The splits in the armed resistance
Taxi of Freedom
Introduction
Taxi of Freedom
In an image associating the idea of liberty, nomadic mobility & modern technology, a female voice expresses in this book the desire to be a 'taxi of freedom' who, from the east to the west & the north to the south, would cross her desertic country.
Could this dream of liberty ever become reality & under what conditions ? Or should it be filed under Utopias, even more unthinkable & inaccessible because it goes against the established order ? Far from agreeing or even crossing, the desires & the reality, the projects for life & what is actually lived, seem to be in total disagreement. Where exactly is the boundary between the sphere of reality & that of the imaginary ? Are the ideas of 'freedom' and 'equality' so different depending on whether one takes the viewpoint of the nomadic minorities of the Saharo-sahelian region or of the authorities that administer them ? En fact, these words which tell of suffering, agony, the indifference of others & the necessity of struggling just to win the right to live, these voices which speak of moral ideals and of human dignity create polarities unknown to those invoked by politicans, journalists, academics, experts. They oblige a questioning of the limits of the dominant model of the modern State and on its ability to conceive of difference. They lead one to look for alternative solutions which would be more emancipatory, managing to reconcile individual rights with community rights. FInally, they oblige one to note that the apparently opposite positions of the refusal of difference (in the name of equality & universality) and it's acceptance can lead to the same results according to the assumptions that they rest on : the idea of the unequal moral value of cultures leads in both models to discrimination, exclusion and stigmatisation, while the recognition of their equivalence permits mutual respect, exchange, the widening & the joining of horizons.
To understand the struggle of peoples minoritised by the voracity of the currently dominant States, the evolutionist & hierarchical vision - which simplistically opposes societies considered as tribal, feudal, archaic, particularist, to those, dominant, who have the monopoly of political, democratic, modern & universalist organisation - only serves to veil the political realities of sacking & rape that these broken societies continue to endure. Thus, the utopias carried by the margins - whether they be political, economic, social, cultural, linguistic - as prolific as they are diverse, often innovative, never stagnant, are starved in favor of a one-way 'development' which has already sentenced them to extinction, prefering monologue to dialogue & preparing the terrain for tomorrow's extremisms.