Bamako, Mali

World Social Forum puts Africa up front

By John Catalinotto
Bamako, Mali

For those who know that Mali’s capital, Bamako, has only a handful of large buildings—some government offices, a 15-story luxury hotel, an international bank and a large mosque—it may have been a surprise that this city was picked for the African session of 2006’s Polycentric World Social Forum (WSF).

But Mali has a rich history that reminds people of the high point of African civilization before the slave trade decimated the continent. In the early 14th century, Mali was the leading power in an empire bigger than medieval Europe, on the trading route from the Middle East to the African Gold Coast.

On that route was the legendary city of Timbuktu, located in the dry region of northern Mali known as the Sahel, on the edge of the Sahara desert. It is said that Mali’s 14th-century ruler Mansa (or Kankan) Moussa once traveled to Mecca with an entourage of 60,000 retainers, each carrying a bar of gold. Arriving in Cairo, he gave away so much gold that his generosity collapsed the medieval market for that precious metal.

Landlocked and extremely poor today, Mali still produces and exports gold, along with cotton. These two products account for 80 percent of Mali’s exports. Its territory of 480,000 square miles is almost twice that of Texas, but only 4 percent is arable, mostly in the inland delta of the mighty Niger River. The river starts in the mountains of neighboring Guinea and flows northeast, then switches to southwest through Niger and Nigeria, finally emptying into Nigeria’s oil fields in the Gulf of Guinea.

Over a million of Mali’s 12.5 million people inhabit Bamako, a city of tree-lined streets with small wooden buildings and the feel of a giant village. Many Malians live in crushing poverty at a survival level, statistically about the same rate as Bolivia, and 10 percent of the population are nomads, mostly Touaregs in the North.

Mali’s infant mortality rate is over 100 per 1,000 live births. The adult literacy rate is under 50 percent.

But anyone walking across the Bridge of Martyrs from the south to the north side of the Niger will see a beehive of activity and traffic. People ride mopeds or drive old cars at a density familiar in any modern city. In the blocks-long market area, near the grand mosque, people mostly walk through the busy, narrow, crowded streets.

Everyone is selling and some are buying on these streets—mostly cheap manufactured goods from all over the world.

Mali had a progressive government when it won independence from the French Empire in 1960, but now, like most of Francophone Africa, it is ensnared in French neocolonialism. Mali’s currency, the CFA, is locked into the euro, as the currency of the Bahamas or Ecuador is to the dollar. The few real jobs are in government services, on a railroad now facing privatization or in the gold mines. But 80 percent of the people live off the land and cotton prices are so low on the world market that imperialist agribusiness is wiping out the local producers.

Africa front and center

The organizers of the World Social Forum chose this city to host the African session of its 2006 gathering from Jan. 19-23. Malian activists organized, with a minimal infrastructure, a series of 600 meetings over those days in the universities, government buildings, museums and conference centers of Bamako. According to these intrepid organizers, including former Minister of Culture Aminata Dramane Traore, between 15,000 and 20,000 people, mostly from Francophone Africa and including many from farming villages, attended the Bamako WSF.

For the first time in the five years of the WSF’s existence, the issues of Africa were at its center. According to Malian organizer Mamadou Goita, “We had over 300 people from the rural areas of Mali alone, while another 8,000 came from neighboring countries. All of them participated in the forum and enriched the discussions. This has never happened before.”

At the opening demonstration on Jan. 19, thousands of people marched through Bamako’s streets to the National Stadium demanding fair trade policies, no privatization of the railroad, an end to subsidies to imperialist agribusiness, freedom for Western Sahara and an end to Third World debt.

For the peoples of Africa, who for the first time had the opportunity to discuss their day-to-day problems before the world, the forum meant a chance to raise some of the most basic demands—fair trade for agricultural products with an end to subsidies for imperialist agribusiness, development of industry in Africa, fair treatment of immigrants in Europe, protection of the environment of the poor countries, an end to the crushing debt burden. All were on the agenda.

On Jan. 23, a group of international guests from Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Sweden, Belgium and the U.S. stopped at a local restaurant near the train station. As we left, some young Malian men implored us to bring this message back to the WSF and to the world: “All we want is work. We would prefer to stay here and work. Or we will go to Europe and work.”

The train station is at one end of the rail road from Dakar, Senegal, to Bamako, which was the scene of an historic 10-month-long strike in 1947-1948. The strike played a big role in the region’s struggle for independence from France. Senegalese author and filmmaker Sem bene Ousmane brought the story of this strike to the world in literary form in his novel, “God’s Bits of Wood.”

Malians at the WSF raised as a major issue the attempt to privatize the railroad and sell it to a Canadian-based transnational corporation.

A fate worse than debt

Because the media has hyped the imperialist banks’ Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, people may think these countries’ debts have been canceled and the debt problem substantially relieved. In reality, this initiative has achieved little.

Throughout the 1990s and in the 21st century, the major imperialist powers have used the leverage of the crushing debt to enforce, through the International Monetary Fund, what is known as “neoliberal” policies on the indebted countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Without IMF approval, the countries can’t get the new credit they need to function in the world economy.

The IMF demanded that African governments cut trade barriers that protected local producers, denationalize industry, cut government spending on health care, education and food subsidies, and open their markets. In this way their economies remained as sources of cheap raw materials and labor for transnational corporations while ensuring continued interest payments to the banks. In 1999, for example, the HIPC countries repaid $1,680 million more than they received in the form of new loans.

As a result of World Bank and IMF policies, average incomes in Africa have declined and the continent’s poverty has increased. These policies are still imposed on the HIPC countries that received debt “relief,” including Mali.

In Guinea and Zimbabwe, where the governments stopped paying interest on their foreign debts, the Fund, the World Bank and Western countries have frozen all aid, causing the economic situation to deteriorate there.

With an investment of just $80 billion, all the people of Africa could have basic medical care, primary education and clean drinking water, said delegates from the Democratic Republic of Congo. This would go a long way toward lifting the continent out of poverty. However, they said, the poorest nations are saddled with more than $300 billion in debt to developed countries.

Enormous wealth, in people and resources, has been stolen from Africa over the last five centuries. It is actually capitalist Europe and the U.S. that are in debt to Africa, not the other way around, and they must be made to pay reparations.

The Bamako WSF scheduled 600 meetings at nine sites throughout the capital. Many were focused on the issue of immigration. A whole group of West African immigrants had just been expelled from Morocco after spending up to a year walking north in the hope of ending up in Europe with some sort of job, no matter how hard or how ill-paid.

At one forum, Africans told of their plight, and European progressives, mainly from France and Italy, told of trying to work in solidarity with the Africans and to fight for the rights of all workers. A man from Angola told of being separated from his family without contact for seven months as he tried desperately to get to Europe. He had still only reached Mali.

The WSF does not make overall demands, let alone organize to carry them out. But participants expressed their satisfaction in meeting others from the continent also working for human progress.

However, at a separate meeting of Marxist intellectuals and activists, called on the eve of the WSF by economist Samir Amin, a list of demands on relevant issues was approved. (See the Bamako Appeal, WW, Feb. 2.)

In Caracas, Venezuela, where the second of the Polycentric WSF sessions finished Jan. 30, President Hugo Chávez called for an international organization to take anti-imperialist action.

The 2007 WSF is scheduled for Nairobi, Kenya.

Catalinotto represented the Inter national Action Center at the meetings that issued the Bamako Appeal.

---