Gregory Mann. 2015. from Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Nongovermentality

Gregory Mann. 2015. From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Nongovermentality. New York: Cambridge University Press. 281 pp. Gregory Mann's new book is an intriguing exploration of the reconfiguration of political boundaries and the development of NGOs in Mali from the late 1940s through the late 1970s. This study is extremely valuable for the growing number of scholars seeking to explore the impact of international NGOs in the first decades of African independence following colonialism. Rather than provide an overarching survey, individual chapters tackle different interactions between the French and Malian governments with a wide variety of nongovernmental entities and foreign states. The opening chapter offers a fascinating exploration of the career of Mamadou Madiera Keita, an anti-colonial activist who became a colleague and assistant to the prominent French anthropologist Georges Balandier. Keita's radicalism shaped Balandier's analysis during fieldwork in Guinea, and Balandier's research credentials led Keita in new directions as well. The leftist socialist regime in power in Mali from 1960 to 1968 employed sociology to produce and examine new understandings of society. The new moment produced by the creation of an independent Mali required the formation of citizens. This meant reordering the often loose legal and political categories of the colonial era, from women who earned the right to vote as mothers to the power of indigenous chiefs. Instead of allowing anomalies in the same way as the colonial state had, Malian state authorities created a new category of citizens. Of course, this fiction of universality still had room for exclusion, particularly for Toureg people and suspected enemies of the state. These exclusionary measures became even greater after Moussa Troare seized power. Former top members of the regime underwent years of torture in Saharan prisons, and sometimes labored in salt mines as slaves had in earlier years. Varied efforts enforce or erase government controls over migration are another important theme of From Empires to NGOs. The new Malian government faced a major challenge in seeking to impose Malian citizenship on the tens of thousands of Malians who had moved to Sudan and gone on the pilgrimage to Mecca. French officials had only haphazardly tried to document these migrants, given the challenges they placed on colonial bureaucratic controls. Malian officials demanded firmer identification requirements, in large part out of accusations that northern Tuareg migrants were selling other Malians into slavery in Saudi Arabia. …