Dakar, for Bamako, Conakry, N — and all the cities where the people pay while predators rule, preach or loot

J. Accuses those who claim to be the protectors of Africa for having made his clandestine collectors, his official jailers, his house-dwellers.
It accuses African despots of being served by the continent's historical humiliations as a convenient curtain behind which to continue to steal, lie, brutalize, betray.
Accuses those who shout at imperialism in the morning and empty public treasures in the afternoon.
J. accuses those who invoke sovereignty to better stifle their people.
J. accuses those who, after denouncing foreign domination, have reproduced in them pure, naked, voracious domination, without even the excuse of distance.

Because it must be said: not everything comes from elsewhere. Not everything comes from empires, multinationals, external networks, distant influences. There is an inner, obstinate, inventive, local predation in Africa, which has learned to live in the folds of our flags, in the rhetoric of our liberations, in the uniforms of our armies, in the offices of our ministries, in the sermons of our fanatics, in the instrumentalized ethnicities, in the domesticated universities, in the palaces repainted with the money of the dispensaries absent.

Accuses African heads of state who confuse themselves with the state itself.

You arrive with the vocabulary of salvation. You promise stability, dignity, security, development, rupture, refoundation, national restoration. Then you settle down. The country becomes your extended lounge. The constitution becomes a suggestion. The warrant becomes a joke. The nation becomes a setting for your longevity.

You like the word « continuity ». It often means my chair or chaos.

You present yourself as the last bulwark against civil war, Islamism, tribalism, interference, disorder. You give yourself the beautiful role of the dam. But who sabotaged the institutions or you? Who emptied the parties, humiliated the counter-powers, domesticated justice, bought the media, neutralized the unions, made any alternation risky precisely because you had concentrated the entire power in one body?

I accuse the putschists of coming on behalf of the people to sit in their place.

They always appear with the same staging: the uniform ironed, the grave voice, the flag behind, the people invoked, the corruption denounced, the cursed political class, the promised transition, the announced refoundation. They speak of honor, of rectification, of public salvation. They utter words worn out by a century of confiscation.

I accuse the coups d'état of often being embezzlements of popular anger.

Yes, sometimes the people are so humiliated, so betrayed by civilians, so disgusted by the electoral masquerades, that they applaud the boots. But it accuses those who exploit this fatigue to convert legitimate anger into a case rent. They confiscate disappointment, return it to military power, and then ask for time, always time, while the time of the people, he, continues to be stolen.

They replace a predator with another suit. They call this sovereignty restored. Too often, it's just a change of keys for the same body.

Accused African elites who have made the state a prey.

You know everything about modern language: governance, transparency, attractiveness, emergence, inclusion, resilience. You speak the lexicon of donors, the jargon of consultants, the flexible language of panels, forums, partnerships. You know how to write impeccable speeches about structural transformation while the real structure of the country is to transfer the public good to your private pockets.

You hijack, you puncture, you overbill, you commission, you share, you place. You fly as a group, as a family, as a network, as a clan, with the professional softness of people who call it normal functioning.

The most obscene is not just that you steal. It's that you're flying to countries where the child dies from a tiny breakdown, from an absent medicine, from an impassable road, from a maternity without gloves, from an inoperative generator, from a lost file, from further corruption.

You're not just corrupt. You're fate thieves.

Accused the dynasties of betrayed independence.

In your home, power is not a burden. It's a legacy. Family property. A concession. A house that is passed on to his brothers, sons, cousins, wives, nephews, creatures. The palace becomes a heritage enterprise. The party becomes chieftain. The Treasury becomes a domestic attic.

In your systems, it is not enough to be competent; one must be related, recommended, faithful, docile, indebted. The Republic becomes a parenthesis between two loyalties. Merit dies stifled under the surnames. And the brightest, the most upright, the most useful simmer or silence while the poor well-born in the network prosper.

The clans are accused of turning the state into a customary succession under modern varnish.

J. accuses the jihadists of not loving neither God nor men, but only power over the terrified bodies.

You come with the Book in hand and death in the wake. You talk about purity by burning schools. You talk about justice by whipping women. You talk about the truth by killing the villagers. You talk about salvation by making orphans. You claim to defend faith while you only enlarge the reign of fear.

You hate music, free thought, women standing, school teachers, living markets, peaceful villages, libraries, laughter, nuances, all that shows that a human world can exist without your ferrule.

And also accuse those who, out of cowardice, calculation or confusion, excuse you in the name of the humiliations suffered. No. Poverty does not excuse the massacre. Unrighteousness does not absolve barbarity. The abandonment of the state does not turn fanaticism into legitimacy.

J'accuse the militias, the road cutters, the warlords, the traffickers of kidnappings, the bandits of chaos, for having made the collapse a profession.

You thrive where the state has withdrawn or sold. You tax roads, trucks, villages, fears, bodies, lives. You ransom existence. You replace tax with extortion and sovereignty with the toll of kalashnikov.

You sell stolen cattle, dirty gold, smuggled fuel, human beings, weapons, porous borders. You are the shareholders of the disorder. You do not need coherent ideology; Terror is enough. A village that is fleeing, a school that is closing, a market that is silent, a road that is empty: this is your mode of government.

Accuse those who cut Africa into murderous belongings and call it authenticity.

Ethnicity in your home is not a memory. It is an electoral weapon, a rhetorical machete, a recruitment mechanism, a way of distributing posts, justifying injustice, naturalizing preference, preparing hatred.

• You say: « ours ». Then very quickly it means: not the others.
• Then it means: first ours.
• Then it means: everything for ours.
• Then it ends in the mass graves of absolute preference.

I accuse the ethnologists of having understood that it is easier to govern a fear than a project.

You take historical wounds, regional frustrations, social humiliations, old rivalries, and you blow over until you produce the fire. You simplify complex peoples into electoral tribes. You're replacing citizenship with a strong membership. You take the nation back to the camp.

I accuse your policy of being an organized return to primitive distrust.

J'accuse those who know and lie down.

I accuse domesticated academics, palace editorialists, protocol essayists, subsidized philosophers, experts invited to justify the unjustifiable with this soft voice, this impeccable syntax, this elegance of living room: those who susurrect in the salons of condescendency.

Maybe you're the saddest of all. Because you don't even have an excuse for ignorance. You know how to name confiscation, authoritarianism, corruption, ethnicization, moral bankruptcy. You read, studied, taught, theorized. Then you'll have dinner with them. Then you grade. Then you contextualize. Then you explain that it is necessary to understand the complexity, not to judge too quickly, to balance, to consider the achievements, to protect stability.

You offer violence its respectable vocabulary. You provide the lie with its bibliography. You turn bondage into subtlety. You call this height of sight; It's often a low moral altitude.

Also accuses those who experience criticism without ever wanting responsibility.

It is too easy to limit the requirement only to installed rulers. Because there is a complementary fauna: professional opponents, hotel revolutionaries, studio resistors, circumstance leaders, new men already old of their calculations. They spend their lives denouncing power to learn more about geography, wait, covet, reproduce it.

How many of you were not against looting, but simply frustrated to be excluded?

Finally, we accuse of this moral fatigue that ended up trivializing the African predator.

We have sometimes explained too much. Too sorry. Too historicized. Too forgiven in the name of colonization, underdevelopment, external humiliation, complexity, threatened sovereignty. Yes, all that exists. Yes, that matters. But I accuse the perverse use of these truths when they become alibi for our own criminals.

The fact that we have long been looted does not allow our leaders to finish us. The fact that the alien conspires does not authorize the ruling cousin to hijack. The fact that history is tragic does not allow the present to become filthy.

I accuse the reflex of believing that a local predator would be less predatory because it resembles us.

I accuse all these predators of having made the African people heroic out of necessity.

Because at last, what people did we have to become to continue in spite of you? A people who stand in line before the administration that despises him. A people that pays tax and ransom. A people who vote and whose vote is corrected. A people who pray for the light to return, for the water to flow, for the road to hold, for the school to open, for the son to return from the forehead, for the daughter to escape the rapt, for the hospital to have oxygen still, for the harvest to pass through the dam of armed men.

You have taught people to ruse with the state, to circumvent the law, to negotiate with the arbitrariness, to live in uncertainty, to beware of the public promise, to laugh at what should be ashamed, to call « system D » which is first a tax imposed by your bankruptcy.

You have narrowed the horizon to the point that getting the minimum sometimes seems a miracle. And when the people adapt, you call it resilience.

I blame your admiration for our resilience. It is often the most polite way to take advantage of our ability to survive what should be intolerable.

And yet, despite you, something resists.

• There are still judges who refuse.
• Journalists investigating.
• Teachers who hold.
• Mothers who bury and continue.
• Students reading despite the breakdown.
• Alert launchers.
• Peasants.
• Poets.
• Trade unionists.
• Steady lawyers.
• Citizens who understand that sovereignty is not a barracks, that a flag is not a permit to fly, that a religion is not a right to kill, that an ethnic group is not a program, that expertise is not a conscience.

There's still one refusal.

There is this sentence that grows from mouth to mouth: We no longer want to be administered by our own predators.

• We will learn not to applaud the boots anymore because the costumes have disappointed.
• Not to confuse anger with putsch.
• Faith and fanaticism.
• Appearance and hatred.
• Nuance and servility.
• Sovereignty and confiscation.
• Elite and predation.
• Stability and asphyxiation.

We will learn to judge our own with the same severity as others. This may be the real beginning of dignity.

Epilogue — Accused

So I write so that there is no escape.

I accuse you of taking a wounded continent and deciding that the wound would be an annuity for you.

I accuse you of turning the anti-colonial struggle into a family enterprise, sovereignty into a slogan of repression, religion into a machine of killing, identity into a fuel of division, intelligence into a domesticity, the civil service into a private mine, the presidency into an addiction, the people in reserve of obedience or corpses.

I accuse you of having made Africa not only a continent attacked from outside, but also a place ravaged by its own devorers.

I'm writing to name.
I write so no one can say: we didn't know.
I write so that anger stops being confused and finally finds its true faces.
I write so that Africa, by rising against its external predators, also rises against its internal predators.
I write to remind you that no liberation will be complete as long as we continue to be governed, terrorized, divided, stolen, commented and betrayed by ours.

I do not expect your answer, your wounded elegance, your offended statement, your ungrateful accusation, or your complaint about the complexity of things.