Dorothea E. Schulz. Political Legitimacy in Postcolonial Mali.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Political Legitimacy in Postcolonial Mali by Dorothea E. Schulz Bruce Whitehouse Dorothea E. Schulz, Political Legitimacy in Postcolonial Mali. Suffolk, UK: James Currey, 2021. 239pp. $120 Paper. Many of us observing Mali’s political trajectory have presumed that throughout the country’s two decades of multiparty, democratic rule which began in the early 1990s, the Malian state commanded unprecedented political legitimacy. We believed that the Malian people generally considered the elected regimes of Presidents Alpha Oumar Konaré (1992–2002) and Amadou Toumani Touré (2002–2012), despite their obvious flaws, as far more legitimate than their single-party predecessors had been. The military coup that ousted Touré in March 2012 was viewed as a giant step backward, ushering in a profound political crisis for the country. But what if Malians have never seen their postcolonial state as legitimate? What if Mali has been suffering, not from a post-2012 “crisis” of political legitimacy but instead from a chronic failure to generate legitimacy, a failure as old as the postcolonial state itself? What if, moreover, scholars have not adequately understood either what “legitimacy” means or how to assess it in African postcolonies? These are among the provocative questions raised by anthropologist Dorothea Schulz in her latest book, the product mainly of her fieldwork in rural western Mali. Less a traditional monograph than a wide-ranging set of reflections on how ordinary people have articulated with the Malian state, Political Legitimacy in Postcolonial Mali is a challenging, theoretically rich work of ethnography. In her attempt to define legitimacy and understand how it is constructed, Schulz engages deeply with political philosophy and with theories of the African state. In the book’s introduction and five chapters, Schulz attempts to come to terms with the ill-defined concept of legitimacy. Chapter One examines the state from the micropolitical perspective of rural farmers, many of whom remember the country’s period of military rule (1968–1991) as a time when the state and party politics were mercifully absent from their villages. To these villagers, the state’s primary function was to ensure stability and provide for dependents, and they judged Mali’s post-1991 democratic order as failing on both counts. Chapter Two considers the use of cultural performance (specifically jeli praise singers) by successive Malian regimes as a tool of political legitimization. While these performances helped to naturalize the Malian nation-state, Schulz contends, they failed to legitimize the people or institutions running it. Chapter Three argues that Mali’s political decentralization process, initiated in the mid-1990s, instead of bringing decision-makers closer to their rural constituents, only multiplied competing layers of authority and left farmers reliant on urban intermediaries to get the attention of the state and its bureaucrats. Chapter Four traces the Malian state’s efforts since the 1990s to construct legitimacy through the promotion of “local culture” via festivals and media broadcasts (specifically, the “Terroir” program on Malian state television). [End Page 222] The fifth chapter, which explores the emergence of Islamism in Mali, stands out in many respects from the preceding ones. Schulz zooms out from her focus on village/state encounters in the western Kayes region to view the phenomenon of Islamic renewal through a national-level lens. Building on the problems discussed earlier in her book, she convincingly portrays Islamism, both in its mainstream political and militant armed manifestations, as a response to a political order seen as “devoid of legitimacy because it cannot ensure the basic conditions for citizens to live in proper moral terms” (2021, 159). In other words, the Islamist challenge to Mali’s secular state is not an atavistic or irrational anti-modern backlash. This chapter considers this challenge through a profile of the charismatic Muslim leader Shaykh Chérif Haïdara and his complex positioning vis-a-vis the Malian government. The book ends with a brief concluding chapter followed by a postscript bringing the reader up to date with the events that toppled yet another of Mali’s elected presidents, Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, from power in August 2020. The largely rural perspectives in these chapters (with the exception of Chapter Five) offer a necessary corrective to the urban bias...