Mali: Contested meanings of “collective interest”

By social anthropologist Dorothea Schulz

On 30 November, some Malian newspapers pre-printed the speech that N’Ba Daou, the president of the transitional government in Mali formed after the military coup in August 2020, wanted to use on national television to call on “the Malian people” to abide by a newly imposed night curfew and other accompanying measures to contain the corona epidemic. Already circulating only a few hours later in a transnational sphere of communication mediated by Facebook and other social media were the first protest slogans, such as: “N’ba Daou, Malians are telling you that poverty reigns among Mali’s youth, who therefore prefer Covid-19 to living with empty pockets in 2020. We will therefore not adhere to the demands of the curfew”. As the tone of voice and the combined use of French and Bamanakan (the lingua franca of southern Mali) show, these messages bore the specific signature of unemployed and unmarried men with an education. At the same time, the point common to many messages that curfews and other restrictions on mobility exacerbate economic precarity reflected a widely shared resistance to the measures – not in protest against the restriction of personal rights, as is currently observed in Europe and North America, but out of concern for being able to ensure daily survival. In response to this protest, President N’Daou cancelled, at least temporarily, his televised address, which seems to indicate the extent to which the president and his transitional government see themselves as dependent on wider acceptance, and how precarious they see their own position of power as being.

In Mali, widespread resistance and strategies to avoid and evade state control are by no means new. Even before the overthrow of former president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in August 2020, resistance to state epidemiological measures was justified by a discourse about the absence of political legitimacy. What is striking about many protest messages currently circulating, however, is that they increasingly question the official rhetoric of a “collective” good and interest, and instead refer to Covid-19 as a particular problem of “rich” people and “infidels”, alluding to air conditioners, closed offices, and other places of affluence as key transmission zones. Thus, at the centre of the discourse of resistance is currently not the contrast between individuality and collectivity, between individual rights and a collective interest in national health, but a reinterpretation of collective interest. Instead of equating “general well-being” and “health”, the critics cited above demand that national well-being be redefined – as the opportunity shared by all to shape their own lives under dignified material conditions.