To see further than the enemy, to mark new paths
To invent our future ourselves
Hawad
Hawad is a writer , a poet and a calligrapher.
The regression
Today we're back where we started, at the beginning of the century when our ancestors had to confront the French, Turkish or Italian colonialists. No bloodbath would make us accept the legitimacy of the rifles and the laws which exterminate us. In 1990, the Touareg youth, the ishumar, took up arms, they confronted the States which were strangling them and occupying their territory. But from the beginning, in exile, their chiefs, in the camps of military training, were trained to erase all contact with those who incarnate the values that they wanted to defend, that is to say the temujagha, the consciousness that the Touareg have of being a nation which has its territory confiscated, its rights denied, a truth to wrestle out. The fighters who took up arms to confront the system which massacres their parents have even given up their own name. It is because States like Algeria, Libya, Niger, Mali, France have found the bearers of their politics amongst the educated. No, the picture has not changed. Today sends us back to yesterday.
The people and the militants are living currently in total disarray, which does not come from a military defeat nor a political one, because on the political level there has been no struggle nor resistance from what is called the rebellion. No politics. One has the impression that they've just been pushed by this pain, by this inspiration that all the Touareg share : do something to push back this monster of the States which is crushing them. So here we are today, we the Touareg, in front of this defeat that is not the defeat, that is to say a struggle recuperated from the beginning by Libya and Algeria, and now by France's sub-contractors, Mali & Niger. Whether it's in refugee camps, in the country, in it's valleys or in hiding, the people cry out treason, the twisting around of what makes sense to them, that is to say the freedom to exist and to manage their territory.
Some of us think that this situation, even if its terrible, is preferable to that of a struggle which leads to death that is not undertaken in the name of values for which we are ready to die. Things are starting to find their place. On one side, there are the collaborators in the school of their masters, the valets of the system which oppresses us and kills us, those who, via Paris, have been able to deviate the sense of the Touareg resistance so as to transform the desert and the Sahel into a safari circuit. These men have no politics, either for the Touareg or for themselves - they don't even defend the interest of their stomachs which is their goal - nor for these States. On the other side, the Touareg people stumble and, even though broken, it still has not lost the the goal of its ideal nor the dream of being free tomorrow. The question is how to refind the path which leads towards this ideal that is for the moment inaccessible but is nonetheless a target in the sights of the touareg.
We are convinced that we are going to continue being massacred in silence. Nothing has changed, but it is from there that we must draw our strength, because the enemy has no other project than fire and hunting to tie our heads on our knees. We prefer this exclusion to the time when they pretended to represent us. At the same time, the years that are coming, for the people who need easy and rapid solutions, are going to be difficult.
The autonomy of thought
We must count only on ourselves and on our desire to transform death into life. The first autonomy that we are demanding, we are not asking for it from Algeria, nor from Libya, nor Niger, or Mali and not from their master France, we are demanding it of ourselves : the autonomy of thought. This is not a right but a duty. We are obliged to come back to it because the oppressor has no project neither for us or for himself.
I am not saying that one should disconnect oneself from the world, but that it is necessary to connect ourselves to our own centre.
A society that no longer generates its ideas, nor its culture, nor it's own vision, is the excluded fringe of the centre. For me, the centre is like a gyrating sense which turns on itself to generate energy. But today the centre is no longer the centre : it has become its own fringe. To be a centre there must be a convergence of axis, of arrivals and departures : there are none.We have been excluded ; in Africa, the States exile everybody except the bureaucracy, the administration and the langue de bois. We, the Touareg and other peoples, have become marginalised.
We need to make these margins into centres and forget this centre that is not a centre : it is the only thing that gives me strength. The youth have accepted to lay down their arms, like a flock of sheep, have realised that Bamako and Niamey haven't either got a centre where one can be fed ; there was a terrorist called the FMI and the gaping mouths of the States stuck together in the emptiness.
We need to invent independent axis and make of our marginalisation and our exclusion by the State the starting point for new routes. It is our only hope.
A centre, crossroads for all peoples
The pseudo-centre, like a boil on the sickness of poor African backs, has become an abandoned camp, because its essential action is to exclude. We are arriving at the stage where the excluded, having lost all hope of one day returning to the centre, break with it. Another centre starts to emerge in front of them : we want this new centre to be a mirror for all peoples, and not only of a single people. A different centre from the one that excluded them, & itself, is needed because it is no longer capable of creating its own dynamism, not even capable of feeding its parrots. This centre of another type is is ahead of the march, towards unknown and abandoned territories, beyond artificial frontiers and technocratic theories. It needs to be invented and only the peoples at the margins of the world, they who have been speared by pain, are fit for this journey and this transition because they themselves represent the angles to assemble in this new centre-crossroads.
The problem is there for all the African peoples confronted by this State which is not African and was not created in the interest of the African peoples. The more they submit us, the more they prevent us from creating alternative systems, the more the problem becomes shared. In fact, it was from the beginning, but we did not find support from the peoples who suffer.
We, we want to live with others. But apart from the oppressors, we haven't yet seen real actors ready to play in a new theatre that escapes from the tired old plays. Our neighbours are dying of hunger as we are. Only phantom States are on the stage. The solution is for these false interlocutors to disappear so that our true neighbours can live and that they awake instead of being used to massacre us to try and forget the plague that is eating away at them as well. We have no more neighbours, no more companions, no more alter ego.
The pyramid must be destabilised from above. Power has become a booty which enriches some and starves the majority of the African people, it must be distributed, torn away from those who have grabbed it in the name of Nation-state and who keep this privilege through military power. The African nations, the peoples of these nations, need to demand its redistribution, to grab it, because those who have confiscated their riches will never give it back. The goods of Africa have been stolen.
Soon we will be with our true brothers : a Jerma or a Bambara that the FMI has made unemployed, who is dying of hunger like I am and who is struggling to overturn the system that has permitted that, there is my brother, but not these Nigerians, Malians, Algerians or even my own brother who, with his weapons, wants to apply a system that is destroying him and for whom he is nothing but a policeman or a pimp getting us massacred by it.
If there are other Africans who thinking like this, we call them to travel with us, to debate, to find a solution for the whole of Africa, for it is the whole of Africa that needs a solution.
States strangling themselves
Economically, nobody is feeding us today. For us it's been a long time since the frontiers of the States have strangled us, but today it is the States themselves who are strangled by their own frontiers.
The enemy destroys its own logic. Now we are at the stage where everything is broken, but it is precisely there that our liberty will emerge. There is nothing else to steal from us. The colonial system has nothing left to eat.
We are helped by the way in which the enemy, the States, block all our ways out. We're going to leave these enclosures where they have made us like angry wolves so that we eat ourselves. Our bodies have no more flesh on them. It's no longer any use today to sell one's brothers for a position in a ministry. The bureaucrats in Bamako, in Niamey, are not paid.
There will be beggars from our people but no more real active collaborators.
The pact, what is it ? Folklore. It has no content. The people who signed it had their arms twisted. They have no more faith in anything and know only the scorn of others and of themselves.
For me, a peace pact is an agreement by two parties connected by understanding and mutual respect : what respect did they show us as they slit us open ? Who are they trying to fool ? How can a pact be possible between the hyena and the rabbit ?
It's like the French experts who want to make us admit that we are not a nation, that we are not a people, that we have never existed. The day we are made to admit this, we will no longer be ourselves. It is our phantoms that would admit it. Isn't it laughable that those who take themselves for the holders of truth and right start to talk with phantoms ?
The day that there's no more Touareg devil, there will be a Songhay devil or a Haoussa. The day that the Touareg, that they call whites, have disappeared, it will be the black Touareg - that the States try to enroll in their Black African ideology - who will serve as an alibi. One should not be friendly with these greedy scavenging powers who need a scapegoat to conquer, massacre, devour and then belch on the ashes.
The bearers of the system
The "representatives" of the armed fronts have changed nothing : they have confirmed the conviction of the Touareg that each time that we let ourselves be manipulated, we are nothing. It is a lightning bolt that strikes us again like at the time of colonisation. The educated, like the auxiliaries of yesterday, are the bearers of the oppressive systems that colonise us, again and forever. In addition, the system doesn't use them even as nails to build with, but like puppets that they throw away as soon as they start pulling on the strings. It is a lesson as far as the pale face of despair, a lesson of the philosophy that we already had. And those who speak in their name or organise them or advise them, the experts, for us, speak only the the language of the colonial officers of before.
To the supporters of the Republic of Niger, I reply that in my region, the Air, there is not a single tractor to work the soil so as to sow barley and wheat under the palm trees and the fig trees, no, not a single tractor but hundreds of tanks and all terrain vehicles full of eager soldiers. And there isn't a single garden in the Air which is watered by a motor pump ; donkeys, bulls and camels do it. I don't believe that the French ministry of cooperation supplied the Touareg with these donkeys or these camels. As for the roads, there is only one and it is used to take uranium to the city. Perhaps they have made invisible roads for the spirits, but we have not seen them !
To all those who reduce our predicament to a simple problem of under-development and archaism, we recall to their blind vanity that the major part of the petrol and the uranium that fatten Alger, Tripoli, Niamey and their partners, are extracted from the Touareg Sahara, our country where these riches return in the form of apocalyptic armies which plunge us into misery and agony without an end.
The solution is not to wait, it is in resistance. It turns its back on everything. It is in the margins who no longer look in the direction of this centre towards which the pseudo-chiefs of the armed fronts are turned ; it is oriented towards another dream, the dream of our people to be free one day, to be able to live in dignity on land that it calls its country. They think that it is possible that a breach open. They need no centre. Their resistance, their endurance and the spirit that animates them, they take it from themselves, from what they were, from what they are and what they want to be.
The fighters have been tricked. They thought that the imushéten were fighting like them for the liberation of their nation. They are waiting. They have been told that an autonomy has been achieved. But we, now, we don't depend on the fighters anymore. We depend on future fighters, that is to say ourselves, on what our vision is capable of making and imagining beyond this chaos.
A new cloth must be woven from our own fibres, the old worn fibres of the Touareg cloth. We must weave, we must move forward. From the moment that we get up to weave and that we get to work, the cloth is already woven. It is that that interests us and it is that which the Touareg people are demanding today.
The new feudalism
There are no longer hierarchical classes amongst the Touareg. The new class, it is France that has created it with tourism and Touareg mercenaries getting rich. The others are made equal by misery and death.
The difference, today, is that the new feudalism has neither the morals nor the paternalism of the old, it is rapacious and greedy, capable of ruining everything in order to remain the sole owners of power and wealth.
The rebellion has not had the ability to provide its own ideas, its originality. For us, the revolution is not just about putting those who are below on top and bringing those on the top down. It is about new ideas and the capacity to invent without necessarily copying others. Today they confuse revolt and revolution. The armed struggle favourises revolution but it is not the revolution itself. We wanted the military struggle to become like a school in taking care of oneself. But they refused. They said why resew our cloths since we can find ready weaved cloth elsewhere. But we wanted a true re-evalution of ourselves.
No people has ever lived alone. Autonomy is being able to make what one needs, import what one doesn't have and renounce the useless. Flexibility and nomadism, there is the freedom of action that we are calling for. There is no material autonomy but independence of spirit is necessary. For example we need the radio to listen to news about the world, but we need the autonomy of the ear to listen to the radio. And he who makes the radio needs me to buy it, he isn't autonomous either.
To open up to the world
The only current that I can today call political is that which defends the idea of an autonomous Touareg nation, free to remain in its country and to open up to the world. The idea is that the peoples must be the true actors.
The best thing, we have said, is federalism, but some amongst us think that one should not seek to federate the Touareg with the State where they are but to federate all the areas of the Sahara and the Sahel which have in common a geography, a culture, an economy - on the condition of not making them into States which exclude and suffocate. Each community would have its own council, free to federate with others.
What we must absolutely avoid, is the horrible hand of this soulless & heartless Daddy State that has put everything into one single logic. We must unlock the father's closed fist, it must be broken so that things can move. Of course, for things to move, we must have people circulating, nomads, create free flows, staging posts.
In fact there is no real difference between the States whether they are Algerian, Nigerian or Malian, it is the logic of anti-unity itself, unity in the sense of putting oneself side by side to work. For them its like trying to create a national unity by force. We do not participate in the national construction of any of the States, except by the taxes that we are obliged to pay and by the fact that we are sacrificed on the altar of inexistent Nation-states. In any case the State God will soon need fatter chickens, it's not going to last long. Our chickens, that is to say our fighters and our people, are too thin at the moment.
The African system before was more efficient than the Western system of the Nation-state. Our way of managing society is based on the representation of groups at all the levels by assemblies which are organised around the functions of arbitrage.
A big parliament which we, the Touareg, would take part in, could unite all the Sahelians and the Saharians. All this Africa of deserts that must be federated have three things in common : ecology, poverty, cultural proximity. The powers must be redistributed from the top to the bottom, by recreating real and legitimate representatives of the communities which live in this country and not of the States which divide and exterminate them. Today we have nothing but soldiers and infantrymen. And the inheritors of France and of their 'right' to take the best of everything are not ready for any change.
We are not attacking any African nation but it is the States that we are attacking.
Today the Touareg resistance makes people afraid. But we don't want to take power in Niamey or Bamako, nor in Alger. We want to be Touareg in the central Sahara and work with the Arabs of Alger, the Jerma of Niamey.
Differently from those who seek, through a coup d'Etat, to get hold of the aid packages, we don't want to use the republic of Niger or of Mali in isolation, no, we want there to be Jerma, Haoussa, Bamabara, but not as owners of a central system.
It is the colonial system that we are attacking and these centralised micro-States which are racketing the people.
This State, inheritor of the colonial system, has failed. And perhaps they are going to make even more monstrous ones. We must act.
To see further than the enemy
The true resistants who have a project for society and who dream of a peace for everybody - often more involved than those who shoot bullets - I have found them in exile and in the country : they are people who see further than the enemy and seek a solution not only for themselves but for all those who are living in this chaos.
The Touareg resistance in this dusk is made of the suffering and the disarray of a people brought to their knees, encircled, minoritised and weakened, a people who feel alone. How to slip between the iron nets which harass them everyday ? How to protect the civilians whose only shelter is famine and death in the camps guarded by the army all along the frontier between Algeria, Mali and Niger, camps that one cannot leave and that on cannot live in ? To resist despite the eclipse that is submerging us, we must lean our vision on memory, on the small spark of our spirit which refuses their fire, and imagine a project which surpasses the enemy's.
Imagine a poor old Jewish woman in one of the gas ovens adopting Hitler's logic. It is impossible. That is why this old Jewess, who today is my mother, must not say to herself that she is at the bottom of a chasm and that it is natural that she should be there, but rather she should imagine how her ancestors succeeded in escaping the dictatorship of the Pharaoh.
The dominant political model at the moment is that of the Nation-State-Territory. We don't want one but, for the moment, to exist one needs a State. I receive a blow, I return it. If the Africans could regain their sanity, we should make an Africa of nations that federate if they wish. For me, the nation is people who recognise a culture in common, interests in common and the desire to remain together.
We Touareg today are looking for an interlocutor, even an enemy, but an interlocutor. Of course we prefer a brother who discusses original ideas with us, but not the pimp who takes us back to the mould so as to squash us into it.
We are going to resist and carry on, even if we carry on spiralling down like wounded souls do. And we call on all the men and women of the world and in particular of Africa, who are close to us, to come and join us and advance with us, to freely debate in order to widen the cramped meaning of all these notions of State, of nation, of frontier, of federalism. Let us not leave the Africa of tomorrow to the experts, to the petrol companies and the NGOs, with their barbed wire and their dividing walls, because no people will resist their appetites.