AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	29. Extended families in time. Creating alliances and power networks in Western Africa societies and history
Paper ID	445
Author(s)	Ciavolella, Riccardo
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	This paper shows how a fulbe group of Mauritania (fulaabe) has made use of family connections to exit from their marginal position and integrate state system. The fulaabe occupies a particular place in the socio-political landscape of Mauritania. Historically, they have always preserved a peripheral position in front of any political centralization, upholding their pastoral activities and semi-nomadic mobility in “frontier regions”. Climatic crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, however, have dramatically changed their relations with the Mauritanian state. Both the narrowing of transhumance corridors under ecologic pressure and the advance of state control over the brousse has definitively reduced their autonomy. From their previous extraneousness, Fulaabe have moved to a condition of “exclusion within integration”. Gaps in the timing of integration to state administration, and in the access to education and economic development have shaped a more profound fracture in the Mauritanian society than the over-evocated opposition between “Arabs” and “Africans”. A breach divides the urban and cultivated elite oriented to the global economy from the mass of “broussards”, such as the fulaabe, who remains excluded from political and economic power. In their exodus towards the urban areas and in their effort of reducing this marginality, fulaabe younger generations tried to mobilise family relationships as a strategy for achieving administrative or political offices. My discussion will touch on two main points. On the one hand, the idiom of family connections was understandable to the old generations living in the rural areas; it allowed keeping alive the relationships with the original villages, thus creating a sort of refuge in case of failed social and political careers. On the other hand, patronage relations based on family and “tribal” ties seemed the only way open to access the Mauritanian state. In the 90s, the first “fulaabe associations” emerged in Nouakchott with the explicit intention of “strengthening families relationships”, by delivering economic assistance in urban areas and collecting resources to “maintain good relations with administration” in the countryside. This strategy of converting kinship affinity into an “ethnic” consciousness to be mobilised in the political arena eventually failed. Individual choices seemed to be worthier, while family relations of proximity worked more successfully on the economic rather than on the political level. Furthermore, the recent development of political and electoral decentralization have rearticulated local patterns of alliance making the political unity of the village more relevant than the lineage group.

Mobilising family connections as a strategy against marginality. The Fulaabe groups of contemporary Mauritania