>>Good morning and welcome to Global Perspectives.

Today, we are joined by Dr. Mark Deets, who is a professor of history at the American University in Cairo.

Dr. Deets is an Africanist specializing in West Africa and has recently written a book, "A Country of Defiance" which we'll discuss today.

Welcome to the show, Mark.

>>Yeah, thank you very much David.

>>Mark, before we begin talking about your book and Senegal, tell us how you got interested in this particular region.

You are a graduate, first of all, of Annapolis, you are a marine and a marine pilot, helicopter pilot.

How did you end up in academia as a African specialist?

>>That's a great question.

So there's a program in the military for military officers called Foreign Area Officer Program.

And in this program, the military sends you to get a master's degree in a particular kind of area studies.

Focused.

And so my focus was sub-Saharan Africa.

And I got to do that program and go to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

And then because I got this assignment to go be the defense attache to Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, the Cape Verde Islands.

But I was going to be living in Dakar.

I was sent to the Defense language Institute to learn French, so I got the opportunity to study French for about six months before heading to Dakar and starting the job.

>>Did you always have an interest in Africa, or is this this just emerging to you?

Obviously, it's quite different than and then flying helicopters.

>>It was not something that I had always been interested in, but I became interested in it and I was interested in an assignment that would allow me to live overseas with my family.

And I thought that would be a valuable experience.

I also wanted to learn a foreign language and so I took Spanish in high school, but I was never really fluent in that.

And so this program that would give me the opportunity to become fluent in a language was very attractive to me.

And you know when I also discovered that almost half of the African continent speaks French in one way or another.

That also made that very intriguing to me.

And so, yeah, I applied the program and got accepted to study sub-Saharan Africa for subsequent assignments, either with a staff or in an embassy in sub-Saharan Africa.

And so I got to do that in Senegal.

>>You've written a lot on society and culture.

I mean, above and before politics.

How does the colonial history affect this region to this day in society, culture, and of course, in politics?

>>Well, I would argue that it's one of the most fundamental legacies in the region.

And I think all you have to do in fact, this was actually kind of one of the things that triggered my interest in the in the Casamance conflict was the geography of Senegal and the Gambia.

So if you take a look at the map of West Africa, the westernmost tip of Africa is Senegal.

And it's it's right where Dakar is, which is the capital of Senegal.

The country of Senegal kind of makes this backward sea shape.

And then The Gambia, which was colonized by the British, is like, right in the middle of the hat.

So it's sort of this lock and key kind of geography.

And this is actually a part of the some of the kind of origins of the conflict is what I argue in the book, because you had Senegal, which was colonized by the French, and then you had The Gambia, which was in the very middle of the country, which was colonized by the British.

And then to the south, you had the at that time Portuguese Guinea, which then becomes Guinea Bissau.

Obviously colonized, colonized by the Portuguese.

All of this sort of colonial mapping is a part of what brings about the Casamance conflict.

And that's a that's a part of the argument in my book.

And, you know, it's really inter the colonial horse trading that was kind of taking place in the late 1800s because at one point the French had gone to the British and said, hey, this doesn't make any sense for you to have a colony in the middle of ours.

So why don't we trade you The Gambia for Cote d'Ivoire and Gabon?

The British turned them down because at that time trade along the Gambia River was so valuable to the British.

And of course they had no foresight to see what, you know, the the oil and the sort of rubber and other kinds of resources that could be found in Gabon, Cote d'Ivoire.

And so the Gambia remained a British colony, remained an English speaking colony.

And so that was one of the original things that really attracted my attention.

And yeah, it's it's a result of the of the colonial legacy in this part of West Africa.

And just to add to that colonial legacy a little bit, the the name Casamance actually came from the Portuguese, who were some of the original Europeans to start showing up on this part of the West African coast in the 15th century.

This region was known Casa and it had it had it in an earlier era, been touched by the old, the ancient or medieval Mali empire.

So it was kind of Mandinka.

And the the Mande word for King was Mansa.

And so they referred to the Mansa of Casa or the King of Casa in their reporting from kind of that earliest exploration and sort of colonial beginnings in West Africa from the Portuguese.

>>Let me ask you, in writing this book, I mean, a lot of a lot of our viewers have not heard of this conflict.

So did you write this book in part to raise awareness of it or to explore in depth or a little little of little or both?

>>Yes, a little of both.

So it is a very lesser known conflict.

And I think that's partly because of the the relatively low casualty figures that we have from this conflict.

First of all, Senegal is one of the few sub-Saharan African countries that's never had a coup d'etat.

And so Senegal takes a lot of pride in that.

However, they've had this separatist conflict going on.

The the earliest violence began in December of 1982.

So I did write the book partly to raise awareness.

It's a story that deserves to be told.

It's been a little over 5,000 casualties, 5,000 people have been killed in the conflict since it first began in December 1982.

And so in terms of West African conflicts, that's a relatively low number of casualties When you're talking about Liberia, with hundreds of thousands of people killed in the Liberian civil war, or you're talking about Sierra Leone with about 70,000 people killed in that civil war.

This is a very low intensity conflict.

And yet, obviously, to the families of the 5,000 people who've been killed, it matters a lot.

It also matters a lot because of the sort of limited opportunities for development because of this and also because of the use of landmines by both sides in this conflict, which then takes out of commission some of the agricultural lands, the Jola people in them, and the Mandinka to some extent in the southern part of Senegal, are known for their rice agriculture.

And so, you know, all of these minefields have taken out some of that land from from production.

And so, you know, just in terms of development, it's really been a big problem.

One of the things that the US government was working on when I was there was a humanitarian demining project to help take out some of those landmines.

But nevertheless, in spite of a ceasefire that was signed in December of 2004 excuse me, a peace accord, there have been several ceasefires that were signed and then broken.

But there was a peace accord signed summer of 2004.

There's been this sort of continuing nagging conflict that today people refer to it as neither war nor peace.

That just kind of keeps nagging and limiting the opportunities for development in the region.

>>Mark, can you briefly summarize the nature of the conflict, why this is going on, what are the central grievances?

Sure, sure.

So the the primary grievance for the for the separatists, this is a separatist conflict.

So the the separatist group and I'm not going to say the casamance say because the separatist group does not represent all casamance.

It does not represent all of the people in southern Senegal.

But the separatist group wants to have their own independent slice of Senegal.

In fact, they don't want to be a part of Senegal anymore.

And they say that it's because of the ways in which the Senegalese were basically an occupying force that replaced the French as the colonizers in the region.

So they basically consider, again, the separatists do not everybody in Casamance.

The separatists consider independent Senegal to be just another sort of colonizing power that is practicing power illegitimately because it doesn't understand the people and it looks down on the people of the Casamance.

And so, you know, I mentioned the importance of rice agriculture before.

There are these sort of these sort of stereotypes, right, of people from northern Senegal being merchants and being involved in commerce historically and coming to the Casamance to basically take advantage of the people there and take advantage of these agriculturalists, these peasants.

There was the development of a tourism sector after World War Two, kind of in the sixties and the seventies, after Senegal got its independence in 1960.

And a lot of the people who were kind of running these tourist hotels and involved in the tourist industry, partly because of their experience with France in northern Senegal, were these people coming from northern Senegal.

And so many of them were Wolof in terms of their ethnic group.

Others were Toucouleur or Mandinka.

They were kind of viewed as these invaders, if you will.

And this this movement, this idea, this idea for separatism really gets going in the late 1970s following kind of the worldwide economic crisis, the oil crisis, the coming of structural adjustment programs in sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the third World led to this kind of this sense of crisis in the late 1970s.

And so that's really when the separatist movement began to gain momentum.

And it named itself after an earlier version of the movement of democratic forces of the Casamance, the MFDC, which is the French acronym they named themselves after this party that was in that was in existence from 1949 to 1954.

So but it was a regional party from this, the southern part of the country.

They kind of resurrected that and called themselves the MFDC.

And then eventually began to engage in violence with Senegalese gendarmes and Senegalese armed forces after 1982.

>>Mark, your you write a lot about mapping identity.

And identity, of course, is a very strong element in a lot of these countries.

You're describing the region itself.

They're not natural boundaries.

These are countries largely written in terms of a map by colonial mapmakers, not by necessarily tribal tribes that work together or are naturally allied, but they put in put in these countries that come up with names, whether they're Senegal or or Zimbabwe or wherever in Africa.

This is this is frequent.

>>Right.

>>And the attempt, of course, is made to create a national identity out of something that is not necessarily historically based.

How successful has it been in Senegal compared to other African nations?

Creating an identity.

>>I would say it's been very successful, especially in comparison to other African nations.

You're absolutely right that this is one of the primary challenges for post-colonial African states, is to build a nation and to build a national identity.

And in many cases, as you mentioned, you're bringing together a number of ethnic groups who had not been together before.

In other cases, you've had colonial borders that divided ethnic groups that had been together before.

And so now they're actually divided.

In fact, we can talk about the Jola and the Mandinka and the Fulani in West Africa being groups like this that are divided by a number of different states.

This is actually a part of one of the claims of the separatist group, which is that they were representing this kind of Jola Republic, which is that that that ethnic group that's kind of at the center of this rebellion.

Not everybody in the MFDC is Jola.

But a lot of them are.

And this has been viewed as kind of a as kind of a Jola rebellion.

And so you have all of these these different groups, the Jola, and they referred to talk about the people of the old Jola Republic, the separatist leader who was a Catholic priest by the name of Agust - I think in America we would say Augustin Diamacoune Senghor, he referred to the three B's of the Jola Republic, which were Bongo in the Gambia, Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, then Begona, which is a regional town in the Casamance, part of of Senegal.

And so you have these these legacies of the of the pre-colonial history that's still there.

And you you have these challenges for these nationalist leaders who are trying to kind of pilot the ship of state here in the late colonial period, which is basically from really kind of the 1950s and 1960s in sub-Saharan Africa, that they're trying to to to navigate these the ship of state into independence with with peace and sovereignty.

And you can see why this is this is a real challenge.

One of a famous historian of Africa referred to this as the bundling of ethnicities, trying to bundle these ethnicities together and to get them to stop thinking of themselves as in terms of of only the ethnic group and to think of themselves as Senegalese.

Now, one of the challenges, if I could go on, one of the the challenges in the Casamance is that Senegal has been founded on what one scholar, Mamadou Diouf refers to is calling it kind of the is Islamo-Wolof model or in other words, kind of the Islamo-Wolof national identity of Senegal, which suggests that in order to be Senegalese, you're, for one thing, Muslim.

And if if you're not Wolof, by the way, it's only 35% of the population, maybe 40% that's that's actually Wolof.

But everybody else speaks Wolof because it's the lingua franca.

If you're not speaking French, which is the official language, the language of the educated people, then then most people are speaking Wolof.

So that seemed exclusionary to people from the Casamance who first of all, were not Wolof.

And they view the Wolof as invaders as I mentioned earlier.

Second of all, the Casamance was one part of Senegal, which is 95% Muslim, where Catholic missionaries achieved some success and conversions.

And so actually in the other area is is north of the Casamance and north of the Gambia, where the country's first president, Leopold Senghor, was from.

This is is one of the areas that is is Catholic, it's Christian.

However, it's still majority Muslim.

It's probably about somewhere between 65 to 75% majority Muslim, even though it's the one part where Catholicism achieved some success in conversions, mostly in the late 19th century to early 20th century.

Yeah.

So you can see we have ethnicity, we have religion, we have nationalism and all of these things that are kind of going into this this brew or this soup that create these different identities and this this, this, this sense for Casamance that they are different from people from northern Senegal and that they don't want to be a part of Senegal because of this.

>>Is are there aspirations for for separatist state independence, if you will?

Are they are they actually probable likely or is this more an aspirational type of type of goal?

>>It's it's aspirational.

What we haven't really seen, I don't think any kind of detailed planning or sort of strategy document for kind of day after, if you will, of of the Casamance conflict of what if the Casamance actually got its independence, which comparing the combat power of the Senegalese armed forces, which is a modern professional army against the MFDC is a kind of a kind of a story of David and Goliath.

And so it kind of looks from from an outside perspective, it looks very unlikely that the Casamance would ever win its independence against the will of the Senegalese and so, yeah, it's doubtful that that would happen.

There hasn't been much there's been some rioting by a few Casamance intellectuals of what that could look like.

But other people have talked about some degree of autonomy short of independence.

But all of these are rather elementary.

None of them have been really fleshed out in much detail to this point.

>>Is there an international role in making sure that this doesn't become a conflict that goes from 5,000 casualties over 40 years to 5,000 in a month?

I mean, these things can happen relatively quickly, but of course, there's issues of sovereignty.

But also, you know, is the international community paying attention?

Should it be?

>>Yes.

Yes.

The international community has been paying attention, at least in the region.

It's not something that most of us in America would see.

But the the international community has definitely been involved in trying to help the Senegalese government and the MFDC implement the peace deal.

From 2004.

This peace deal was signed a month before I arrived in the country as the as the one of the American military attachés in January of 2005.

And so, yes, the international community has been very involved in trying to help kind of broker this peace and various a couple of different nations have kind of taken the lead at different times and trying to lead this, of course, as the former colonial power at one time, France, that was kind of the mid-to-late nineties and then in the early to early to mid 2000, it's kind of when I was there, the United States was kind of playing that role and trying to help broker a lasting peace.

There was hope that this had been achieved by 2004.

You know, again, with that with that peace deal in December of 2004.

But the violence returned in March of 2006.

So it was about the time actually, of the of the conflict in Lebanon with Israel and all of that kind of stuff at about the same time that really most of the international community's focus was on that that the the Casamance conflict kind of rekindled and kind of restarted in spite of what was supposed to be what was hoped for, a permanent peace accord.

>>Are there there are outside actors who are inflaming the situation or is this entirely internal?

>>So there are outside actors.

The neighboring countries of the Gambia and Guinea-Bissau have not always helped.

Some of the political turbulence from the last president of the Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, who was replaced as president in the 2016.

And he was Jola himself.

He was from that ethnic group that's at that's at the heart of the rebellion.

And so he kind of liked to meddle in this to to kind of seemed like to kind of poke the bear a little bit with Senegal occasionally.

But for the most part, I think he found it more in his interest to to not go too deep into meddling in the Casamance even though he comes from a village which is right across the border from from the Casamance.

The other neighbor to the South Guinea Bissau has seen quite a bit of combat just across the border.

You have to understand that when this conflict first began, the MFDC, they were equipped, they were armed with bows and arrows and spears and machetes.

That was about it.

And so over the course of time, they were able to, especially in the post-Cold War era, as a former Soviet and former American weapons began to flood into the continent to some extent, but mostly former Soviet weapons.

They began to obtain AK 47.

They began to obtain landmines that I mentioned.

They they came to obtain rocket propelled grenades and things like this.

So to some extent, I think they may have had a border capability at some point.

But all of this is no match whatsoever for the combat power of the Senegalese armed forces, which has modern combat aircraft.

They have are heavy, heavy artillery.

They have mortars that, you know, and M-16s.

I mean, they receive American and French military training and all of these kinds of things.

So it was not a fair fight.

But the you know, one of the advantages that a guerrilla force often enjoys is knowledge of the terrain.

Right.

And so they would go across the border into the Gambia to the north or across the border into Guinea-Bissau, in the south, and kind of hide that's where they would hide their weapons.

They have weapons caches in these these in these neighboring countries.

And then when they were ready, they would come across the border, punch the Senegalese armed forces in the nose, and then flee back across the border as soon as they could, because the Senegalese is a modern sort of, you know, Senegal is a modern nation state and they respect those international borders.

So they eventually that kind of that that respect for sovereignty kind of begins to degrade a little bit, certainly with Guinea-Bissau, where they're chasing rebels into Guinea-Bissau.

But they have to be careful about that.

They knew that and that that did limit them somewhat.

Yeah, I think those are the main countries kind of those neighboring countries that have also played a role in the conflict besides kind of the, you know, the great powers like America and France.

>>Mark, thank you so much for joining us today.

We're unfortunately out of time already, but congratulations on the book and we hope to have you back to talk about some of the issues facing this region particularly, but Africa generally.

>>My pleasure, David.

Thank you very much.

>>Take care.

And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again next week on another episode of Global Perspectives.