Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
Excellent updates, as usual, and always nice to see the Greco-Egyptians continue on. Such an ancient and integral community there, it is little wonder Egypt today, without the traditional Greek and Jewish Egyptians, has lost its bearings somewhat.
Ever the ethnocentrist (I kid,) I'm very much looking forward to next week's updates, but I've enjoyed the Persia and Caucuses updates as well. I was going to ask for more background and detail on the Egypt story, but I suppose many if not most of my curiosities will be answered by the Ottoman update.
Great and fascinating work, as always.
I'm currently working with JE on just that
. The map (which will probably be for the "present day" of TTL) is revised with each new update, and will be posted once JE gives it the go-ahead.I don't find it surprising, but perhaps it's just professional habit
. The Abbasids actually came into power partly as a reaction of the formerly Persian parts of the Caliphate against the Omayyad rule, although I would advise caution in overplaying the ethnic angle as the leadership and initial ideology was clearly rooted in Arabic ancestry and Islamic values (at a time when many ethnic Persians were still of Mazdaic faith). But yes, the Abbasid court was quite consistently imbued with Iranic culture and, in many regards, consciously replicated Sasanid practices. On the other hand, Iran has also shown a considerable ability to absorb and integrate outside influences from said conquerors, often in a remarkably harmonious way (some of the credit for this should probably go the Abbasids indeed). Some of the most significant authors I teach about in my course of Medieval Arabic Literature are indeed ethnic Persians living in Iranian courts (sometimes with orginally Turkic dynasties), just to make an outstanding example. And the notable Turkic and Mongol presence was fairly well integrated too.
True (pace Gibbon).
It's a lot feebler than the Chinese counterpart, particularly because, all across the pre-modern Islamic period, "claiming to be an Iranian empire" was problematic both in the "Iranian" and the "Empire" bit. This does not mean it was not done, or at least tried. But between the Sassanids and the Safavids, dynasties spanning the majority of the Plateau tended to be non-Iranic, relatively short-lived, or both. Most of the time, you hade different regional dynastic centers jockeying for control, and little perception of Iran as a geopolitical unit (as opposed to a cultural one; in that regard, you could say that poetry trumps Shahdom as a lasting institution
). Fair enough. Note the almost-a-millennium-long gap between Sassanids and Safavids, meaning that yes, the title of Shah and the geographical extent are pretty much the main elements of continuity.
Although, as noted above, there were some short-lived Shahdoms during that time. I could also nitpick that the Sasanids and Parthians arguably focused more upon Mesopotamia than the plateau, but that's beside the point, and debatable anyway.
Certainly the Pahlavi dynasty has not been long term successful. I agree that the killing people bit wasn't of much help.
I expect that the ideology of the Persian religious left ITTL will look a lot like Shariati's "Red Shi'ism," with Abacarist ideas of self-rule and anti-colonialism combined with a conception of class struggle that borrows from the Marxists and narodniks. The Shi'a symbolism used in the 2009 protests IOTL might also be a model of the kind of rhetoric and imagery TTL's left would use.
On the far right, I'd expect that they'd be more concerned about the Sunni minority and about the creeping social change to which even many conservatives are acquiescing. The radical right clergy do exist, but they don't hold power outside a few districts, given that they were virtually wiped out in the cities during the 60s and that they were secondary players in a revolution dominated by the secular and religious left, the army, and the more modernizing conservatives.
Egyptian nationalism played out somewhat differently ITTL - Egypt was a very nationalist country during the 20s through 40s and is still one of the more Westphalian and centralized states, but its nationalism included the minorities, who were seen as part of the heritage of Egypt. The minorities had to conform somewhat, including learning Arabic (which proved to be good for everyone in the long run), but there was none of the wholesale expropriation and de facto expulsion that took place under Nasser IOTL. And of course, the fact that Israel never became a thing ITTL has made life much more comfortable for Egyptian Jews.
Alexandria at the turn of the 21st century is a very polyglot place - in addition to the traditional Greeks, Jews and Armenians, there are sizable Italian and Russian populations, neighborhoods full of Sa'idis and Sudanese, and significant numbers of Ethiopians, Baganda and East Africans. And yes, the forthcoming update will show more of how it got (or stayed) that way.
Aram Sakalian, The Young Ottomans from Tanzimat to Democracy (Stamboul: Abdülhamid University Press, 2011)
… The 1952 constitution and the formation of the Ottoman Union [1] was a key turning point in Ottoman political history. Since the beginning of the Tanzimat in 1839, the Ottoman world had continually restructured itself, and its bodies and methods of government had changed repeatedly and often violently. But after 1952 there were no fundamental changes in Ottoman constitutional structure: there were adjustments, certainly, but the political system has continued to function in the same framework. This is not to say that there haven’t been changes, but the changes since the 1950s have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
One often-cited example is the role of the Sultan. In the Ottoman Union, he was no longer even the formal chief executive, and laws were promulgated in the government’s name without the need for his assent. Under the 1952 constitution, he was a state symbol and religious overlord only. Nevertheless, the fact that the Union depended on him both for internal legitimacy and its role as center of the Muslim world gave him moral authority and meant that he had a continuing political role: indeed, a role that was sometimes more powerful for being freed from mundane politics.
The seeds of the Sultan’s new function had been planted after the 1911 revolution, when Abdülhamid II, reduced to a formal role domestically, turned his focus to diplomacy. A succession of Sultans, now trained as diplomats from childhood, offered their services to resolve disputes between Muslim countries, leading to the Porte becoming almost a mini-Consistory for the Islamic world. This extended to the outermost tier of the Union, where the government in Stamboul had no political power but where the Porte’s proposals for joint action or dispute resolution always got a respectful hearing. Many of the Sultans’ diplomatic initiatives were initially proposed by the government, but it was their prestige that carried the efforts through, and as such, they were influential in shaping and execution of Ottoman diplomacy.
Also, beginning in the 1940s with the rise of the Legatum Humanitatis doctrine [2], the Sultan increasingly became trustee of the holy places. This was formalized in the 1952 constitution, which made him protector of all holy sites within the first and second tiers of the Union and the head of a unified public Waqf. This put the holy places of all religions beyond everyday politics, but in another way, the Sultan became their political arbiter, resolving dissension among their elected governing boards and mediating between them and the surrounding municipal and sanjak governments.
Last but far from least has been the Sultans’ contribution to Ottoman literature, scholarship and jurisprudence. A 1965 constitutional amendment took the succession out of the hands of the House of Osman and provided that new Sultans would be elected by the ulema from eligible members of the royal family and then approved by the Meclis. The ulema has typically chosen older members of the dynasty with proven records of religious scholarship, several of whom have also been notable poets. These Sultans’ rulings and essays on religious subjects are respected well beyond the Union’s borders. The Ottoman Sultan is no longer truly a monarch, but he is still a very real Caliph…
… The organs of government have also evolved, due to economic as well as political factors. The formula for distribution of oil revenue set by the 1952 constitution has held firm and much of it has been devoted to rural development, leading to nearly all the first and second tiers of the Union being part of the developed world by the 1990s. Over time, greater wealth and interconnectedness has meant, on the one hand, a greater sense of self-sufficiency and desire for local control, and on the other hand, an increased need for cooperation with adjacent regions. Both of these have tended to increase the second tier of the Union at the expense of the first, with more directly-governed sanjaks joining together to become autonomous vilayets. There has also been some motion the other way as vilayets have broken up over internal disputes or sanjaks have seceded from them (the ill-fated attempt to create a Levantine Vilayet in the 1980s being the most famous example), but where first-tier sanjaks represented more than 60 percent of the Union’s population and land area in 1960, they are less than 35 percent of it today.
Part of the trend toward consolidation, and one which is viewed as positive by some and worrying by others, has been the formation of vilayets among ethnic minorities or for regional cooperation. During the 1970s, a number of sanjaks with Armenian majorities or pluralities formed a vilayet and have undertaken joint educational, cultural and economic development projects with Armenia in the decades since. The Armenian vilayet has taken on a status similar to the Principalities of Rhodes, Samos and Cyprus: a second-tier Union territory and thus an integral part of its constitutional structure, but one that often uses its autonomy to expand ties with foreign countries. Armenia’s own accession to the Union as a third-tier state with defensive commitments to the Porte [3] has alleviated fears that the vilayet might represent a threat, and the courts have strictly enforced religious and ethnic equality, but given the Ottoman state’s centrifugal tendencies during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some Turks and Arabs still regard the minority vilayets with caution.
There have been several constitutional measures designed to counteract potential separatism. One, enacted in 1978, was the formation of a Federal Council to facilitate regular meetings of the vilayets and sanjaks, resolve disputes between federal units in situations where the parties are reluctant to involve the Meclis or the courts, and to promote joint action. Another amendment in 1984 codified the areas in which vilayets and first-tier sanjaks could conduct foreign policy and gave Stamboul a broader national security veto. This veto has never actually been used, but its existence has given the central government influence in shaping the federal units’ relations with their neighbors.
A final amendment affecting the Union’s federal structure was ratified in 1996, allowing the formation of vilayets with intermediate degrees of autonomy. This was appealing to sanjaks that wanted some degree of regional cooperation but did not want to entrust a vilayet government with all the powers not specifically reserved to Stamboul. Hejaz would become such a state in 1999, but the most prominent example thus far has occurred in the Balkan provinces. In 1994, Sarajevo entered a sanjak-level cultural and tourism arrangement with Serbia [4] which, despite alarm on the far right in both places, proved successful enough for other Bosnian sanjaks and even those outside Bosnia to join. By the early 2000s, Bulgaria also wanted in, and the governments on both sides of the border wanted to deepen their cooperation beyond what was permitted for sanjaks.
Before 1996, this would have been impossible: the independent Balkan countries had no desire to join the Ottoman Union even in its outermost tier and the sanjaks on the Ottoman side were too diverse and fractious to form a traditional vilayet. But the amendment allowed the formation of a very loose vilayet that had expanded foreign policy powers but had little function other than to be part of a Balkan treaty union. After much negotiation between the sanjaks and involvement from the Meclis and even the Porte, such an entity was formed in 2007, and also included, for the first time, non-territorial collectives of Serbs, Greeks and Bulgarians with autonomous cultural institutions. In 2010, Dalmatia, Romania and Croatia acceded to the framework treaties – they, too, wanted greater cooperation with the Union in a way that didn’t force them to join it – and it appears that the Balkans may be the next emerging regional grouping …
… Socially, the Ottoman Union continued to be turbulent during the 1950s and 60s, The land reform struggles continued, and although democracy leveld the playing field, it was not in itself a solution. Politics in rural districts remained as volatile as it had been in the 1940s – sometimes more so, now that local elites couldn’t stop organized slates of peasant activists from seeking power – and municipal and sanjak elections were often violent. During the 1970s, when the recession threatened both tenant farmers and smallholders, the federal government intervened, earmarking a portion of oil revenues to purchase land and to shore up agricultural cooperatives. This resulted in land politics becoming somewhat less antagonistic and resulted in millions of dunams being distributed to individuals and cooperatives, but land reform is an ongoing process; in the meantime, many of the zu’ama feudal families have directed their resources into business and remain influential.
The countryside has also been affected by the spread of mass culture from the cities, with television becoming widespread throughout the Union by the 1970s and new media increasingly prevalent after the 1990s. This has led to a decline in the influence of traditional authority figures, both religious and within the family, and has also resulted in the spread of feminism well beyond the cautious version that existed in rural areas after the 1911 revolution. For the most part, this has taken place on a level outside politics – as in Persia, the increase in educational and job opportunities for rural women has made them more economically independent and culturally influential – but it has crossed into the political realm on a number of occasions when equality legislation has met vigorous opposition. This has been a regional divide as well as one between the city and the country, and opposition to social change was one of the main factors that motivated the formation of the Hejaz vilayet, leading to stormy legislative debates and clashes between the vilayet government and the courts…
… The Union era has been marked by simultaneous Ottomanist and local revivals. In Stamboul and in other major cities, mass culture and earlier literary and cinematic traditions [5] have built a truly national artistic tradition, consciously drawing from all the Union’s cultures and favoring grand epics and broad regional themes. At the same time, many of the same places, and others, explored new ways to express local cultural traditions and made use of local languages, history and symbolism. The localist revivals were often sponsored by the vilayets or autonomous institutions: the Chayat Haaretz movement, whose cultural and educational entities were granted constitutional status in 1982, promoted Hebrew literature and cinema extensively, while the Mesopotamian vilayet did the same for works that expressed cultural Arabism. But the national and local artistic movements have sometimes overlapped, with groups as diverse as Bosnian Muslims, Lebanese Maronites and Baghdadi Jews taking part in both. And both have, at various times, been influenced by political and religious currents, with socialism, feminism, religious reformism and the peasant movement all having their impact.
These trends have not been confined to the fine arts. Where culture and art interact with folkways, such as cuisine and interior design, the combination of mass media, mobility and deepening interest have placed local traditions and the emerging national fusion in continuous dialogue. Turkish styles of architecture and design may be found in the Hejaz and traditionally Arab ones in Sarajevo; the cuisines of the Union’s many minorities are often found together around the table; and Sunni, Shi’ite, Jewish and Christian celebrations are public occasions for the entire country. In every way, the integral Ottoman world is becoming more of a union, but it is and will be a union of distinct parts…
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Renzo Zarrouk, North Africa in a Post-Westphalian World (Tunis: Mediterranean, 2015)
… By the 1950s, Egypt had fully recovered from the Nile War. After a turbulent start, the Nile Authority [6] had won the public trust and achieved an amicable and fair distribution of water resources. The Peace Railroad from Alexandria to Kampala, which would eventually form a link in a chain of freight railways that extended all the way to Cape Town, boosted regional trade and brought Egyptian companies to Kush, Buganda and East Africa even as Ethiopian and Baganda investment flowed north. The flow of money and trade was joined by a flow of people, as East Africans and Somalis sought work in the industrial cities of Lower Egypt. Like every Egyptian government since Riyad Pasha’s, the postwar governments were influenced by neo-Mu’tazilite reformism [7] and invested heavily in education, scientific research and industrial development, sponsoring advances in desert agriculture and taking part in the global development of high-yield crops.
Egyptian nationalism softened somewhat during this period, as the bloody lesson of the Nile War and the emerging era of regionalism sank in. This manifested itself not only in the newly cooperative relationship with neighboring countries but in domestic cultural policy. The nationalism of the Egyptian Republic had always been inclusive of minorities, calling them an ancient and indispensable part of Egypt’s heritage, but through the 1940s, this came at the price of pressure to assimilate and an official skepticism (albeit not a ban) toward minority cultural institutions. The assimilationist policies were steadily scaled back during the 1950s through 70s, and by 1980, the only one that remained was the law requiring Arabic to be the universal medium of education: Greek, Armenian and Italian literature and art flourished, and minority institutions operated without restriction and were consulted by the government on cultural matters. At the same time, the Upper Egyptian and Sudanese communities in the northern cities swelled to hundreds of thousands and then millions, adding their own element to the cultural mix.
The emerging Egypt was still a politically and economically centralized state, with Cairo holding an eighth of the population and almost all meaningful government institutions, and with Cairo, Khartoum and the Nile Delta cities accounting for 90 percent of industrial output. But outside the political realm, its centralism was fast declining…
… Egypt’s interest in scientific and industrial development brought it into increasing contact with its western neighbor. Bornu’s growing oil wealth, its vulnerability to climate change and need for water security, and its state-Belloist ideology of the common good, all inclined it toward large engineering projects, and Egypt’s neo-Mu’tazilism and its own water conservation needs inclined it the same way. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the two countries collaborated in expanding the pipeline from the Nubian fossil aquifer, drawing its water for thirsty Egyptian and Libyan cities and using it to replenish Lake Chad. Both also engaged in joint desalination and water treatment projects, developing many of the technologies that are used in desert countries today.
Not all the megaprojects met with success. The Aswan Dam, while greatly beneficial for Egyptian industry, has had adverse effects on soil salinity and has necessitated costly drainage works in the affected regions. The same factor stalled Bornu’s attempt to dig a hydroelectric canal to the Sabkhat Ghuzayyil depression: an alarming rise in the salinity of coastal soil halted the project in 1994 and forestalled any attempt to replicate the project in Qattara, although a smaller canal continues to lead seawater to evaporation ponds for chemical harvesting. Thus far, also, Bornu’s plan to build an enormous solar farm in the Sahara has proven economically unfeasible, although the technologies developed during the course of failed efforts have made Bornu a leader in solar energy development, and the projects themselves (in which nearly all citizens have participated via their public labor obligation) have contributed to a sense of accomplishment…
… Algeria found that it was pulled in two directions as much after becoming an autonomous overseas territory as before. Five million people of full or partial Algerian descent lived in metropolitan France or the overseas departments in 1970, and that number had increased to eight million by 2010, which meant that nearly every Algerian family had one or more members elsewhere in France. The Algerian economy was thoroughly integrated into the French one, with Algiers and Oran departments exceeding the median French living standard in 1994. The future Napoléon VII’s 1975 marriage to Zohra Benyahia, who he had met at the Sorbonne, was the social event of the year, and meant that after 1998, France had an empress from a prominent Oran family of Arab and Spanish ancestry. A third referendum in 1985 saw support for full independence drop to 21 percent, and since then, the debate has largely been between maintaining the status quo and entering an association relationship similar to that between Kazembe and Germany or Tunisia and Italy.
At the same time, Algerians reached for a leadership position among the nations of the Maghreb. As early as the 1960s, the Algerian government reached agreements with the neighboring countries on cultural and educational exchanges and regional water management [8]; these deepened in the 1970s and 80s, and one of the few real disputes between Paris and Algiers during this period was the extent of the latter’s foreign relations authority. The devolution of self-government to Algeria was a compromise of France’s historic centralism, but Paris kept tight hold of political and economic relations with foreign countries, and it was not until 1992 that Algeria won the power to make trade and development deals and to move toward a unified Maghrebi road and rail network.
On an unofficial level, there were many fewer obstacles to cooperation. As the largest regional economy, Algeria became the financial center of the Maghreb, and its universities attracted students from Morocco, Tunisia and the Rif Republic. This would affect domestic politics – as the Rif had brought Abacarist ideas home from Algeria at the turn of the twentieth century, the Algerian left was influenced by Rif radicalism at the turn of the twenty-first – and it also gave rise to a cultural movement that combined the pan-Maghrebi ideas of the 1930s and 40s with the futurism of Paris. Since 2000, the studios and workshops of Algiers and Oran have become centers of the Maghrebi avant-garde…
… Morocco contested Algeria’s claim to leadership of the region. Algeria was richer, but Morocco was more populous, and although its venerable monarchy had yielded to constitutional rule, it was the region’s oldest continuously-existing state. Moroccan traditionalism was a counterpoint to Algerian futurism, and Morocco’s universities and cultural institutions competed with Algeria’s for prestige in the Maghreb and the world. Morocco, too, was more active in promoting Berber language and culture than Algeria was, and although Arabic remained the prestige language, the Berber languages were used for education by the 1980s and a Berber and Darija literature was beginning to develop.
But Morocco was not as economically dynamic as Algeria or Tunisia, and its relative lack of industrialization and modern infrastructure meant that it lagged further behind and that opportunities for graduates were hard to come by. This underemployment combined with increasingly easy mobility meant that, by century’s end, Morocco was suffering a brain drain: its universities were world-class, but their alumni were as likely to live in Paris, Timbuktu or Dakar as in Casablanca or Fez. A growing tourism industry and the beginnings of a local information sector were beginning to stem the exodus by 2010, but it is still uncertain how many graduates these industries will be able to absorb…
… And the Kingdom of the Arabs – or Tinariwen (“the Deserts”), as it was called after 1974 – was where past and future met. In 1970, it already had the highest per-capita income in the world, and after a moderate retrenchment during the recession, it became even richer during the 1980s and 90s. This did nothing to stop the anomie and resentment of foreign workers that existed among many of the younger generation. The government’s attempt to protect traditional ways of life through subsidized luxury nomadism reached absurd heights, with many tribes living in a style that resembled motorized royal caravans and having access to the world’s entertainment and educational resources via satellite media, but this had worn thin among young people by the turn of the century, and the government jobs offered to them as an alternative were also unattractive. In the 1990s, and increasingly during the 2000s, Tinariwen experienced its own brain drain, as university-educated citizens took their subsidies and went to find more fulfilling jobs in Algiers or Dakar.
The Shelterers – the anti-technological communities that were the other alternative for those who wanted to opt out of the kingdom’s society [9] – also grew. Many of the new recruits were educated, which meant that the Shelterer villages and peri-urban neighborhoods became centers of anti-modernist literature and art, but they also added to the movement’s fanaticism. The terrorism that had already existed before 1960 among a minority of Shelterers became more widespread and effective, leading to an increase in repression. Shelterer communities were increasingly monitored and restricted, and the majority who condemned the violence but refused to cooperate with the government were treated as if they too were terrorists. By the late 1980s, the Shelterers had largely been driven out of the cities: some went to Mali or the Toucouleur Empire where they were more tolerated, and others retreated to the deep desert and tried to evade both government patrols and their own more fanatic brethren. In the meantime, the militants among them expanded their targets from oil wells and Tinariwen government buildings to the countries that were helping to fight them: the first Shelterer bombing in Algiers occurred in 1998, and by 2005 there had been attacks in Timbuktu, Bornu and Paris.
Tinariwen today shows the two faces of wealth: its people are fabulously rich, but their society still has difficulty coming to terms with the changes that wealth has brought. The government has recently begun to recognize the need to provide better life opportunities for young people, and has announced programs to diversify the economy and to bring scientific and creative jobs to the country. To do so, though, it will have to find a modus vivendi with the Shelterers, and with the moderate Shelterer communities alienated from the state and victory over the fanatics proving elusive, that will not be easy. Maybe the Shelterers further to the south, who are better integrated into their societies – especially those in the Toucouleur Empire, whose jurisprudence has been influential in Tinariwen for generations – can be the bridge, if enough people within Tinariwen are willing to cross it…
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Ali Faraj al-Jaber, The Khaleejis (Abu Dhabi: Jumhuriya, 2014)
… For the emirates of the Persian Gulf, the nineteenth century lasted well into the twentieth. The Trucial Coast came under British suzerainty in 1820, and Bahrain and Qatar during the 1860s, but the emirates were internally self-governing and British political and administrative ideas had little impact. Nor, due to their isolation, were they swept by the currents of Islamic reformism that were taking shape in Africa, India and the Ottoman world. They were almost untouched by the Great War, and even the Imperial era passed them by with the exception of a troop levy (mostly filled by slaves) to fight in the Indian War of Independence. A traveler who visited Abu Dhabi or Bahrain in the 1930s would find life little different from a century before.
The timeless façade that such a traveler would see, however, was already deceptive: under the surface, great changes were under way. Oil exploration in Qatar and Bahrain had begun before the Indian war, and commercial exploitation commenced in 1927; in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, further exploration would lead to the development of commercial wells in the late 1940s and early 50s. This would bring new wealth to countries that had traditionally subsisted on pearling and herding, and as importantly, would bring foreign workers by the thousands. By 1960, there were as many Baloch, Somali and East African workers in the oil emirates as there were native-born people, and the influx showed no sign of slowing.
Ideas were also coming to the Trucial Coast, filtering in from the prophetic Ibadis of East Africa and from the desert Bedouins who had begun to develop a Wahhabi-inflected Belloism based on tribal communities as early as the 1870s. [10] These would gain their first purchase in Fujairah and Kalba, emirates in the eastern part of the Trucial Coast which had split off from Sharjah during the early twentieth century. Fujairah had an independent-minded ruler who saw Belloism as a means of resisting Imperial-era bullying; Kalba, even more remarkably, was ruled de facto by an East African slave named Ali between 1911 and 1952. In 1937, after the sheikh died without adult sons, Ali was named regent, and continued to exercise influence even after the new sheikh’s majority. [11] Among other innovations, Ali abolished slavery, incorporating slaves as members of their former owners’ tribes; this would be replicated in Fujairah during the early 1940s. His state was puritanical, in keeping with Wahhabi austerity, but it emphasized both religious and secular education, and those who had previously been at the bottom of the tribal hierarchy now had a chance to rise on merit.
Yet more radical changes were in store for the oil emirates, where foreign workers began to unionize in the 1930s and were demanding the rights of citizenship by 1960. Initially, the sheikhs banned unions and repressed popular movements harshly, but that was an increasingly untenable position to take in the evolving British empire of the time. By the 1950s, the Qatari government, somewhat like Liberia, tried to incorporate the foreign workers into its society by adopting them into the existing tribal structure; Dubai, under a relatively forward-looking sheikh, granted selective naturalization to educated workers and allowed the unions, along with local notables, a place on his advisory board.
In Bahrain and Abu Dhabi, which had withdrawn from the British sphere after the empire converted itself into a commonwealth, a period of cautious opening in the 1940s was followed by repression. By this time, though, foreign workers were a majority in Abu Dhabi, and their unions, led by East Africans and inspired by the prophetic Ibadism of Zanzibar, had a strong clandestine organization. In Bahrain, immigrant oil workers were a minority, but they had begun to build alliances with the indigenous Shi’a majority which was inspired by the Persian left.
In 1968, after protests over working conditions spiraled into violence, revolution swept Abu Dhabi: the Eight Emirates of the Trucial Coast were now seven emirates and one republic, and the state had transformed overnight from a tribal sheikhdom to a modernist polity that was as much East African, Baloch and Sindhi as Arab. Bahrain had its revolution in 1977, triggered by the Persian one two years earlier and with much of its arms coming from the Persian religious left; as in Abu Dhabi, the provisional government declared universal citizenship and elected a multi-ethnic cabinet, although here, Shi’a Arabs were firmly in the majority.
The revolutions set the stage for much of what has happened in the Persian Gulf since then. The Bahraini republic has not always been a happy one: the descendants of Sunni and Ibadi oil workers have sometimes clashed with the Shi’a, and with only a few exceptions, politics break down along ethnic and tribal lines. There are signs that this is changing: in the most recent elections, multiethnic leftist and liberal parties (the latter led by a Bahraini Jew whose family had originally arrived from Baghdad in 1879) combined to take 40 percent of parliamentary seats, and the universities and mixed urban neighborhoods have become something of a cultural leveler. Economic diversification, which some say has made Bahrain the Singapore of the Gulf, has also brought the different ethnic groups together, although for some, the changes brought on by industrialization and tourism are a step too far.
In Abu Dhabi, the republic has been more harmonious, and interethnic relations have progressed to the point where mixed marriages are common, but this has come at the price of being a de facto single-party state, with the United Labor Party dominating every election since the revolution. This has predictably led to the evolution of a rentier state with widespread corruption and political fiefdoms, albeit tempered by labor ideology and Ibadi conceptions of the common good. Again, there are signs that this is changing – in the 2011 election, the ruling party lost its two-thirds majority, and independent media and schools have grown in number – but the party is fighting back, and the country seems likely to enter a new era of political conflict.
The existence of the republics has, in turn, put pressure on the remaining emirates to democratize, especially the ones with large immigrant populations. Both Dubai and Qatar moved toward formal democracy in the 1980s and 90s, aided by the degree to which the immigrant elites had already been incorporated into the local power structures. The emirs, both having taken the title of king by this time, retained the whip hand, but ceded more power to elected parliaments and courts, and in Dubai’s case, completed the process of naturalizing those immigrant workers who satisfied residence and Arabic-language qualifications. In the eastern emirates, which were little touched by oil wealth and immigration, society remains conservative – the formal abolition of slavery in Sharjah did not occur until 1981 – but even here, there has been movement toward elected advisory councils, and several of the sheikhs have sought to emulate the consensus government that has grown up in Kalba and Fujairah. These states are the poorest in the region, and the journey to modernity – especially for women and the traditional lower classes – remains a long one, but the first steps have been taken…
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[1] See post 5352.
[2] See posts 5147, 5153 and 5154.
[3] See post 6749.
[4] See post 6563.
[5] See post 3232.
[6] See post 4890.
[7] See posts 1099 and 3402.
[8] See post 6208.
[9] See post 6208.
[10] See post 553.
[11] Lest I be accused of an overactive imagination, this is nearly OTL: an East African slave named Barut was governor of Kalba for many years, and in 1937, the local notables chose him as regent but he was vetoed by Britain. He continued to serve as governor of the city into the early 1950s. A couple of the Trucial sheikhs were almost Imperial Roman in the way they entrusted administration to the slaves of their household.
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Please, do yourself the favor of reading it all the way through.
In comparison to the region in OTL, it's quite bittersweet to see how the Ottoman Union played out.
Egypt is excellently done - I dig the partnership with Bornu especially. It's a pity the Aswan Dam was still built, but I suppose it's unavoidable for a megaproject-minded regime. What's Lake *Nasser called in TTL, I wonder? I'm hoping Abu Simbel, Philae, and other sites were relocated as OTL.
My usual distaste for French Algeria is tempered by delight at how Algerian France has become, so congratulations on pulling that off
Both countries' ideologies incline them toward megaprojects, so they're natural partners once large-scale water and environmental management projects become a priority. Fortunately, their ideologies also incline them toward sanity, so neither will go completely overboard.
The Aswan Dam is a natural project for an Egypt that wants energy for industrial development, as this one plainly does. IOTL, Aswan was marked out as a dam site as early as the nineteenth century, and the Low Dam was built between 1899 and 1902, so it would be on the to-do list of almost any modernizing Egyptian government.
They probably named the lake after Riyad Pasha or Muhammad Abduh, or maybe something romantic like "Lake of the Pharaohs." And don't worry about Abu Simbel or Philae: one thing that Egyptian nationalism has been very firm about ITTL is preserving the country's antiquities.
My usual distaste for French Algeria is tempered by delight at how Algerian France has become, so congratulations on pulling that off
Well, it's an Algerian kind of French Algeria - it has somewhat more autonomy than New Caledonia or French Polynesia IOTL, plus limited foreign relations authority and Consistory membership. The Algerians are masters in their own house, even if that house is a building in a larger compound.
And yes, the consequences of a more equitable colonial era include not only Europe having more of a presence in Africa but Africa having more of one in Europe, especially France and Portugal. That's been unfolding ITTL for quite a while.
Of course, that's starting from a very low bar. The Tuaregs ITTL are no doubt unhappy about Shelterer terrorism, police repression and anomie, but at least they're not dealing with al Qaeda and full-scale civil war.
The countries that really would have cause to complain compared to OTL are the eastern Trucial emirates - without an equivalent to the UAE, they don't get those sweet subsidies from Abu Dhabi.
"Lake of the Pharaohs" is a name everyone in ATL Egypt would accept, regardless of their ethnicity, mother tongue, religion or political leanings - throughout its history, after all, ancient Egypt had pharaohs from a variety of ethnicities, up to and including Greek/Macedonian and Nubian ones; and such a romantic name would do much to attract tourists, too.
On the other hand, their ATL equivalent isn't known for exploiting foreign workers to the point that their condition isn't dissimilar from outright slavery, and is being targeted by Islamic fundamentalists instead of sponsoring them... I thought the Trucial States ITTL were a (loose) federation as in OTL though, not independent states?
I'm pretty sure I've only mentioned the Trucial States in passing up to now - it's been established that they were in the British sphere and that they contributed troops during the Indian war of independence, but nothing more than that. If I did say something about a federation, we can assume that I was referring to a customs union (which does exist among some of the emirates) or that several of them have joined the third tier of the Ottoman Union.
West Africa will be the next and last academic update. Any more thoughts on this one in the meantime?
Finally, I have fixed my internet!
Looks like the Middle East is maturing better ITTL, though the extremist Shelterer communities are a cause for concern. I can't think of anything more since this region is not my forte, but it is nice to see Arab world being less outwardly volatile and more inclusive, though not without the rolling of a few heads.
Looks like the Middle East is maturing better ITTL, though the extremist Shelterer communities are a cause for concern. I can't think of anything more since this region is not my forte, but it is nice to see Arab world being less outwardly volatile and more inclusive, though not without the rolling of a few heads.
For some reason, I really want to see future posts include excerpts of history books for children.
We all love how positively Byzantine this world is in its myriad identities- I'd like to see how kids are brought to understand it.
Actually, there are really two strands to that-
How kids in the Westphalian countries (for instance, the US) understand the strange way people overseas do things, and how that contrasts from when they used to be more like the States...
And how kids in post-Westphalian countries, accustomed to its complexity, try and understand the simplicity of previous centuries (and those backwards Yanks, possibly.)
We all love how positively Byzantine this world is in its myriad identities- I'd like to see how kids are brought to understand it.
Actually, there are really two strands to that-
How kids in the Westphalian countries (for instance, the US) understand the strange way people overseas do things, and how that contrasts from when they used to be more like the States...
And how kids in post-Westphalian countries, accustomed to its complexity, try and understand the simplicity of previous centuries (and those backwards Yanks, possibly.)
They have, but they were late in doing so. After the town vs. country struggles of the 1910s and 20s, and after the major cities were broken off into separate sanjaks, they were reluctant to get back together, and clan rivalries in the hills didn't help matters. Ultimately, as rural Albanian society modernized, joint development projects became desirable, and the law on vilayets became more flexible, the Albanian sanjaks did club together, but their union is a loose one.
It helped that many of the twentieth-century conflicts were pre-empted and that others were channeled into the political process - this meant that when heads did roll, they could generally be contained.
On the first question, I suspect that a lot of the complexity is glossed over in books aimed at the younger kids, just like history textbooks IOTL simplify feudalism and don't show the full complexity of the British Raj or the Holy Roman Empire. There would be a basic treatment, with infographs like the one at the bottom of this comment, a brief discussion of each kind of entity, and the functions of the more important ones, but it wouldn't get too far down into the weeds. High school textbooks or nonfiction books aimed at young adult readers would go into more detail on the evolution of the system and the problems it was intended to solve, but would also not be exhaustive.
On the second question, I think there would be more recognition that the past wasn't really that simple - that feudalism, for instance, was a web of sometimes-conflicting obligations, and that colonialism was a spectrum of relationships rather than one size fits all. I expect that there would be more discussion of princely states, different models of state formation, and post-Westphalian forerunners such as Congress Poland. Certainly there would be discussion of how Westphalian statehood came to be and why, but the focus would be on showing how the past led to the present, and in the process, there would be a certain amount of projection of present-day understandings onto the past.
There would also, no doubt, be some impact on children's fiction, especially books that have a historical setting or plots that involve government. This is a fascinating question - the evolution of childhood ITTL is something I haven't explored much, although there was some discussion of children's literature around page 170 and youth movements have figured in the story. I'm not sure that I can capture the voice of a children's history book, but if anyone else wants to try, I'd love to see what you come up with.
The Education of Laila Abacar, 2003-2009
Zaria, 2003:
The walls of Ali bin Bello Street were covered in posters two layers deep. The top stratum, all of it in the bold colors and reinterpreted traditional patterns that characterized the Irmandade Zaria artistic movement, proclaimed the virtues of candidates in the election. Below them, where the candidates had left a gap, were others with revolutionary slogans and appeals to Labor Belloist mysticism, put up by the people who had demanded the election in the first place.
“The people’s griots were all on the street last month,” said Sefi Nasiru. He meant the poets, the musicians, the storytellers, who had helped to overthrow the emir fifty years ago and who had now taken down his successors. “The workers’ cooperatives and the labor brotherhoods sheltered them. We’ve always been more independent here – the state put us under management, but they didn’t dare dissolve us. They remembered what happened the last time someone tried.”
Laila Abacar nodded. She’d heard the story many times in the week she’d been here as election observer, and to her mind, the Zarians had a right to tell it. The cities of the industrial belt always had been more independent, and they’d been the first to come out on the streets and demand the government’s resignation – the protests in Yola had delivered the coup de grace, but Yola would never have come out if Zaria and Kano and Kaduna hadn’t done so first.
Sefi led them to a side street where a warehouse floor had been converted to an impromptu polling place – with only a month to prepare, and with this being the first free election in forty years, much of the voting apparatus had been organized on the fly. From what Laila had seen, it was all working somehow, at least in Zaria: people wanted it to work, and they took the inevitable snags with good nature. Laila had made a few suggestions, but most of them hadn’t really been necessary.
“What I’m worried about,” she said as a poll warden inspected their credentials, “is that there isn’t really a national election authority. The old one was too compromised and the new one hasn’t had a chance to get on its feet, so the local governments are the ones really running this. That’s not a problem here, but out in the country, or in the towns where the old party hasn’t been replaced…”
“They haven’t had time to get ready either,” Sefi answered. “They’ve never run elections before, so they don’t know how to rig them. And the provisional government has enough observers to keep anything too obvious from happening.”
“There are things they can do that aren’t obvious.”
“The first election doesn’t have to be perfect – just good enough. Whatever the old party gets in the country, it won’t get anything here.”
The crowd inside the warehouse certainly seemed to bear that out. Zaria, like the other industrial cities, was strongly to the left – they’d been so since they birthed the Niger Valley labor movement – but almost none of the citizens queued up to vote wore the colors of the old ruling party. They liked left-wing dictators here no better than right-wing ones; from what Laila had seen, she’d be surprised if the old party got five percent of the vote in the factory belt.
They made a quick inspection of the polls, and some of the people in the queues recognized Laila. “Ilorin!” they said. “After this, no more borders,” one of them added, and many others in the room cheered.
“I wish it were that easy,” said Laila to Sefi as they left for the next polling place. She’d come to Zaria as Ilorin’s foreign minister, and she’d spoken on the streets before the government fell when it was still dangerous; she’d said that democracy throughout the Niger Valley would be a step toward a four-freedoms world, and people had cheered then as they did now. But in Yola, and elsewhere in eastern Adamawa, the people weren’t as enthusiastic about union as they were in Zaria. “I don’t know if the votes will be there in the Majlis, even after the election.”
“If the Majlis votes no, then we’ll join anyway. We’re Malê – we don’t care what they think in Yola.”
For a moment, Laila was taken aback. Most people in Zaria were no more Malê by blood, and little more by culture, than they were in Yola. But being Malê had long since ceased to have much to do with such things. If you spoke Sudanic, if you counted Abacar and Bello among your political ancestors, if the Quran called to you in words of revolution, then you were Malê, and if Zaria seceded from Adamawa to join the four-freedoms corridor, it would make perfect sense to them.
“And it would make perfect sense to the people in Yola not to join,” she said, too low for Sefi to hear. By now, the political and economic benefits of union were well known: the Niger Watershed Authority had functioned for a quarter of a century and the four-freedoms corridor longer still, and there were plenty of examples elsewhere in the world. The objections that remained were cultural and ideological. Everyone assumed that a Niger union would be a Malê union, so most Malê wanted to create one and most others didn’t – even the Igbo, who were willing partners in the treaty corridor, balked at going further and becoming like India or Europe.
“It will have to be something else, then,” she said. “Not Malê – something else.”
“What was that?” asked Sefi.
“I’m not sure,” Laila answered. And she wasn’t. A Niger union was such a Malê concept – ever since Usman, its vision had always been Abacarist self-rule and Belloist community writ large – but it would have to be these things in a way that assured non-Malê that they could remain what they were. It would have to be built, just as the idea of union had been built in the first place.
Then they reached the next polling place, and the conversation turned to other things.
Dorset, 2005:
“Your five-times baba and Aunt Sarah would sit together here,” Laila said. If there was anything odd about calling a woman “aunt” who wasn’t a blood relation and was almost seventy years in her grave, neither she nor her daughter felt it: Sarah would always be “aunt” in family legend, just as Usman dan Fodio’s daughter would never be anything but “the Nana.”
“Exactly here?” said Mélisande.
“Well, they didn’t measure. But nearly here.” The two of them sat in silence for a while on the embankment above the River Cerne, with the Alexanders’ old manor house just visible beyond the trees.
After a few minutes, Laila spoke of something else. “Did you enjoy the visit to Oxford?”
“It was beautiful. But I don’t think I want to go to Magdalen – I still want to stay home.”
“Five generations of the family have gone to Magdalen. And your great-grandmother’s family would love to have you for school holidays.”
Mélisande didn’t answer for a moment. She knew what her mother really wanted to say: that her grandfather Ahmadu had done his graduate study at Ilorin once he’d finished at Oxford, and that he’d married iya-iya Asma’u a year after he came home and died of the Congo fever four years after that. Laila had said all the things about Magdalen to Mélisande that great-grandfather Tiberio had said to Laila, but what she’d really been saying was I want my daughter to live.
The silence lengthened, and Mélisande decided to take the bull by the horns. “What happened to baba-baba could have happened at Magdalen too,” she said. “And… what happened to Asma’u doesn’t happen anymore. We don’t give people vaccines that turn out to be the disease.” She looked in her mother’s eyes and was unsure of them, and her tone changed. “Besides, your grandfather told you to go to Oxford because a person can never know her own country until she’s lived in another one. I’ve lived abroad most of my life – it’s about time I got to know my homeland.”
That forced a laugh from Laila. And in truth, she realized she’d always known that her daughter would never go to Magdalen. Mélisande and her ọbàkan Amina were inseparable, and the two half-sisters would never want to live apart for three years. And Mélisande wanted to join the Court of Arbitration’s permanent staff, and Ilorin University had one of the best international law faculties anywhere.
“And if I’m home” – Mélisande pressed her advantage – “I can help with your fair.”
“Yes, I suppose you can. Your Aunt Funmi” – another woman who would always be an aunt – “was helping with political things already when she was your age.”
Two years ago, Mélisande might have protested that a trade fair wasn’t political, but now she just nodded. She realized – and how could she not, after absorbing all the ostensibly nonpolitical things that Laila had organized in those two years for the Niger countries to do together? Regional fairs like Zanzibar had done, joint projects for the public universities, literary and civic prizes… Some of them didn’t even involve governments – regional concerts and dance recitals, a conference of bar associations on uniform commercial law, student symposia – but India had proven that a union of the clubs could be a powerful thing. She wasn’t trying to build a common culture – how arrogant it would be to think she could do that – but maybe, while her proposals for a regional union were being floated and negotiated, these events could show how much of one already existed.
That was how Liberia built Afro-Atlantism, she remembered, recalling what she’d learned during her time as ambassador there, and it was how the Malê converted the northern Yoruba. Those took generations, of course, but history moves faster now, and much of the groundwork here has already been laid.
“It’s almost time for dinner,” she said, and rose from where she sat: she said nothing more about where Mélisande would study, but both of them knew the decision had been accepted. “The Alexanders won’t be home tonight, so we can stop by the market …”
“Why – did Iya Kudirat fly up today to meet us?”
Laila made as if to cuff Mélisande. “I can cook too.”
“I think we’d both like it better if I did. I learned what Iya Kudirat taught me – heaven knows you never did…”
“Maybe I was busy learning other things,” Laila said, and treasured the fact that she could still appall her daughter. “All right, we’ll stop by the market and get something for you to cook. Let’s see if Iya Kudirat taught you to make a gourmet dinner for…” she felt in her pockets, “five pounds seven and four.”
Mélisande rose from the embankment, and the road to the market stretched before them.
Abomey, 2007:
The foreign ministry of Dahomey was near the old palace wall, which meant that Laila’s visits were personal on both sides. Paulo the Elder had died here, and depending on where one stood, the battle in which he fell was either the culmination of a lifelong crusade against slavery or the colonial conquest of a proud and independent kingdom. The Abacar name wasn’t taken lightly here, and for generations, the Fon people had emphasized their independence from the Malê even as Abacarist ideas inspired their own social movements and revolutions.
“I could wish,” the foreign minister had said once, “that Ilorin could have sent someone whose family had no history.” But he’d only half-meant that, especially since his own name was de Souza. He was descended from slaves and slave traders, and his Afro-Brazilian ancestry came from those who’d fought in the Marianada as well as those who’d worked in the slave markets at Ouidah. Once, in an unguarded moment, he’d wondered if any of his ancestors who’d rebelled against slavery in Pernambuco had been sold into it by other ancestors.
By now, of course, his family had thrown in firmly on the side of freedom – his parents and grandparents had been prominent in the 1957 revolution – and he, unlike many of his countrymen, acknowledged his debt to Abacar. It had taken him many months to warm up to Laila, but moments of shared history had helped, and now the two counted themselves as friends. That had made things easier – negotiating with him was merely hard rather than impossible.
He was expecting her today, and when she was ushered into his office, two cups of tea were already on the table. Next to them was a sheaf of paper, and from the number of red marks he’d made on her latest proposal, she could tell that they’d be here most of the day.
The proposal was part of what she’d been doing the last few years along with all the fairs and conferences – she’d unveiled her plan for union a little at a time, circulating each part for comment and negotiation before the states met to discuss a finished treaty. That had made sure that the union would be a continuous part of public debate, that there would always be new ideas to talk about, that everyone in the region would feel part of it: over time, the polls showed that the public was warming to the idea, and as they did, so had their governments.
But Dahomey was still where Laila went first, because it was still where convincing her counterpart would be hardest.
“Let’s talk about your common currency, Senhora Abacar,” said de Souza as he poured the tea. “It’s worked well enough in India, but there, you have one economy within the union that’s overwhelmingly dominant.”
“Integration matters more than dominance, I’d say. The Niger region has been in a customs union for generations now; our infrastructure is connected, our business cycles have synchronized…”
“Different parts of the region still have different priorities, and some are quite a bit richer than others. There are things that affect us here that don’t have much impact in Ilorin, and fiscal independence helps us deal with them. Why should we surrender our monetary policy…”
“You wouldn’t be surrendering any more than we would.”
“Why should any of us surrender our monetary policy, then?”
“None of our currencies are strong enough to be reserve currencies on their own, but a region-wide currency would be. We’d have easier credit, and we’d have much more influence in the Consistory economic forums. The whole would be more than the sum of the parts.”
“But the parts still matter. If the economy here is suffering, we want to be able to do something about it.”
“Well, the way I’ve proposed it, the currency board gives everyone an equal vote, so no one country will dominate. Part of the board will be elected, so it won’t be insulated from issues of concern…”
“Very Abacarist of you.”
“Money is one of the most fundamental components of the state – surely, the public should have a part in overseeing it.”
“I wasn’t disagreeing, only commenting.”
“And the central bank guidelines call for automatic supports for distressed sectors…”
“I’m not sure the safeguards are safe enough, or that there’s enough local input.”
So now we come down to it. “I assume you have proposals?”
De Souza slid another sheaf of papers across the table, and Laila looked quickly at the first page. The proposals were complicated, and the finance ministers would have to be involved before all was said and done, but it didn’t seem like there were any deal-breakers.
“In the second paragraph, are you sure…”
Laila poured another cup of tea for both of them, and settled down to work.
Ilorin, 2009:
“An eventful day, ife mi?” asked Yahya.
“Well, it’s not every day that I turn fifty and get passed over for prime minister.”
“It was a close vote.”
“I still came in second. They think I have too much of a foreign focus.”
Beside her, Kudirat smiled. “That’s better than the reasons they used to reject you.”
“There is that.” Times had changed, and Laila’s marriage to Kudirat was now as legal as Yahya’s marriage to both of them. The countryside was slowly catching up to Ilorin City, and it had been some time since her family arrangements had been a political matter.
“I hate to say it, but they’re right,” Yahya said. “The premiership would be a distraction to you at this point, especially with the consolation prize the Majlis gave you.”
“Yes.” Only hours after the party committee had rejected Laila for prime minister, the parliament had approved the finished draft of the union treaty and cleared it for a referendum once a quorum of the Niger states had signed. Now the hard part would begin, and it would make the past eight years seem as nothing: resolving last-minute disputes, making sure changing governments stayed the course, organizing a referendum campaign across twenty countries…
Below, there was the sound of a door opening and closing: Mélisande had returned from her graduate classes and Amina from the evening class that she was taking in preparation for university study in the fall. She was going to Ilorin too; maybe Usman at least would go to Magdalen…
Footsteps sounded on the stairs, and not two but three people entered the room: Bakare, who was reading law with Mélisande, had accompanied her home. Bakare and Mélisande were together all the time these days, and sometimes Laila worried about that: people didn’t have to marry young for fear of Congo fever any more, and even at almost twenty-one, Mélisande still seemed a child to her. But old habits died hard – she knew that if anyone did – and when she thought about Bakare dispassionately, there was much to approve.
“Happy birthday, Senhora,” he said, and she certainly approved of that. She noticed Mélisande’s hand in his, and said nothing.
The door to the balcony was open, and Yahya had set a pitcher of date wine on it. They walked out into the warm breeze, and Laila looked out on the city. Maybe sometime soon, it would be the center of more than just one republic; in the meantime, there were other things to celebrate.
Zaria, 2003:
The walls of Ali bin Bello Street were covered in posters two layers deep. The top stratum, all of it in the bold colors and reinterpreted traditional patterns that characterized the Irmandade Zaria artistic movement, proclaimed the virtues of candidates in the election. Below them, where the candidates had left a gap, were others with revolutionary slogans and appeals to Labor Belloist mysticism, put up by the people who had demanded the election in the first place.
“The people’s griots were all on the street last month,” said Sefi Nasiru. He meant the poets, the musicians, the storytellers, who had helped to overthrow the emir fifty years ago and who had now taken down his successors. “The workers’ cooperatives and the labor brotherhoods sheltered them. We’ve always been more independent here – the state put us under management, but they didn’t dare dissolve us. They remembered what happened the last time someone tried.”
Laila Abacar nodded. She’d heard the story many times in the week she’d been here as election observer, and to her mind, the Zarians had a right to tell it. The cities of the industrial belt always had been more independent, and they’d been the first to come out on the streets and demand the government’s resignation – the protests in Yola had delivered the coup de grace, but Yola would never have come out if Zaria and Kano and Kaduna hadn’t done so first.
Sefi led them to a side street where a warehouse floor had been converted to an impromptu polling place – with only a month to prepare, and with this being the first free election in forty years, much of the voting apparatus had been organized on the fly. From what Laila had seen, it was all working somehow, at least in Zaria: people wanted it to work, and they took the inevitable snags with good nature. Laila had made a few suggestions, but most of them hadn’t really been necessary.
“What I’m worried about,” she said as a poll warden inspected their credentials, “is that there isn’t really a national election authority. The old one was too compromised and the new one hasn’t had a chance to get on its feet, so the local governments are the ones really running this. That’s not a problem here, but out in the country, or in the towns where the old party hasn’t been replaced…”
“They haven’t had time to get ready either,” Sefi answered. “They’ve never run elections before, so they don’t know how to rig them. And the provisional government has enough observers to keep anything too obvious from happening.”
“There are things they can do that aren’t obvious.”
“The first election doesn’t have to be perfect – just good enough. Whatever the old party gets in the country, it won’t get anything here.”
The crowd inside the warehouse certainly seemed to bear that out. Zaria, like the other industrial cities, was strongly to the left – they’d been so since they birthed the Niger Valley labor movement – but almost none of the citizens queued up to vote wore the colors of the old ruling party. They liked left-wing dictators here no better than right-wing ones; from what Laila had seen, she’d be surprised if the old party got five percent of the vote in the factory belt.
They made a quick inspection of the polls, and some of the people in the queues recognized Laila. “Ilorin!” they said. “After this, no more borders,” one of them added, and many others in the room cheered.
“I wish it were that easy,” said Laila to Sefi as they left for the next polling place. She’d come to Zaria as Ilorin’s foreign minister, and she’d spoken on the streets before the government fell when it was still dangerous; she’d said that democracy throughout the Niger Valley would be a step toward a four-freedoms world, and people had cheered then as they did now. But in Yola, and elsewhere in eastern Adamawa, the people weren’t as enthusiastic about union as they were in Zaria. “I don’t know if the votes will be there in the Majlis, even after the election.”
“If the Majlis votes no, then we’ll join anyway. We’re Malê – we don’t care what they think in Yola.”
For a moment, Laila was taken aback. Most people in Zaria were no more Malê by blood, and little more by culture, than they were in Yola. But being Malê had long since ceased to have much to do with such things. If you spoke Sudanic, if you counted Abacar and Bello among your political ancestors, if the Quran called to you in words of revolution, then you were Malê, and if Zaria seceded from Adamawa to join the four-freedoms corridor, it would make perfect sense to them.
“And it would make perfect sense to the people in Yola not to join,” she said, too low for Sefi to hear. By now, the political and economic benefits of union were well known: the Niger Watershed Authority had functioned for a quarter of a century and the four-freedoms corridor longer still, and there were plenty of examples elsewhere in the world. The objections that remained were cultural and ideological. Everyone assumed that a Niger union would be a Malê union, so most Malê wanted to create one and most others didn’t – even the Igbo, who were willing partners in the treaty corridor, balked at going further and becoming like India or Europe.
“It will have to be something else, then,” she said. “Not Malê – something else.”
“What was that?” asked Sefi.
“I’m not sure,” Laila answered. And she wasn’t. A Niger union was such a Malê concept – ever since Usman, its vision had always been Abacarist self-rule and Belloist community writ large – but it would have to be these things in a way that assured non-Malê that they could remain what they were. It would have to be built, just as the idea of union had been built in the first place.
Then they reached the next polling place, and the conversation turned to other things.
*******
Dorset, 2005:
“Your five-times baba and Aunt Sarah would sit together here,” Laila said. If there was anything odd about calling a woman “aunt” who wasn’t a blood relation and was almost seventy years in her grave, neither she nor her daughter felt it: Sarah would always be “aunt” in family legend, just as Usman dan Fodio’s daughter would never be anything but “the Nana.”
“Exactly here?” said Mélisande.
“Well, they didn’t measure. But nearly here.” The two of them sat in silence for a while on the embankment above the River Cerne, with the Alexanders’ old manor house just visible beyond the trees.
After a few minutes, Laila spoke of something else. “Did you enjoy the visit to Oxford?”
“It was beautiful. But I don’t think I want to go to Magdalen – I still want to stay home.”
“Five generations of the family have gone to Magdalen. And your great-grandmother’s family would love to have you for school holidays.”
Mélisande didn’t answer for a moment. She knew what her mother really wanted to say: that her grandfather Ahmadu had done his graduate study at Ilorin once he’d finished at Oxford, and that he’d married iya-iya Asma’u a year after he came home and died of the Congo fever four years after that. Laila had said all the things about Magdalen to Mélisande that great-grandfather Tiberio had said to Laila, but what she’d really been saying was I want my daughter to live.
The silence lengthened, and Mélisande decided to take the bull by the horns. “What happened to baba-baba could have happened at Magdalen too,” she said. “And… what happened to Asma’u doesn’t happen anymore. We don’t give people vaccines that turn out to be the disease.” She looked in her mother’s eyes and was unsure of them, and her tone changed. “Besides, your grandfather told you to go to Oxford because a person can never know her own country until she’s lived in another one. I’ve lived abroad most of my life – it’s about time I got to know my homeland.”
That forced a laugh from Laila. And in truth, she realized she’d always known that her daughter would never go to Magdalen. Mélisande and her ọbàkan Amina were inseparable, and the two half-sisters would never want to live apart for three years. And Mélisande wanted to join the Court of Arbitration’s permanent staff, and Ilorin University had one of the best international law faculties anywhere.
“And if I’m home” – Mélisande pressed her advantage – “I can help with your fair.”
“Yes, I suppose you can. Your Aunt Funmi” – another woman who would always be an aunt – “was helping with political things already when she was your age.”
Two years ago, Mélisande might have protested that a trade fair wasn’t political, but now she just nodded. She realized – and how could she not, after absorbing all the ostensibly nonpolitical things that Laila had organized in those two years for the Niger countries to do together? Regional fairs like Zanzibar had done, joint projects for the public universities, literary and civic prizes… Some of them didn’t even involve governments – regional concerts and dance recitals, a conference of bar associations on uniform commercial law, student symposia – but India had proven that a union of the clubs could be a powerful thing. She wasn’t trying to build a common culture – how arrogant it would be to think she could do that – but maybe, while her proposals for a regional union were being floated and negotiated, these events could show how much of one already existed.
That was how Liberia built Afro-Atlantism, she remembered, recalling what she’d learned during her time as ambassador there, and it was how the Malê converted the northern Yoruba. Those took generations, of course, but history moves faster now, and much of the groundwork here has already been laid.
“It’s almost time for dinner,” she said, and rose from where she sat: she said nothing more about where Mélisande would study, but both of them knew the decision had been accepted. “The Alexanders won’t be home tonight, so we can stop by the market …”
“Why – did Iya Kudirat fly up today to meet us?”
Laila made as if to cuff Mélisande. “I can cook too.”
“I think we’d both like it better if I did. I learned what Iya Kudirat taught me – heaven knows you never did…”
“Maybe I was busy learning other things,” Laila said, and treasured the fact that she could still appall her daughter. “All right, we’ll stop by the market and get something for you to cook. Let’s see if Iya Kudirat taught you to make a gourmet dinner for…” she felt in her pockets, “five pounds seven and four.”
Mélisande rose from the embankment, and the road to the market stretched before them.
*******
Abomey, 2007:
The foreign ministry of Dahomey was near the old palace wall, which meant that Laila’s visits were personal on both sides. Paulo the Elder had died here, and depending on where one stood, the battle in which he fell was either the culmination of a lifelong crusade against slavery or the colonial conquest of a proud and independent kingdom. The Abacar name wasn’t taken lightly here, and for generations, the Fon people had emphasized their independence from the Malê even as Abacarist ideas inspired their own social movements and revolutions.
“I could wish,” the foreign minister had said once, “that Ilorin could have sent someone whose family had no history.” But he’d only half-meant that, especially since his own name was de Souza. He was descended from slaves and slave traders, and his Afro-Brazilian ancestry came from those who’d fought in the Marianada as well as those who’d worked in the slave markets at Ouidah. Once, in an unguarded moment, he’d wondered if any of his ancestors who’d rebelled against slavery in Pernambuco had been sold into it by other ancestors.
By now, of course, his family had thrown in firmly on the side of freedom – his parents and grandparents had been prominent in the 1957 revolution – and he, unlike many of his countrymen, acknowledged his debt to Abacar. It had taken him many months to warm up to Laila, but moments of shared history had helped, and now the two counted themselves as friends. That had made things easier – negotiating with him was merely hard rather than impossible.
He was expecting her today, and when she was ushered into his office, two cups of tea were already on the table. Next to them was a sheaf of paper, and from the number of red marks he’d made on her latest proposal, she could tell that they’d be here most of the day.
The proposal was part of what she’d been doing the last few years along with all the fairs and conferences – she’d unveiled her plan for union a little at a time, circulating each part for comment and negotiation before the states met to discuss a finished treaty. That had made sure that the union would be a continuous part of public debate, that there would always be new ideas to talk about, that everyone in the region would feel part of it: over time, the polls showed that the public was warming to the idea, and as they did, so had their governments.
But Dahomey was still where Laila went first, because it was still where convincing her counterpart would be hardest.
“Let’s talk about your common currency, Senhora Abacar,” said de Souza as he poured the tea. “It’s worked well enough in India, but there, you have one economy within the union that’s overwhelmingly dominant.”
“Integration matters more than dominance, I’d say. The Niger region has been in a customs union for generations now; our infrastructure is connected, our business cycles have synchronized…”
“Different parts of the region still have different priorities, and some are quite a bit richer than others. There are things that affect us here that don’t have much impact in Ilorin, and fiscal independence helps us deal with them. Why should we surrender our monetary policy…”
“You wouldn’t be surrendering any more than we would.”
“Why should any of us surrender our monetary policy, then?”
“None of our currencies are strong enough to be reserve currencies on their own, but a region-wide currency would be. We’d have easier credit, and we’d have much more influence in the Consistory economic forums. The whole would be more than the sum of the parts.”
“But the parts still matter. If the economy here is suffering, we want to be able to do something about it.”
“Well, the way I’ve proposed it, the currency board gives everyone an equal vote, so no one country will dominate. Part of the board will be elected, so it won’t be insulated from issues of concern…”
“Very Abacarist of you.”
“Money is one of the most fundamental components of the state – surely, the public should have a part in overseeing it.”
“I wasn’t disagreeing, only commenting.”
“And the central bank guidelines call for automatic supports for distressed sectors…”
“I’m not sure the safeguards are safe enough, or that there’s enough local input.”
So now we come down to it. “I assume you have proposals?”
De Souza slid another sheaf of papers across the table, and Laila looked quickly at the first page. The proposals were complicated, and the finance ministers would have to be involved before all was said and done, but it didn’t seem like there were any deal-breakers.
“In the second paragraph, are you sure…”
Laila poured another cup of tea for both of them, and settled down to work.
*******
Ilorin, 2009:
“An eventful day, ife mi?” asked Yahya.
“Well, it’s not every day that I turn fifty and get passed over for prime minister.”
“It was a close vote.”
“I still came in second. They think I have too much of a foreign focus.”
Beside her, Kudirat smiled. “That’s better than the reasons they used to reject you.”
“There is that.” Times had changed, and Laila’s marriage to Kudirat was now as legal as Yahya’s marriage to both of them. The countryside was slowly catching up to Ilorin City, and it had been some time since her family arrangements had been a political matter.
“I hate to say it, but they’re right,” Yahya said. “The premiership would be a distraction to you at this point, especially with the consolation prize the Majlis gave you.”
“Yes.” Only hours after the party committee had rejected Laila for prime minister, the parliament had approved the finished draft of the union treaty and cleared it for a referendum once a quorum of the Niger states had signed. Now the hard part would begin, and it would make the past eight years seem as nothing: resolving last-minute disputes, making sure changing governments stayed the course, organizing a referendum campaign across twenty countries…
Below, there was the sound of a door opening and closing: Mélisande had returned from her graduate classes and Amina from the evening class that she was taking in preparation for university study in the fall. She was going to Ilorin too; maybe Usman at least would go to Magdalen…
Footsteps sounded on the stairs, and not two but three people entered the room: Bakare, who was reading law with Mélisande, had accompanied her home. Bakare and Mélisande were together all the time these days, and sometimes Laila worried about that: people didn’t have to marry young for fear of Congo fever any more, and even at almost twenty-one, Mélisande still seemed a child to her. But old habits died hard – she knew that if anyone did – and when she thought about Bakare dispassionately, there was much to approve.
“Happy birthday, Senhora,” he said, and she certainly approved of that. She noticed Mélisande’s hand in his, and said nothing.
The door to the balcony was open, and Yahya had set a pitcher of date wine on it. They walked out into the warm breeze, and Laila looked out on the city. Maybe sometime soon, it would be the center of more than just one republic; in the meantime, there were other things to celebrate.
I love that this Britain still uses pre-decimal currency. Little things like that - just the tiniest brush-strokes, five words that bring to light something that literally hadn't occurred to me in the two-and-a-half years I've been reading this story - are one of many reasons why this is one of my favourite works of fiction.
I've had a hunch about where the denouement of this story is going for a while now, and a lot of this seems to be borne out by this update. There is a niggling thought at the back of my mind, though, that I really hope isn't true...
On a different note: this was a ray of light in a rather bleak and confusing evening. Thank you.
I've had a hunch about where the denouement of this story is going for a while now, and a lot of this seems to be borne out by this update. There is a niggling thought at the back of my mind, though, that I really hope isn't true...
On a different note: this was a ray of light in a rather bleak and confusing evening. Thank you.