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Ténéré daféo nikchan .… yes, I’m back there again. The smells, the sounds, the wind. This col­lec­tion of arti­cles, writ­ten over a decade by a lead­ing author­i­ty on the pol­i­tics of Saha­ran nomads, was an absolute delight for me to read. It deals with the very peo­ple (not just the same eth­nic group, but the par­tic­u­lar seg­ment of them, the kel-Aïr of Niger) who first awak­ened me to the nature of pro­to-demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions. I read these arti­cles with a tremen­dous wave of nos­tal­gia. When as a naive toubab, I came to that part of Africa, many years ago, I had been led by the small amount of lit­er­a­ture avail­able on the sub­ject to believe that the Tuareg rep­re­sent­ed a strict­ly strat­i­fied soci­ety, rigid and tra­di­tion­al — the last place to look for any kind of pro­to-demo­c­ra­t­ic ele­ments. But what I saw con­fused me, and ulti­mate­ly enlight­ened me: a maze of con­cil­iar insti­tu­tions, both for­mal and infor­mal, embody­ing all the ele­ments from which demo­c­ra­t­ic the­o­ry evolved in less exot­ic places. Good and bad things, but the same stew-pot of good and bad from which our best insti­tu­tions ulti­mate­ly evolved. I also saw that much that had been writ­ten or assumed was blind to this, shaped by pre­sump­tions that desert nomads where either chaot­ic beings with­out “com­plex” polit­i­cal insti­tu­tions, or a rigid, change­less hier­ar­chy in which dis­cus­sion, rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and equal­i­ty played no part. My eyes told me that nei­ther pre­sump­tion was valid. It was this expe­ri­ence that got me inter­est­ed in the issue of the uni­ver­sal roots of demo­c­ra­t­ic prac­tice, and trig­gered decades of read­ing. Sad­ly, when Steve Muhlberg­er and I began our first work on the sub­ject, there was no pub­lished work on the Tuareg usable for our pur­pose. This book, had it exist­ed then, would have been a cen­ter­piece of our discussion.

The Tuareg, the “Peo­ple of the Blue Vail” who loom in pic­turesque splen­dour in images of the Sahara, are, no mat­ter how alien they may first appear to an out­sider, human beings. They did not come from Mars. In the many years since I encoun­tered them, they have drift­ed more and more into con­tact and involve­ment with the world as a whole. Tuareg musi­cians now cut albums with Euro­pean rock stars, and film crews poke into the more acces­si­ble por­tions of their domain — both devel­op­ments that I could not have imag­ined when I was there. But there is still lit­tle inter­est or knowl­edge of the Touareg as polit­i­cal beings, as peo­ple try­ing to solve the peren­ni­al prob­lems of pow­er, deci­sion-mak­ing, author­i­ty, and inclu­sion that are crit­i­cal to our sur­vival. This book is a bril­liant excep­tion. It’s a great pity that it isn’t avail­able in Eng­lish. But I can pre­dict one thing: some day, it will be avail­able in Temazhek.

con­tains:

16616. (Hélène Clau­dot-Hawad) “Éper­on­ner le monde” [pref­ace]
16617. (Hélène Clau­dot-Hawad) Hon­neur et poli­tique: Les choix stratégiques desTouareg pen­dant la . . . . . coloni­sa­tion française [arti­cle]
16618. (Hélène Clau­dot-Hawad) His­toire d’une bévue colo­niale: Le “sul­tanat” de l’Aïr [arti­cle]
16619. (Hélène Clau­dot-Hawad) La cou­tume absente ou les méta­mor­phoses con­tem­po­raines du
. . . . . poli­tique [arti­cle]
16620. (Hélène Clau­dot-Hawad) Ordre sacré et ordre poli­tique: l’éxemple du pélerinage
. . . . . aux lieux saints chez les Touaregs de l’Aïr [arti­cle]
16621. (Hélène Clau­dot-Hawad) Per­son­nages de l’entre-deux: l’initié, l’énad, l’aggag,
. . . . . le soufi [arti­cle]
16622. (Hélène Clau­dot-Hawad) Élite, hon­neur et sac­ri­fice: La recon­fig­u­ra­tion des
. . . . . savoirs et des pou­voirs nomades [arti­cle]
16623. (Hélène Clau­dot-Hawad) Iden­tité et altérité d’un point de vue touareg [arti­cle]
16624. (Hélène Clau­dot-Hawad) Cap­tif sauvage, esclavage enfant, affranchi cousin… 
. . . . . La mobil­ité statu­taire chez les Touaregs [arti­cle]
16625. (Hélène Clau­dot-Hawad) L’oubli du désert: Regard nomade sur la moder­nité territoriale 
. . . . . [arti­cle]

Use­ful sup­ple­ments to this book are: (Hélène Clau­dot-Hawad) Les Touaregs: Por­trait en frag­ments; (Karl‑G. Prasse) The Tuaregs: The Blue Peo­ple; and (Maguy Vau­ti­er & Jean Sec­chi) Femme Touarègue. Most books avail­able on the Tuareg are in French, but the thin vol­ume by Prasse, trans­lat­ed from Dan­ish into Eng­lish, is a good gen­er­al intro­duc­tion, and touch­es some of the points that Claudet-Hawad deals with.