REMi
Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, 2024, 40 (1), pp. 91-115
Racialized Impacts of Migration
Governance in Mali
Marie Deridder1 and Almamy Sylla2
In December 2017, we were conducting fieldwork in Bamako, the capital of
Mali. Our focus was on migration issues, in a context that had become particularly tense. In November 2017, an undercover report by CNN had revealed
the existence of modern-day slave markets in Libya. People around the world
were deeply shocked by video images and pictures of sub-Saharan migrants
with black bodies held in appalling conditions before being sold off as slaves
outside the Libyan capital, Tripoli. The violence of this reality reminded our
Malian interlocutors of the heavy heritage of the historical slave trades. These
images of horror caused outrage and a harsh backlash around the world. Official
statements on both the African and European sides denounced these acts and
demanded urgent action to end them.
The rapid, viral dissemination of these images via social media forced people to
take a public stand. Whether they were European or African leaders, politicians,
artists, or anonymous people, it was no longer possible to “pretend we didn’t
know”. Hundreds of protesters, mostly young black people, demonstrated in front
of the Libyan Embassy in Paris (Youssef, 2017), and Libyan authorities promised
an investigation (Levenson, 2017). A report of the International Organization for
Migration (IOM, 2017) and other NGOs portrayed these black people as subSaharan migrants attempting to reach Europe via Libya. The Security Council of
the United Nations (2017) condemned the slave trading as “heinous abuses of
human rights which may also amount to crimes against humanity” and called
upon “all relevant authorities to investigate such activities without delay to bring
the perpetrators to justice and hold those responsible to account”. The African
Union also condemned these facts (Mafu, 2019) and neighbouring countries
1 Social anthropologist, postdoctoral researcher and Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow
(MSCA-IF, grant agreement n° 895859), Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden;
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3719-9431; marie.deridder@uclouvain.be
2 Social anthropologist, lecturer, Université des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de
Bamako, Bamako, Mali; syllaalmamy@gmail.com
Marie Deridder and Almamy Sylla conducted fieldwork in Mali and analyzed collected
data together. Almamy Sylla investigated more specifically the bilateral agreement on
labour migration between Mali and Libya. Marie Deridder designed, conceptualized, and
wrote the paper in English.
We wish to express our gratitude to David O’Kane for his proofreading, comments, and
language revisions. We also thank the colleagues at Uppsala University and from the
GenMig/UGC annual meeting at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, as well
as the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article.
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like Niger and Mali started repatriating their nationals. In two months, more
than 600 Malians were repatriated from Libya with the help of the High Council
for Malians Living Abroad, and other non-governmental organizations. On the
streets of Bamako, daily conversations focused on EU-led migration governance
and its strategy of outsourcing border control to West Africa, as well as on
Libya’s complicity in the use of migration governance as a diplomatic weapon
(Perrin, 2009).
For decades, migration control has been becoming increasingly securitized.
Security and migration have been framed as major, and interrelated, political
problems, prompting crisis discourses and policies (Bonnecase and Brachet,
2013). This has legitimised restrictive policies merging security, migration, and
development policy (Deridder et al., 2020). By promoting a security-centred
and restrictive approach to border externalization in third countries, including
the Sahelian region, the European Union (EU) is tightening its migration policy
in ways that have deadly effects (Brachet, 2018; Stock et al., 2019). West Africa,
meanwhile, has, over the past decade, faced a rapidly deteriorating security
situation accompanied by democratic backsliding, mounting armed insurgencies, and military take-overs. According to the UNHCR, the UN Refugee
Agency,3 more than 5 million people in the Sahel have been displaced. Africa is
now seen by some geopolitical analysts as the new so-called “arch of terrorist
activity”. During the last decade, the Sahelian region has experienced a proliferation of non-state armed groups, variously qualified as “terrorist” or “jihadist”
(Pelckmans, 2015; de Bruijn, 2018). West African mobilities have been shaped by
and have contributed to these political and (in)security changes (Gary-Tounkara,
2013). Labour migration and general mobility in West Africa, both part of the
region’s long-term history, are now under jeopardy, as is free circulation within
ECOWAS.
It was in this context that we met Alassane in 2017. Very tall and athletic, he was
hanging out in front of the building of a migrant association in Bamako, where
he hoped to find out what kind of reintegration assistance he might obtain.
On International Migrants Day, this association had organized a meeting to
denounce EU migration policy, as well as the Malian authorities’ shady game.
Alassane angrily pointed out the discrimination between Tuareg returnees in
northern Mali and what was happening to black returnees in southern Mali. He
said:
“It may not be obvious (pointing to his dark skin), but I was also in Gaddafi’s army. I am
a Tuareg combatant, even though I have a dark skin. Some Tuaregs are black. Not all of
them have red skin. If the Malian government doesn’t understand this, maybe I should go
back to the north and join the terrorist groups. Maybe then they will pay attention to me.”
(Alassane, Bamako, December 18, 2017)
Alassane’s story highlights an unexpected and problematic effect of the EuroAfrican “migration-development-security” nexus in Mali (Deridder et al., 2020).
This nexus updates a racial grammar historically rooted in Mali, and reproduced, with deadly consequences, in the current conflict. This paper explores the
ways in which these racial arguments have been deployed by black returnees
3 https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/sahelcrisis (accessed on 17/04/2023).
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in Bamako. Our aim is to examine the socio-political “work” (Hall, 2011a)
performed by race and racial formations (Omi and Winant, 2014) in migration
governance in post-colonial Mali. We interrogate how blackness and nationhood
are reframed through the lenses of mobility and deportation from the Libya
of Colonel Moammar Gaddafi, and from post-Gaddafi Libya. This reframing
reshapes Malian socio-political landscapes in complex ways. We analyse how
racial categories and migration politics intersect, becoming mutually constituent
and interrelated, and leaving various actors, institutions, processes, histories,
and multiple scales entangled with each other. While racialized impacts of
migration governance in Western countries are well documented, there is much
less understanding of the reshaping of racial formations and discourses in Mali
and other West African countries by deportation regimes (De Genova and Peutz,
2010).
Mali is relevant, here, because it has for decades, taken an unusual political
path: one of opposition to France, its former colonizer, and to the EU, and EU-led
migration governance. In Mali, national public debates on migration non-state
actors, such as the diaspora and migrant associations, have been successfully
politicized (Siméant, 2014; Lecadet, 2016; Soukouna, 2020). In recent years,
discontent and protests among Malian black returnees sent back from Libya
have taken on a new dimension of racial discrimination, with implications, also,
for racial formations and discourses. A new colour line has been drawn, dividing
black returnees who held subaltern jobs in Libya from red or white-skinned
Tuaregs. The latter were seen as potential rebels, terrorists, or former combatants in Gaddafi’s army (and perceived as having higher social status as a result),
while the former felt abandoned by the Malian state.
The data presented in this article derives from our doctoral and postdoctoral
research with returnees in Mali.4 We draw, specifically, on data collected through
a mix of informal exchanges, ethnographic fieldwork, and in-depth biographical
interviews conducted in Bamako with different groups of black returnees from
African and European countries. Our field interlocutors were mainly Malian men
who had lived in Libya during the 1990s and 2000s, and who returned to Mali
because of the Libyan civil war of 2011 and its consequences. We met them in
Bamako through migrant associations and the public events they were organising, such as International Migrants Day and National Mourning Day (the latter
was organized in memory of those who died crossing the Mediterranean Sea).
We observed, and participated, in these events, where returnees would publicly
voice their claims and assert their rights. During this participant observation we
established relations with black returnees and secured their consent to work
with us in in-depth biographical interviews. Some of them were met on several
occasions; others we only met once, as they took to the road again or returned to
their family outside Bamako. We conducted these interviews in various locations
chosen by the returnees (migrant associations, returnees’ home in Bamako,
restaurants, etc.) and collected around thirty life stories explicitly and directly
addressing the issue of race in migration trajectories. The second author also
observed returnee demonstrations in the streets of Bamako. Interviews were
also conducted with Malian state functionaries and representatives of migrant
4 The first author’s fieldwork was conducted during different phases between 2017 and
2022. The second author’s fieldwork was mainly conducted between 2015 and 2022.
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associations in Bamako. Racial issues were not, initially, the main focus of our
respective research. They emerged through an inductive process that revealed
their importance. Racial discrimination and violence run through the stories we
have gathered. We have thus decided to analyse them after completion of our
fieldwork. To safeguard field interlocutors’ anonymity, we use pseudonyms, and
we do not disclose the name of the migrant associations.
This article is divided into four sections. The first provides an overview of theoretical approaches to global migration governance and the global colour line,
and to Mali’s historically rooted racial grammar. Returnees’ racial consciousness
in Mali is embedded in global racialization processes induced by three major
factors: global migration governance, the legacy of French racial colonial rule,
and the Sahelian region’s local, situated legacies of race, subalternity, and
slavery. The second section outlines the historical background of Malian exile
in Libya, an exile historically linked to conflict and racial state violence, in particular that endured by Tuareg people. Racialization processes have, in important
ways, been among the cornerstones of post-colonial Malian state-building. This
section shows also how Libya has played an important role as host country
during these traumatic events. The third section considers labour migration
from Mali to Libya and emphasizes inter-regional mobility within West Africa. It
shows how Malian labour migration in Libya has been historically embedded
in racial formations, subalternity and precarity. We see how Libyan geopolitics
has a long history of producing racial formations of blackness as subalternity
and outsiderness, formations that resonate with the anti-migrant and anti-black
migration agenda of the EU. In the final section, we examine the rising contestations of black returnees about migration governance in Mali and their unexpected racial dimension when being back home after fleeing Libya. Challenging
the idea of the African continent as a non-racialized space, our article contributes
to a historically situated engagement with race and racialization processes, an
arena often neglected and undertheorized in Mali and African states in general
(Hall, 2011a and b; El Hamel, 2013; Pierre, 2020; King, 2021; Gross-Wyrtzen and
Gazzotti, 2021).
This article also contributes to the literature that decentres the European
continent, focussing analysis, instead, on places usually understood, in a
Eurocentric way, as “transit”, “sending”, “partner” or “third” countries. This
allows us to investigate those inequalities which are effectively produced,
reproduced, confronted and contested in the “Southern” contexts that are
facing externalization measures (see also Stock et al., 2019; Deridder et al., 2020;
Triandafyllidou, 2020; Gazzotti et al., 2022; Gross-Wyrtzen and El Yacoubi, 2022).
This de-centring allows us to pluralize our understanding of migration governance in various “Southern” contexts that possess situated historical, racial,
and migratory legacies. As Gazzotti et al. (2022: 627) argue, the historicization
of “Southern” contexts, and the unpacking of “Southern” actors is needed for
a fine-grained understanding of the power dynamics at work in contemporary
migration governance. This entails an understanding of the power dynamics
that (re)shape migration, and of how “transnational and local interests conflict
and overlap, producing unexpected, and sometimes contradictory, architectures
of governance” (Gazzotti et al., 2022: 627) with unintended racial effects, as is
the case in Mali. This article will assist, therefore, the incorporation of race more
centrally in migration studies (Sáenz and Douglas, 2015).
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Racialized Impact of Migration Governance in Mali
The Global Colour Line of Migration Governance
and the Racial Grammar in Mali
Over the past fifty years, imaginaries of human mobility and migration have
been profoundly refined, but also politically transformed. On the one hand,
there is a body of humanitarian narratives, which focuses on suffering and the
need to securitize migrants as passive victims (Fassin, 2011; Ticktin, 2014). On
the other hand, in Europe and Africa, people’s mobility is becoming increasingly
delegitimised via allegations of opportunism, duplicity and meritless claims
for asylum, accentuating forms of racism and xenophobia based on exclusive,
chthonic claims to national, ethnic, and racial belonging (Geschiere, 2009;
Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018). “Unwanted” and “undesirable” migrants are often
perceived as illegitimate, and governments and media smear them as threats to
national sovereignty.
On both continents, discourses and politics of fear have used a threatening
figure of Otherness that merges migrants, and people in a state of precarity,
with terrorists and terrorism. This ideological and performative “Othering” of
migrants and aspiring migrants has gone hand in hand with problematic media
use of racialized stereotypes. European media coverage of migration repeatedly
reproduces the “border spectacle” of the crossing of the Mediterranean Sea by
boat and imagines the overcrowded camps in Southern and Eastern Europe
(De Genova, 2013; Betts, 2012). This is a “border spectacle” that stages black and
brown bodies in a sordid and lethal setting, thus enacting a scene of “exclusion”
where “migrant ‘illegality’ is rendered spectacularly visible” (De Genova, 2013:
1181). The “migration, development, security” nexus re-draws and reinforces
the “global colour line” (De Genova, 2016 quoting Du Bois, 1993; see also Omi
and Winant, 2014) inherited from the segregationist policies of past centuries.
The asymmetrical and racialized power relations between Europe and Africa are
historically rooted in, and shaped by, racialized capitalism and colonial imperialism (Lemberg-Pedersen, 2019). The global policy framework for the management of migration operates within the logic of coloniality, and with racializing
effects (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018): these policies directly impact the construction of Sub-Saharan migrants’ political subjectivities, not only in Europe, but
also, as we will see, on the African continent.
However, African uses of “racial formations” (Omi and Winant, 2014) to describe
intra-African differences cannot be reduced to colonial legacies alone, nor
solely to the Euro-African encounter (Hall, 2011a; El Hamel, 2013). Hall (2011a:
2) argued that “along the Sahel in West Africa, a long history of racial language
is evident in the writings of Muslim intellectuals well before the arrival of
Europeans. Sahelian writers made a fundamental distinction between ‘whites’
(Ar. bidan), for those who claimed Arab pedigrees [and nonslave origin], and
‘blacks’ (Ar. sudan) [who might be slave descents]”: race, as an ideology, is
not only a social and historical construct, but is also not exclusively EuropeanAmerican. Depending on the language used, nonblack people in Mali describe
themselves — or else, are described by others — as white or red. People use
racial labels to talk about themselves and others as a matter of course but do
so via racial discourses that “do not correspond directly to the idea of ‘race’
in the West” (Hall, 2005: 339). The racial formations deployed in contemporary
conflicts often hearken back to older histories in which blackness was equated
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with inferiority, slavery and subalternity, while whiteness signified aristocracy,
or banditry of a predatory or uncivilized kind (Hall, 2011a). Therefore, African
histories of race and local ideas about racial differences have been important
in the generation and intensification of conflicts in the Saharan and Sahelian
regions since the end of colonialism (Hall, 2011a).
Racial grammar, racialized social statuses and the colour-based language that
distinguish those statuses remain part of the imaginary of ordinary people in
Mali. Interlocutors from northern and central Mali (members of the Bellahiklan,5 Bozo, and Somono ethnic groups6) shared with us historical narratives
about Tuareg and Fulani people enslaving black-skinned people in the pre-colonial period. In the historical memories of Inner Niger Delta communities, redskinned Fulani and Tuareg elites are remembered for their raiding and pillaging
of sedentary black populations (Deridder, 2021). These interlocutors regarded
contemporary Tuareg and the Fulani nobles as perceiving and treating black
people as socially inferior, servile persons who are slaves “by nature”: this noble
insolence arose, they said, from the nobility’s past role as slave masters. The
language of slavery and subalternity is central to both the region’s present-day
racial formations and its larger history of racial ideas (Hall, 2011a).
In Tuareg society, social status is linked to racial categories and shaped by
variable local dynamics, playing so an important role in classifying and assembling people (Lecocq, 2005). This means an association of blackness with slavery,
unfree birth, inferior social status, and an agricultural, sedentary lifestyle. In
contrast, free-born nobles are perceived as racially “white” and associated with
a lifestyle of nomadism. Lecocq (2005: 45) explains that “the racially ‘black’
iklan or slaves were supposed to behave according to a model defined for
them by the free strata of society”. In Fulani pastoralist and nomadic society, we
encounter similar dynamics and colour-based terminology that serves to define
social statuses: the nomadic nobles are red-skinned (wodeebe), while the agricultural sedentary subaltern groups and slave descendants are considered black
(baleebe). Hall (2005: 341) argues that, in the precolonial Southern Sahara and
Sahelian region, “the common feature in all of these colour-coded schemes of
social status and identity is the negative and servile connotation of blackness.
Even in ethnic communities that today are most often considered ‘black’ by
others, and whose members self-identify as such, the idea of blackness was used
in the past to refer to their own servile populations”.Whiteness, on the other hand,
signified a prestigious, noble lineage and often played a role in the “reconfiguration of local genealogies connecting local Arabic- and Berber-speaking groups
with important Arab Islamic historical figures in North Africa and the Arabian
Peninsula” (Hall, 2005: 345). Embedded in a wider set of religious ideas, racial
categories based on phenotypic differences were thus used as ideological justifications to naturalize a social structure of hierarchy, domination, exploitation, and
inequality. In the pre-colonial period, an interconnection between blackness and
slavery circulated in the Maghrib (El Hamel, 2013), thanks to mobile intellectuals,
the travels of pilgrims and the centuries-long trans-Saharan slave trade. Then, in
the late 19th century, the French empire arrived in the region.
5 The term “Bellah/Iklan” refers to people of slave origin in Tuareg society who are
labelled as black-skinned.
6 The Bozo and Somono are black fishermen navigating along the Niger river.
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In organizing their colonial administration, the French used these pre-existing
local ideas of race and racial differences (Lecocq, 2005; Hall, 2011a). Affinities
between the racial ideas of the Sahelian region and those of France were clear: as
Hall (2011a: 2, 16) argues, “a language of race was shared by both colonizer and
colonized, albeit in different configurations and meanings for each”.The colonial
encounter produced “new kinds of dialogue and negotiations that invoked race
between French officials and Africans, and between Africans themselves in the
new circumstances of colonial rule” (Hall, 2011a: 17). Colonizing Europeans
perceived the local Tuareg elite as “an alien invader which had subdued an indigenous African population” (Lecocq, 2005: 45-46). Some even assumed those
elite Tuaregs to be white people of European ancestry, reflecting the colonial
project itself (Lecocq, 2005). Fluid, flexible identities were transformed into more
rigid, essentialized categories (Amselle, 1998).
By exerting such homogenizing pressures, France’s colonial regime reduced the
social and political complexities of the Sahelian region “into a series of dichotomous and mutually exclusive groupings, namely nomad and sedentary, master
and slave, black and white” (Hall, 2011a: 109), notions which have since entered
everyday life (Lecocq, 2005). Although crafted from existing materials, these
categories were, along with the racial rhetoric of colonialism and its attendant
imperialist violence, crucial to the maintenance of slavery and servility. They
made race a key marker of identity and power (Hall, 2011b; Pierre, 2020). Local
social hierarchies were, therefore, drastically racialized by the colonial encounter.
The idiom of race became important in the decolonial struggles of the 1950s and
the early years after Mali’s independence in 1960, when the project to create a
postcolonial nation-state was “specifically based on Mali as a Mande nation”
(Lecocq, 2010: 367). The Bellah question and its politicization were gradually
transformed into a policy of social and economic emancipation (Lecocq, 2005;
Hall, 2011b). Hall (2011b: 65) explains that in northern Mali, “postcolonial development strategies aimed — at least rhetorically — at the empowerment of
socially subordinate people and the elimination of purported feudal and racial
privilege for noble Tuareg in particular”. Mali’s new political elite considered the
whiteness of the Tuareg nobility to be a threat, along with their nomadic way
of life, as signs of otherness belonging to the past (Lecocq, 2005; Hall, 2011a,
2011b). Malian independence saw ethnic labels acquire a new racial dimension:
“white” or “red” for Arabs, Tuaregs and Fulani, and “black” for Songhay,
Bambara and Dogon (Hall, 2011a). Many Tuaregs and pastoralists felt that they
would have no place in the new post-colonial Mali, which was to be run by blacks
for the benefit of blacks (Lecocq, 2005; Hall, 2011a). Such ethnic and racialized
representations would resurface at various times after independence, bringing
racialized violence with them. Race had become a cornerstone of post-colonial
Malian state-building.
Today, competing claims of racial oppression are omnipresent in Mali (Hall,
2011a). For our white/red-skinned Tuareg and Fulani interlocutors, Mali’s postcolonial government is still “black-controlled for black interests”, and this
black-dominated government is nothing less than as a recolonization of their
lands by the southern part of the country, which has dispossessed and marginalized Tuareg, pastoralist and nomadic populations since independence. At
the same time, black people remember the racial violence of the centuries-long
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trans-Saharan slave trade. Both black people and white or red people deploy
competing narratives of racial oppression in which they become the victims of
racism (Hall, 2011a).
Here, a key point must be emphasized: when the terms “black”, “white”, and “red”,
and, also, “race” itself are used in this article, they are not used as objective or
essential descriptors of physical or biological differences. Although the raceconcept may be “ocular” and may arrive with a “crucial corporeal dimension”
(Omi and Winant 2014: 13), it is socially constructed and historically fluid —
and not rooted in any objective, material reality. As Omi and Winant (2014: 13)
explain, “human bodies are visually read, understood, and narrated by means
of symbolic meanings and associations”, as well as classified for purposes of
domination and resistance. This kind of classification requires the race-concept:
however, due to its socially constructed nature and its historical fluidity, the
meaning of race has always changed over time. That meaning differs according
to the sociohistorical conditions prevalent in whatever setting in which race is
embedded (Omi and Winant, 2014). Race, to quote these authors, is “unstable,
flexible, and subject to constant conflict and reinvention” (Omi and Winant,
2014: 8). It embodies consequences in terms of prejudice, discrimination and
racial stratification — but in order to prevent a fixed and static understanding
of race, we should approach it, as Omi and Winant (2014: 13) do, via the processual notion of “racialization”. This permits an emphasis on the historically and
locally constructed nature of racial categorizations, and the ways in which they
attribute, on the basis of perceived phenotypical differences, stigma to some and
honour or dignity to others.
As Omi and Winant (2014: 10) argue, “race operates in the space of intersections,
at the crossroads where social structure and experience meet”. The existence
of racial groups and identities is not prior to the social relationships, everyday
experiences, and personal interactions that produce them. Processes of racial
formation occur “through a linkage between structure and signification. […]
Racial projects connect what race means in a particular discursive or ideological
practice and the ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences
are racially organized, based upon that meaning” (Omi and Winant, 2014: 125).
What is important, then, is the ways in which racial formations are constructed
and reconstructed over time, and the specific impacts that these processes have
on particular social relationships, on the way race is understood as everyday
“common sense”, as well as on individual and collective everyday experiences
(Omi and Winant, 2014). This is why we trace both the development of racial
formations in Mali, and the ways in which those formations are recast through
the implementation of the “migration-development-security” nexus. Our aim is
to understand how racial claims are currently deployed by black returnees from
Libya in Mali.
At the Intersection of Conflicts
and Racial Histories: Double Traumatic Memory
Histories of slavery and race (Hall, 2005, 2011; El Hamel, 2013; Pierre, 2020; King,
2021; Gross-Wyrtzen and Gazzotti, 2021) have long entangled Mali with North
Africa in general and Libya in particular. We now turn to the web of relations
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between Mali and Libya that have provided a platform for racialization processes
that link the present with the past. Current migration governance in Mali, we
show, does not operate in a vacuum: it also intersects with long and situated
histories of mobility, racial violence, and state formation. Those histories do not
belong to Mali alone but are also part of its relationship with Libya. Presentist
accounts of African migration as a “new phenomenon” or as a “crisis” often
overshadow these histories of mobility (Lemberg-Pedersen, 2019; Deridder et al.,
2020; Ould Moctar, 2020; Gross-Wyrtzen and Gazzotti, 2021; Gazzotti et al., 2022;
Gross-Wyrtzen and El Yacoubi, 2022). When, in contemporary Mali, racial formations change and black returnees make their claims, these historical legacies,
situated mobilities and direct, and recent, experiences of racism and xenophobia
play crucial roles.
Northern and Central Mali are one of the most important “hotspots” of racial
conflicts in both Mali itself and in the Sahelian region. In that regional context,
the shared history of mobilities which connect Mali and Libya have a peculiar
importance (Gary-Tounkara, 2013; Sylla, 2019, 2020). Although Libya is often
seen as only a gateway to Europe, it was also one of the most important destination countries for Malian migrants and has been pivotal for inter-African labour
migration. Today, that history continues in the form of deportations of Malian
migrants from Libya. This is the latest turn in the shared Malian-Libyan history of
mobility, which has, at certain moments, produced different experiences of exile,
migration, violence, and racism.
The three Tuareg rebellions that have marked Mali’s post-colonial history, in
1962-1964, 1990-1996, and 2006-2009, are among the most important of these
moments. Many Tuaregs were pastoral nomads and caravan traders. Principally
inhabiting the Sahara, the Tuareg “trace their origins to various places in the
Maghreb and Libya” (Lecocq, 2004: 89). This means that their political organizations extend across national boundaries in a vast area stretching from Algeria,
Burkina Faso, Libya, Mali, to Niger. Tuareg people have historically expressed
aspirations to self-government: even before decolonization, they resisted the
colonial power, as they later contested the modernist project of independent
Mali. In the name of that project, the postcolonial Malian state sought to
dismantle Tuareg and Fulani socio-political structures. It condemned these
as feudal, backward and nothing less than a “premodern obstacle to modern
life” (Lecocq, 2004: 105). This perception was particularly acute regarding the
nomadic and pastoralist white-skinned chieftaincies that had acquired an ambivalent “colonial privilege” under French colonization (Lecocq and Klute, 2013:
426).
Tuareg and Fulani pastoralists were, thus, placed under considerable pressure.
The postcolonial state created livestock cooperatives with the aim of integrating pastoralists into the national economy. The Tuaregs and the Fulani were
obliged to sell their cattle through these monopolistic institutions (Boilley, 1999).
Caravans to Algeria and Libya were drastically restricted. These policies were
perceived by Tuaregs and pastoralists as a new form of colonization, this time
carried out by southern, black, Mali. They became a major source of discontent
among the Tuaregs and other pastoralist populations.
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Between 1963 and 1964, therefore, the Malian government faced its first Tuareg
rebellion. The black-dominated Malian army brutally repressed the rebels: there
were public executions and massacres of both cattle and people (Boilley, 1999;
Lecocq, 2010; Hall, 2011a). Then, the central government in Bamako put the three
northern territories of Tombouctou, Gao, and Kidal under a military administration that local people saw as a military occupation. Many Tuareg people fled
to Algeria and Libya. The marginalization of northern populations (particularly
Tuareg groups), in postcolonial Mali was triggered by this bloody conflict. It
strongly reinforced a situation of widespread mistrust and division between the
“white” or “red” pastoralist populations of northern and central Mali and the
black populations of the south and the capital.
Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, Mali and the Sahelian region suffered two major
droughts. These disasters destroyed many of the herds of cattle and small
ruminants on which pastoralist populations depended for their subsistence,
and whose stocks had not yet been replenished since the massacres of the
first rebellion (Boilley 1999; Lecocq, 2004). The pastoral economy of the region
almost collapsed. Moreover, little of the international aid intended for droughtstricken populations reached the north of Mali, due to high levels of corruption
within the black-dominated ruling elites in Bamako (Bourgeot, 1990; Klute,
1995; Boilley, 1999; Lecocq, 2004). These droughts eroded the Tuareg’s pastoral
lifestyle and drove them to work in agriculture, urban wage-earning, and transSaharan smuggling activities. After that, Tuareg people and pastoralist populations have migrated to Libya and other countries in North or West Africa. Many
young Tuareg men of different national origins enlisted in the Libyan armed
forces. A shared experience of exile (Klute, 1995) contributed to the historical
consciousness of these young Tuaregs, and their political consciousness, also,
began to develop. A painful common past, a common language (albeit one
divided into different dialects), and a shared brotherhood as soldiers in Libyan
service all helped to unite them. The idea of reactivating the first insurrection
began to grow.
In the 1990s, Tuareg militias rose again against the Malian state, in what
would become known as the second Tuareg Rebellion (1990-1995). Following
its blueprint of the 1960s rebellion, the Malian state responded with violence
against rebels and civilians. These tactics degenerated quickly into violence
based on local categories of racial and ethnic differences. The Tuareg and the
Arab rebels identified themselves as “non-blacks”, who were fighting against
the black-dominated government and army of Mali. The rebels’ grievances
were often expressed in the language of racial oppression: “Tuareg intellectuals
presented a picture of themselves as an oppressed racial minority forced to fight
brutal and corrupt regimes that targeted them because of historically driven
racial animus” (Hall, 2011a: 3).
Such language was not confined to the Tuareg. During the conflict in northern
Mali, a famous black vigilante movement called the Ganda Koy was created. It
grouped black farmers from different ethnic groups living in the north (mainly
Songhai, Bozo, Dogon, as well as slave descendants from Fulani and Tuareg
societies). Recalling the historical legacy of the trans-Saharan slave trade, the
Ganda Koy asserted that the “rebels” were racists, mercenaries of Gaddafi and
slave traders who considered all black people to be servile, inferior beings.
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They depicted Tuaregs “as foreign elements seeking to dominate the indigenous Malian population” (Lecocq, 2010: 370). The Ganda Koy also described
the Tuaregs as having always been bandits, who lived from raiding and brigandage.7 According to Lecocq and Klute (2013: 427), “this movement carried out
pogroms against Tuareg and Arab inhabitants of the major cities in northern
Mali”, resulting “in the mass flight of around 100,000 Tuareg and Arabs to neighbouring countries”. Rumours held that the Ganda Koy and its violence had the
support of the Malian army and government. Certainly, deep scars were left in
traumatised Tuareg memories, and civilians were the main victims of army retaliation (Klute, 1995; Boilley, 1999; Lecocq and Klute, 2013).
In 2006, a decade after the end of the rebellions of the 1990s, Tuaregs took
up arms again. Many elements of the new insurgency were reminiscent of
the rebellion of the 1990s, notably the socio-political marginalization of Mali’s
north and the disproportionate development of the south. These both seemed
to signify failures of the peace agreement. This time, the army unit fighting the
rebel movement was led by a former Tuareg combatant who had been integrated
into the Malian army in compliance with the peace agreement (Lecocq, 2010). In
2009, the Malian State won the military struggle, bringing a temporary end to
the conflict.
Our Tuareg interlocutors, who felt marginalized by state policies, used the
strong words of “ethnic cleansing” to describe the atrocities committed by
the Malian army in suppressing the rebellions of the past sixty years and the
violent massacres of non-black civilians and livestock (Hall, 2011b; Lecocq, 2010).
According to Lecocq (2010: 369), racial arguments have played a significant role
in these conflicts: “The discursive shape the conflict between the Malian state
and [the Tuaregs] took, forms part of a problem that haunts all of the Sahel, a
problem often seen as one of ethnicity, but locally phrased in terms of race.”
This led to the massive exodus of Tuareg populations to neighbouring countries,
especially to Libya, and the crafting of a traumatic memory at the intersection
of racial formation, violence and conflicts, and Malian state formation. The rest
of the country, however, mainly recalled that rebel leaders were integrated into
the national political and military apparatus, and that the north of the country
had benefited from socio-economic reintegration programs. As Lecocq (2010:
370) rightly noted, “the most interesting side to the racial aspect of the conflict
between the Malian state and the [Tuaregs] is that both sides were equally
obsessed with race and that both used racial discourses”, fuelled by “mutual
distrust and negative preconceived stereotyped images”.
In the context of these conflicts in Mali, Libya played a crucial role. From the time
of Malian independence onwards, it hosted Tuareg people fleeing state violence.
Nor was this all: in line with his Pan-Arab and Pan-African political ambitions, the
Libyan leader Gaddafi long portrayed himself as a Tuareg and a defender of the
Tuareg cause. As a result of his ambivalent geopolitical interests and intentions,
many of the young Tuareg who were welcomed in Libya enlisted into the Libyan
armed forces, and were deployed, during the 1970s and the 1980s, in several
Libyan military campaigns, for instance in Chad and Lebanon. Others, however,
7 Le Monde diplomatique (1995) « Négrafricanisme » et racisme, [online]. URL: https://
www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1995/04/CLAUDOT_HAWAD/6337
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held the lowest jobs in Libya, or became involved in smuggling to and between
Algeria, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger (Scheele, 2012). Tuaregs in Libya also
found that they still faced racial discrimination, the same as that faced by other
African migrants in Gaddafi’s land. To the average Libyan, a “‘white’ [Tuareg] was
simply a ‘black’ African”, and black-skinned Tuaregs of slave descent were “even
more ‘black’” than they were in Tuareg society in Mali (Lecocq, 2010: 255).
Malian Labour Migration in Libya:
From Eldorado to Hell
It is not only the exile of Tuareg populations that has characterized mobility
between Mali and Libya: African labour mobility was also historically central to
the latter country’s economic landscape, as a means for maintaining an oil-based
rentier system (Puig, 2020). Malian labour mobility has, historically, been a part
of the “moving space” (espace mobile) of that Sahel-Sahara (Boesen et al.,8
2014). After its independence in 1951, Libya lacked workers, so it sought migrant
labour from the African continent, particularly from neighbouring Sahelian
countries. Sub-Saharan labour migration was initially encouraged in Libya to
carry out major development projects and intensified between the 1980s and
the 1990s.9
For most of our Malian interlocutors, Libya was, until the war in 2011, seen as an
attractive country, an “economic Eldorado”, a place where it was easy to “make a
quick buck”. Libya offered economic opportunities, the possibility to send money
to one’s relatives, and the fulfilment of aspirations. It also represented a chance
to gain independence from family pressures and expectations (Kleist, 2017). To
our interlocutors, the country was generally a temporary destination, where they
could work and earn money faster than was possible than in Mali because of the
good salaries that were available in the oil, construction, carpentry, plumbing,
agricultural or housework sectors, or in any other hard-physical, low-skilled
jobs. Once enough money had been earned, they would head to destinations
elsewhere in the region or, possibly, to Europe. Undocumented black migrants10
provided the cheapest labour and took the lowliest jobs.
Libya was highly dependent on this African labour force. On December 12,
1980, Libya and Mali signed a bilateral agreement11 to regulate Malian labour
migration to Libya.12 This agreement was intended to put an end to previous
8 These authors are referring to the work of the geographer Rétaillé (2011).
9 Before the war in Libya in 2011, migrants represented twenty to 25% of the Libyan
population, or approximately 2.5 million foreign nationals, including from 1 to 1.5 million
sub-Saharan Africans, mainly from Niger, Chad, Mali, Nigeria, and Ghana (IOM, 2012;
Bensaâd, 2012; Perrin, 2008).
10 Most black African nationals resident in Libya were undocumented, and their numbers
were estimated as being between 1 to 1.5 million (IOM, 2012).
11 Convention relative à l’emploi de la main-d’œuvre entre la Jamahiya arabe libyenne
populaire et socialiste et la république du Mali, 12/12/1980, Bamako.
12 The 1990s saw the emergence of Gaddafi’s open-door policy towards nationals from
the Sub-Saharan region, and the adoption of legal regulations to end visa requirements
for sub-Saharan Africans. Later, in 2007, after years of an open-door policy, Libya again
imposed visas on African nationals and adopted normative changes concerning stay and
labour migration (Di Bartolomeo et al., 2011).
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waves of “irregular” migration and, according to official rhetoric, offer good
working conditions to Malian migrants recruited through official channels (Sylla,
2020). Articles 2, 4, 5 and 11 of this agreement obliged Malian candidates for
emigration to Libya to obtain a formal employment contract. Working conditions and employee rights were defined in these contracts, while obtaining a
residence permit was conditional on the existence of an employment contract
(Perrin, 2008). However, the bureaucratic and administrative costs involved in
obtaining these formal contracts were a major obstacle for many Malians hoping
to migrate legally to Libya. Many such migrants, therefore, continued to use
informal migration networks to get to Libya. Once there, legal papers remained
hard to get, keeping undocumented Malian migrants in Libya in a precarious
situation. In 1987, 80% of Malians living in Libya were considered “illegal” immigrants (Sylla, 2020). The bilateral agreement of 1980 allowed for the “illegalisation” of Malian undocumented workers in Libya and enabled their expulsion.
As an oil-based “rentier” state, Libya “both needed to attract an immigrant
workforce and was exposed to the volatility of oil prices […] with periods of
unemployment during which the presence of migrants was seen as a burden”
(DeVargas and Donzelli, 2014: 246-247). Recruitment programmes tended to
alternate with mass deportations, depending on changes in the political situation
(Puig, 2020).
Over the historical course of this Mali-Libya relationship, there were several
waves of expulsion of unwanted migrants from Libya, in 1979, 1981, 1985, 1995,
2000 and 2007 (Bensaâd, 2012): these events were related to Libyan domestic
political matters and to Gaddafi’s geopolitical ambitions. Expulsions happened
in the form of both official repatriation convoys and violent, unannounced
mass expulsions. In an economic context weakened by the decline of its rentier
oil-based model, Libya ensured the “reversibility of migration”, alternating
periods of openness and closure (Bensaâd, 2012). Libya oscillated between calls
for a new labour force, pan-Africanist claims, and expulsions.
The expulsions of the 2000s concerned exclusively sub-Saharan migrants and took
on the appearance of race-based massacres (Bensaâd, 2002). The beginning of the
2000s also marked a major change in Gaddafi’s agenda for migration: he aligned
with European interests who were externalizing their “border control” (Haddad, 2009;
Paoletti, 2011). Gaddafi presented himself as the EU’s border guard, or the gatekeeper
of black African migration flows towards Europe, and Libya as a respectable migration
partner for the EU in the region. Several cooperation agreements on migration were
concluded. This resulted in a tightening of border controls and an expansion of the
detention infrastructure for those being repatriated. This was funded by the EU and
characterized by inhuman conditions (Haddad, 2009; DeVargas and Donzelli, 2014).
This shift in Gaddafi’s strategy led from the illegalisation of irregular migrants to
their criminalization “with direct consequences for the daily lives of migrants” (Puig,
2020: 163). Black Malian returnees from Libya generally told us that they had suffered
various forms of racial violence, humiliations, and xenophobia while in Libya,
reminding them of the servile, slave status associated with blackness. Many of them
were arrested, molested, or imprisoned during their sojourn in Libya. Some of them
reported failure to be paid after completing work. They were constantly subjected to
verbal reactions ranging from mockery to outright hostility. Even children expressed
disgust and insulted them in the streets.
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“In the street, bilakoro [boys] spit on you because you’re black. But watch out if you react! If you
react, their brothers will beat you. There’s nowhere to complain. You should not answer, and you
should let them pass.” (Issiaka, Malian migrant back from Libya in 2012, Bamako, June 2012)
“People spat at me. They pinched their noses in the street as I walked by. The women took their
loincloths to cover their noses, as if to say that we didn’t wash ourselves. It was contemptuous.
They threw stones at me.” (Thomas, Malian migrant back from Libya in 2008,
Bamako, September 2022)
In everyday life, black migrants were commonly referred to as “slave”, attesting to their
otherness and outsider-status in relation to Libyan society. Describing the anti-black
racism he suffered, one of our interlocutors explained that: “In Libya, we were treated
like donkeys, like dogs. We were considered slaves, dirty and sick, although there
were a few exceptions and some people who appreciated our value.”The racialization
of black migrants portrayed them as a source of insecurity, and saw them accused of
bringing delinquency, organized crime, drug trafficking, terrorism, prostitution, occult
practices, disease, and epidemic diseases such as AIDS or Ebola.
Only subordinate jobs were available to Malian migrants. They were at the bottom
of the social hierarchy in Libya and depended on their Libyan bosses for work, and,
often, for accommodation and food as well.
“After the desert, we were taken to the city, where all the blacks like me often arrived. I started
seeing a lot of the people we had met in the desert. We arrived at a Cameroonian restaurant,
and they offered me something to eat. I ate like never before. I was so hungry. Then, they made
us sleep in an old house with no roof and no door, but there was a tap with water. After that, we
were told to come and eat in the restaurant every morning for free and to get our strength back
for a week. After that, we started work on building sites, electricity, masonry, plumbing, etc. In
other words, we walked behind a technician and in the evening, after the day’s work,
he gave us a little something.” (Mahamadou, Malian migrant back from Libya
in 2017, Bamako, December 2017)
The relationship between informal Malian workers and Libyan bosses was clearly
asymmetrical and ambivalent: it constituted a form of patronage characterized by
exploitation and care, based on an historical construction of blackness related to
slavery and servility.
“Well, our relationship with the Libyans… it was a question of behaviour. You know, they are
racist. They are really racist. Sometimes they make Africans suffer. Even if the Libyan authorities
don’t say to arrest black people, but if they see black people, they will arrest them to racketeer
them, imprison them. […] but there are situations where your boss can defend you. Because in
general, if there are raids, bosses who are brave are at their door with guns, at the door of their
workplace, and no policeman will dare to cross their door to come and arrest a black person
even if your papers are not in order. [...] This life is not easy, I suffered too much there.”
(Lassy, Malian migrant back from Libya in 2012, Bamako, May 2015)
Long-standing forms of racial discrimination and xenophobia took on a new
dimension during the Libyan war in 2011, which led to the fall of Gaddafi and
the collapse of his regime. Racism and the racialisation of black African migrants
intensified (Puig, 2020). During the initial phase of the conflict, when Gaddafi was
still in power, he threatened retaliation against Europe unless NATO countries
ceased their military campaign against Libya. One form of retaliation would
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have involved an opening of Libya’s maritime border, enabling an “invasion to
Europe” of undocumented black African migrants. Alleging that Al-Qaeda was
responsible for the Libyan uprising, Gaddafi also added that Europe would have
to face an Islamic jihad “on its doorstep” in the Mediterranean. At that time,
black Malian migrants were caught up in the violence of the conflict and trapped
between two fronts: the pro-Gaddafi armed groups and the rebels. As one of our
interlocutors explained:
“The rebels attacked black people accused of being pro-Gaddafi. The pro-Gaddafi groups
attacked blacks because they were suspected of being Chadian or Sudanese black
rebels. So, Blacks were systematically searched and hunted [‘la chasse aux noirs’]. Our
belongings were taken away [....] And some ill-intentioned Libyans thought that Gaddafi
had given good opportunities to black people in various towns and that, since Gaddafi
was on the run, these groups should be targeted and attacked. This is how the Malians
lost all their belongings during this conflict. They were between two fronts, and nobody
liked them. The rebels considered them pro-Gaddafi. The pro-Gaddafi groups saw them as
black African infiltrators.” (Djibril, member of an association of returnees
from Libya in Bamako, Bamako, December 2017)
This testimony13 alludes to the shady game Gaddafi played before his fall. In
early 2011, it was rumoured that he had recruited Tuareg fighters and other black
Sahelian mercenaries to join his troops fighting Libyan rebels, as he had done
in the past (Sylla, 2020). According to Forte (2011), opposition spokesmen and
anonymous “Libyan” Twitter accounts who would become associated with the
Libyan rebels spread racial fear and propagated “accusations about foreign/
black/African mercenaries engaged in ‘massacres’ against Libyans” (Forte, 2011).
They brandished the black spectre of African mercenaries supposedly known
for their ferocity and barbarism, another well-known racist trope (DeVargas and
Donzelli, 2014). Libyan geopolitics thus continued its long history of producing
racial formations of blackness as subalternity and outsiderness, formations that
resonate with the anti-migrant and anti-black EU migration agenda.
Black Returnees Contest Migration Governance
in Mali: The Unexpected Racial Dimension
The outbreak of war in Libya in early 2011 saw hundreds of thousands of African
migrants flee the country. After Gaddafi finally fell in October 2011, many Tuareg
ex-combatants returned to Mali by the north of the country, bringing their
weapons with them (Gary-Tounkara, 2013). Tuareg people were also victims of
retaliation by Libyan rebels for their (real or presumed) support for Gaddafi.
Many Malian migrants also went back, either by their own routes or through
repatriation programmes organized by international organizations such as the
IOM. NGOs were also active in the repatriation process, as was the High Council
for Malians Living Abroad. Those who returned to Mali generally returned with
nothing: most of them had lost everything. Their life projects were disrupted,
provoking feelings of failure, shame, and frustration (Kleist, 2017). Once back
13 See for instance NPR quoting BBC interview: NPR (2005) In Libya, African Migrants
Say They Face Hostility, [online]. URL: https://www.npr.org/2011/02/25/134065767/-AfricanMigrants-Say-They-Face-Hostility-From-Libyans
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Marie Deridder and Almamy Sylla
in Mali, Malian migrants had two main options for mitigating their unexpected
and empty-handed return: to “take the road again” (“prendre la route encore
une fois”) to another destination as our interlocutors explained; or else to stay
in Mali and try to build a new life project, often starting from scratch. Those
who decided to stay often returned to their hometowns and villages; if not, they
tried to navigate the new landscape of international aid through reintegration
processes due to their new condition as “forced returnees” or “repatriates”
(Puig, 2020).
In Mali, the management of return migration and expulsions from European
and African countries has been a central parameter of political life. Non-state
actors from the Malian diaspora and civil society have succeeded in politicizing
the national public debate about migration. Migrant associations have generally
argued for increased protection of migrants by the state, whose shortcomings
and absence on the ground they have denounced (Gary-Tounkara, 2013;
Siméant, 2014; Lecadet, 2016; Soukouna, 2020; Sylla, 2019 and 2020). In 2014,
Mali became one of the first African countries to adopt a national migration
policy (PONAM). One of its priorities was to better support Mali’s repatriated
migrants by offering them more protection and better conditions on their return
home. Humanitarian and emergency assistance for Malian citizens abroad
was also a key element of this policy. These policies required funds, which left
their implementation dependent on contributions from international organizations and bilateral donors. PONAM’s implementation took place, also, in the
aftermath of the 2015 EU-Africa Valletta Summit on Migration, which saw the
launch of the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF for Africa). The declared
purpose of this fund is to enhance stability by addressing the root causes of
irregular migration and displaced persons in Africa. Today, the EUTF for Africa
funds fifteen national programmes in Mali and the country is part of seventeen
EUTF regional programmes — many of which have a security focus. European
Development Cooperation Agencies, international organisations, and European
NGOs are the “partners” that have received this funding: when implementing
these programmes, they often subcontract some activities to Malian organisations. In this context, the IOM emerged as the main player in migration governance in Mali.
For “humanitarian” reasons, the Malian government is now collaborating with
these EU and international organisations to implement the Assisted Voluntary
Return and Reintegration programmes (AVRR). Collaboration, in this case,
means that the Malian government lacks any real capacity to influence these
policies and actions (Keita and Maïga, 2022). In any case, the moral force of the
humanitarian motive (Fassin, 2011) makes it impossible to refuse or even contest
the implementation of these programmes. In the context of the Libyan civil war
and its aftermath, the IOM has presented the AVRR programmes as a humanitarian rescue operation aiding migrants in distress. It gives the impression of
humanizing expulsions (Frowd, 2018: 1660), even if the aims were to stop and
repatriate undocumented migrants. On their return, they might be promised
access to them individual or collective reintegration projects, while their pain
and the forced nature of the deportation of migrants would be veiled through
seductive and depoliticizing development language and activities (Sylla and
Cold-Ravnkilde, 2021). As we have seen, the expulsion of Malian migrants from
Libya is not a novelty and is the continuation of practices that have existed since
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the 1980s: what is new is the institutional set-up of the repatriation process, and
the reception of migrants by international agencies such as the IOM.
Additionally, the number of protests about migration on Malian streets has
declined since the adoption of the Global Compact for Migration by the UN
in 2018. The negotiations that produced this Global Compact included civil
society representatives from all over the world. The Malian representative
was the president of a well-known association heavily involved in politicising
migration issues in Mali. However, it is now more difficult for these associations
to criticise a negotiated global political framework, in whose negotiations they
were formally involved. During our interview in 2022, a representative of the
Malian government denounced these Malian associations: “All they do is shout,
but that’s just to eat. They were there for the Global Compact. They took part
in the negotiations.” Moreover, since the launch of the EUTF for Africa, actors
previously active in politicising migration issues in Mali have been co-opted into
a “post-expulsion” market by implementing EU-funded reintegration projects
for returnees.
The expectations of returnees and migrant associations are far from being met
even if protest has declined. Some migrant associations benefit from a small
part of donors’ funding but feel excluded from access to the main funds. They
criticize the state for being co-opted by its donors, who increasingly use funds
for security matters. During the last decade, dissatisfaction among Malian black
returnees “assisted” by international organisations and the Malian state has
increased. For example, in 2020, returnees vandalized the reception centre in
Bamako (La maison des Maliens de l’extérieur) because of the loss of their
luggage during the repatriation process. This centre, financed by the EU and
equipped by the IOM, has a capacity of around 200 places. It symbolically
materialized the collaboration between the Malian government, OIM and the
EU. Another example: following the fall of Gaddafi in Libya in 2011 and the
Malian coup d’État of March 2012, the Malian government’s management of the
return of former Tuareg ex-combatants and black-skinned migrants from Libya
was contested (Gary-Tounkara, 2013). The General Secretary of the Association
malienne des expulsés (AME) in Bamako, meanwhile, publicly argued that one
of the reasons behind the 2012 coup was the Malian government’s handling of
returnees from Libya in Mali: “Failure to care for people in forced return situations, particularly those returning from Libya, while at the same time, Tuaregs
from that country were welcomed with arms and baggage to the palace of the
President of the Republic. As if that was not enough, food and money were sent
to these people to help them settle in.”
Here, again, the problem was phrased in racial terms by black returnees as our
interlocutors regularly recalled: “I tell you, an adventurer from Libya, a black
adventurer from Libya, is worthless in the eyes of the Malian government.” Black
returnees felt that they were unwanted, discriminated against, and abandoned
by “their” state. One of our interlocutors explained that in 2012: “When we
got off the plane [in Bamako], they put us on a bus that dropped us at the fairgrounds. There was no mat, no food. There was no guide to tell you where to go
or how to organize yourself. They left us like that, like orphans.” Black returnees
perceived racial discrimination by their own state, which, in their view, privileges
red-skinned Tuareg people over black returnees.
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“After the problems of arrivals, the Tuaregs were escorted to the presidency while the
rest of us were brought here to the fairgrounds [...]. The white Libyan adventurers were
escorted from the airport to the White House [the presidential palace]. And we were
picked up and brought here to the fairgrounds. [...] But we were all at zero. So, both
groups, the blacks and the whites, tried to claim their rights. We, the blacks, were 13,000
while the Tuaregs were about 300. They received 50 million. Here in Mali, we, the 13,000,
were granted 500,000 CFA francs.” (Mohamed, Malian migrant repatriated
from Libya, Bamako, March 2012)
They also denounced a range of eligibility criteria used to profile applicants to
reintegration programs and to determine whether they were former combatants
or repatriates from a country along the pre-defined “European Migration routes”,
or just simple people on the move. These criteria seem arbitrary to them.
“As we do not yet have a stable government [referring to the coups d’État and the transition], we didn’t go to see them, we do not know how things are going. In any case, we will
continue our actions. When there will be a stable government, we will approach them.
Until now those who have come from Gao (in the north) receive aid, sugar, rice. This is
what we have been looking for and have not yet received. We are not jealous or selfish
of those who receive aid, but we have also the right to receive it. We also have the right
to sugar because there are fathers among us, there are husbands with their wives and
children and who do not know what to eat today. They can give sugar, rice, oil, but none
of this has been given to us.” (Mohamed, Malian migrant repatriated from Libya,
Bamako, March 2013)
When black returnees fail to receive aid, this means a lot — both materially and
symbolically. To be unrecognized by international organisations and the Malian
state as legitimate beneficiaries of reintegration funds has an impact on their
attempts to regain a positive social status as providers, and, according to local
ideals of masculinity, as men (Kleist, 2017: 322).
Black returnees denounce the attention given to Tuareg people, who are often
associated with terrorists and rebels, as a form of racial discrimination. They
explain that former Tuareg combatants were enrolled in DDR (demobilization,
disarmament, and reintegration) programs, which gives them an advantage over
black returnees where possible economic reintegration is concerned (furthermore, these programmes were implemented exclusively in Mali’s northern and
central regions by MINUSMA, the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated
Stabilization Mission in Mali). Moreover, humanitarian aid for internally
displaced persons was, at first, mainly directed to the north, and then, later, to
the central region of the country. Our interlocutors have the impression that they
have been left out of the aid industry, which has a massive presence in Mali. They
see themselves as unable to benefit from the aid rent despite their condition as
“forced returnees” and the violence they have encountered. As Behrends (2020:
31) underlines, “technologies of aid work well with clearly delineated boundaries of who is and who is not entitled to aid. Those who are entitled to aid are
rendered highly visible, while those not entitled to it are relegated to an invisible
place, one in which aid can only be provided in a limited way”. This structural
disadvantage created by the aid industry takes the path of racial discrimination.
It draws a colour line between, on one hand, “black returnees” who occupied
subaltern positions in Libya and feel abandoned by the Malian state and, on the
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other hand, white/red-skinned Tuareg, perceived as former combatants who held
a higher social status in Gaddafi’s army. However, left-out black returnees were
not passive. They actively challenged (albeit without much success) their invisibilization through racial discrimination claims and demonstrations targeting the
Malian state. In so doing, they were trying to make themselves visible to those
who should have been able to see them.
Conclusion
To challenge the idea of the African continent as a non-racialized space, this
article has explored how racial arguments were unexpectedly deployed by black
returnees in Bamako after their repatriation from Libya. The racial consciousness
of returnees in Mali is rooted in processes of global racialization induced by
global migration governance, on one hand, and in local, situated legacies of
race and slavery in the Sahelian region, on the other. The language of slavery,
servility and subalternity is historically at the heart of racial formations in both
Mali and Libya. Race and racialization processes were also one of the cornerstones of French colonization, and then of the post-colonial Malian state in
many respects. The Malian state has been enmeshed in racial violence and racial
formations linked to ethnicity since independence.
Today, in the context of the current conflict in Mali, the repatriation and reintegration programmes and the exclusionary power effected upon those who
remain excluded from the aid industry have created a structural disadvantage
for black returnees in Bamako who are left out. We argue, therefore that the racial
grammar of the past, historically rooted in the country since the pre-colonial
period, is now being updated for the twenty-first century. It is being updated by
the Euro-African “migration-development-security” nexus and the contemporary migration governance in Mali, as it is implemented through the aid industry.
They mobilize situated racial formations and migration politics that are mutually
constitutive and interrelated: they bring together multiple actors, institutions,
processes, histories, and scales. They intersect with long and situated histories
of mobility, racial violence and state formation in both Mali and Libya.
As Omi and Winant (2014: 10) argue, “race operates in the space of intersections,
at the crossroads where social structure and experience meet”. Racial formations
change over time and contexts. In Mali, a violent, double traumatic memory of
whiteness and blackness roots contemporary racial formations and nationhood.
Racial formations of blackness as subalternity and outsiderness resonate with
an anti-migrant and anti-black EU migration agenda, while also being entangled
with Mali’s current overlapping crises and conflicts since 2011.
109
Marie Deridder and Almamy Sylla
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Résumé - Abstract - Resumen
Marie Deridder and Almamy Sylla
Racialized Impacts of Migration Governance in Mali
Perceptions of Africa as a non-racial space are belied by cases such as Mali.
This article explores how racial arguments were deployed by black returnees
in Bamako after their repatriation from Libya. Race, racialization processes, and
racial violence were one of the cornerstones of French colonization in Mali, and
then of the post-colonial state. Mali had a complex relationship with its northern
neighbour Libya, for many decades a destination for Malian migrants. The fall of
the Gaddafi regime in Libya in 2011 created new problems, as both black Malian
migrant workers and Tuareg ex-combatants were returned to the country. Both
experienced, in different ways, the effects of a migration regime, influenced
by European Union programmes. This article shows how racial categories and
migration politics intersect in Mali, becoming mutually constituent and interrelated, and leaving various actors, institutions, processes, histories, and multiple
scales entangled with each other.
Impacts racialisés de la gouvernance migratoire au Mali
Les perceptions de l’Afrique comme un espace non racial sont démenties par
des cas comme celui du Mali. Cet article explore la manière dont les arguments
raciaux ont été déployés par les rapatriés noirs à Bamako après leur retour de
Libye. La race, les processus de racialisation et la violence raciale ont été l’une
des pierres angulaires de la colonisation française au Mali, puis de l’État postcolonial. Le Mali a entretenu une relation complexe avec son voisin du nord,
la Libye, qui a été pendant de nombreuses décennies une destination pour
les migrants maliens. La chute du régime de Kadhafi en Libye en 2011 a créé
de nouveaux problèmes, quand les travailleurs migrants maliens noirs et les
ex-combattants touaregs ont été renvoyés dans le pays. Ces groupes ont subi,
de manière différente, les effets d’un régime migratoire influencé par l’Union
européenne. Cet article montre comment les catégories raciales et les politiques
migratoires s’entrecroisent au Mali, devenant mutuellement constitutives et
interdépendantes, et laissant divers acteurs, institutions, processus, histoires et
échelles multiples enchevêtrés les uns avec les autres.
Impacto racial de la gobernanza de la migración en Malí
La percepción de África como un espacio no-racial queda desmentida por casos
como el de Malí. Este artículo explora cómo los retornados negros en Bamako
desplegaron argumentos raciales tras su repatriación desde Libia. La raza, los
procesos de racialización y la violencia racial fueron una de las piedras angulares
de la colonización francesa en Malí y, posteriormente, del Estado poscolonial.
Malí mantuvo una compleja relación con su vecino del norte, Libia, durante
muchas décadas destino de los emigrantes malienses. La caída del régimen
de Gadafi en Libia en 2011 creó nuevos problemas, ya que tanto los trabajadores migrantes malienses negros como los excombatientes tuaregs fueron
devueltos al país. Ambos experimentaron, de diferentes maneras, los efectos
de un régimen migratorio, influido por los programas de la Unión Europea.
Este artículo muestra cómo las categorías raciales y las políticas migratorias
se entrecruzan en Mali, constituyéndose e interrelacionándose mutuamente, y
dejando enredados entre sí a diversos actores, instituciones, procesos, historias
y múltiples escalas.
115