This is Africa

This entry is not, in fact, a commentary on the atrociously hot weather we've seen in Chicago this summer.

No, I've had West Africa on the brain these last few days.  I recently read Whiteman by Tony D'Souza, which is a fictionalized account of the life of a U.S. American volunteer in northern Cote D'Ivoire during the beginning of the civil war that was going on while I also happened to living next door in Ghana.  The book, which is worth tracking down and reading, dwells some on the subject of belonging (he's the white man in an all-black village), loneliness (and the things which it drives us to do), and reconciling privilege (he can leave the violence) with belonging (but he doesn't know how to leave and go to a home that's not home anymore).

It's taken me, in my mind, back to my own four months (a comparative blink) in Ghana, and the places around the region my travels took me.  Mali has been especially on my mind lately.  Since it's gotten very little attention in the U.S. media, a brief recap of the past few months...

-Mali is a large West African nation, 2/3 of which is sparsely populated desert.  Most of the national population is black, sub-Saharan African - groups such as the Bambara, Malinke, and Dogon, with nomadic Peul populations, as well.  There is a significant Tuareg minority; these are a nomadic desert people who are ethnically and culturally more like the Berber people of North Africa...the average person from the West would describe them as being similar to Arab people.

-The Tuareg have always felt isolated and persecuted by the Malian government, which is dominated by the black population.  They've taken up arms in the past against the government in hopes of forming a separate state.

-In the winter, the Tuareg launched a new uprising - a much better armed one than in the past thanks to many Tuareg serving as mercenaries in Libya and obtaining arms left over from the conflict there.  The Malian military was being trounced.

-In the spring, some Malian military officers staged a coup, removing the long-serving (and democratically elected) president. They blamed him for the military failure, accusing him of not giving them adequate weapons and supplies to fight the Tuareg.  The African Union, and rest of the world, immediately condemned the coup and threatened the military government with total isolation and possible intervention if they didn't step down.  A provisional civilian government has since taken over, but with the specter of the military junta weighing heavily over them.

-In the meanwhile, the Tuareg effectively took over the northern half of the nation; much of their success came through allying themselves with militant Islamist groups interested in creating a Sharia-led Islamist state.  The international community refuses to recognize their new "nation," which is now racked with in-fighting between the Tuareg nationalists and Islamists.  However, the international community is reluctant to get involved, as the largest regional power, Nigeria, is beset with religious strife of its own and is afraid that fighting the Islamists will result in Nigeria's own Islamist militants declaring an all-out war on the government.

So, now you know the story.  I spent two weeks in Mali, roughly half of which was with the Tuareg in the yes-it's-a-real-place city of Timbuktu.  And...Timbuktu's disappearing.  Its new Islamist masters disapprove of the presence of tombs, shrines, and monuments to Muslims of other times and of other strands of Islam, so they're destroying them.  The Tuaregs who I stayed with in Timbuktu may very well be among the fighters.  One of the models of democracy in the region is now a shredded mess.

And...it's heartbreaking.  I love West Africa, and there is perhaps no harder thing to love in this world.  Every step forward seems paired with a step back...or two, or three.  Sometimes, it comes from internal problems; more often, it's the by-product of foreign meddling, colonialism by another name and with less accountability.  God, help us.