

I mean, she’s a historian publishing a book about the history of the Casamance, but history, as we know, is always political in one way or another. And that history is being pulled into the political discussion currently in Senegal. Anyway, that’s the first thing that jumps to mind.

That’s very interesting. And it’s interesting how you contrasted what you say are Senegalese nationalists to Diomaye and Sonko, especially Sonko with his Casamancais roots. Do these nationalists not see them as sort of a national unity project? 

Nationalism always requires a certain kind of othering. And so I think that’s what it’s about. There’s always been a certain amount of kind of joking derision by some people, not everybody, but by some people from northern Senegal about their cousins to the south. And there are these tropes that somehow they’re more African. Their Islam is suspect. First of all, there’s a significant Catholic Christian population in the south, in the Casamance. However, the Casamance is still majority Muslim. It’s I think sixty to seventy-five percent Muslim. But there is this sizable Catholic minority. There’s a certain amount of that kind of othering that goes on. 

Diomaye Faye, coming from Faye, I’m pretty sure is a Serer name. There’s always been this kind of cousin relationship between the Serer and the Jola, which is the majority ethnic group in the south that has been largely associated with the rebellion in the Casamance.

And so there’s always this sort of question that a lot of people have. Okay, this person from the Casamance, first of all, are they Jola? And then if they are, okay, are they loyal to Senegal or are they a rebel? So there’s a kind of prejudice there against people from the south. There’s this derogatory discourse about their intelligence and their culture. Because it’s the part of the country where rice agriculture is a very important staple of the economy, and especially of the local political economy. So you know the way people in cities talk about people in the country, right? That they’re not as intelligent, they’re not as developed, they’re not as sophisticated. You have a certain amount of that from people who are from Dakar or Saint-Louis in the north, talking about the Casamance. And the Serer, which is Faye’s ethnic group, have often been considered, again, because of this kind of joking cousin relationship between the Serer and the Jola, they’ve always been considered as like the go-between, between the Jola in the south and the Wolof in the north.

Of course, there are other ethnic groups besides these two, but those are the ones that are at the center of these two identities. In fact, the very first president of the country, Leopold Senghor, was a Serer. And so in some ways, the father of the country inhabited this kind of interlocutor role between these groups.

So anyway, I’m not prepared to say that the people who are writing or saying these things on social media about Faye and Sonko, that they’re all Wolof. I’m not saying that. But Wolof is kind of at the center of this, if you will, northern Senegalese identity that tends to look down on people from the south.

So those people from the south, because their patriotism has often been called into question, they go above and beyond in order to establish their bona fides as Senegalese. When I was the American military attaché in Senegal, I would often hear from Senegalese officers that they loved having these Jola from the Casamance in the Senegalese army because they were willing to take risks and do high-risk things that not everybody in the army would be willing to do because they were so motivated to prove their loyalty to the Senegalese military and to the Senegalese nation.

You mentioned a lot of valuable points when it comes to African states and how they view themselves, especially in West Africa. And this is what our issue is about. It’s about the Organization of African Unity and its successor, the African Union.

How do African states and their leaders view themselves today vis-à-vis this idea of African unity, and given the diversity within the continent?

Well, last time we talked about Nkrumah and Senghor and actually especially Senghor having this vision of a West African federation, which is exactly what ECOWAS is supposed to be. But some of these regimes that have taken over these military coups in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali have chosen to leave ECOWAS because they basically said we don’t have anything to do with you and you’re not going to tell us how to run our country. So, yeah, I think that dream of some kind of sub-regional federation is still quite far off.

A part of the problem is that even in some of those countries where they do have a constitution, they don’t have the institutions that work or that abide by that constitution, if they even have a constitution.

And I’ve been teaching this American Studies course this semester where we’ve talked about this a great deal and talked about the Constitution of the United States and how it’s the only constitution right now that has been in effect since 1789. Now, granted, you have a number of amendments starting with the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments. But when you think about the revolution of the time on the other side of the Atlantic, the French Revolution, they’re on their Fifth Republic now, right? So that’s pretty amazing. 

How do you take that, the development of those political institutions and economic institutions, and how do you export that? I mean, this is what the United States has been trying to do with the whole democratization thing with the Bush administration and Condoleezza Rice and this whole idea of planting a democracy in the heart of the Middle East, in Iraq. All of that was tied to this democratization theory and democratization politics or political science, if you will. And obviously that didn’t go well, right?

How do you take that, those ideas, and develop a nation-state with that? I think that what these coup leaders are doing in West Africa is they’re rejecting those ideas. They’re rejecting that Western democratic model, and they’re very interested in what the Russians and the Chinese have to say. And part of the reason is because, at least in the past, and maybe this is changing a little bit, but the Russians and the Chinese don’t come in and criticize their human rights record and tell them how to run their country and tell them how to hold elections and send over a bunch of election observers. It’s much more hands-off, and there’s not the same concern about human rights and things like that, because obviously the Russians and the Chinese don’t want anybody poking around into their record on human rights. 

So yeah, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens. You know, I study the African past. If I had to take a guess on what’s going to happen with the possibilities of federation in Africa, I have no idea. I really have to say that.

How could they possibly begin to build institutions that would be strong, that will be stable, that will allow for economic growth and development, which all of those countries need and they know it? You know, there’s a lot of people who are arguing that they have to start by cutting the ties to the Western donors, that they have to start with that so that they can have a certain amount of autonomy.

And this is what the argument of Dambisa Moyo, which I may have mentioned to you before, she wrote this book called Dead Aid, where she was basically calling for African leaders to refuse or turn down Western aid so that they could be responsible to their own citizens, their own population. But a lot of African leaders, especially some of the ones that we’re talking about who perpetrated these coups in West Africa, they haven’t really expressed an interest in being responsible to the citizens of the country. So I think that this really bears watching.

In the book, [Moyo] is talking about African sovereignty. She’s talking about each country being sovereign and turning down, turning away Western aid. And I don’t know that she’s necessarily calling for isolationism and only developing your own economy without any trade with anybody else in the world. I don’t think that’s what she’s saying. But I think she is saying that they have to turn down Western aid because Western aid is not being given in the interests of Africans, African states. They’re being given in the interests of Westerners and Western institutions.

I think it’s a very contingent time, if I might use that historical term, that we’ll see what happens. But things have changed. I feel like the forces of the Cold War still operated for quite some time in a lot of these African countries, even though the Cold War was over. Some of the institutions that were sort of set up for the Cold War, especially when it comes from the U.S. government, were still in effect, even though there had been some adjustment for the global war on terror and those developments. A lot of that was still in effect. And again, I feel like with this new generation of African leaders, a lot of them have finally told the French and the Americans and any other Western power that tries to exert influence in their country, they’ve told them to buzz off, to go pound sand.

We’ll see if that continues because, like I said, the other thing that they need is they need development for their countries. Otherwise, they’re going to be thrown out in the next coup. So I think if they’re smart, they know that, and they know that it’s just a matter of time until the next coup if they can’t change the situation.

But how do you change something, or how do you build an institution that’s never been there to begin with? How do you exercise sovereignty if you’ve never really had it? So these leaders are rejecting the West and taking over in these coups in West Africa, I mean in a way it’s kind of great that they’re asserting their sovereignty, but what are you going to do with it?

So I think they’re going to have to begin to produce in some way for their people or they’re going to find themselves thrown out in the next coup. So we’ll see.

It comes to show the intersections between disciplines. You’re a historian and there are legal issues involved, and we’re talking about these at very core political issues about how to design our international system, how to design the units that compose the system. It’s really a wide and interdisciplinary discussion.

Yeah. The other thing that’s relevant that we never really expressly talked about was the Senegambian Confederation. But that is an example of where Africans did try to take charge of their own destiny and do something different that was not solely based on the nation state. There was an attempt at federation. And at the end of the day, these two groups of elites in the Gambia and Senegal could not work things out. And the Senegambian Confederation, it was a national security and political union that never really extended to economics. They maintained separate currencies in the two countries. It wasn’t necessarily free and open trade between the two countries. So the thing that really led to the demise of the Senegambian Confederation was the economic regime, which they could never really figure out because of these elites who were not ready to give up the power that they had.

And so thinking about the future, perhaps alternative political imaginations for Africa, that’s one of the things that’s going to have to be worked out is the interest of the various groups of elites in all of these countries. And how are you going to get these people to, in some ways, give up what they have for the good of the country? And I think that’s why some of the Marxist alternatives are often very attractive because they basically promise to do that.

But there’s a track record of that that hasn’t exactly gone well in Africa as well. So there’s  a lot to continue paying attention to on this issue of federation in Africa. But that’s a part of why I’m interested in trying to develop an article and eventually a book about this question of federation in Africa.

What you just said is very interesting because it emphasizes the role of economic union. I think if you look at the history of what became the EU, it makes sense that the EU started as the coal and steel community and it grew from there. So maybe it is all about economics at the end of the day.

Yeah. Maybe they should start with that instead of starting with the political and the military and the national security apparatus, which is what they did. And then eventually they just abandoned the whole idea after seven years.

But what was the point in time that was identified as the one where people realized, okay, this political union idea isn’t working? 

I don’t have a sense for that from the sources thus far. You know, I think if I had to guess, I would imagine it was about two years before it actually ended in 1989, that the elites in each country were just getting tired of each other.

I think the Senegalese felt like the Gambians were dragging their heels on effecting this union, and I think that the Gambians never got over the fear that they were just going to be swallowed up by Senegal. So, there was a precipitating event that brought about the Senegambia Confederation, which was that coup in 1981 while the president was out of the country at Princess Diana’s wedding. And then the precipitating event for the end of the confederation was a conflict with Mauritania. 

Senegal got into a border conflict. It wasn’t really about the border, but anyway, a border conflict with Mauritania along the Senegal River because Mauritania began oppressing and attacking Senegalese communities in southern Mauritania. And so these Senegalese communities began to appeal to Senegal to save them from the Mauritanian state. Now, these Senegalese communities in Mauritania are purportedly Mauritanian, right? But they’re really Senegalese.

And this goes back to this old Arab and black African slave relationship where a lot of the slaves in Mauritania came from Senegal. And there’s plenty of books written about how race gets coded onto these things. 

But that conflict in 1989 was the precipitating event that marked the end of the Senegambia confederation because the Senegalese said to themselves that the confederation was becoming too much of a distraction. And what they really needed to do was focus on this conflict with Mauritania. 

That was the precipitating event. In terms of like when it began to break down, it’s in the last few years of the confederation as again both groups are looking at the other with suspicion. The Senegalese and the Gambians, the Gambians are fearing that the Senegalese are just going to take over and the Senegalese are looking at the Gambians like they’re never going to actually try to make this work. They’re dragging their heels all the time.

And so I think that maybe those thoughts were there from the beginning and they just never went away. 

It also draws a lot of parallels to the United Arab Republic and this suspicion between elites, or fear of getting swallowed up by the bigger country. 

Yeah, exactly.

What lessons can we learn from the Senegambian experience beyond the dimension of the insufficiency of the political union alone? 

First of all, the colonial legacy is lasting and enduring and it’s not going to be easily overcome. But at the same time, it seems like right now there is a desire by this new generation of leaders in West Africa that we’ve been talking about, like Faye, there’s a willingness by these guys to reexamine that colonial legacy and think about making perhaps alternative political configurations of the nation-state. Now, you know, nobody’s conducting a war, thank God, but it seems like that generation, leaders like Sonko and Faye, are willing to rethink this a little bit. I think they view getting the French out of their country as an important step along the way to reconsidering and overcoming that colonial legacy in general. 

And those three Sahelian [Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali] have decided to do that in the ASS, there’s a willingness to reconsider the colonial legacy and go in a different direction. And of course, what this means with those three countries, the ASS, is that they’re also willing to accept the partnership with China and with Russia, which is what has the NATO countries so concerned. But if I were going to draw some lessons from what’s been going on, I think those are the things that I would point to, that this idea has not gone away. I think that’s maybe that’s another point to make, Omar, is that Africans have been resisting colonialism from the beginning, and they never stopped.

Now, the resistance was often being waged at different levels, right? It wasn’t always like all out combat. Nevertheless, sometimes it was kind of a passive resistance, right? Just in not accepting various aspects of Western culture, maybe. But in various ways, Africans, since the earliest days of colonialism, the colonial conquest in the late 1800s, have never stopped resisting colonialism.

And I would argue that some of the stuff that we’ve been seeing going on in West Africa, with these coups and the election of these new leaders, this younger generation of leaders, in many ways that has [carried on the anti-colonial legacy]. It’s like a new form of resistance. And these three countries that have rejected ECOWAS and have formed the ASS and have welcomed the support of China and Russia, in a way, that’s a resistance. In this time and place, that is a way of them [expressing] a resistance to colonialism. 

I think that continues. I don’t know when we get to stop talking about colonialism, Omar, in African history and politics, but we’re not there yet. It sounds kind of obvious, like the colonial legacy is lasting and enduring and still a factor today. I mean, that sounds really boring and kind of like, yeah, no kidding. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I think we’ve seen this in the news almost every day still, especially in those three countries [of the ASS].