From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Nongovernmentality

by Gregory Mann

This book looks beyond the familiar history of former empires and new nation-states to consider newly transnational communities of solidarity and aid, social science and activism. Shortly after independence from France in 1960, the people living along the Sahel – a long, thin stretch of land bordering the Sahara – became the subjects of human rights campaigns and humanitarian interventions. Just when its states were strongest and most ambitious, the postcolonial West African Sahel became fertile terrain for the production of novel forms of governmental rationality realized through NGOs. The roots of this “nongovernmentality” lay partly in Europe and North America, but it flowered, paradoxically, in the Sahel. This book is unique in that it questions not only how West African states exercised their new sovereignty but also how and why NGOs – ranging from CARE and Amnesty International to black internationalists – began to assume elements of sovereignty during a period in which it was so highly valued.

Genres: Africa, Politics

300 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2014

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really helpful study of the rise of what Mann refers to as "nongovernmentality" in the Sahel (focused mainly on Mali, with glances at Niger and Senegal and Guinea) in the 1970s. The Sahel is a perfect place to study "the deepening shadows along the border between the private and the public in contemporary Africa," "a zone of intense mobility and uneven sovereignties." Mann's basic point is that the ideal of the nation-state as the provider of security and social services was in fact a very brief interlude -- it was neither the only ideal in the run up to independence, nor has it been something honored except in the breach for most of postcolonial period. "What it meant to be anti-colonial changed over time. In the 1940s, it meant contesting the dual authority of French authorities and canton chiefs in the countryside... By 1960, it meant seeking distance from France on an international stage." Ironically, 50 years later, the Malian government would be inviting the French back in to fight Toureg Islamists in the North.

As with so much else related to the governance of society and the economy elsewhere, the 1970s were a time of experimentation in the Sahel. While the early postcolonial state "set out to govern aggressively, taking society as its site of intervention" the reality was that it failed "to nurture any sense of a public or a common good beyond and aggrieved nationalism." Specifically, NGOs entered to fill blank space, and are not agents for the displacement of the state. The empirical work looks at various NGOs that implanted themselves in the Sahel to contend with humanitarian crises in the 1970s (famine) which were beyond the capabilities of the local states. He acknowledges that these NGOs were at the time still bit-players, but they are interesting because these would grow in significance over time, functionally filling space that traditional Western social science regards as the rightful role of the state. (There is an additional thread to the book which is a critique of traditional Western social science (read: mid-century modernization theory) as useful for assessing the reality on the ground in places like the Sahel. It overstates his claims only slightly to say that Western categories of political science have obscured the realities of governance in the Sahel.) This periodization is important because it suggests that the inadequacy of the (African) nation-state to live up to Western ideals is its baseline conditions (he describes the idea of the sovereign African nation-state as a "myth"), rather than a product of neoliberalism and structural adjustment programs in the 1980s.

[David]

A very entertaining read that looks to how post-independence Sahel states “pawned” their sovereignty in the years of crisis of the 1970s. Responds to debates on neoliberalism and nongovernmentality that I haven’t really engaged with, so I miss the higher order of argumentation.

[Vinny · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is why people hate academics and their writing.

[Theo Anastopoulo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read again