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Stabroek News

A new kind of politics
published: Thursday | December 6, 2007


John Rapley

TOUBA, Senegal:

THREE HOURS' drive east of Dakar, along a smooth road through the Senegalese savannah, we turn into the dry, dusty city of Touba. A squat, sprawling place of a few hundred thousand people - it is growing so fast, its actual population is not known - Touba has the feel of a frontier town: hand-built, half-completed, new structures rising on every corner .

Touba is the spiritual centre of the Mourides, an Islamic sect founded in Senegal when it was a French colony. One day in 1887, Sheikh Amadou Bamba, the sect's founder, decided to make this barren place his home. Following his death, his followers began building a huge mosque. It would become the Mouride Vatican. After its completion in 1963, the city grew quickly, with Touba coming to occupy, in the Mouride imagination, a role similar to that played by Jerusalem to the devout Jew.

Powerful work ethic

The fashionable dress and tight jeans of Dakar give way in Touba to Islamic robes and veils, and the music, alcohol, dancing and drumming that animate Dakar's celebrated nightlife are all absent here. The Mouride faith is encapsulated in a simple injunction to work as if you will live forever, but pray as if you'll die tomorrow. From this has emerged not only an Islamic faith based on loyalty to the Sheikh's descendants, called caliphs, but a powerful work ethic as well. Senegalese Mourides migrate to wherever in the world economic opportunities exist. Once there, quietly, humbly, they prosper.

When such success meets Muslim faith, and its demand that a portion of earnings be given in alms, a powerful mix emerges. For decades, Senegalese abroad have been sending millions of dollars to Touba, both to build the holy city, and to reserve their own little space in it. "Touba," as one town councillor told me, "is not a place for Mourides to live; it is where they come to die."

Just how much money is flowing into Touba, no one knows. Little of it flows through the formal banking system. Equally unknown - but of growing interest to the authorities in Dakar - is whether any of the money coming into Touba is illicit, and whether criminal interests might be exploiting a legitimate trade to cover their own activities.

But, what is clear is the way in which the flow of money into Touba i the country's politics. While some of the remittances go to households, many of the funds find their way into the caliph's accounts. He then uses the money to develop the city's infrastructure and provide a whole network of social services. His secular power, thereby, rein-forces his moral authority.

In consequence, the caliph has been able to negotiate a special status for Touba. Where local councils are normally elected in Senegal, the presidency of Touba's is hand-picked by the caliph. The police work closely with the caliph, enforcing his strictures on the city's morals, while allowing immunity to important families.

A medieval Europe

Thus, while the Senegalese government is, nominally, the sovereign authority in Touba, at best it enjoys a sovereignty that it negotiates daily with the caliph and the network of powerful families allied to him. It could hardly be otherwise: Senegal's president is himself a devout Mouride, and travelled the day after his election in 2000 to seek the caliph's blessing.

If it has the feel of a medieval European king seeking his pope's approval, that's because that, in effect, is what it is. Welcome to the new middle ages, an age in which sub-state actors are carving out autonomous spaces for themselves, but doing so thanks to the possibilities brought to them by globalisation.


John Rapley is a senior lecturer in the Department of Government, University of the West Indies, Mona.

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