Perhaps I have generalized too much and should restrict myself to the band of countries stretching from Somalia in the east to Senegal in the west.
As I pointed out a few years ago, practically none of these countries today is exempt from more or less violent conflicts, all related to natural resources (starting, obviously, with land and water) and in the same way they have become important hubs in the 'fight against terrorism' (of an Islamist matrix in its protean guise) which the West has decided to pursue in the region.
These are conflicts of which we Italians hear almost no echo, given that, on the one hand, the main newspapers and television networks hardly ever talk about them, while on the other, the main political parties seem to be completely uninterested in the matter.
There are always other priorities, now Covid, before the immigrant landings, before the financial crisis of 2008-9, and in this way, by always stopping at the surface of the problems, not only do we not understand anything but even less are we able to think about what future we are preparing for ourselves.
The fall of the Berlin Wall had forced the Western world to rethink, at least on the surface, its relationship with Africa: the excuse of the Cold War was no longer usable, so it was necessary to redecorate, to give a hand of 'democracy' to those corrupt regimes that served our interests so well, in order to build a new narrative that, without touching the bottom of the problems, would allow our rulers to continue to maintain those colonial relations that had never ended even after decolonization.
The farce of elections, imposed on all regimes, lasted only a few years, and meanwhile the same faces continued to govern, minding their own business and ours, and little by little nobody was interested in "democracy" anymore.
The first independent variable, or at least not calculated by Western political scientists, was the rise of China as a new world player, proposing to supplant the Western world in retreat from Africa with their capital and labour. Using the same techniques of corruption and control of real power, the Chinese have implanted themselves in most of these countries and, suddenly, we in the West have rediscovered the democratic vein, protesting at the poor working conditions offered by the Chinese to local labour. This challenge is well present, but it is not the crux of the problem, which has come from the religious world.
I had an idea of these dynamics in the early 1990s, observing what was happening in Algeria, the arrival through democratic elections of the GIA and the civil war that followed. The factor that I felt was missing from the analysis was the emergence of the fundamentalist and anti-Western response by the GIA in response to an economic and cultural model that favoured a very small elite, proposed as universal values what was displayed on our televisions, and implied that to be modern it was necessary to abandon the lifestyles of the past, enter the logic of the market and do everything possible to have access to all the goods (often useless and in any case of programmed obsolescence) that were trendy in our country.
A model of this kind, which I dare not call developmental, had worked in many of our European countries after the Second World War, thanks in part to the tough trade union struggles to raise wages from the starvation levels of the Fascist era. This created an acquisitive capacity that, however limited, could get on the merry-go-round of consumerism, starting with essential goods such as washing machines, telephones, cars etc. The acceleration of the model in the following decades, with more and more products on the market and a contraction of the acquisitive power imposed by the industrial and political world, opened the door to a series of illegal behaviours that became 'necessary' to continue to feel part of the same world as the richest. The answer that has been found up to the present day is the police and military one, which obviously cannot solve anything, since it does not attack the structural basis of the problem.
In the South, in this case I am thinking of what I saw in Algeria, a country very exposed to the Western (French) world overseas, at some point something broke. The consumerist model, which also brought with it other elements of greater rights for women, as well as 'revolutionary' dress codes (such as the miniskirt), united against it not only those who rejected it for simple economic reasons (not having the acquisitive power to satisfy these growing demands from the new generations) but also those who, for their own cultural reasons, saw called into question the only place of power left to them: the sphere of man-woman relations. The combination led to a revolt, which lacked just the ideological detonator that would be religion.
Not being able to be part of our 'model', which was seen as the consumer model and where women were 'free', the response was to cut ties, violently and definitively. The military response calmed things down but obviously did not solve anything structurally since there was no societal awareness of the problem and its components.
In this way, convinced that it was a passing fever, the same model continued to be imposed on increasingly reluctant societies, where the idea that women could become autonomous and equal to men, even in conditions of poverty, ended up becoming the real glue of all the revolts.
We in the West did not understand what was brewing, given also that male-female relations in our societies, while improving, were progressing at a speed worthy of turtles. So, we did not consider it a major problem in our countries, even less so in the southern countries. The same analysis was also carried out by the United Nations and its technical agencies. To this underestimation must be added the complete underestimation of the grabbing of natural resources by the few and the very few, obviously always in the name of what we called "progress", leaving a growing and very numerous majority without the minimum resources to survive, condemning them to urban migration first and then cross-border migration.
The conditions for prolonged conflicts were all there. We Westerners, conscious or not, bearers of the values of a consumerism that requires high levels of income, as well as united with those powers that take away natural resources for our benefit only and as vehicles of modernizing ideologies where, in addition to material goods, the critical point was the questioning of "traditional" structures that almost always allowed to maintain a patriarchy and a total control over women, so all this had to be fought.
They carry out attacks, kill Westerners, show us the way they want to go, that is a return to the past in the form of caliphates where women will have no rights. And us? We send in the military and continue to do business with their resources.
We want to start thinking about how to get out of this. The critical point, more than religious, is how to evolve the male mental construction that sees in the submission of women the only power left to the poor peasants and shepherds to be able to say that there is always someone worse off. The movements that support the claims of peasants and shepherds should work more, and not alone, on the necessary evolution of the man-woman relationship. Women must have more rights, but at the same time men must learn to question themselves. If men do not change as well, fighting only for women's rights will get us nowhere.
Putting this relationship in the centre, which needs to be rebalanced, requires the search for political allies: here too the United Nations could do more and better, both those working on specific issues such as agriculture, and those who focus their action on cultural and political levels. To these should and could be added inter-religious movements and/or alliances (I am thinking for example of the African Council of Religious Leaders), which could bring a good word where technical interventions would fail.
Recognizing the rights over natural resources (and their territories) to local populations is possible, and we have done it in countries like Mozambique, working to change for the better both the politics and the land law and the daily practices of officials and judges. Going down into these territories to have the specific rights of women recognized is another possible step, and the case of Mozambique has shown this again, even if it is all a long process of building alliances, of trust, both with the government and with associations of producers, with universities and other movements. But all this, however commendable, is not enough. If we really want to get to the roots of conflict, we must reduce the fear of the male world at the moment of women's emancipation. Reducing this fear to acceptable levels, which then causes all the violent reactions we see in all these countries.
At present, none of this is being done or, dare I say it, even thought about. The spirit I propose is summed up in the triad I have been defending for many years: dialogue, negotiation and consultation. But in order to start a dialogue, one must learn to recognize and accept the other. And we must commit ourselves to working towards a reduction in power asymmetries at all levels.
In short, there is much to discuss. For the time being, I send this message in a bottle, hoping that someone will be interested.
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