Waiting Around

Hi.  Not much to report from Bamako.  The city has resumed much of its daily activities, though there's still a lot of tension.  Yesterday, wedding parties on mopeds were out driving on the streets, blaring their horns like normal.  Unfortunately, though the participants were ready, the neighborhood mayors' offices were closed, leading to much confusion.  To my mind, this is a good example of where Bamako is emotionally right now; most people want to get on with their daily lives, but there's mass confusion among the political/elite class.  It's entirely unclear how this coup d'état is going to work itself out.  There are several demonstrations planned today, the 26 March, in remembrance of the day 21 years ago when Amadou Toumani Touré, the Malian president just overthrown by the coup, staged a coup of his own and overthrew Mali's dictator, Moussa Traoré!  The irony is not lost on Malians...

At this point, I'm just waiting around to see what happens.  I had been planning to go out today and begin kora and n'goni lessons again, but what with the demonstrations, I'm going to wait until tomorrow.  Several of my Fulbright colleagues have decided to leave the country, while several others have decided to stay and see if the situation worsens.  I'll also be staying, for the time being.

Exciting times!

Oh, and a quick political postscript.  There's been a fair amount of analysis in the world media of Mali's coup, and I've found much of it superficial, in that most commentators have universally condemned a coup against a "functioning democracy" that was less than two months away from presidential elections.

The problem is, many Malians didn't see the regime of ATT as a "functioning democracy."  The systemic corruption which has plagued Mali since the time of Moussa Traoré, but particularly during the last ten years, has been extremely frustrating to Malians of all walks of life.  Everyone from my host parents (members of Bamako's growing upper middle class) to my music teachers (who, if not at the poverty line, are not incredibly far from it), to my friend the Sotrama driver, to all the unemployed young guys who hang around my kora teacher's neighborhood, have increasingly complained about corruption since I've been here.  International commentators who see the military coup as purely related to the mismanagement of Mali's war against Touareg rebels in the North are seriously missing the point: this coup was the apotheosis of years and years of frustration.  The all-inclusive, nobody's-at-fault politics of ATT's presidency have, at least in the eyes of many of the Malians I've spoken to, seriously undermined the political and societal institutions of the state.  The poor performance of the Malian Army in the North during this latest Tuareg rebellion are a symptom of Mali's problems as a whole, a microcosm of the macrocosm of Mali's universal corruption.

I could go on in this vein, but my friend and fellow Mali Fulbright Scholar, Bruce Whitehouse, has already written an excellent analysis of what I think is the underpinnings of the coup.  You can read it here:

http://bamakobruce.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/good-riddance-att/