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. 91 Marie Deridder and Almamy Sylla 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). 92 Racialized Impact of Migration Governance in Mali 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. 93 Marie Deridder and Almamy Sylla 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). 94 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 95 Marie Deridder and Almamy Sylla 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. 96 Racialized Impact of Migration Governance in Mali 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 97 Marie Deridder and Almamy Sylla 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 98 Racialized Impact of Migration Governance in Mali 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. 99 Marie Deridder and Almamy Sylla 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. 100 Racialized Impact of Migration Governance in Mali 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 101 Marie Deridder and Almamy Sylla 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). 102 Racialized Impact of Migration Governance in Mali 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. 103 Marie Deridder and Almamy Sylla “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 104 Racialized Impact of Migration Governance in Mali 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 105 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 106 Racialized Impact of Migration Governance in Mali 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. 107 Marie Deridder and Almamy Sylla “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 108 Racialized Impact of Migration Governance in Mali 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 References Amselle Jean-Loup (1998) Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Bensaâd Ali (2012) L’immigration en Libye : une ressource et la diversité de ses usages, Politique africaine, 1 (125), pp. 83-103. Bensaâd Ali (2002) La grande migration africaine à travers le Sahara, Méditerranée, 99 (3-4), pp. 41-52. 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URL: https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/world/africa/libya-migrants-slavery.html 114 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