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"Decolonization -- Niger"
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The Yearning for Relief
In The Yearning for Relief Klaas van Walraven traces the history of the Sawaba movement in Niger and its rebellion against the French-protected regime during the 1960s. The book analyses its guerrilla campaign and failure, followed by the movement's destruction.
eBook
West Africa's post 2020 coups and decoloniality
The post-2020 coups that took place in West Africa's former French colonies in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Niger had stark contradictions with the traditional coups in West Africa in that they challenged leaders who had cordial relations with the West, predominantly France. The coups showed a drive towards delinking with French influence and the countries to draw their course outside the rigid colonial spheres of influence. This article attempts to analyze these coups through the decolonial lenses. The author follows the decolonial route given that while many analyses have been made, they centered more on discussing the return of military intervention against the democratic gains in the region, or a simplified questioning of whether France has lost its colonial empire in Africa. This stance does not look at the deeper drivers of coloniality and its impact on the current coup, which this paper attempts to do.
Journal Article
Fleeting Glory in a Wasteland: Wealth, Politics, and Autonomy in Northern Chad
In January 2012, a new derdé (traditional leader) of the Teda in northern Chad was officially appointed. Held in the Tibesti, a remote, notoriously unruly but strategically important part of the Sahara, the investiture ceremony was attended by Teda from throughout the country and neighboring Libya and Niger, as well as by an impressive number of Chadian civil servants and international diplomats. Yet the ceremony itself was short and messy. Similarly, the historical underpinnings of the institution of the derdé and the selection process were unclear, leaving much room for debate. This uncertainty appears to lie at the heart of the institution of the derdé. Far from a resurgence of “traditional authority” to make up for “state failure” or to partake in the restructuring of postcolonial states—as observed elsewhere on the African continent—the investiture ceremony confirmed the decentralized nature of Teda social organization and the absence of even attempted governance, both with regards to the Chadian state and local political institutions. What mattered from a local point of view were not long-term strategies of power and control, but rather the immediate and gloriously wasteful distribution of wealth. Admiring eyes were turned not toward the derdé or the state officials who appointed him, but instead toward high-ranking military officers, well-dressed urban Libyan Teda, and trans-border smugglers, models of rapid but often short-lived success. This provides a counterexample to the current emphasis on governance and power in the analysis of African states and politics.
Journal Article
Rethinking Militancy and Environmental Justice: The Politics of Oil and Violence in Nigerian Popular Music
The Niger Delta question is not just the most controversial issue in postcolonial Nigeria: it has launched Nigeria into global news circuits. The delta itself, the most marginalized geopolitical zone in Nigeria, gives vibrant expression to the paradox of wealth and poverty tied to a single space. With the establishment of the amnesty policy, most mainstream media seem to have forgotten that the cardinal aim of the policy is to create a platform to ease infrastructural development in the Niger Delta and thereby to articulate the importance of ecological and human justice. What fascinates the media is the idea of militancy itself, not the postamnesty assurance of a new world for the doubly marginalized delta people. This essay examines how popular music has become the new site for political activism, especially in engaging the society and government on pressing postcolonial issues in Nigeria, specifically the Niger Delta question and the functionality of the amnesty package. The essay examines how these popular artists articulate the predicament of the delta in their songs, considering that popular music is hardly discussed among cultural art forms that give expression to the Niger Delta question. Popular music offers the Nigerian public an alternative to the hegemonic position.
Journal Article
Remaking Body Politics: Dilemmas Over Female Fatness as Symbolic Capital in Two Rural Tuareg Communities
This essay explores nuanced, debated and changing meanings of female fatness as a bodily aesthetic ideal in rural Tuareg communities in northern Niger and Mali. I compare two communities—one where nomadic herding, of longstanding importance among the Tuareg, remains prevalent, and intermarriage is rare between aristocratic and formerly servile persons, and the other where residents have become more settled in hamlets, now garden, and where intermarriage between social categories is frequent. Both communities have experienced conflict with colonial and postcolonial nation-states, but the more nomadic herders have had especially tense relations with French colonial and postcolonial state regimes. Although many oasis residents express greater ambivalence toward female fatness, these communities do not express neatly polarized attitudes but admire it to varying degrees, for different reasons, and attach different meanings to it from their experience of different double-binds over achieving it. Fundamental to understanding these meanings, I argue, are psychosocial dilemmas arising from historical change and regional variation affecting power relationships between persons of aristocratic and those of servile origins, between husbands and wives and between nomadic herders and the nation-state. More broadly, these data show the importance of reversals of power in symbolic capital and suggest more nuanced processes surrounding body politics.
Journal Article
DECOLONIZATION BY REFERENDUM: THE ANOMALY OF NIGER AND THE FALL OF SAWABA, 1958–1959
This article deals with the 1958 referendum that the French held in Niger to gain approval for the Fifth Republic and reorganization of their empire. It reassesses the French record in Niger, where more people voted ‘No’ – in favour of immediate independence – than in other territories, except Guinea. It does this on the basis of research on the history of the Sawaba movement, which led Niger's autonomous government until the plebisicite. It shows that the French forcibly intervened in the referendum to realize a ‘Yes’ vote and preserve Niger for their sphere of influence after independence in 1960. In detailing the violence and manipulation of the referendum and its aftermath, the article criticizes a revisionist viewpoint which disputed the significance of French intervention. The analysis draws on research on the Sawaba movement, benefiting from insights of social history into the grassroots forces in the nationalist movements of the 1950s. It discusses the historiography of Niger's referendum in relation to new archival sources and memoirs, drawing parallels with other territories, notably Guinea. It concludes that France's interventions in 1958 are crucial for understanding the long-term consequences of the transformations of the independence era.
Journal Article
The nation state, resource conflict, and the challenges of \former sovereignties\ in Nigeria
Opinion leaders in Europe have often expressed penitence over Europe's colonial legacies. While these leaders rethink the roles of their nations in colonialism, human rights abuses arising from colonialism, and state formation elsewhere, the discourse underscores the need to revisit colonialism as an ideology, and the role of the nation state in grievance construction in Africa. This article revisits colonial ideology and examines how the colonial legacy of the nation state affects the internal security of postcolonial Nigeria. The aim is to understand grievance dynamics underlying the relationship between the state and local communities, and how this relationship has resulted in contestation for sovereignty between the Nigerian state and previously independent communities. Using archival and ethnographic data, the article focuses on selected coal and oil producing communities of Southeastern Nigeria and the Niger Delta region.
Journal Article
Rethinking resistance : revolt and violence in African history
Rethinking Resistance analyzes revolts from the nineteenth century and early colonial Africa, post-colonial rebellions and recent conflicts in African history by reinterpreting resistance studies in the light of current scholarly thought and linking them to new conceptual perspectives on the changing nature of violence.
eBook
Bounded and Multiple Identities
Theories of nationalism have debated to what extent nationalism is a recent phenomenon, ethnicity playing a major role in that regard. The article focuses on ethnicity by using colonial texts and ethnographic data in regard to WoDaaBe FulBe in Niger. I stress that colonial classifications of others—often believed to have created new ethnicities—can be incoherent and base on various actors. Following feminist theories of multiple identities, I claim that ethnic identifications are interwoven with various other sources of identifications, individuals manipulating and identifying with others in a shifting ways in real life. FulBe have been imagined for a long time in various colonial and post-colonial texts, often characterized in racial and essentialist terms, making their classification especially interesting for this purpose. The article emphasizes the agency and creativity of those involved, stressing that even though ethnicity constitutes an important part of identity, other kinds of boundaries become relevant and are emphasized in various contexts.
Journal Article