
Mali: Soldiers Acting Like Children
It’s very hard to figure out what the soldiers who took power in a coup in Mali, have in store for the country. Or if they even have a plan.
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Gregory Mann is an historian of West Africa.
It’s very hard to figure out what the soldiers who took power in a coup in Mali, have in store for the country. Or if they even have a plan.
What does all that mean for French-African politics? It’s hard to tell what will next emerge from that fetid swamp.
Malians have little patience for Amadou Toumani Touré, Mali’s former president, deposed in a coup on 22 March.
Both of the front-runners, incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist François Hollande, have run against FrançAfrique. Easier said than done.
We mean the kind of bad that comes from being caught in a Beckettian loop of either saying nothing at all or having nothing to say.
The rebels–that is, the MNLA and their disavowed and dangerous allies–hold Mali hostage.
A sense of how the Malian diaspora experiences the political tensions and instability back home.
Historian Greg Mann is not a big fan of Tuareg group, Tinariwen. The music is alright, he agrees, but the politics is rancid.
Is the adoption of a new constitution by Mali’s military regime a starting point for getting the soldiers back under civilian rule? Let’s game this out a little bit.
The idea that because the coup happened, it’s no longer worth taking positions on it is wrong-headed and dangerous. We should ask why, and why now.
A few things are worth saying about the mutiny and the coup that rocked Bamako over the last few days.
The intersection of rape, power, and impunity in Guinea has a history that is very recent and very dark.
Tunisia, which kickstarted the “Arab Spring,” is in a long pause between longtime dictator Ben Ali’s flight and elections scheduled for July 2011.