Democracy and Development in Mali

Preface

Preface I n May 1998, President Alpha Oumar Konare of Mali was granted an honorary doctorate by Michigan State University in honor of his strong commitments to democracy and human rights, and to freedom of speech and scholarship during his career as a scholar and in his presidency ofMali. On that occasion, President Konare and the first lady of Mali, Madame Adame Ba Konare, were invited to participate in a one-day academic symposium as a celebration of their scholarship. They accepted the invitation, and a major Symposium on Democracy and Development in Mali was convened. Many of the papers presented at this academic symposium are published in this volume. African Studies and the Scholarship of Mali This symposium in 1998 appropriately connected the Malian and American communities devoted to the study ofAfrica, reminding participants that the field ofAfrican studies is not new in this century. Africanists from both countries need to remember that the study of Africa began more than 2,000 years ago as geographers , philosophers, historians, and social observers from Mediterranean countries and the Middle East focused on the continent. But the second source was from Mali when, at the beginning of the second millennium, African elders, griots , and scribes south of the Sahara were mounting their own scholarship of Africa, first in oral tradition and then, by the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, in written records. Mali offers to the West the probable beginnings of literate studies of Africa from south of the Sahara. Long before the Western colonial authors explored Africa's cultures and histories, the scholars of Jenne had begun recording information about Africa. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, African scholars in xv xvi DAVmWILEY both Jenne and Timbuktu, such as the Kati family of Jenne, were gathering oral traditions and genealogies, and recording chronicles and biographies of earlier African histories of the empire of Songhay. They relied primarily on their newly found tools of written Arabic and used the more global perspective of Islam as a paradigm for their conceptualizations. This tradition spread southward and westward from Timbuktu in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like African studies in North America, the first focus was on chronicling African history, clan genealogies, biographies, and religious texts and histories.} By the nineteenth century, building on these Malian initiatives, there was a flowering ofAfrican scholarship in Hausa, Kanuri, Fulfulde, and other Sahelian languages with chronicles of great cities of the region. Western European studies of Africa emerged more slowly, starting first with the Portuguese geographers and the geography of the continent and only developing after the colonial expansions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By that time, a broad array of African writings already existed-about Africa and its peoples and about the foreigners who were invading. In fact, scholarship about Africa among African-American and other Western scholars came very late in the field of African studies. This symposium reminded us that not only have African scholars and their institutions been at the center of African studies, but also that African scholarship has been resurgent in recent years in spite of the economic and political trials of the Cold War and post-Independence periods. It also put us on notice that the writing of the history ofAfrica in the world should be a partnership, and that Western and African scholars need each other in this enterprise. In that partnership , scholars can draw on competing models as well as on global and local contexts to portray continuities and changes. With diverse perspectives, scholars can write and criticize the histories that have shaped the structures of society on this planet we share. Such an ecumenical enterprise can be mutually enriching and will be less governed by the individual perceptions, dominating theories and traditions, and national interests that so frequently have shaped the work of the scholars. The Scholarly and Political Commitments of the Presidential Family of Mali Inviting President and Mme. Konare to the seminar was especially appropriate because both are scholars of Malian history and culture and both have completed doctoral degrees. In the 1960s, President Konare completed his undergraduate work at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Bamako, a teacher-training PREFACE xvii institution that was then the sole institution of higher education in Mali. Konan! was an active leader of student protest and of a 1969 student strike against the authoritarian military regime of Lieutenant-General Moussa Traore, who had seized power in 1968...