Niger, the Sahel totalitarianism made of sand
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Roshan Amiri
- . October 30, 2021
- . Update: October 30, 2021 8:31 pm
Niger–Niger is organizing itself to approach far more critical and established totalitarianism elsewhere. But, as in other realities highlighted several times, tyranny is made of sand and politics, justice, formal education, the economy, and life itself. It is still here, the sand, that characterizes marriages, missed appointments, many friendships, and social life in general.
A state of urgency has been declared in various regions of the Sahel. That implies, in these areas, a severe limitation on the use of motorcycles, as these are one of the means most used by the Armed Terrorist Groups to sow death and desolation among local farmers. For example, the bandits have adapted and, in one of the latest massacres that stained the ‘three frontiers’ area with blood, they seem to have even used dromedaries. We arrived at the absurdity that, ultimately, almost only the terrorists’ used motorcycles with impunity, and the peasants made do with donkeys or wheelbarrows to transport the sick to the nearest dispensary.
A truck full of firewood, illegally collected by peasants for use in the city kitchen, was burned yesterday in the fields. The new owners of the area are forbidden to do so. In many villages in this and the other regions, people live in terror. Killings and kidnappings are totalitarian.
The first and frontal totalitarianism is, however, that of misery. Provoked, sown, and finally harvested in all these years, primarily through armed violence. In the area as mentioned above, about 150 kilometers from the capital Niamey, over 600 thousand people have had to flee homes, fields, and livestock stolen and then sold elsewhere. Food insecurity is growing in real-time, affecting millions of people in Niger and many more in the Sahel.
Misery is, in turn, the privileged daughter of the god of money who, with totalitarian authority, is the primary and unmatched colonizer of the imagination. Indeed, not today has the totalitarianism of capital established itself as a monopoly without significant competitors. Wars, weapons, humanitarian emergencies, Structural Adjustment Plans, the hoarding of resources, coups d’état, and religious ideologies are nothing more than the expression and consequence of the assumption of the god of money as the totality of history. Too late, we realize that this type of God is nothing but sand stolen from the wind of the merciless indifference of the painted system of death. Thus, from these two totalitarianisms, that of generated misery and that of money, a worse one comes out by tragic fate.
The totalitarianism of the trivialization is fragile and useless, hanging from the sacredness of words and bodies entrusted to the sand of the nameless cemeteries of the sea. The trivialization of suffering and life of those who do not find enough voice to be recognized as human. The totalitarianism of never lived yet individual lives. The totalitarian trivialization of reality is betrayed and manipulated by the daily lie by those who do not care about facts and faces.
The totalitarianism of confinements, social distances, and the trivialization of the poet’s utopia and the uncertain horizon of the prophets. The authoritarianism of banality is the deadliest among the cited because it empties within the breath of eternity that dates back to the first kiss between the human and the divine in every creature. Finally, there remains a mask held together by appearances bartered in exchange for fearful security. Totalitarianism trivializes what happens between man and woman when a new destiny of alliance sprouts by causality—the tyranny of sand that a child’s tears will transform into a flowering tree.
