8 - Acting as Heroic: Creativity and Political Violence in Tuareg Theater in Northern Mali

Summary

Introduction In Tuareg communities of northern Mali, actors call themselves, and many others call them, ibaraden. This plural term (sing. abarad) in the Ifoghas dialect of their language, Tamajaq, denotes approximately “courageous (brave) people” or “notables.” Why is this so? What are the nuanced and multiple meanings of this term, often translated as “brave” by French-speaking Tuareg? How are these meanings historically, socially, and culturally constructed?

The present chapter explores these questions in the urban performance context of Kidal, in the Adragh-n-Ifoghas Mountains of northern Mali, the primary setting of my 2006 project on theatrical performance, modernity, and memory. The theoretical perspective and methodology are interdisciplinary: the disciplines involved include anthropology, history, and aesthetics/performance. This chapter also addresses the broader issue of how performers cope, through their creativity, with recurring political violence and oppression in alternating periods of armed conflict and peace mediations, and how their performances express the cultural consequences of war. The chapter includes an analysis of these performers and their performance poetics (aesthetics as lived, practiced experience) and their politics (power) but also of their creativity in resistance to oppression—in terms of how they convey retrospective historical memory and contemporary social commentary on the causes and effects of political violence, and how these experiences shape their aesthetics.

The Tuareg data also suggest that these contemporary local performances are in some respects, as Stoller terms Songhai possession rituals, a “sensory arena of countermemory” in their dramatic and satirical conveying of past and current events, and of fears over future socioeconomic and political experiences. Courage in the face of fear is central here: in efforts to reclassify and distinguish friend from foe, to reestablish boundaries that have become blurred in the sporadic resurgence of the Tuareg armed rebellions and among the new, “lost” youthful generation returning from flight and exile as refugees.

This essay draws from approaches to theater in Africa as crisis management. Yet theater in Africa, as elsewhere, is also an art form, albeit historically situated in broader power systems.This analysis is intended to contribute to anthropological theories of performance, memory, and narrative. More broadly, the performances studied here contest, but also reproduce, cultural ideologies of power—for example, long-standing and changing distinctions in social relationships and emerging nation-state and global hierarchies.