India-Africa News and Discussion

[ricky_v]

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/the-sahel/

In Mali, General Assimi Goïta, who took power in a 2020 coup, now plans to remain in power through at least the end of this decade, as do his counterparts in neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger. As long-ruling juntas consolidate power in national capitals, much of the Sahelian terrain remains out of government control.

Recent attacks on government security forces in Djibo (Burkina Faso), Timbuktu (Mali), and Eknewane (Niger) have all underscored the depth of the insecurity. The Sahelian governments face a powerful threat from jihadist forces in two organizations, Jama‘at Nusrat al-Islam wa-l-Muslimin (the Group for Supporting Islam and Muslims, JNIM, which is part of al-Qaida) and the Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP). The Sahelian governments also face conventional rebel challengers and interact, sometimes in cooperation and sometimes in tension, with various vigilantes and community-based armed groups.

The roots of instability in the Sahel extend both to specific crises in the 2010s (especially a rebellion in northern Mali in 2012) and to broader, systemic issues having to do with land use, resource competition, poverty, official corruption, the spread of jihadist mobilization through a chain of socially combustible zones, and citizens’ loss of faith in institutions. Government responses largely fueled insurgencies, as security forces committed abuses and collective punishment, and as civilian leaders pursued inconsistent and often tone-deaf policies.

Foreign intervention also inflamed the situation. France, the European Union, and the United States pursued a narrowly security-focused policy matrix that failed to reverse the escalation in violence in the 2010s and that crumbled upon contact with the coups of the early 2020s. Russia, the new partner of choice for the central Sahelian regimes, supplied an even more brutal dose of violence, but one that produced no concrete gains for national governments other than the Malian authorities’ triumphant but ultimately isolated victory in Kidal, a northern rebel stronghold. The jihadists, who delight in having a foreign adversary, have replaced the French with the Russians in much of their propaganda and targeting.

Western governments are still adrift on Sahel policy. In Europe, expectations for how much influence governments can wield over the Sahel, bilaterally and collectively, have been tempered by the rebukes the Sahelian juntas have issued over the past five years. Ambitions to rebuild influence persist, and the most thoughtful suggestions involve pursuing “a pragmatic course that reconciles [Europe’s] interests and diplomatic priorities with political realities on the ground.” Yet there are few genuinely new ideas in the mix in Europe, as concerns about migration control and insecurity lead policymakers and analysts back to a familiar menu of security assistance and development partnerships.

In the United States, intermittent concern about the Sahel under the Biden administration has given way to relative indifference under the Trump administration. Both under Biden and Trump, meanwhile, there was greater concern about the potential for (and to some extent, reality of) spillover from the Sahel into coastal West Africa than there was concern about the Sahel itself. Tellingly, U.S. Africa Command hosted the April/May 2025 edition of its annual Flintlock training exercise in Cote d’Ivoire, and periodic reports suggest that AFRICOM is scouting the possibility of basing drones there (after the government of Niger expelled U.S. personnel in 2024). AFRICOM, however, could ultimately be cut amid the Trump administration’s ongoing restructurings.


The Sahel appears poised to remain both politically frozen and deeply volatile through 2030, and if disruptions to that trajectory arrive, the easiest disruptions to imagine are ones for the worse, including further coups, the fall of major cities to jihadists, and/or mass famines. To the extent that Western governments seek to re-engage, it should be with a realization that the 2010s are not coming back, that the juntas have a do-or-die mentality, and that some fresh thinking is required.

added later: it took 2 years to move a page for this thread, an entire continent and only sporadic covering of numerous conflicts through the eyes of outsiders..

[A_Gupta]

Good wake up call, need more focus on Africa.

[ricky_v]

book review, but as done by robert kaplan, posting here, the book is the second emancipation, focusses on the slew of independence of the african nations from euro colonial / imperial rule, and its divergence from the nation states gaining independence around the same time in south / south-east asia

https://archive.is/bFzR1

Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of Ghana from its independence in 1957 to his overthrow in a military coup in 1966, was in his day as important as Nelson Mandela of South Africa and Mohandas Gandhi of India. “For a shining moment mid-century,” writes Howard W. French, “Nkrumah turned Ghana into a fountainhead of emancipation from European domination, which was followed by a wave of pan-Africanism that seized” not only Africa, but the minds of leading African-Americans. Nkrumah led the way, even though he is today mostly forgotten. His country, tucked under the great bulge of West Africa, wasn’t large. Nkrumah wasn’t vastly corrupt and grandiose like Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire or Félix Houphouët-Boigny of the Ivory Coast. And as a socialist-tinged intellectual who flirted with the nonaligned Third World, he was held in suspicion in Washington and other Western capitals. But he vividly comprehended that African development was impeded by its fragmentation—its Balkanized puzzle pieces of tiny countries, the legacy of colonialism, made little economic or geographical sense. Overcoming such debilitating divisions constituted his life’s work, explains Mr. French in “The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide.”

Mr. French, a multilingual professor of journalism at Columbia University and a former New York Times foreign correspondent, employs Nkrumah’s life story to demonstrate the blunt fact of a “global color line—the categorical discrimination against dark-skinned people”—that both poisons and destabilizes international politics. Yet the links between Africa and black America, beyond the institution of slavery, didn’t happen naturally or by accident, but peaked in the mid-20th century through a process the author traces through the lives of prominent individuals: Nkrumah himself, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore and others. This is a sprawling book, and the better for it. Mr. French has delivered a panoramic, sympathetic, yet analytical portrait of a global black movement, deepened by his own family connections with West Africa.

He writes about little-known West African intellectuals and colonial officials in the wake of the 1884-85 Berlin Conference that partitioned colonial Africa among the European powers, and recreates Harlem in the early 20th century, with its fancy-dress elegance, where Nkrumah “felt immediately at home.” This wasn’t an easy time for Nkrumah, who experienced bouts of homelessness in the northeastern U.S. while he attended a historically black college in Pennsylvania, working night shifts to pay his way. But he intellectually matured, reading Marx and Lenin but also the 19th-century Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, who abhorred Marxism. “By now, Nkrumah’s compass was fixed on the liberation of his continent,” Mr. French writes. Nkrumah would turn out to be an unusual African strongman: a man of books and the arguments they induce rather than of the gun and military uniform. And he came to power just as Africa was catching the world’s imagination at the still-young United Nations. The U.N., conceived of as a venue for the postwar great powers, quickly transformed itself—largely through the liberation of dozens of African states—into an arena for the airing of Third World grievances. This was part of the “high tide” of global blackness the author refers to in his subtitle: a time of numerically powerful and hopeful African states merging with a Pan-African consciousness among black elites in America and the West.

France, for example, drew reassurance from its influence in Africa after its defeat and occupation by Germany. Africa became the near-abroad where the “paradoxically haughty” France could show off its power.

Ghana was the first sub-Saharan African colony to achieve independence, on March 6, 1957, with Nkrumah installed as its leader. The following year he made a triumphant state visit to the U.S., having established relationships with such disparate figures as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Vice President Richard Nixon. “At the moment, he was arguably the most compelling and important statesman in what we now call the Global South,” the author writes.


Alas, though Nkrumah had long assailed the colonial borders that divided ethnic and tribal groups, and called for a federation of African states, nearly every state in Africa remained simultaneously too small and too large to make sense politically. Even diminutive Ghana was divided ethnically and tribally. Such relations were too complex and fluid to coexist with the hard and false borders erected by European colonialists. And with weak educational and institutional development, ethnic and tribal divisions become all the more paramount.

After the 1966 coup that removed him from power, Nkrumah went into exile in Guinea, where he continued to inspire radical black American leaders such as Stokely Carmichael. Nkrumah died in 1972 in a Romanian hospital from prostate cancer. Following his overthrow, Ghanaians experienced “ever more brazen corruption, resurgent tribalism, and political executions under a variety of regimes,” Mr. French writes. Though a democracy since 1992, “the economic takeoff that Nkrumah dreamed of has never been attained.” Thus Ghana and much of sub-Saharan Africa haven’t experienced the fantastic growth of Southeast Asia, for instance.