Introduction: historical imagination in the mande diaspora

Any kinship system will challenge the people who use it with structural tensions that require socio-cultural organizational solutions; no kinship system is perfect, and societies change,Footnote 1 while most societies depending for their existence on agriculture face a structural problem for younger brothers. If an agricultural way of life is carried out in one place, as it is in most of sub-Saharan Africa, people tend to settle in a particular area for a long time, and most such systems combine patrilineal kinship with a patrilocal settlement strategy. That means sons remain on their father’s compound or homestead and marry women from “elsewhere”, regulating both biological reproduction and political support. The system works perfectly until population growth and scarcity of food and land or personal ambition put pressure on it. Since inheritance rights to the homestead will belong to the eldest son, that pressure can lead to fission or to the departure of younger brothers.

A good way to deal with the resulting tension is awarding to younger brothers tasks and duties outside the homestead or compound, hunting being the external activity par excellence, which I will illustrate by discussing developments in the “Mande World”, particularly in modern-day Mali. The Mande World is a concept that came into fashion in the 1980s and is now widely accepted and used to describe the culture, social organization, and history of a cluster of ethnic groups that now inhabit large parts of modern western Africa.Footnote 2 They are now the majority in Mali, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Gambia, and sizeable minorities of them live in Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Niger, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Senegal.Footnote 3

The presence of these “Mande peoples” in large parts of western Africa is due mainly to twentieth-century developments: migration in search of labour,Footnote 4 and a huge increase in population partly due to the introduction of biomedical health strategies.Footnote 5 The people involved took advantage of the fact that their first language was Bambara or Dioula, the local lingua franca.Footnote 6

These developments had their precedents, although much smaller in scale, long before the twentieth century, when people moved around prompted by either commercial or political ambitions, or in flight from war and famine, whether caused by bad harvests or population pressure. These predecessors of the modern Mande created fertile ground for the diaspora which the world witnessed in the second half of the twentieth century.

As a consequence of the spread of the Mande diaspora, geographical delineations of orally remembered polities can seldom be reconstructed if traditions are not embedded in the landscape and corroborated by reliable external sources.Footnote 7 Ethnic groups in the Mande World imagine or experience the major parallels in their cultural and social principles by relating themselves to the oral epics through which they trace descent from prestigious “empires” such as the Wagadu, Ghana, Mali, Sonrhay, and Fulbe “empires” that are geographically imagined in what is now, roughly speaking, the southern half of the republic of Mali.Footnote 8

For historians not acquainted with the history of sub-Saharan Africa it is probably difficult to grasp the immense dynamics of the discourse used by ethnic groups to forge their own identities. Amselle’s classic Les négociants de la savane Footnote 9 is still a good illustration. In it, he describes how the ethnic group of the Kooroko came into being in the twentieth century, included at certain moments thousands of “members” – according to the French administration, which had a policy of “fixing” identitiesFootnote 10 – and had disappeared almost completely by the end of the 1970s.

The terminology that ethnic groups use is dynamic and meanings are bound by context. To give two striking and much-quoted examples: in some parts of the Mande World Soninke means “pagans who do libations”, while elsewhere the term is used as an ethnic marker for a highly Islamized group. In some parts it is used in both ways. The term Bambara or Bamana is equally difficult to interpret, referring to many forms of identity: to descendants of the eighteenth-century kingdom of Segu, but also to “pagans” as well as to “people not from here” – Bazin’s famous title “A chacun son Bambara” is a good summary of the principle.Footnote 11

When gaining a presence in the public sphere, or in order to gain it for that matter, any group in the Mande World, ethnic, social, or cultural, will develop a historical identity for itself that creatively and convincingly relates its history to oral histories of great “empires” and “states”. The fact that such groups produce new traditions does not mean that they “invent” them, as seems to be suggested in Hobsbawm and Ranger’s 1983 classic The Invention of Tradition.Footnote 12 Any “new tradition” cannot emerge ex nihilo, but needs to meet many criteria to be acceptable.Footnote 13 In fact, the emergence of any tradition is a highly complex political, social, cultural, and historical process; this is reason enough for those who study the “invention” of tradition usually to prefer the term “reimagination” – a term actually proposed by Ranger in that 1983 volume.

This long introduction to the active processes of historical imagination or reimagination in the Mande World is necessary to understand the dynamics of hunters’ associations, which is the subject of this essay. Although hunters’ associations might have elaborate oral traditions about their founding fathers from the Ségou state or the Mali empire, one should note that most of the traditions are of a recent origin. Epics about empires,Footnote 14 often based on hours-long recordings with “professional” storytellers, frequently mention hunters and hunting, quite logically of course since “they all hunted”,Footnote 15 and warriors are often depicted as hunters because hunters are obviously owners of weapons. I will insist therefore in my analysis on including a strong emphasis on the omnipresent task of “hunting” as a structural characteristic of life in the Mande World, which I would combine with a rejection of attempts to relate today’s hunters’ guilds to some precolonial polity.

Nowadays, almost every village in these countries has a hunters’ association. The importance of hunters should not be explained by their skill in hunting game, since game has almost disappeared from that part of Africa. Rather their social functioning, and in particular their intermediary skills, are what require close analysis. In retrospect, it is almost self-evident that hunters have been put forward to deal with civil wars in the region, including those in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire, or challenges set by national governments in shaping a civil society. Examples of these efforts will be described in the second half of this article.

Mande hunters’ associations are organized according to practices that reflect the principles of European guilds. That in itself clearly demands attention, since when writing about Mande hunters we are certainly dealing with a phenomenon labelled by PfisterFootnote 16 as “a guild [that] is not necessarily a guild”. However, before I elaborate on that I will first discuss the nyamakalaw (singular: nyamakala), the allegedly “casted” artisan groups among Mande ethnic groups, which have often been described (incorrectly, I shall argue) as guild-like organizations. By describing the nyamakalaw I will, however, introduce cosmological dimensions of the Mande World which will serve to explain why hunters are still part of the present-day political scene.

Why mande artisans are not organized as guilds

The nyamakala artisan’s activities should be analysed in terms of a combination of spatial, social, and cosmological characteristics. Ethnic groups in the West African savannah share the characteristic of a tripartite division of “social status categories”: noblemen or free men (hòrònw), the unfree (jònw),Footnote 17 and nyamakalaw. To the last group belong blacksmiths, leatherworkers, and bards (jeliw/jalilu [“griots”] and finaw/funèw, religious (which is to say “Islamic”) singers of praises).

The three status categories are endogamous, in that they do not marry outside their own group. The jònw are, in the Mande historical imagination, descendants of free men, captives in wars often long forgotten. The nyamakalaw have always been excluded from warfare and in the ideal image were never captured in wars, since they are attributed a diplomatic function and their skills are imagined to be in craftsmanship instead of warfare.

Everyone in the Mande World can trace a relationship to Sunjata, the legendary founder of the Mali empire. Sunjata’s deeds had already reached the ears of Ibn Battuta when he travelled along the river Niger in 1349–1351. Sunjata’s history has been transmitted for centuries in standardized form and has served as a charter for Mande society.Footnote 18

Mande people all bear a jamu, a patronymic derived from a heroic ancestor who fought in the era of Sunjata. After conquering “Mande”/”Mali”, Sunjata allotted a task to each ancestor. The resulting division of tasks has been the blueprint for public discourse on the social and political organization of Mande society down to the present day. Due to changes brought about by colonial regimes and social changes in general in the past century, the divide between free men and unfree has vanished,Footnote 19 and since both have the same patronymics, so much migration has taken place, and everyone in Mande shares the same discursive models to produce oral historical narratives,Footnote 20 original status is difficult or even impossible to trace. As a result many unfree families have “upgraded” their status in the past century.

The nyamakalaw, however, have their own patronymics, making their status more obvious, but it is a mistake to think that their inherited status automatically implies any professional practice or competence, although the nyamakalaw themselves deny that in their self-representation: for public consumption they are all wonderful craftsmen, tracing their descent from heroic ancestor-artisans. But only the most talented nyamakala families derive an income from nyamakala activities. Most of the nyamakala live from agriculture, like most others in their society.

Furthermore, the nyamakalaw cannot change their status easily, since their public behaviour is a little different and their attitudes, absorbed from childhood, are difficult to conceal. Nyamakalaw, who make up 5–10 per cent of the population, still practice endogamy and there are many reasons why the other two groups are unwilling to marry them. For example, nyamakalaw will excite anyone’s imagination, since the term “nyamakala” itself is related to “nyama”, a generic term for “occult” or “supernatural” powers which the nyamakalaw are said to be able to wield.Footnote 21 Then again, the nyamakalaw’s special position becomes clearer when we look more closely at the cosmological processes in which they are involved.

The French colonial administration designated the nyamakalaw as casted people, thereby transposing an Asian model into West African Sudan.Footnote 22 This designation has been met by a great deal of criticism.Footnote 23 In a review of Conrad and Frank’s Status and Identity in West Africa: Nyamakalaw of Mande, which is the most quoted work on them, Amselle argued that in current research on nyamakalaw, dynamics, contextualization, and deconstruction are key concepts:

The “relative” openness of each group is for present-day researchers the main reason to avoid the term “caste”, although it still appears to be very tempting, in particular to scholars who study only the nyamakalaw in depth.Footnote 25

In spite of such openness, the Mande artisans are, by definition, unsuitable candidates for description as a guild since, following De Moor in the present volume, a minimal definition of a guild should include some form of collective action. On the contrary, however, a family of nyamakalaw will strive to establish a relationship of dependency on the family of prestigious free man, who will then be their jatigiw (“hosts”).Footnote 26

Hunters deal with nyama, but are not artisans

When they kill game in the bush, hunters liberate the dangerous and evil nyama forces, but why are they not then nyamakalaw, and what makes them so special? The answer lies for me in the spaces of their activities and their social organization. When analysing activities by nyamakalaw the dichotomy between village and wilderness is crucial. John Johnson described the difference between them for Mande as follows:

Johnson’s description illustrates that the people in the wilderness are differently socially positioned from those in villages,Footnote 28 and that is precisely why hunters, distinctively nyama specialists, are not nyamakalaw. Hunters work in the wilderness, in contrast to nyamakalaw, who work in villages, at least partly.Footnote 29 Since they work in the bush, hunters are not considered to be “deliberately disrupting social harmony”,Footnote 30 while nyamakalaw are.

Nyamakalaw are able to transform “nature” into “culture”. They shape or mould events to fit them into village life by activities in which nyama is liberated: the male blacksmith transforms ore into iron, and then turns it into tools; the male blacksmith works with wood too and turns that into furniture and masks; the female blacksmith works with clay, turning it into pots and other household utensils. Blacksmiths, male and female, give young children a position in society by performing ritual circumcision or excision,Footnote 31 and the blacksmith’s role in the arrangement of marriages is an example of how nyamakalaw mould or even create the social world.

Transformation into a cultural entity features in both the terminology for the blacksmith’s work and for social change: they are both phrased in anthropomorphic terms. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the work of the blacksmith is often imagined as a process of giving birth, the forge being the womb, the iron being the product.Footnote 32

The other artisans are just as occupied with transforming “nature” into “culture”. The leatherworker transforms animal skins into clothing; bards create social identities for people by relating them to the past through their ancestors, and weaving, forging, and talking are all activities referred to by the verb da, the first meaning of which is “to create”.Footnote 33

All these activities take place, at least to some extent, within the borders of the village. By contrast, the hunter liberates nyama by killing game and transforming it into food, but that happens outside the village.Footnote 34 The crucial features of nyamakalaya are therefore derived from nyama-related activities that take place within the village.

Space is therefore central to understanding the nyamakala’s status. The status of artisans is related to their ability to transform nature into culture, and so mould the human individual into a social being within the space of the village. Against Amselle and Conrad and Frank, whom I have quoted above, I claim that this ability of the artisan is the basis of a “fixed relation between profession and status”.

The nyamakalaw have been called ambiguous or ambivalent. In explanations about their status, “polysemy” has been the guiding principle, but ambiguity and ambivalence are incorrectly applied to nyamakalaw by Conrad and Frank because positive as well as negative assessments of nyamakalaw are, inevitably, context-related. In times of trouble, the nyamakalaw are welcome to direct the process of “change”, and then they are positively valued, but when people live in harmony and peace, nyamakalaw are despised, because they threaten by definition to transform harmony into disharmony.Footnote 35

A nyamakala does not have “an” ambivalent status: nyamakala status is assessed monovalently, but it changes in relation to the temperature of the situation. Since radical change is never appreciated, nyamakalaw are supposed to guide the process of heating and cooling down. If nyamakalaw were really “utterly alien” and “the Other”Footnote 36 as compared to free men, there would be no grounds for free men to maintain their inherited relationships with nyamakala families, which they definitely do.Footnote 37

Towards a hunters’ guild

Hunters are, as we know now, agents who deal with nyama outside the village. From an empirical point of view, hunters’ associations among the Mande ethnic groups meet the criteria for a guild. The trajectory to the status of donso sinbon (a master-hunter) is open to everyone and not a family affair as is the case with the nyamakala status. However, similarly to a guild member’s trajectory it is an apprenticeship full of initiations and tests and a non-formalized process of learning a broad variety of hunters’ skills and one that embodies complex obligations. Being a hunter is more than knowing how to track and kill game; it is an ethos, or a lifestyle,Footnote 38 well expressed in a proverb often quoted among the speakers of Mande languages: “Not every owner of a gun is a hunter”. Even if someone has acquired a technical skill, that does not mean he has the capacity to use it properly.

In terms of organizational form the hunters’ association is a brotherhood that, though hierarchical, is governed by meritocratic values. In a society with a hierarchical ideology in which belonging to a status category, and kinship position largely determines someone’s role in public life from cradle to grave, the relatively open structure of hunters’ guilds is an important counterweight, making the society more dynamic.

In Bamanakan the word for hunters’ guild is donso tòn. A tòn is the generic name for a voluntary association.Footnote 39 There is no more specific word for a hunters’ guild in the Mande languages. Hunters consider themselves to be blood brothers and children of the legendary ancestors Sanin and Kontoron, a mother and her fatherless son. The alleged blood tie with Sanin and Kontoron and, as a result, the image of all hunters as belonging to the same lineage, obliges the hunter to value his fellow hunters over his own immediate family, and according to the Malian researcher Youssouf Tata Cissé, himself a member of a hunters’ guild, any hunter should think “tu n’as de parents que Sanin et Kont[o]ron? Tu n’as de frères que les chasseurs.”Footnote 40

As structurally occupied with external activities, hunters, younger brothers, as we might remember, have had an important role in regional management in the savannah zones where they practised hunting. By definition their activities were not family directed; as specialists in killing game they provided meat to a localized population producing agricultural produce.Footnote 41 Hunters have always gathered “traditional” medicine too from bush flora, so as a corollary to their interest in game and other bush products hunters have always been concerned in the wellbeing of the forest.Footnote 42

An even more important consequence of their activities outside villages, particularly in relation to the argument set out in this article, has been their role as inter-village diplomats. Where nyamakalaw, in particular bards and blacksmiths, have been responsible for negotiating matters to do with kinship, such as initiation, marriage, and family rivalries, hunters are active in diplomacy between villages.Footnote 43 Hunters have the image of being somewhat outside village politics, wherein an older brother’s authority is unquestioned, and that is probably because the bush, like common fields in premodern Europe, is not village property.

Given the fact that hunters’ associations deal with collective action to manage the commons, it is correct to label them as a “guild”. Following De Moor in the present volume, I would argue that the institution of hunters’ associations in the Mande World may be seen as a form of collective action that represents a set of “agreements [that] can be considered to be forms of risk avoidance and as a way to benefit from economies of scale in the management of natural resources that are necessary or even vital to the agricultural system but cannot be […] commercialized”.

A guild in a society based on agriculture: collective action in the Mande world

In the case of the Mande peoples hunting is not the act of killing game, which can be done by any marifatigi (“owner of a gun”). Rather, hunting is a role model for men who are not born to a position with inherited authority; it is a mould to channel their ambitions. Purely economically, the ultimate goal for a “hunter” in the Malian countryside is always to become a respected cultivateur (sènèkèla).Footnote 44 Hunting is an institutionalized role, and thus a hunters’ “guild” is an ever-present and powerful sociological force.

In the Mande World the structure of hunters’ guilds is related to their lack of inherited authority. By definition, hunters negotiate their identity and activities in relation to formal political authorities, the “older brothers” who are the heads of families. Whether a killer of game, a diplomat in inter-village conflict, or a medical expert, a hunter lays claim to all those activities, which are “external” in that they have an aspect that goes beyond the kinship group.

Now it is clear that hunters’ guilds were a serious and structural factor in the imagination of collective action in the Mande World, but one might ask what hunters really contribute to the present-day world? That is the subject of the second part of this essay, in which I shall describe themes and activities that are propagated by today’s hunters. I will argue that hunters have established a successful self-representation as “traditional”, on the basis of two factors. On the one hand, hunters’ activities are a response to challenges and opportunities offered by the republic of Mali, which is in search of a civil society that subscribes to the classical idea of a division between religion, in its case Islam, and state. On the other hand it is the result of the belief in “tradition” as a panacea for the problems Malians, and Africans in general, face in coping with “modernity”.

The hunters’ revival in West Africa since the early 1990s

When I visited Mali for the first time, in 1988, hunters had almost disappeared from the public scene. Only occasionally I spotted a person dressed as a traditional hunter, and because of their appetite for alcoholic beverages,Footnote 45 and their disrespect for Islam, such persons were never highly respected by local people. Hunters believe in fetishes to help them to battle the material and spiritual beings of the bush and they sometimes need drugs, such as alcohol, to arrive at deeper insights or to please their spirits (djinns).

A decade later, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the scene has changed dramatically, and in a positive direction for the hunters. Leach explains: “Hunters’ organizations appear to be helping construct emergent forms of collective solidarity and citizenship practice, linking the phenomenon with another major debate about contemporary forms of African sociality and governance, and with the broad question to what citizenship is coming to mean in West Africa.”Footnote 46 In spite of the disappearance of game, hunters’ associations flourish nowadays. Each village has a hunters’ association, and educated people from the cities organize themselves into hunters’ organizations.Footnote 47

It is generally agreed that the popularity of hunters’ associations is due to their attempts to transfer the state’s demand for citizenship to the rural population that, in colonial times, experienced and represented itself as subject to a polity with coercive power, but was still a population that had never learned to be citizens.Footnote 48 Ferme observes for Sierra Leone an analytical dichotomy between hunters in urban and rural areas.Footnote 49 For instance, the figure of the Sierra Leonean kamajô, a militiaman dressed as a hunter who featured in newspaper pictures in reports of the civil war, was a deliberate but urban creation of MendéFootnote 50 “authentic” culture.

The security guards in Abidjan in the 1990s were an urban invention too.Footnote 51 Hunters created an urban security service in the neighbourhoods in Côte d’Ivoire’s capital, claiming to transfer traditional values to the present-day multiethnic society there. That initiative was appreciated at first as a step forward in the creation of a civil society, and the image presented was that of hunters, thanks to their diplomatic skills, being able to encourage “relaxation” in village and town. Although “owners of a gun” they were supposed, as hunters in the Mande World are, to be able to deal with security in the public sphere.

In Côte d’Ivoire, only those with an official dozo (the Dioula term for “hunter”, cf. donso) identity card could be hired as security guard. This meant in reality that the people from the north (the Dioula, a Mande ethnic group that has absorbed many migrants from Mali) created an ethnically based security service monopoly for themselves, which was met with heavy criticism, and when the association appeared to be unable to correct criminal behaviour by some of its own members, the hunters’ prestige in Côte d’Ivoire soon decreased dramatically. In urban areas they are now feared.

In Mali, however, hunters are a dominant presence in public life, and apparently more successful than elsewhere in West Africa. Hunters are nowadays omnipresent: their songs are broadcast on radio and television, they are consulted for advice on social problems, and people love to wear attributes or clothing related to hunting.

I will now argue that, for Mali, Ferme’s urban–rural dichotomy is more or less absent, and that the popularity of the hunters both expresses and disguises serious problems that the nation-state is facing.

The Mande hunter reimagined: on modernity, islam, and occult economies

Nowadays, Malians tend to emphasize that the hunters’ presence in public life is “traditional” and that it has always been this way. That is not true. As I will explain in this section, hunters owe their recent popularity to two global developments. First, the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), which forced African governments to reform their budgets substantially. Second, contradictorily as it might sound, the upheaval of Islam.

The SAP policy has increased the IMF’s grip on the poor African nation-states and has had catastrophic consequences for the continent. Before the end of the Cold War, most African governments were dictatorial regimes supported by either the Soviet Union or the United States. The end of the Cold War marked a transition to democracy in sub-Saharan Africa, since African states, having lost their sponsors from one side of the Iron Curtain, were allowed to receive foreign aid and IMF loans only if they introduced “good governance” (democracy, elections, transparency).Footnote 52

The IMF policy aimed to combat the enormous “gaps” in the national budgets of African states, and to make those gaps disappear African states systematically cut their budgets for education and health care. The decrease in the health-care budget resulted in a dramatic rise in prices for biomedical health-care services, and, in effect, an increased demand for “traditional” health-care remedies. Since hunters are specialists in “bush medicine” of old, they benefited both economically and socially from the desperate search for treatment of various health problems.

However, this economic dimension is only one side of the coin. The recent turn to hunters’ “traditional” services and knowledge should not be seen as a step back in time, forced by lack of means.Footnote 53 On the contrary, it has become attached to images of modernity, and people spend more money than ever before on a wide spectrum of health-care services, including “traditional” practices.

All over sub-Saharan Africa images of “tradition” have been “reimagined” in order to provide people with answers to questions about modern life. Sorcery, for instance – a phenomenon that was considered to have disappeared on the introduction of “modernization” (new technologies, large-scale production, rationalization, monetization) – is nowadays typically in Africa a prerequisite for successful participation in the modern market economy.

Hunters, by definition associated with the bush, the realm of the spirits, and nyama-containing wild animals, are therefore considered mediators to successful participation in the world of “modernity” which most people in sub-Saharan Africa do not experience as predictable. “Why success and why not?”, they ask. The modern world is a source of danger, sorrow, and uncertainty. Anthropologists have introduced the concept of “occult economies” to describe this phenomenon in which tradition is by definition analysed as a discourse on modernity.Footnote 54

The second global development that helped to improve the hunters’ image is, contradictory as it might sound, the strong upheaval of Islam in the public sphere in African countries. The upheaval of Islam faces the states with new challenges in their attempts to shape a civil society, which is an IMF criterion for “good governance”. Why then, one may ask, does a government in search of a civil society choose alcohol-consuming hunters as a public relations instrument, although more than 90 per cent of its population is Muslim?

Islam’s role in the public sphere in West Africa is a topic that had been attracting attention many decades before “9/11”. The French colonial administration, at least from the beginning of the twentieth century, closely watched how Muslims in West Africa locally organized themselves and the French actively promoted particular groups and leaders of Islamic brotherhoods.Footnote 55 Islamic brotherhoods and Islamic traders’ networks have often been considered an alternative to create the civil society necessary for efficient administration. However, introducing Islam into state politics brings with it a Trojan horse into any state that strives for the constitutional separation of “Church and state”. The danger in inviting sharia is ever present, as the cases of present-day Nigeria, and, to a certain extent, Turkey, demonstrate.

Silences are often very meaningful, as any historian knows. Hence, it is interesting to see the upsurge of the hunter in government-supported representations of national culture, since it always implies an indirect denial of Islam. Here is an example. In September 2006, Mali’s biggest printing company, Groupe KLEDU, launched the full-colour magazine Simbo (sinbon, the honorary title for a master-hunter). Its table of contents shows a vision of society, because it contains chapters about society, with articles on the Lions and Rotary Clubs in Mali; then articles about the railway system, the oil economy, tourism (with an article on hunters of course!), culture, and sport; and development and new technology. Perhaps it is a suspicious mind that prompts me to interpret all this as anti-Islamic, but to me the magazine reinforces a classical modernization agenda embellished with culture, a dimension that was added in the 1980s to the development policy of many Western states.

In the 1990s, as part of their attempts to shape a civil society, the Malian government depended on nyamakalaw, in particular on griots (jeliw), which led to a lot of criticism stemming from the long-felt ambivalence about nyamakalaw referred to above. Moreover, a nyamakala family is connected to a particular noble “host” family, and that resulted in accusations of nepotism.Footnote 56

Hunters, in contrast to griots, represent the image of an “open” society, because of the formally “democratic” nature of hunters’ associations and because hunters’ associations are organized outside kinship structures. Therefore, hunters are a better alternative for a state in quest of a civil society, although in practice hunters follow formats of “tradition” that had been “imagined” previously by griots.

For instance, hunters now feature in public “conciliatory” events that used to feature griots,Footnote 57 exemplified by the hunters’ festival that took place in Mali’s capital, Bamako, in January 2001. It was attended by hunters and scholars from Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Niger, Guinea (Conakry), and Mali. Moreover, there were scholars from France and the United States. The event was broadcast on radio and television and the festival’s proceedings were published in a volume distributed by the Malian Ministry of Culture. A government representative argued that these “traditional” hunters had to be supported because of their potential to become an “integrative force” that must shape a future civil society.Footnote 58

Hunters as agents of civil society in present-day Mali

The urban–rural dichotomy observed by Ferme in Sierra Leone is not to be found in Mali. The very popular hunters’ bards (donsojeliw) owe most of their prestige to songs they learned when they were young and lived on the land. Hunters, including hunters’ bards, travel back and forth between towns and the country, but as we saw from the examples above of the festival and the full-colour magazine Simbo, the image of the “traditional” rural hunter features in the urban media.

But how “traditional” are these hunters? The following case illustrates well the inevitably hybrid identity any Malian has to accept when becoming a hunter; the state needs the hunter and the hunter needs the state. The case is based on a hunters’ performance that I attended in January 2007 in the village of Farabako, in the isolated and thinly populated Monts Manding (Mande Mountains), 100 kilometres south-west of Mali’s capital, Bamako.

Figure 1 Hunters in Farabako, 30 January 2007. Two hunters play the jinbi, the “hunter’s lute”. Photograph by Lien Pelckmans. Used with permission.

The government of Mali promotes a health-care policy that advocates the construction of health centres with a radius of activity of 15 kilometres, a goal achieved in the isolated Monts Manding: since 2003 there has been a health centre in both the administrative centre, Sandama, as well as Nioumamakana, two very small towns, each about 15–20 kilometres from Farabako. The village of Farabako lies between Sandama and Nioumamakana, and on 30 January 2007 a maternity clinic was officially opened there on a day of joy for the local people. Although the 15-kilometre radius is reasonable enough for most of Mali, which is a flat country, it is a serious problem for the inhabitants of the Monts Manding. It takes them a long time to cross the 15 kilometres through a mountainous area with neither roads nor bridges, and the price of fuel for transport by motorcycle might easily be double the price of the medical consultation or the Western medicine a doctor will prescribe. Many economic activities there have not yet been monetized, so since money is rather scarce in the area most people live with a complex system of debts. Hence, a health centre in Farabako was an important improvement for its 400 inhabitants and for the people of some of the neighbouring villages, each of fewer than 1,000 inhabitants.

However, the opening of the centre unfortunately had to be a political statement in a complex political process. Farabako and the neighbouring village of Tamalen are involved in a long-standing dispute over a piece of land between the two villages. The land was once cultivated by Farabako, but abandoned in the 1970s; it has recently been put under cultivation by Tamalen. In the meantime, however, times have changed. Village populations have grown and the state nowadays pursues an active policy to set up a land register (allottissement in French); so what was once land temporarily withdrawn from the commons, cultivated on the basis of “custom” and mutual consent, has now become a commodity that can be sold. Hence, Farabako is reclaiming the land it abandoned long ago.Footnote 59

The land issue has seriously damaged relations between the two villages. The people of Farabako withdrew their children from the Tamalen school, 3 kilometres from Farabako, and now send them to the primary school in Danbele Makandjana – a walk now of 4 kilometres. Even worse is that the villages chose different administrative centres when the state implemented its policy of decentralization in the mid-1990s.Footnote 60 Farabako joined Nioumamakana, Tamalen opted for Sandama.

The maternity clinic was more or less coincidentally constructed in Farabako, with money donated by Dutch sponsors. From the start, it was clear both to sponsors and locals that a maternity clinic in Farabako could – and should – have a regional function.

How was a peaceful setting to be organized for use of the maternity clinic by the whole region? That was a question that always worried me. I had expected that each neighbouring village would have been asked, by the village chief of Farabako, to send a delegation representing the village chief, but when I attended the opening festivities at the end of January I found that the Farabako people had solved the problem by inviting hunters from each village!

The opening festivities for the maternity clinic resembled to a large extent a hunters’ association’s meeting, starting the day before the official opening with a parade of hunters from all over the region. Many of them displayed a membership badge of the Malian National Hunters’ Association, attached to their costumes alongside their many “power objects” (basiw [“amulets”]). The next day, 30 January 2007, an official opening took place in which a hunter from each and every village solemnly declared that the clinic was for every woman who needed health assistance. Such public repetition was utterly necessary to ensure that people would tell the right story back home; that is what creates “social memory”.Footnote 61

These opening festivities represented the format of a classical “traditional” meeting, and appeared rather innocent and folkloric to those not involved in the local politics. On closer inspection, however, in sub-Saharan Africa the apparently traditional format is nowadays the appropriate method to deal with the tensions produced by rapid changes and the increased influence of the state (allottissement issues), the presence of Western-based health care, and the presence of money. All such changes fit the local idea of modern life, so, while they are greatly appreciated, the danger that these changes bring with them, dangers often expressed in terms of sorcery and local rivalry, is faced by attributing new roles to established players.

From guild to rotary club?

The case of the maternity clinic in Farabako demonstrates how hunters offer a template to deal with supra-local affairs; transferring a local issue to them is a way of transcending it, and probably solving it. Hunters can clearly deal with “modern” issues such as landownership and access to public health services, and in doing so they demonstrate a diplomatic function that goes far beyond the management of wildlife and the bush. Hunters can mobilize the tradition needed to cope with the future.

I compare present-day hunters’ guilds, then, to a Rotary Club, or a Lions Club, in the sense that groups of that kind are characterized by male membership, certainly have a socializing dimension, are dedicated to good citizenship, and attach great value to the idea of a well-organized civil society. Members of hunters’ associations are people not only from rural areas, but from cities too, who have strong, frequently family-derived, ties with rural areas and who claim that “tradition” is necessary to cope with the new complications of “modern” life.

In the kinship system of the Mande peoples, hunters have been imagined as being drawn from the never-ending cohorts of younger brothers, individuals with a clear local identity but without immediate hope of having a position with any formal, which is to say inherited, authority. That made younger brothers, hunters, the ideal people to become involved with matters unrelated to kinship, what one might call “external activities” or “collective action”. The problematic structural position of the younger brother in the family does not diminish, so the format of “hunters” keeps being used, reconfigured in relation to modern issues, to deal with the nyama-laden “big world out there”.

In the circumstances of modern life, the diplomatic function of hunters is more relevant than ever. Hunting game is no longer the point and forestry protection is in the hands of civil servants and NGOs.Footnote 62 Today’s standards are best covered by a variation of the proverb at the beginning of this article: “Why should a good hunter be the owner of a gun?”. Even a crippled or cross-eyed person might be an excellent “hunter” these days, given the emphasis on diplomatic skills, dedication to public interest, and presentation of “authentic tradition”.

The days of game hunting are long gone. The modern hunter has a membership card issued by the government, an artefact dating from the colonial era when French bureaucracy wished to regulate hunting; permits were issued to combat poaching. At that time, regulations were enforced in a context where the hunters were subjects in a system of centralized rule.

However, times have changed. Governments are actively pursuing a policy intended to produce a civil society by stimulating local initiatives of organization, and to achieve that, hunters are among the groups selected to be exemplary citizens, not subjects now; they represent “tradition” in order to realize modernity. However, hunters are at the same time active agents in the production of an “occult economy”.

It is no coincidence that many hunters in Mali, both in towns and in the country, have proudly attached their membership badges, sporting the Malian flag, to the amulets on their “traditional” costumes. Of course, as with almost any form of citizenship nowadays, the hunters’ citizenship is “flexible”; it is to a large extent a matter of calculation,Footnote 63 and a means to keep government influence at bay in local areas.

However, both state and hunters adhere to and reproduce the image of a secular society, promoted by the IMF and Western sponsors, which makes the hunters’ guilds resemble a movement for responsible citizenship. As “traditional hunters” they help West Africans deal with the hardships of daily life, hardships caused in part by the severe Structural Adjustment Programmes. Hunters are “reimagined” as the backbone in a society of citizens, and hunters and state share allegiance to an agenda that has been interpreted in this article as a voice raised against the increasing influence of Islam in Africa’s public domain. I wonder, however, if the hunters themselves are aware of this recent upheaval in their own lives, or are aware of being used as instruments in one of the major ideological clashes in present-day sub-Saharan Africa.