The ghosts of the Sahel

There is a geographical Sahel, a historical Sahel, a cultural Sahel, a geopolitical Sahel: four dimensions that intersect with each other, in a play of projections that fuels ghosts

It it difficult to measure the border between the desert and the savannah. But the area which has been called the Sahel since 1900, lies in the middle. The word Sahel derives from the Arabic “Sahil”, meaning ‘coast’, ‘edge’, ‘shore’. It is a mobile frontier, not only because the Sahara continues to expand southwards¹, but because more than others it lives on the reciprocal projections between the peoples who inhabit it and those who observe it, imagine it and are in turn imagined by it, between violence and desire.

What is Sahel and how it was born

On the map, the Sahel is a strip 8500 kilometres long and almost 6 million square kilometres wide, running from west to east, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, all of today’s African states bordering the Sahara Desert to the north: Gambia, Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Sudan, South Sudan, Eritrea.

But until 1900, there was no link between this area and the name by which we know it today: this was demonstrated by the anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle in his latest work, L’invention du Sahel (2022), a stage in a more than twenty-year journey of deconstruction of the categories with which we address Africa² and therefore with which we represent the world.

“The Sahel, in geographical and ethno-religious terms, is a category that developed exclusively in the French colonial context”, writes Amselle. In particular, the term was first used by the botanist Auguste Chevalier, on a mission to Sudan in 1899-1900, to designate a “Sahelian vegetation”’” dependent on rainfall³, and in subsequent years in various geographical and ethnographic exploration texts. Since then, writes Amselle, “the Sahel was separated from the Sahara, although it has no meaning except in relation to it”.

Anthropologist Marco Aime and journalist Andrea De Georgio, in the essay Il grande gioco del Sahel (2021), distinguish between a climatic-environmental Sahel; a historical Sahel, linked to the great gold kingdoms (Ghana, Mali, Songhay) and the caravans that connected central Africa to the Mediterranean and the Middle East; a cultural Sahel, developed from the exchanges of these caravans in hybridisation between monotheism (Islam above all) and animism; the Sahelistan, or the geopolitical strategies between jihadist terrorism, Sahel states and foreign states (Europe, Russia, China) in one of the world’s poorest areas but rich in gold, hydrocarbons and rare earths. An area where 40% of the population is under 15 years old and the over-60s are 5%.

These four dimensions of the Sahel intersect with each other, as shown by the link between increasing desertification and temperatures and internal and international emigration, which in turn is linked to human trafficking and identity-hardening strategies that make fundamentalisms flourish and make the Sahel a place laden with ghosts.

The ghost of gold

The Mediterranean and central Africa met in the Sahel: in the Middle Ages, the four main routes from the north to the south of the Sahara (and vice versa) were used to transport gold, salt, slaves, and precious stones. During the Cruciate, when contact between Catholics and Muslims was prohibited, the Jews took charge of the commercial intermediation between the other two groups.

If everything moves in the desert, “the power belongs to those who control the movement of people and goods between the two shores” writes Amselle.

First, in 300 a.D. the kingdom of Ghana, and then the empires of Mali and Songhay were all accompanied by the fame of astonishing riches. Already in the 7th century, Arab chroniclers wrote about Ghana as a land of gold: in the Catalan atlas of 1375, next to the route to the country of Rex Melli, present-day Mali, the word “Tombutto” was inserted with a drawing of the king which showed a large gold nugget. There was still an echo of the large donations of gold given during the journey to Mecca by Sultan Musa in 1325, which had caused the market price of the metal in Egypt to collapse. The myth of gold and the search for the African Eldorado contributed to the fame of Timbuktu, a city at the centre of medieval trade routes, today a UNESCO heritage site, which fell into decline after the movement of trade across the Atlantic, a passage that was defined by historians “from the caravan to the caravel”.

Even today, many Sahel countries are among the largest gold exporters in the world: the World Gold Council’s 2023 ranking⁴ by 2022 volumes shows Ghana in sixth place, Mali in eleventh, Burkina Faso in twelfth and Sudan in sixteenth. According to the OECD “Gold at the crossroads⁵” report (2018), in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger the extractive industry accounts for between 62 and 65% of exports and 16-17% of the GDP of each state but only 0.22% of local employment. In 2012, the discovery of a very productive deposit in Sudan’s North Darfur relaunched artisanal mining and brought over 100,000 gold seekers to that area alone.

“Artisanal” or unauthorized extraction involves parastatal actors in controlling mines, workers and profits, used to finance and launder the proceeds of armed organizations such as jihadist groups or the mercenaries of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner. According to a report by the International Crisis Group⁶ (2019), over 50% of gold production is unregulated: the estimate is between 20 and 50 tonnes in Mali, between 10 and 30 in Burkina Faso, between 10 and 3pm in Niger, for a total value estimated between 1.9 and 4.5 billion dollars.

Since 2020, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso have been affected by several military coups which have caused their suspension from ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African Countries, a subgroup of which is the UEMOA, the Economic Union and West African Monetary System based on the CFA franc (since 2020 Eco⁷) as the common currency. In January 2024, the three military governments announced their exit from ECOWAS.

The ghost of gold itself seems to have been one of the most important causes of the fall of Gaddafi’s regime in Libya: tons of gold reserves were stored in 2011 by Libya in the Sahel to encourage a pan-African currency project based on the Libyan dinar and an alternative to the franc cfa. Among the numerous geopolitical effects of the fall of Gaddafi in the Sahel, the return of the Tuareg hired by the Libyan army to Mali.

The ghost of identity

The case of Mali, a country four times the size of Italy, represents for Amselle an example of “ethnicization of the Sahelian conflict“: for the anthropologist, once again the complex socio-political situation of an African country is reduced in the West to opposition between different ethnic groups, in this case the “white” north, i.e. Tuareg, the “red” center i.e. Peul and the “black” south i.e. Mandinka.

A stereotyped and essentialist vision, according to which the Berber men dressed in desert blue are certainly less adherent to the jihad than the Arabs and, for this reason, have always been supported in their struggle for independence from the Malian state: the Tuareg cannot be jihadist even though, Amselle underlines, biographies such as that of Iyad Ag Ghali seem to suggest the exact opposite.

In this scheme, the “red” Peul are all transhumant shepherds with a particularly noble ethos, which extends not only to the aristocracy that originally expressed it: “many Peul are in a certain sense ‘false Peul’, either because they have become one, either because they do not speak the Peul language (Fulfulde) which supposedly corresponds to their ethnonym, or because they are sedentary farmers and not transhumant shepherds as the stereotype would have it” writes Amselle. The insurrection in central Mali was led by the Peul jihadist Hamadoun Kouffa in controversy with the Peul group dominant in the territory: since then, the Peul-jihadism connection is almost automatic. Finally, the “black” Mandinka are, by stereotype, all sedentary and not very Islamicised farmers, descendants of Sunjata, the founder of the Mali empire in the 1200s.

In summary, for this geopolitical doctrine “peace in the north depends on the Tuareg, to whom the Bamako authorities must make notable concessions, while peace in the center depends on the Peul, who today, as in the times of the great Peul jihads of the 19th century, they threaten the ‘Mossi’ ethnic bloc, that is, ‘black’ and not contaminated by Islam” writes Amselle.

This reading has guided the French military intervention in the area in recent years: after the insurrection of January 2012 by the Tuareg warriors united in the “National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad” and allied with the jihadist groups Ansar Dine and the “Movement for unity and jihad in West Africa”, the French government was called by the Malian government to crush the insurrection. The Serval (2013) and Barkhane (2014) operations, in parallel with the birth of the G5 Sahel for security coordination and the two EU training missions of the local army, EUTUM and EUCAP Mali Sahel, did not give the desired results.

Between 2015 and 2019, unrest broke out in central Mali and the rebels’ influence spread both to Burkina Faso, where France had to launch Operation Saber, and to Niger, where the EU sent the task force Takuba. In the two-year period 2020-21, Colonel Assimi Goita, protagonist of two coups d’état in two years, channeled anti-French discontent to consolidate his government: he turned to the Russian paramilitary group Wagner to fight Islamic terrorism and expelled him in 2022 the French ambassador to the capital. In the same year, the coup d’état in Burkina Faso and, in 2023, in Niger further precipitated relations with France and, by extension, Europe, until the announcement of the exit of the three states from ECOWAS.

Reflecting on the success of Sahelian directors, male and female writers in France, the anthropologist Amselle wonders whether “the denigration that the continent has suffered for decades has been replaced by a certain almost sensual fascination that African authors, often passed through the best schools, they operate on the French editorial, academic and media scene”.

He thus identifies some aspects common to Sahelian literary and cinematographic works successful in France in the last three decades: the ethnicisation of the narrative, or the large space given to local habits and customs; primitivism as a remedy for contemporaneity; animism; Afrocentrism and/or Afrofuturism, or, respectively, the idea that everything comes from and everything returns to Africa; Sufism, a moderate form of Islam as an antidote to fundamentalism; femonationalism, or projecting Western feminism onto Sahelian societies; homonationalism, that is, imposing human and sexual rights from the West on these same societies. The great thing that has been removed is jihadism, considered as “brought from outside” even though it has been present in the area since the end of the Second World War.

Violence is always from others, always outside of us. And so the bodies of the people who leave the Sahel and try to cross the desert to get to Europe will continue to be ghosts.

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1. Since 1920, the surface of the Sahara Desert has increased by 10%. For a detailed analysis, see Thomas, N., & Nigam, S. (2018). Twentieth-Century Climate Change over Africa: Seasonal Hydroclimate Trends and Sahara Desert Expansion. In Journal of Climate, 31(9), 3349-3370. https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0187.1. ↩︎
2. For example, see Amselle, J. L., M’Bokolo, E. (2017). L’invenzione dell’etnia. Meltemi. (ed. orig. Au cœur de l’ethnie, La Découverte, 2005). ↩︎
3. The “climate Sahel” designates an area with precipitation ranging from 100 nm (in the north) to 600 nm (in the south) per year. ↩︎
4. World Gold Council. (2023). Global mine production. In World Gold Council. https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/gold-production-by-country. ↩︎
5. OECD. (2018). Gold at the crossroads Assessment of the supply chains of gold produced in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. https://mne,..guidelines.oecd.org/Assessment-of-the-supply-chains-of-gold-produced-in-Burkina-Faso-Mali-Niger.pdf. ↩︎
6. International Crisis Group. (2022, Settembre 28). Getting a grip on Central Sahel’s gold rush | Crisis Group. https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/sahel/burkina-faso-mali-niger/reprendre-en-main-la-ruee-vers-lor-au-sahel-central. ↩︎
7. Afp, L. M. A. (2020, May 21). La France acte officiellement la fin du franc CFA en Afrique de l’Ouest. Le Monde.fr. https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2020/05/21/la-france-acte-officiellement-la-fin-du-franc-cfa-en-afrique-de-l-ouest_6040339_3212.html. ↩︎