This weekend I went to Cheikh Anta Diop University. I saw the marks of passage of barbarians who broke, ransacked and set fire to buildings, buses, books and 70-year-old archives. There weren’t many people in what is usually a bustling, lively place, with students revising, lecturers pacing the corridors, other staff and sellers who make the University of Dakar a city within a city. I know these corridors by heart, this square in front of the University Library, these imperfect corridors between faculties and laboratories, these faded walls, these corners invaded by wild grass behind the Cesti, the sacred wood where thousands of students revise, some of whom lay their books and notebooks on the dusty floor. I know these old lecture theatres, Boilat and Mbaye Guèye, where Oumar Ndao passionately taught us about the literature in general and the political subtleties of Garcia Marquez famous novel, The Autumn of The Patriarch. 

Read the column: Preserve our Arts from the Barbarians

I have seen the university scarred, this place of fabrication of Senegalese and African elites has suffered the blind violence of those who are no longer in electoral competition or proposing alternative programmes, but in the destruction of a social and republican model. What hurts the most is the silence of eminent members of the university community, some of whom have even justified these acts of savagery.

There is a desire to destroy the social model by planting the virus of civil war in people’s minds, particularly young people, through ethnic discourse and confrontation. Our old common desire to live together clashes with their project to destroy the Nation as a homogenous entity and the foundation of all political and economic vision. The republican model is also their target because, since their arrival in the public arena, they have constantly threatened its foundations, attacked its principles and used existing anger as a weapon to destroy what unites us and makes us a political society that has chosen democracy and the expression of public freedoms while respecting beliefs and cultural diversity. Ousmane Sonko and the Pastef party are a populist gangrene at the estuary of dual rivers: separatism and Islamism. Both have a common ambition: to drain the Republic of its substance, weaken its foundations and finish it off with a final assault (the famous tchouki final).

Read the column: Senegal Will Win Again

The attempt at insurrection at the beginning of June failed, because from Senghor to Sall, our country has built a strong state that has withstood all external and internal aggressions and threats. So far, Senegal has been an island of resistance to the advance of the Islamist hydra. It has never experienced a military putsch and has defeated the Mfdc, whose current attempts to revive via a political apparatus are doomed to failure. But how long will our country resist? The dikes are collapsing, republican conscience is crumbling everywhere, many intellectuals are losing their footing through fear, cowardice and opportunism; journalists no longer care about the truth but are the sounding board for an openly fascist project. And on the other side, among those who govern, the lack of a sense of state, the absence of seriousness, the constant recourse to insignificant political details in the face of serious threats have long surprised and worried me. Their preoccupations are so far removed from the real issues and challenges facing our country, which is caught in a geographical ring of fire and facing the deep infiltration of the State apparatus by enemies of democracy, secularism and the Republic.

I realise that high public office is often viewed from the angle of privilege, but rarely is it seen as an instance of responsibility, of the imperative to serve the State and to contribute to consolidating the republican legacy received from our elders, from those who shed blood and tears so that this flag continues to fly. But you can’t pick the wrong adversary. When seditious violence tends to form a rhizome; when separatism dons a politician’s cloak; when Islamism takes root at the heart of the State, I know how to situate my adversaries and separate my struggles and consider those who are in the republican arc and those who are not by choice or intellectual wandering. The deaths of March 2021 and those of June 2023, not to mention those of 2022 between the local elections and the legislative elections, all have their origins: They include refusing to conform to democracy, opting for sedition and systematically using human shields to save themselves from private affairs. And ideologically and politically I have not forgotten my tradition.

The fight of my life is anti-fascism and I have opted for republican socialism, the substance of which is the sacredness of the Republic, economic responsibility and the choice of social progress. And in these uncertain times, I never forget that you don’t fight another opponent, no matter what the opposition, when a fascist horde is at the gates of power. Mr Sonko and the fascism he embodies are adversaries who must be fought vehemently and responsibly, without ever abandoning the tools of the law and reasoned political debate.

Annie Ernaux, Sublime Writing of Shame

To ensure that the flag of democracy, freedom and social progress continues to fly, having confronted and defeated the current internal and external threats to national unity, social cohesion and the inviolability of the Republic, republicans on all sides of the political divide must stand together and confront this quasi-civilisational challenge. I have no lessons to give to anyone. But I do endorse the words of Annie Ernaux: « I write to avenge my race. » And so, I am addressing the Left, the Left that has lost its compass and given itself hand and foot to a political current that has been our adversary for two centuries. A current that promotes fanaticism, obscurantism, the opponents of enlightenment, schools and culture.  The Senegalese left has a fine history, rich in social and democratic achievements, but part of it has been lost to calculations and to international changes that have left the progressive movement little chance in all parts of the world.

Yet; what saddens me about this left, which did not form an alliance with the Pastef party while retaining its identity, but opted instead to blindly follow Mr Sonko’s lead, is the conscious choice, out of hatred for one person and a fantasy of chaos, to descend into organised sedition.  In truth, I am ashamed for figures that I once respected and admired to the point of having campaigned alongside them and having co-signed articles with them. And I remind this left of this: violence is never a viable and serious option. In the case of armed struggle, the best militants always lose their lives. And in the event of insurrectionary disorder, it is our people, the people from working-class neighbourhoods, the fragile, the precarious who pay the high price. I come from the people of Pikine, Guédiawaye, Thiaroye, this triangle of the forgotten and the oppressed. A precious thread of melancholy binds me to dead people, victims of a violence of which they do not always measure the political springs. 

Whether they come from the petty bourgeois of Dakar who are graduates and professionally integrated, intellectuals who fantasise chaos, idle wanderers on Twitter and Facebook, Senegalese in the Diaspora who, from Europe and America, call for civil war, or expatriates comfortably installed in the Mermoz or Mamelles neighbourhoods, accusations about me, of contempt for the people or condescension, leave me unmoved.

The Rent of Indignity

I know who I am and what I stand for, and where my people still live. It’s my comrades, my friends, their friends, my family and friends of my family who are suffering the horrors of the violence promoted by an irresponsible political caste with no empathy whatsoever for the oppressed little people. I can only be shocked by so much bloodshed, and appalled by the carelessness of those who, instead of calling for peace, are taking advantage of the confusion to settle personal scores and take revenge for yesterday’s vices. It’s our own people who are suffering the destruction of their meagre resources: the Auchan workers, the street vendors, the fruit and vegetable sellers, the greengrocers, the temporary workers… They lost everything because of the compulsive lies of a man who decided to evade his country’s justice system in a private matter, because of the irresponsibility of his political allies and members of civil society, and because of the failure of the State to keep its promise to protect the weak and vulnerable, to educate and instruct children and to imprint in their hearts a sense of civic duty and a cult of the Republic, which should represent our common allegiance. In order to establish who is responsible for these deaths, we need a serious and thorough investigation that goes beyond mere announcements.

The Value of an Imperfect System

The daughters and sons of… Which politician lost a child in the demonstrations of March 2021 and June 2023? Grief strikes the mothers and fathers of poor and defenceless families whose children have been turned into human shields by Ousmane Sonko.

In the Republic, power is acquired through electoral channels, especially as our country has shown on several occasions that it knows how to organise free and transparent elections. The proof is that the government has a minority in the National Assembly. Dakar has been governed since 2009 by a radical opposition party. Not resorting to violence is a choice of courage and greatness in the face of adversity, especially at a time when populism, demagoguery and the excitement of Internet users are leading us to all kinds of excesses. Only those who know how to adorn themselves with nobility and hauteur in all circumstances will make this choice. And that, fundamentally, is what politics is all about.

By Hamidou ANNE / hamidou.anne@lequotidien.sn

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH / Serigne S. DIAGNE