This Oxford Handbook provides the first comprehensive overview of the African Sahel. Structuring the volume around ‘challenges’ rather than ‘crises’, Leo Villalón invites his contributors to provide critical appraisals of the many perplexities of the Sahel while keeping in view both the variety of contexts it encompasses and the patterns wrought by environment, history and a legacy of French colonial governance. The essays collected bear the marks of a coherent network of scholars who know one another's research well and who have an interest in multi-disciplinary approaches ranging from political science, to religion, to linguistics. It is always difficult to do justice to the richness of an edited volume – in this case the whole is very much greater than the sum of its many excellent parts.
The first section interrogates the Sahel as a region. Geographers Olivier Walther and Denis Retaillé note the shifting ways that the Sahel has been understood, first as an intermediate zone between desert and savanna, then as a front between pastoralists and farmers, and most recently as the site of ‘security’ concerns with little reference to environment. Greg Mann argues that French colonial institutions set the stage for the intervention of military rulers and the gradual erosion of state sovereignty in favour of a ‘nongovernmentality’ through which key functions of government are taken on by external agencies. Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan sets out some of the dynamics undermining the capacity of Sahelian states to respond to the current challenges facing their citizens.
Section two offers fine-grained analyses of the national specificities that distinguish the ‘patrimonial democracy’ of Senegal (by Marie Brossier) from the undemocratic military powerhouse of Chad (by Ketil Fred Hansen). Bruce Whitehouse balances internal and external dynamics and actors in analysing the decline of Mali. Together these national profiles give the lie to the notion of the Sahel as a monolithic space shaped by environment, a uniform French colonial approach, or a shared socio-cultural milieu.
In what is perhaps the most optimistic contribution to the volume, Suzanne Cotillon, Gray Tappan and Chris Reij explore some of the positive interventions on the part of small farmers that have demonstrated (once again) their canny adaptations to changes in climate. Alisha Graves, Nouhou Moumouni and Malcolm Potts offer an account of the challenges of demographic growth. Sarah McCune makes a case for animal sources of food to counterbalance the risks of agricultural production, improve household incomes, and enhance the nutritional content of Sahel diets. The volume devotes sustained attention to pastoralism in economic, political and environmental terms (Tor Benjaminsen on climate change and conflict, Marjatta Eilattä on drivers of growth and decline in the crucial but neglected livestock sector, Wendy Wilson-Fall on pastoralist societies in the Sahel, Cedric Jourde on social stratification).
The volume also addresses the challenge of development from a variety of quite different vantage points. Isaline Bergamaschi explores the political economy of aid. Fatou Guèye and Ahmadou Aly Mbaye address the significance of the informal sector and the challenges it presents for an under-resourced state. Renata Serra focuses upon agricultural policy, while Giorgio Blundo offers an analysis of corruption that recognises the specificity of the Sahelien context. Section five on politics features contributions by Mamadou Bodian and Leonardo Villalón on democracy, Daniel Eizenga on parties and political elites, Sebastian Elischer on the military, Cristina Barrios on the vexed problem of security and counterterrorism, and finally by Roland Marshal on some surprising dimensions of French intervention in the Sahel.
Sections six and seven open the way to more humanistic concerns. Rahmane Idrissa explores continuity and change in Sahelian intellectual ‘currents’ and Alioune Sow offers a literary history of the region. Rudiger Seesmann provides an appraisal of Islamic-intellectual traditions in the Sahel, while Ousseina Alidou explores Muslim women's social movements. Benjamin Soares offers a dynamic view of Islamic religious practice in a rapidly changing and globalising context. Fiona McLaughlin presents a fascinating glimpse of the ‘linguistic ecology’ of the Sahel, where multi-linguicism is the norm, specialised oral skills are typically entrusted to a caste, and both French colonial rule and Islam have left a powerful imprint. Leonardo Villalón and Mamadou Bodian reflect upon the relationships between education (increasingly in private schools with an Arab language and religious training component), citizenship and national identity. Alexander Thurston's study ‘negotiating secularism’ offers a welcome counter-balance to the emphasis on Islam, recognising the interplay between national politics, Christian minorities, and multiple and conflicting Islamic discourses regarding the relationship between state and religion.
Given the centrality of migration and mobility to the contemporary ‘securitisation’ of the Sahel, the final section provides a crucial endpoint to the volume. The contributions dove-tail nicely, emphasising the long history of regional migration within Africa (Sylvie Bredeloup), the nature of trans-Saharan migration through and from the Sahel (Harouna Mounkaila), and the ways that rapid urbanisation contributes to complex patterns of impoverishment, settlement and population dynamics (Florence Boyer and David Lessault). The final contribution, by Abdoulaye Kane, raises questions about the durability of economies built upon remittances sent through transnational networks, given the contraction of opportunities to migrate outside Africa and the possibility that the next generation born overseas will have less interest in investing on the continent.
If you, dear reader, choose to harass your library to acquire only one book this year, let it be this one. It will be useful to anyone teaching about Africa, doing research on the Sahel, or assessing policy options in a region increasingly in the spotlight. Should Oxford issue it in paperback it would make an excellent textbook for an interdisciplinary course on contemporary issues in Africa, on the cultural geography in Africa, or on politics at multiple scales.
