The Peasant’s Arrested Revolution

by Rahmane Idrissa

The 1970s marked a turning point in the history of the peasantry of the Sahel, the arid and semi-arid band immediately south of the Sahara that spans the breadth of Africa. That decade began with a humanitarian catastrophe, whose origins apparently lay in a protracted period of drought, and ended with a drastic challenge to the Sahelian social system by a multi-faceted peasant movement. The drought and subsequent famine prompted international interventions in 1972 and 1973; rather than centring that often undisciplined mobilisation (as many previous narratives have), this essay traces how the crisis gave rise to a new politics among the people who lived through it. I will focus on the West African part of the Sahel, which includes Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.

The changes that were set in motion in those years were so radical that we no longer remember the social conditions that very briefly prevailed in the Sahel after the independence of these four nations, all in 1960, until the drought – a vanished world of small towns commensurate with the means of governments with limited resources, and vast rural populations. Among the latter, a minority of ‘producers’, toiling in the ‘useful’ zones, had been incorporated into the plans of the productivist economic regime that was supposed to ‘develop’ the new nations; meanwhile, the majority were practically left to fend for themselves in remote or ‘deprived’ regions during the catastrophe.

The peasant movement that was then born took two forms: firstly, rural exodus (so-called), which, without ending the binary structure of the Sahelian social system (urbanites versus the peasantry¹), radically destabilised it; and secondly, a more organised political movement that claimed the standing of a governed public for the peasantry and proposed, as an alternative to the productivist regime, a kind of agrarian ordoliberalism based on the ideal of family farming as inherited from the history of the old Sudan.

Productivism was a widespread strategy of development in the 1960s. It relied on increased, streamlined production of crops in the primary sector for exports and industrial processing, with the aim of supplying the foreign exchange and capital required for modernisation and industrialisation; ordoliberalism refers to practices of economic policy whereby the state would guarantee, via a set of ordering regulations (hence the term ordoliberalism), the existence of a competitive market economy in which small, often family-run enterprises could thrive without the lethal risks associated with monopoly capitalism and the reign of giant corporations. Ordoliberalism is sometimes known as social market economy. In the wealthy, industrialised world, it particularly applies to Germany after World War II. Here, I apply the concept to the very different realm of poor countries with agrarian economies, where it has different heuristic implications.

The essay first reviews the conditions of peasant life in the ‘old Sudan’ – the period between the end of the last of the great Sudanic empires (the Songhay Empire) in the late sixteenth century, and the advent of the colonial empires of France and Britain in the late nineteenth century – and the sociopolitical logics that were defined by those conditions, and which would go on to inspire the peasant ideological discourse of the 1970s. The itinerary of Mamadou Cissokho, a peasant leader of the 1970s, is then charted as an introduction to the political movement that he helped give birth to and also chronicled. The third section discusses the socio-political consequences of the moment.

Settlers of the bush and wild

The villages and camps of the old Sudan were economic units. Families and households would come together, sometimes under some sort of mayoral leadership, to develop a piece of land or plot their treks across a swathe of country. In many cases, this foundational logic is apparent in the vocabulary that was used to describe the creation of the units. For example, in Songhay – a language spoken across Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Benin – the word for the founding of a koyra (village) is straightforwardly, ‘development of a place’, nangu zooru. The development work – clearing, building, tilling – carves the village and its fields and pastures out of the saaji, ‘bush,’ and against the ganji, ‘wild’. These terms are pregnant with cultural substance. Saaji is not just the physical bush, it is also the cultural ‘elsewhere’, the world outside the koyra, where its values and usages are unknown; and ganji refers to the untameable both in nature and in the spirit world. Moreover, the founding of a koyra always involves its ‘rooting’ (kanji), meaning ritual offerings and sacrifices to propitiate resident spirits.

But the story that this lexicon tells is also highly economic or material. The village or the camp was the collective enterprise of the colonisation of the bush. Outsiders have often idealised it as enshrining a kind of primitive communism, but its solidarity is better likened to that of shareholders partaking to the same capital: each man’s returns depended on his investment, but so long as the enterprise was successful, he was safe in the enjoyment of at least the basic necessities of life. Yet this was not some sort of primitive capitalism either. The end goal was that the associates live comfortably (bahunay), not that they should accumulate wealth (arzaka). Indeed, the vagaries that the koyra had to cope with were not those of the market, but those of natural cycles and seasons. Hence the koyra had to be prudent and versatile – not put all its eggs in one basket – and always expect hardship. ‘Millet can never abound in the granary for five years in a row’, went a hardnosed Songhay saying. Just as in any enterprise, luck (bonkaanay, lit., ‘good head’) was an important factor. And the goal of collective flourishing meant that solidarity and mutual help at various levels (community, family, etc.) were the organising norms of labour.²

Successful villages and camps in the old Sudan had their predators or supremos, in the forms of raiders or a regional potentate, but their autonomy would not be fundamentally challenged. It was the mechanism of their success, and one would not kill the goose that lay the golden eggs. Autonomy meant that no outside force imposed its priorities on the villages as economic units. That began to change in the 1920s-50s, when colonial powers, seeing the villages as crude realms of peasant production in need of aid or development, imposed their own economic priorities. For example, to avert famines European administrators set up reserve granaries that would supply grain in times of penury. There was tenacious resistance from the peasants to this, at bottom because the ostensibly benevolent act violated their autonomy and created economic risks – in terms of bahunay – which the outside force did not take seriously. That was the shape of things to come.

God is not a peasant

In his book-length essay published in 2009, Dieu n’est pas un paysan, Mamadou Cissokho tells the story of a peasant movement that was born from resistance to outside impositions of the aforementioned kind. It is also the story of a personal journey through disillusionment and despair toward inspiration, resolve, and political awakening.

His story opens with a vignette of the typical Sahelian family farm around 1960. ‘The head of a family farm’, Cissokho writes, ‘may work with his brothers, all of whom are married and sometimes even polygamous. This farm is made up of a group of twenty or even thirty people, living from a single kitchen, based on age-old rules and ancestral lands. In a farm of this type, the family plans production by giving priority to what it needs to eat (cereals and others), followed by cash crops and small livestock, making the most of all the natural resources available in the area. The family also includes blacksmiths, toolmakers, tailors and others. In this way, there is never a static attitude in the lives of farmers, nor a specialisation that says: “This is the priority; this is what’s good.”’³

This is a post-mortem picture of the old Sudanic farm as autonomous economic unit. In the mid-1960s, Cissokho, then barely in his twenties, was deeply disillusioned with the development bargain as he had experienced it in Senegal, Niger, and especially Mali, where the ruthlessness of dogmatic socialism compounded the tone-deafness of development planners. Looking back, Cissokho argues that the newly independent states destroyed the old way of life by imposing upon it their own priorities, which he describes as the exact opposite of the ingredients that had made the old system work. Firstly, the overall objective was no longer to flourish, but to produce, which necessitated an increase in the productivity of land and labour to the detriment of other factors (the environment, training in other skills important to village life), even though the basic conditions of village life had not changed. The Sudanic peasant had to become a modern farm manager, capable of meeting the objectives of the development plan. Community success became less important than individual profit. Specialisation was necessary to intensify productivity, while the traditional versatility of farmers was considered by development planners a form of backwardness, suited to collective self-sufficiency at best. Money was the planners’ secret weapon. Cissokho describes the problems it caused the peasants, whom it turned into debtors, and for whom it created new needs and unknown risks, thus generating poverty. In turn, poverty became the incentive for producing more. Cissokho recounts a meeting of farmers who were astonished to have created, over the years, a great deal of value, which had then been dissipated by the workings of money – of buying and selling. A Songhay saying in vogue at the time warned: ‘Those who sell their millet will beg for it elsewhere when hunger comes’.⁴

This is a peasant perspective on the development bargain of the 1960s, which assigned to the peasantry the contradictory roles of deadweight needing to be removed (‘We often hear’, Cissokho writes, referring to official discourse of the 1960s, ‘“there are too many villages”; “the rural population is too large”’⁵), and simultaneously the primary source of the accumulation that was required for the shedding of the same deadweight (‘The political leaders of the time had told them: “you should mobilise to acquire your sovereignty, to come into your own.” This call caused the peasants to mobilise and form troops to support them.’⁶) The macro-economic income that came from streamlined agricultural production was invested in sectors that were intended to end national dependence on agricultural production, with producers receiving a pittance along with the bonuses of some modern supplies and equipment as their only incentives. The rulers and experts might not have thought of it that way, but peasant poverty was part of the plan: ‘The surest wealth’, as the infamous dictum goes, ‘consists in a multitude of laborious poor’.⁷

As these changes were taking effect, Cissokho was working as a primary school teacher in Nioro du Sahel, Mali. He suffered a profound sense of crisis brought on by the sight of hunger and misery in this particularly bleak part of the country. The catastrophe that would be revealed to all eyes a few years later was already plainly visible there, and his work as a teacher seemed meaningless and unreal. The word that comes most often in the telling of his experience of the period is ‘Why?’. This vexing sense of absurdity was shared by many others in rural society, although it was not felt outside it.

Cissokho ended up quitting his job in 1973, just as the Sahel Drought was becoming a reality for people on the outside. He travelled around in the countryside between Mali and Senegal as a peddler, though that was not a vocation: ‘This trading business was a pretext. My aim was to meet people and explore my questions in greater depth’, to find out ‘what is to be done’.⁸ In these meanderings he befriended two men who had been educated in an Islamic school and were literate in Arabic. They told him they had realised that their education had been a waste of fifteen years of their lives, as far as living and working in the villages was concerned. The sense of absurdity and alienation was broadly shared. It was a response to impending catastrophe. And the conclusion that the peasants reached together was that the solution was in their hands and would not come from outsiders.

City-takers and world thinkers

To outsiders – that is, people living outside the rural areas, including, crucially, development experts, government officials and elite urbanites – the crisis was mysterious. The capitals relied on their productivist regime for their information on the rural hinterlands. The regime was naturally focused on sections of the agricultural population that were integrated in its schemes. As it churned out statistics on production it fostered little contact with producers, and none at all with those considered non-producers, the people living in remote, less ‘useful’ areas, who were the worst hit by the disaster. The only data useful for assessing the food situation were those pertaining to cereal production, and mostly in the more favoured districts. As late as August 1973, a Food and Agriculture Organisation official could note that ‘these countries may not have had a national cereals deficit’.⁹ And even after the graphic appearance, conveyed by the media, of thousands of famished refugees, dying bodies and, between and around human settlements, a countryside littered with the corpses of animals, starkly imposed the truth of the disaster, it was hard to trace its causes and gauge its magnitude. What was obvious, though, was that the development bargain could not carry on as before.

While the outsiders were grappling with this, peasantries were responding to the crisis in their own ways. A mass peasant movement took two distinctive forms. On the one hand there was rural exodus: a mass movement of a different scale from the labour migration that had previously drawn Sahelian villagers toward urban centres of opportunity, usually located in the Gulf of Guinea. It was a shock to a Sahelian social system that rested on towns with relatively small populations, visible to the state, and a vast rural hinterland where many lived largely outside the purview of government. The shock began as something that looked like an epiphenomenon, the mobilisation of refugees who streamed from the many terrae incognita of the region, often crossing meaningless borders, to gather in towns and cities and put pressure on the rulers. In Niger, for example, Bonnecase reports that territorial administrators grew worried that hunger refugees would storm the state’s food storage facilities, like so many Bastilles. One sub-prefect demanded permission to either give the grain in his locality away for free or move it elsewhere.¹⁰

But as time wore on, rural folk were materialising in the urban areas by the tens of thousands. For example, in just the year 1973, the population of Niamey doubled, rising from 108,000 to over 200,000; and the city’s urbanised surface grew four-fold between 1967 and 1977.¹¹ The towns and cities of the Sahel lacked the legal infrastructure with which, for example, China has heavily regulated rural exodus in its recent era of booming development; nor did they have walls, like the cities of medieval Europe, behind which to withhold the rights of bourgeoisie, reserved for citizens of the city-state. (Poltroni, ande arar, ‘back to the plough, shirkers,’ the cittadini of Venice cried to peasants who strayed into the city in search of jobs in 1520.¹²) The Sahel’s rural exodus of the 1970s was a poliorcetic (‘city-taking’) movement that has remade (and is still remaking) these countries’ political sociologies in ways that remain to be studied. In the speech of Songhay exodants, the word used for it is ceeci, which means literally ‘quest,’, as in, looking for one’s livelihood. Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan notes that that word was also used, in the old Sudan, for the raiding of towns.¹³ And the urban elite’s own feeling of invasion led to the repression of what was often called, in the capitals, an encombrement humain, a ‘human clutter’, or even déchet humain, ‘human refuse’.¹⁴

But there was also a more politically conscious side of the movement, composed of people who experienced roughly the same trajectory as Mamadou Cissokho: i.e., moving from a sense that their way of life was no longer working into an existential crisis – Cissokho’s ‘Why?’ moment – and then into a quest for hope, spurred by talking with others about ‘what is to be done’, the old revolutionary question.¹⁵ A critical mass of people who shared such an existential experience led to peasants mobilising independently in village associations that formed foyers, community-level activist clubs, which then federated into inter-community ententes throughout Senegal.¹⁶ The first organisations emerged in the southern region of Casamance. Cissokho founded his own, the Entente de Bamba Thialène, in the centre of the country in March 1976, drawing up an ‘Act of Faith’ that spelled out a three-point programme: resurrect the versatile, autonomous family farm of old; reject unhelpful interference; and rely primarily on mutual help.¹⁷ By the end of the decade, Marie Hrabanski writes, this organised peasant movement had proved capable of posing ‘a direct challenge to … state development companies’, i.e., the entities that had animated the productivist regime of the 1960s.¹⁸ Indeed, by that time the development bargain had been shelved, which opened a space for the movement to consolidate.

The organised peasant movement was also a response to the Sahel’s social system of towns versus rural hinterlands. It demanded that peasants be treated like a public, a body of citizens to which the state would listen;¹⁹ and it proposed an alternative mode of organising rural development, with the autonomous family farm flourishing in the context of flexible, responsive state regulation – a system reminiscent of German ordoliberalism, with small industrial units replaced by family farms and capitalism replaced by social solidarity. Through the years, the movement became a lobby: first in Senegal, where it grew close to the ruling party (President Abdou Diouf wrote the foreword of Cissokho’s book), and later at a regional level, in the guise of the transnational organisation ROPPA (French acronym for the Network of West Africa’s Peasant and Producers’ Organisations), founded in 2000 and headquartered in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso – with Mamadou Cissokho as its permanent honorary chairman.

Conclusão

Humanitarianism is about forecasting human disaster; managing it when it happens; and mitigating its aftershocks. As a result, it tends to develop a catastrophist bias, which obfuscates the historicity and sociology that are at work even, or perhaps especially, in a large-scale humanitarian emergency.

For a few years after the Sahel Drought or the Sahel Famine – the names that outsiders gave to the disaster – food self-sufficiency was touted as the solution. This idea seemed all the more apt because it had apparently worked in Asia, where it grounded so-called green revolution strategies. (Asia was the ‘famine continent’ of the 1960s). In Africa, the approach failed. A common view is that African states lacked the capacities to implement the aid projects that Asian states were able to execute. More relevantly perhaps, it is also the case that the main body behind such projects, the World Bank, shifted to a market paradigm for solutions to crisis just five years after launching its first food-self-sufficiency projects in Africa.

Cissokho writes that, at that juncture, the peasant ententes were very much aware that in place of the ‘tout-État’ (everything by the state) of the 1960s, the ‘tout-marché’ (everything by the market) had taken hold by the 1980s. The 1970s were thus a pause, not an end, to productivism, even though in the new era the market would set the priorities rather than the state. The revolutionary aim of ending the twin socio-political divides – between the productive and the unproductive; between town and country – of the Sahel could not be achieved in such a context. In particular, the vulnerabilities of dependence on cash and on the climate²⁰ – the first characterising chiefly the so-called productive areas and the second the so-called unproductive – remained. As a result, disasters such as that of the 1970s continued to be entirely possible, as was demonstrated as early as 1983-84 and recurrently ever since. The peasant movement born from the disaster of the 1970s, particularly in its politically organised form, is rich in ideas that embed vernacular welfare solutions within an agrarian ordoliberalism, in which farms and herding enterprises would thrive within the framework of consensual rules enforced by the state. However, in the inchoate social formation of the Sahel, the movement has not managed the sort of class coalition with other groups that would give a strong socio-political base to its agendas.

This is not a dilemma humanitarians can solve. But a key contribution to a solution would be to help build strong welfare systems in rural communities. This is the one guardrail against humanitarian disaster that has not been developed in the region – or in any other similar context for that matter. If humanitarian work is to move from emergency care to contributions to welfare systems, that will require an intellectual shift, and a vision that looks beyond the dimension of disaster to focus on historicity and sociology, and investment in the multiple human dimensions that present themselves to those lenses. Such a shift, in itself, will not end the recurrence of disaster, which would require structural change. But it will make each of the three steps of humanitarian interventions – forecasting, managing, mitigating – significantly more efficient, by anchoring them into the living beat of afflicted communities.

NOTAS DE RODAPÉ

1
The Sahel’s urban speech has deprecating terms for people in the countryside, such as kawkaw in Wolof, bakawye in Hausa, kawyayze in Songhay, which all seem to share the same root. In Niger, they use the French pejorative kawyard, which adds to the root ‘kaw’ the French desinence ‘ard’ often found in negative naming in that language (salopard, batard, connard, etc.).
2
See, for these concepts, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, Concepts et conceptions Songhay-Zarma: histoire, culture, société (Nubia, 1982).
3
Mamadou Cissokho, Dieu n’est pas un paysan (Présence Africaine, 2009), 23. Translation by the author.
4
Boureïma Alpha Gado, Crises alimentaires en Afrique sahélienne : les réponses paysannes (Éditions du Flamboyant, 2010), 123.
5
Cissokho, Dieu n’est pas un paysan, 29.
6
Cissokho, Dieu n’est pas un paysan, 24.
7
Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits [ed. of 1732] (Clarendon Press, 1924), 287.
8
Cissokho, Dieu n’est pas un paysan, 38.
9
Quoted in Vincent Bonnecase, La Pauvreté au Sahel. Du savoir colonial à la mesure internationale (Karthala, 2011), 224 .
10
Bonnecase, La Pauvreté au Sahel, 226.
11
Kokou Henri Motcho, “Niamey, Garin Captan Salman ou l’histoire du peuplement de la ville de Niamey”, in Villes et organisation de l’espace en Afrique, ed. Jérôme Aloko-N’Guessan, Amadou Diallo and Kokou Henri Motcho (Karthala, 2010), 22.
12
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism. 15th-18th century. Vol. I. The Structures of Everyday Life. The Limits of the Possible, trans. Siân Reynold (William Collins Sons & Co Ltd, 1985), 518.
13
Olivier de Sardan, Concepts et conceptions Songhay-Zarma, 83.
14
In 1979, the Senegalese writer Aminata Sow Fall wrote a vitriolic morality tale on the subject, La Grève des battù ou les déchets humains, made into a film in 2000 by Malian director Cheick Oumar Sissoko.
15
Refers to Nikolay Chernishevsky’s 1863 novel of that title, which involves the utopian proposal of small socialist cooperatives based on old Russia’s peasant communes; and the pamphlet of V. Lenin, What is to be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement (1902).
16
See Marie Hrabanski, “Internal Dynamics, the State, and Recourse to External Aid: towards a Historical Sociology of the Peasant Movement in Senegal since the 1960s,” Review of African Political Economy 37, no. 125 (2010): 285, https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2010.510627
17
Dieu n’est pas un paysan, p. 45.
18
Hrabanski, “Internal Dynamics,” 286.
19
See Abdourahmane Idrissa, “Out of the Penkelemes: the ECOWAS project as Transformation,” GEG Working Paper no. 76 (2013), 19.
20
In the 1960s, rains in the Sahel were adequately distributed throughout the rainy season year after year, and official international data on famine risks focussed on Asia and Latin America, not on Africa – and, indeed, not on the Sahel. In those conditions, it felt safe (to outsiders) to leave whole populations dependent on the climate, and disregard the necessity of guardrails, such as a combination of market and welfare regimes penetrating deep into the countryside.

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Rahmane Idrissa

Rahmane Idrissa is senior researcher in politics and history at Leiden University's Africa Studies Centre. In recent years his work has focused on the security crisis in the Sahel. He is currently working on a history of the Songhay Empire.