Confronting Crisis and Displacement in Timbuktu, Mali
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2016 Breaking Cover: Confronting Crisis and Displacement in Timbuktu, Mali Andrew Hernann Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1279 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] BREAKING COVER: CONFRONTING CRISIS AND DISPLACEMENT IN TIMBUKTU, MALI by ANDREW HERNANN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 © 2016 ANDREW HERNANN All Rights Reserved ii Breaking Cover: Confronting Crisis and Displacement in Timbuktu, Mali by Andrew Hernann This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ___________________________ __________________________________________ Date Gary Wilder Chair of Examining Committee ___________________________ _________________________________________ Date Gerald Creed Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Vincent Crapanzano Mandana Limbert Michael Gomez Jonathan Shannon THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Acknowledgements I am indebted to countless people for all of their support – without their help, this dissertation would not have been possible. I am grateful to my students, who had to listen to me ramble on about my research and arguments. I am grateful to my fellow graduate students, who also had to listen to me ramble on about my research and arguments, not to mention the challenges of writing a dissertation in the first place. I owe a very special thanks to Estefania Ponti, Emily Channell-Justice, José Vasquez, Duygu Parmaksizoglu, Rachel Daniel and Michael Partis for reading over and critically discussing various chapters. I offer my thanks to the Graduate Center and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for their various fellowships; neither my research nor my dissertation would have been possible without them. A special thanks, too, to the Brookings Institution’s Timbuktu Action Group for including me in their mission and for giving me the opportunity to engage my materials with them. Thanks to Chris Shields for inviting me to join. Of course, much of my success was contingent upon the endless support of numerous university faculty members, both within the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and without. I owe my thanks to the following for reading, listening to and commenting on different chapters: Talal Asad, Michael Blim, Avram Bornstein, Vandana Chaudhry, Brenda Farnell, Ken Guest, David Harvey, Anthony Marcus, Ellen Moodie, Glenn Petersen, Don Robotham and Mahir Saul. And I offer a special thanks to my outside reader, Michael Gomez, to my dissertation committee – Vincent Crapanzano, Mandana Limbert and Jonathan Shannon – and to my advisor, Gary Wilder. I cannot express how much I appreciate your patience and your insight. iv Thank you to the Malian, Burkinabe and Senegalese governments. Thank you to the town and peoples of Bamako, Segou, Djenne, Mopti, Sevare, Ouagadougou, Djibo and Dakar. And an especial thanks to the town and people of Timbuktu. I am so grateful to everyone I met along the way, none of whom I can fully name. But, I offer a special thanks to the Dicko and Litni families for all of your hospitality and patience. Thank you also to Abdoulaye, Abdou, Bokar, Moustafa, Fatim, Mohamed, Ibrahim, Mahmane, Ag Mohamed, Aziz and so many others. Thank you, also, to the United Nations, for your assistance. Thank you as well to Les Archives Nationales in Dakar, Senegal; Les Archives Nationales du Mali in Bamako, Mali; and Les Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer in Aix-en-Provence, France. May I also gratefully acknowledge various kinds of help and support from Gerald Creed, Ellen DeRiso, Judith Pintar and Joanie Ward, as well as from Diane, Neal, Guy and Monique. Finally, I cannot express enough my thanks to my family, specifically my parents, brother, grandparents and in-laws. And the sincerest of thanks goes to my partner, Jacquelyn. You have supported me and expressed more-than-necessary patience in the face of coursework, adjuncting and conducting fieldwork while Mali was under a state of emergency. Thank you for everything. Finally, a big thank you to everyone I could not mention. I am so grateful for all of your support. While this is your dissertation, all errors are my own. v ABSTRACT Breaking Cover: Confronting Crisis and Displacement in Timbuktu, Mali by Andrew Hernann Advisor: Gary Wilder In Spring 2012, a loose alliance of ethnic Tuareg nationalist and Jihadi-Salafist militant groups occupied Mali’s northern regions, forcibly displacing nearly 300,000 residents and ultimately imposing their harsh interpretation of shari’a among those who remained. Later, in January 2013, as these groups began marching towards southern Mali, the French army suddenly intervened, “liberating” urban centers in the North as the militants fled into the Sahara Desert and across the Algerian border. My research examines this period of occupation, displacement and intervention, which most Malians have come to term “the crisis.” Specifically, I analyze the cultural and religious frameworks through which IDPs and refugees from Timbuktu conceptualized and negotiated broader, transnational structures including militant groups, national and foreign armies, refugee camps, humanitarian agencies and so on. As a semi- autonomous hub of Islamic learning that has remained politically and economically distant from the administrative centers of multiple polities over the centuries, I find that Timbuktu reproduces a simultaneously peripheral and central positionality among my interlocutors. Their dissonant, co-lived subjectivity has influenced both how displaced Timbuktians have made sense of (being in) crisis, as well as the creative strategies that they have attempted in order to minimize vi hardships. By way of example, one of the primary religio-cultural knowledge-practices that many displaced Timbuktians expressed throughout the occupation was an ethic of privacy rooted in intersecting globalized and localized understandings of secrecy, modesty and shame. Articulated in social and metaphysical spheres, this ethic of privacy both exacerbated the difficulties that many Timbuktians faced and provided a framework through which they attempted to address them. Indeed, my interlocutors referenced this and other knowledge- practices when organizing self-help groups and commenting upon the socio-political landscape surrounding the crisis. Timbuktian IDPs and refugees’ perceptions of occupation, displacement and intervention, along with the actions that they took in order to better their circumstances, reveal the need to analyze crises beyond certain hegemonic, Euro-American optics. Taking localized knowledge seriously decenters and decolonizes the presumptions that many theorists, humanitarians and politicians have reproduced and more effectively repositions displaced persons as active, strategic agents. vii Table of Contents CHAPTER 1: Introduction: Timbuktians in Crisis………...…………………………...………1 Project……………………………………………………………………………………..2 Postcolonial States………………………………………………………………………...5 Crisis…………………………………………..…………………………………………11 Timbuktu as a Site: Problematizing Race and Ethnicity………………………….…….13 The Malian Crisis………………………………………………………………………...21 Methods………………………………………………………………………………......31 Chapter Summaries………………………………………………………………………36 CHAPTER 2: Gold and Dust: 1000 Years as a Peripheral Center……………………………42 Coercion and Persuasion…………………………………………………………………44 Precolonial Timbuktu……………………………………………………………………47 Colonial Timbuktu……………………………………………………………………….54 Infrastructure……………………………………………………………………..59 Slavery…………………………………………………………………………...61 Military Service and Colonial Education………………………………………...64 Decolonial and Postcolonial Timbuktu…………………………………………………..67 Nation-Building………………………………………………………………….70 State-Building……………………………………………………………………74 Civil Society-Building…………………………………………………………...77 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….83 CHAPTER 3: Keeping Cover: Everyday Experiences of Displacement……………………...88 viii Displacement……………………………………………………………………………..91 Internal Displacement……………………………………………………………92 External Displacement…………………………………………………………...97 Commonalities of Displacement………………………………………………..103 Why “Sutura”?.................................................................................................................110 An Everyday Social Cover……………………………………………………………...115 The Cover of God………………………………………………………………………122 Crisis and Sutura………………………………………………………………………..124 Sutura and Displacement……………………………………………………………….128 CHAPTER 4: Thinking about the Center-Periphery: Timbuktian Geopolitical Imaginaries……………………………………………………………………………………...134 Is the Periphery a One-Way Street?.................................................................................137 Joking Marginalization…………………………………………………………………142 The Strategic Periphery…………………………………………………………………148 Strategic Displacement…………………………………………………………………156 Co-Lived Center and Periphery………………………………………………………...162 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...178 CHAPTER 5: Collective Action: