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7. Villages and Crossroads: Changing Territorialities among the Tuareg of Northern Mali
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VILLAGES AND CROSSROADS Changing Territorialities among the Tuareg of Northern Mali Charles Grémont Let us begin with a historical observation: at the end of the nineteenth century, territorial control as exerted by the various dominant Tuareg groups in the area of what is today the north of the Republic of Mali was flexible, based on alliances with, and control over, people who were relatively mobile. Today, Tuareg livelihoods and political influence, like those of their neighbors, are increasingly defined with reference to geographical limits, while the control over specific locations and areas has become both the object of power struggles and a way of expressing them. My aim here is to show why local concepts of power have changed so drastically, under which circumstances this happened, and with what kinds of resistance these changes were met—resistances that bear witness to the profound impact of these transformations, but that also question the validity of the territorial model imposed by the colonial state and endorsed by the national state after independence. At first sight, then, the case examined in this chapter appears to provide a counterexample to the central argument of this volume, which focuses on the interdependence between North Africa and the West African Sahel and aims to describe the Sahara as a “dynamic shared world.” Indeed, most Tuareg in northern Mali are today much more rooted in the soil and more concerned with control over “their space”—from a social, economic, and political point of view—than they were three or four generations ago. Questions of outside origins and influence and of extensive networks, long put forward in historical accounts, are increasingly replaced by a rhetoric that gives priority to notions of territory and indigeneity . However, because of this dominant tendency toward fixity and closure, an important minority of the population has become even more mobile, by choice or by force, by protest or by bare necessity, thereby escaping exclusive forms of spatial organization. There seems to be a dialectical relation between the increasing rootedness in land of the majority of the population, in particular the dominant sectors , and the deterritorialization of a minority who are at odds with the established 132 Charles Grémont order. Further, my research points toward a lasting correlation between spatial and social mobility, or at least between mobility and aspirations to social, political, and economic change. “Territory” will be understood here from both a practical and a symbolic perspective: how natural resources are used, and how they are understood and imagined. These two levels can be distinguished for the sake of analysis, but they clearly cannot be dissociated in everyday life, where they constantly intrude on each other: “territory is both objectively organised and culturally constructed” (Bourgeot 1991: 704). I am thus using a minimal definition that, I think, can hardly be challenged. Yet we need to keep in mind that the mere use of the term territory T i l e m s i E z g a r e t A zaw agh Tedjarert N I G E R Niamey BURKINAFASO MALI ALGERIA Tin Essako Tamanrasset Tombouctou Gao Mopti Ménaka Tahoua Agadez Kidal Boghessa NIGER 0 200 km C. Grémont, 2009 Ansongo Relief 1,000 to 3,000 m 200 to 1,000 m contemporary state borders administrative boundaries Azawad Tanezrouft Aïr Ahaggar Bourem Adagh Map 7.1. Northern Mali: natural features and administrative boundaries. C. Grémont 2009 [18.191.254.0] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 18:43 GMT) Villages and Crossroads 133 implies a certain relation between land and political community: according to the Petit Robert French dictionary, for instance, a territory is “the surface area on which a human group, and especially a national political community, lives”; the Oxford English Dictionary has “the land or country belonging to or under the dominion of a ruler or state.”1 Such notions are remarkably absent from Tamasheq. Rather than trying to find, at all costs, the equivalent of a term imposed from the outside, I will retrace changing Tuareg concepts of power and their relation to spatial control, to access to natural resources, and to forms and representations of mobility. In other words, I will draw on elements of social, political, economic, and ecological history in order to understand the development of “territoriality” among the Tuareg of northern Mali. This chapter is based on long-term fieldwork in northern Mali and on extensive research in French colonial and military archives in Aix-en-Provence, Paris...