In this panel, we aim to elucidate the role of the historical legacy of population mobility, religious networks, political movements, and hierarchies of power in the current dynamics of the Sahel: how they are transformed over the ages, and their role in the social and political landscape of today.
Culturally and historically, the Sahel is much more than a border area between the Sahara and Sub-Sahara Africa, where recurrent droughts make life difficult. In the past it was the home area of dynamic local communities, strong emirates, and powerful empires characterised by complex stratified social hierarchies, against the background of a capricious ecological environment marked by high risk for agriculture and livestock keeping as the main sources of subsistence. On the economic basis of pastoral nomadism in combination with cereal cultivation by subjugated sedentary populations, and the military basis of a powerful cavalry, Sahelian empires ruled over vast territories. There was a constant reshuffling of power, core versus periphery, and mobility of population groups following political turmoil and ecological hazard. Islam, brought to the area by traders and Arab invaders, provided a frame for organizing commercial and political relations, first at the level of the ruling strata, later on also among the commoners and slave populations. Colonialism brought a different kind of political dynamics that of the nation-state, which undermined this dynamism and the formation of weak states. In this panel, we aim to elucidate the role of this historical legacy in the current dynamics of the Sahel: the flows of people in the region and the role of religious networks, ethnic alliances, political movements and hierarchies of power. How they are transformed over the ages, and what role they play in the social and political landscape of today, and how these processes give the region its shared characteristics.
Like Braudel’s Mediterranean, one must think of the Sahara as an active space where the movement of the ships of the desert transported ideas, cultural practices, peoples and commodities. Yet the Sahara, representing one third of the African continental landmass, has remained largely outside the radar of traditions of scholarship typically landlocked in the area-studies paradigm.
This paper focuses on the relationship between patterns of spatial mobility and political dynamics throughout cycles of ecological change and conflict with particular reference to research carried out in the aftermath of the 1990-1996 civil conflict. In spite of refugees’ resettlement and rehabilitation programmes, the mobility of pastoralists and labour migrants still represents a subsistence strategy which defies aid induced development and the asymmetrical economic relations it engenders.
The Sahara and Sahel form a privileged context to investigate the linkages between the ‘histoire de longue durée’ and the dynamics of historical and contemporary developments. These linkages will be investigated against the background of the extreme climate conditions and the specific political and economic set-up of the region. Reference will be made to the work of Braudel, and theoretical frameworks from ecological anthropology.
In the Sahel quite similar social hierarchies developed in the course of history, based on a distinction between pastoral and sedentary groups and between free and non-free people. This paper will investigate the dynamics of these hierarchies in their historical and political context and their resonance in the present.
The Dogon area has long been defined in the western scholarly tradition as a kind of cultural and social island in the surrounding Sahel “sea”, inhabited by the Dogon an exemplary traditional group. In this paper I will argue that Dogon country has not really conformed to that external “power of definition” and can be “read” as a different text. Dogon villages were never cultural isolates. Their relations with the outside world, both to the North , South and West throughout most of their history, have brought them in continuous contact with both their immediate neighbours and the centres of power at greater distances.
Some scholars consider that Ouagadougou kingdom is a political unit with a strong body of traditions that remains relatively unchanged for centuries. However, Ouagadougou kingdom has never cessed to integrate new elements from outside: traders and artisans, Islamic clerics and even, in some ways, Christian missions, colonial administrators and political leaders in the 20th century. In focusing on places of ritual power in the inner city of Ouagadougou, this paper will examine the change of Enthronement’s rituals and the conjectural political participation of the chieftaincy to ceremonies organised by other institutions.