Bruce Whitehouse AAA 2014 Suspecting the state: How mass suspicion brought down a president in Mali, West Africa Abstract: In early 2012, just months before he was due to leave office, Mali's democratically elected president Amadou Toumani Touré faced a severe political crisis. His government’s ineffective response to a separatist rebellion in the country's northern regions had caused many citizens to lose faith in their leaders. Many Malians suspected that their head of state had manufactured the crisis to prolong his hold on power. On March 21, Touré was toppled in a coup mounted by a few dozen junior army officers and the country was plunged into turmoil. Public mistrust of politicians, aided by new information technologies and stoked by a free but often unprofessional press, fostered manifold accusations of malfeasance, generating new “facts” received as truth in the media and by ordinary Malians. This paper explores the production of public knowledge amidst political uncertainty and shifting power dynamics, focusing particularly on Malian media coverage and public discourse pertaining to a few key events taking place in early 2012. Drawing from the author’s experiences as an ethnographer and blogger in Mali at the time of the crisis, it considers how suspicion and a shortage of verifiable facts combined through broadcast, electronic, print and social media to inflame public sentiment and undermine established political authority. Simultaneously, many Malians willingly suspended their suspicion of those behind the coup. My analysis interrogates the dynamic between suspicion and trust in a troubled West African context. “Conspiracy’s got to be simple. Sense doesn’t come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever’s supposed to be behind the conspiracy.” - William Gibson, The Peripheral (Putnam, 2014) Introduction and background: Democracy, transition, and suspicion The impoverished, landlocked West African nation of Mali today bears many burdens. Its government struggles against separatist rebels and Islamist fighters for control over the country’s northern desert regions. Its head of state and top officials are mired in corruption scandals involving allegedly fraudulent defense contracts and the acquisition of a presidential jet. As if these problems were not enough, in late 2014 Mali is facing an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus. Yet only a few years ago, Mali was celebrated as a bastion of stability, social harmony, nonviolent conflict resolution, and good governance—in short, one of a select group of promising African success stories (see, e.g., Radelet 2010). It had emerged in the early 1990s from decades of authoritarian rule and economic stagnation to become a darling of the global donor community (Bergamaschi 2014), with respectable annual economic growth, a vibrant free press, and a formally democratic political system. Amadou Toumani Touré, Mali’s president from 2002 until 2012, received much of the credit for Mali’s rosy image. Touré had played a key role in the country’s transition to democracy in the 1990s: as a military officer in March 1991, he led a coup that overthrew an unpopular, autocratic 1 Bruce Whitehouse AAA 2014 ruler, then served as interim president until he was succeeded by an elected government the following year. He was succeeded by Alpha Oumar Konaré, a historian and political party leader. Mali’s 1992 constitution decreed that the president could serve no more than two fiveyear terms in office. With Konaré due to step down at the end of his second term in 2002, Touré left the army and ran as an independent to take his place. He received 63 percent of second-round votes. Touré’s legacy as Mali’s head of state is controversial. While in office, he was well regarded in the international media, celebrated as the “soldier of democracy” (SAPA 2002). He maintained close relations with Mali’s former colonial power France and with the United States, which viewed him as a vital partner in its regional counter-terrorism strategy. His government prioritized infrastructure development, especially roads, housing, and public buildings. Yet the country remained one of the poorest on earth, and Mali’s stable democratic system masked considerable popular discontent with its leaders. The private media—a host of newspapers and radio stations that had flourished since the government lost its media monopoly in the 1990s— was generally free from direct state influence, but lacked professionalism and was prone to selfcensorship. When political authorities like Touré and his associates were criticized in the press, it was often in vague terms, or with innuendo. Accusations of corruption or abuse against senior officials were rarely verifiable. Toward the end of his first term, Touré was the target of unconfirmed charges of malfeasance—vote-rigging, venality, corruption—published by a pseudonymous, but reportedly well-informed, Malian author (Le Sphinx 2006 and 2007); these allegations were occasionally echoed in the Malian press. Such critiques, however, went virtually unnoticed outside Mali, and in any case, at the end of his first term, Touré was easily re-elected, taking a 71-percent share of ballots in the first round. My examination of events in Mali will focus on the waning days of Touré’s second term and the circumstances under which he left office in 2012. Despite his positive reputation abroad, Malians came to regard their president with great suspicion and hostility following his 2007 re-election. That suspicion helped generate the political crisis that ensued, which witnessed a military coup, the occupation of more than half of Mali’s territory by separatist and Islamist rebels, and military intervention by France and the United Nations. I consider how political upheaval and uncertainty undermined political authority in Mali by facilitating the transformation of unsubstantiated rumors into widely accepted facts. I also consider what these events suggest about the inverse of suspicion, namely trust—a quality that has studied and theorized by social scientists in a variety of contexts. Suspicions of the president’s motives To understand Malians’ views of Touré during this period, it may be helpful to consider a wider perspective on African heads of state. Since Africa’s “second wave” of democracy began following the end of the Cold War, it has become commonplace for presidents to employ various means to skirt term limits and other official checks on their executive power. In the past ten years alone, presidents have succeeded in scrapping constitutional term limits in Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, and Zimbabwe. Plans for such a change are underway in Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, and Congo-Kinshasa; such plans were underway in Burkina Faso until Blaise Compaoré, the country’s long-serving president, was ousted following massive street 2 Bruce Whitehouse AAA 2014 demonstrations against him (france24.com 2014; Washington Post 2014). Leaders like President Konaré who voluntarily step down upon reaching the end of their constitutionally limited mandates have been the exceptions to the rule on the continent. Many Malians, particularly in Bamako, are aware of such trends in regional politics, and consequently tend to be cynical about their leaders’ intentions, even those leaders who were popularly elected. They often suspect them of seeking to subvert democratic procedures and institutions to strengthen their own executive power. It should not be surprising, therefore, that public discourse concerning Touré’s alleged intentions to extend his time in office by changing Mali’s constitution began early in his second term. “According to our sources,” read an April 2009 article in the Bamako newspaper L’Annonceur, “a third term is reportedly the greatest desire of those close to [Touré]…. As for [Touré] himself, he is reportedly hesitant. In any case, life will not be easy if he tries for a third term” (Camara 2009). The question remained a perennial topic of discussion in Mali’s private media and online news forums over the next few years, with various analyses (e.g. Farafina 2010) speculating as to whether he would step down as he had before in 1992, extend his term, or anoint a successor (as, some claimed, President Konaré had designated Touré to succeed him in 2002; see Le Sphinx 2006). Touré never publicly articulated a wish to cling to power. In fact, he repeatedly and explicitly ruled out the possibility of his staying in office after his term ended in 2012. “With respect to Article 30, that is, whether the president will remain or not, neither the president, nor the parliament can change it,” he told an interviewer in early 2011 (Seye 2011), responding to reports that some of his supporters were calling for him to stay on. “It’s the Malian people who can do it through a referendum. I see in this agitation a lack of trust. I think really people are in a hurry. But me too, I’m in a hurry to leur laisser la place [literally ‘to leave them the place,’ i.e. to leave office]. Nothing prevents Malians from changing that article, but as for me, I wouldn’t vote for it.” In June of the same year he told a reporter, “For those who think there will be a prolongation, let them rest assured, there will be nothing of the sort. I will leave power on 8 June 2012 after free and transparent elections. I have no more desire to remain in power” (PANA 2012). Yet as the date of those elections neared, such seemingly unambiguous statements failed to quell widespread speculation that Touré would not give up the presidency. This speculation grew in tandem with insecurity in northern Mali, where returning Tuareg fighters from Libya helped fuel a new wave of separatist rebellion in January 2012 (Nossiter 2012). Many of Touré’s critics in Mali interpreted this rebellion as part of his sinister strategy to remain in office. “One of his collaborators came to tell me that [Touré] didn’t want to leave,” Seydou Badian Kouyaté, a noted author, former cabinet minister, and founding father of postcolonial Mali said to an interviewer some 18 months after Touré’s ouster (Ballo 2013). “Everyone knows that when one square centimeter of national territory is occupied by foreigners, there are no elections…. Some of his friends were starting to yell, ‘How can we have elections when the country is occupied, we must liberate it first.’” Rebel activity, which for years in northern Mali had been a sporadic nuisance (and which the Malian press seldom distinguished from mere banditry), appeared to enter a new phase in early 3 Bruce Whitehouse AAA 2014 2012 in the town of Aguel Hoc, near the Algerian border. There, between 18 and 24 January, rebel attacks resulted in the deaths of dozens of Malian soldiers defending an army garrison. Reports subsequently emerged that the troops had run out of ammunition, and that many of the dead soldiers had been executed in cold blood—shot in the back, or their throats slit, depending on the telling. Estimates of the number of soldiers killed varied from a low of 82, reported by the French government (Le Monde 2012), to a high of 153 reported by a Malian pro-government human rights group; the higher figure was subsequently taken up by international human rights organizations (see, e.g., Human Rights Watch 2014). While the Malian defense ministry blamed the separatists, other accounts suggest that Islamist rebels were responsible for the killings (Diawara 2012; Aljazeera.com 2013). The events in Aguel Hoc shocked many Malians, who struggled to comprehend how and why their troops had lost their lives. Touré and the rebels Close on the heels of these events, unconfirmed reports began to circulate alleging a link between Touré and the rebels responsible for attacking the Aguel Hoc garrison. According to one version published in a Bamako BOX: A timeline of key events in Mali, early 2012 newspaper several months later • 18-24 January: A rebel assault on the Malian army garrison in (Diarra 2012), the captain in the northern town of Aguel Hoc culminates in the deaths of charge of the Malian troops several dozen Malian troops, many of them allegedly executed there had captured a pair of after running out of ammunition; the Malian government rebel leaders along with their blames Tuareg separatists. satellite phone on 18 January. • Wednesday 1 February: Wives from the Kati army barracks Two days later, that phone march to the presidential palace in nearby Bamako to demand received a call from President an audience with President Touré; he does not meet with them, but delivers a televised speech that evening calling for national Touré, who was expecting to unity, condemning atrocities committed at Aguel Hoc and speak with the rebels. When urging Malians not to retaliate against innocent Tuareg the captain introduced himself, civilians. the president abruptly hung up. • Thursday 2 February: A second demonstration takes place, The subsequent overrunning of and Touré promises to meet with the Kati wives the following the Malian garrison and day. Mali’s state newspaper reports that Touré is “vexed to hear execution of its men was, by certain fallacious and fantastical rumors knowingly this version, directed by the orchestrated by individuals against him personally and the president himself to cover up entire nation.” his own complicity with the • Friday 3 February: In the morning, Touré formally receives a rebels. delegation of some 40 army wives. • Saturday 4 February: Malian state TV broadcasts a 100- Public dismay at the deaths of minute recording of Touré’s meeting with the army wives held the previous day. these troops combined with • Monday 19 March: Kati wives organize another protest march widespread mistrust of the calling for Touré’s resignation. president and his motives in the • Wednesday 21 March: A mutiny in Kati leads to a coup that weeks to follow. Accusations ousts Touré from power. arose that the soldiers had died because the government had failed to give them the necessary arms, munitions and equipment to carry out their mission in the north. On 1 and 2 February, protesters, including many soldiers’ wives and children, organized 4 Bruce Whitehouse AAA 2014 marches from the army barracks in Kati (13 km outside Bamako) to the presidential palace, demanding an audience with the president. The demonstrations were “sparked by local reports that the military ran out of ammunition and that dozens of soldiers may have been executed during rebel attacks,” according to one foreign media account (Reuters 2012). Touré received a delegation of army wives on 3 February to discuss their concerns (see box, above). The next day, Malian state television broadcast 100 minutes of edited footage showing Touré’s exchange with the wives. In it, the president can be seen sitting, regally attired in a gold and violet caftan and his signature brimless hat, behind a table in a formal reception hall; the women, numbering at least forty, are seated in rows of chairs facing him. Most of them appear to be in their 40s and 50s, dressed simply but respectably. After a short introduction in the Bamanan language (the dominant language in Bamako and most of southern and central Mali) by an announcer, a woman comes to the podium. She begins with a pious Islamic invocation in Arabic, then addresses the president in Bamanan. “We are here because our youths [denmisennw] are being killed up north,” she says. She describes her consternation upon learning from a friend “of more than 150 dead” during the recent fighting in Aguel Hoc. “I said ‘How can this be?’ She said ‘It’s true.’ Then she said that money was given to the rebels. Two billion [CFA francs, approx. US$4 million]. I said no; she said it was true.” (The speaker refers here to rumors that the rebels had received cash payments, allegedly from Malian officials.) She urges the president to devote the necessary arms and resources to help the country’s soldiers in their fight against the rebels. Touré offers a solicitous response, also in Bamanan. He thanks her and the other women for coming and speaking with him. Then he addresses the rumors: “Today you’ve come and spoken about the many things that were said,” he tells her. “Many of them are not true. Many things have been said with the intention of disturbing our nation.” He denies that Malian troops were ill equipped for recent combat, and claims that more supplies and equipment are being sent to the troops every day. He also says that the loss of so many men in Aguel Hoc was “a huge regret for us.” Then he denies that the rebels had received any government funds: “I can say that we can’t give a single franc to rebels when our own men are hungry or in need. Not one franc came out of any government funds and our budget to go to the rebels.”1 A second woman, with a shawl around her shoulders, then comes to the podium. “When our children went to the battle, as they told us, they had nothing, not even food,” she says. “Some say that money is being given to the rebels; people must also be found in Mali to look into that.” She pleads for more to be done to help the troops in the north. The president’s reply is again kindly, and he describes the efforts he puts into assuring that the nation’s soldiers get the support they need—to the tune of half a billion francs, or the equivalent of US$1 million, every month. He asks the women to keep him informed of any problems they may learn of. Then a third woman, wearing a dark shawl wrapped loosely around her head and shoulders, comes to the microphone and speaks with a piercing voice. “The business of money being given to the rebels—whether it’s true or whether it’s a lie, God knows…. If you take money to give the rebels, why do you not 1 The suspicion that the rebels were receiving money from the Malian government may have been fueled by government efforts in late 2011 to welcome returning Tuareg combatants from Libya in hopes of ensuring their loyalty; see Whitehouse 2013, p. 43. 5 Bruce Whitehouse AAA 2014 give it to your own people?” The president thanks her, appearing to take no offense at her indirect accusation against him. He frames it as part of a larger problem of disinformation aimed at influencing the innocent but gullible masses. “Much has been spoken about this,” he said; “vicious lies were also spoken. If anyone says that money was sent to the rebels—how could that be? But if you say it to someone who has no idea, that person will believe you.” The dialog continues in this manner, with half a dozen more women shown over another hour of footage airing their concerns, and Touré gamely but insistently repeating his position: We are doing everything possible to help our soldiers and protect the nation; there is no plot to aid the rebels; do not listen to the rumors. The retired army officer represents himself as a seasoned but reluctant warrior, eager to resolve the conflict in northern Mali through peaceful means, yet sparing no effort or expense to support his troops in the field and guard the nation’s territorial integrity against any rebel threat. Most of the broadcast is devoted to the president’s answers, his explanations and elaborations. The women ask questions, sometimes pointedly, but never accuse Touré personally and directly. Again and again they beseech him to give their soldier sons and husbands what they need to win the war. Again and again he says that is exactly what he is doing, and will continue to do. The Malian state aired this footage with the intention of quashing rumors, getting control of the narrative about recent events in the north, and alleviating public suspicion toward the head of state. The broadcast was aimed to reach the biggest audience possible, on a Saturday evening before the popular musical variety show “Top Etoiles.” While most current events-related programming on Malian state television is aired in French, the official language spoken by a minority of Malians, this broadcast was entirely in Bamanan, and thus apt to get through to a larger number of viewers. Unfortunately, the government’s media strategy proved unsuccessful. As February wore on, more and more rumors circulated regarding the president’s alleged intention to cling to power and his complicity with rebels. My interactions with Bamako residents at the time suggested that those who had watched the broadcast were more likely to remember the women’s indirect accusations than the president’s detailed explanations. In retrospect, it appears that airing the footage of the encounter only exacerbated public perceptions of Touré’s illegitimacy. On 19 March, six weeks after the Kati wives’ meeting with the president was broadcast, and following a second military defeat in the north, another demonstration was organized in Kati. This time the protesters openly called for Touré’s resignation (maliactu.net 2012). A coup and its aftermath On the morning of 21 March, a visit by Touré’s defense minister to the Kati barracks ended in a riot, as troops mutinied against their senior officers and their civilian leaders. By midday, heavily armed soldiers were leading columns of vehicles toward the presidential palace and state television facilities. The presidential guard put up little resistance. Touré escaped and went into hiding, leaving the mutineers in control of Mali’s crumbling state apparatus. With few exceptions, the security forces fell into line in support of the mutineers’ new junta (see LeCocq et al. 2013). 6 Bruce Whitehouse AAA 2014 There is much to suggest that suspicions against Touré, by the Malian public in general and by the army in particular, were a key factor driving these events. Two weeks after his ouster, a chronology of the coup published in the widely read Paris-based magazine Jeune Afrique (2012) reported that his defense minister had phoned the president once the riot at the Kati barracks broke out on 21 April. According to the article, the minister told the head of state, “They are demanding weapons—missiles and attack helicopters—that you had promised, and now they are blaming you personally. They claim to have recovered on the battlefield a satellite phone from the rebels, on which the most recent number was yours….” The soldiers who seized power were junior officers and enlisted personnel. While the Malian military had no shortage of generals (see Whitehouse 2013: 42), not one of them was included in ruling junta; the mutineers were as wary of their top brass they were of the head of state and his civilian officials. They also mistrusted representatives of Mali’s civil society organizations, which they associated with Touré and his now delegitimized rule (Gavelle et al. 2013: 40). The putschists appeared to regard any institution connected with the old regime as illegitimate; in public remarks, junta leader Captain Amadou Sanogo compared Mali’s democratic structure to a sagging wall which he and his associates had to knock down in order to rebuild properly (Whitehouse 2013: 44). They saw Touré as a corrupt ruler and false democrat whose failures in office had left him with no popular mandate to govern. After suspending the country’s constitution, Sanogo announced his intention to organize a national meeting in which Malians could begin to plan a new path forward and design a new, more inclusive democracy; reports surfaced that Touré “could be the object of judicial proceedings for high treason and financial wrongdoing” (BBC 2012). I was in Bamako throughout this tumultuous period in early 2012, and blogged frequently about events taking place there. In mid-May I posted a piece about the proliferation of rumors and conspiracy theories pertaining to the nation’s political leaders, and mentioned the story about the recovered phone purportedly showing the head of state’s complicity with the rebels. A Malian reader left the following comment: “The story related to the cellphone was true! It was first reported by Jeune Afrique in its printed version. No need for me saying that Jeune Afrique is a news magazine I fully trust in!” This comment illustrates how an unconfirmed account can solidify into fact once it appears in mainstream media. It did not matter to the commenter, in this case, that Jeune Afrique never claimed that the sat phone story was true; it merely summarized the defense minister’s reported message to the president about the story (the mutineers said they had a rebel phone with his number in it). While the magazine appeared to vouch for the fact that the defense minister had actually said this to the president, it never pronounced on whether the soldiers actually possessed such a phone, or what it would have signified if they had. Although the magazine’s reporting reflected the multiple degrees of separation between the sat phone claim and verified events, many readers overlooked that separation and elided the reported claim with historical truth. Similarly, Malians sometimes referred to a specific radio news broadcast from early 2012 confirming the sat phone story. One brief audio recording of an unidentified French-language broadcast on this subject has received nearly 160,000 visits on YouTube (2012). Yet the journalist who speaks in this broadcast only cites a Malian soldier’s claim about what happened in Aguel Hoc, without commenting on the veracity of the claim. As versions of these accounts diffused throughout Malian society in 2012 via gossip and social media, any uncertainty they originally contained was stripped away and the narrative gradually came to 7 Bruce Whitehouse AAA 2014 assume the mantle of fact for many people in Mali, as well as in the Malian diaspora abroad. Suspicion had become certainty. Bamako residents’ suspicions toward their elected officials’ claims contrasted strikingly with their willingness to accept the junta’s claims. The junta and its leader were in fact quite skilled in communicating with the Malian public; I have analyzed elsewhere the junta’s attempt to legitimize its power by drawing on local historical and spiritual discourses to cast Captain Sanogo in the role of a great Mande warrior (Whitehouse 2012). Yet much of its success in managing domestic public relations after the coup did not stem from such manipulations. In April and May 2012 the junta intimidated its Malian critics by arresting several presidential candidates, senior members of Touré’s government, and heads of several political parties allied with him in Bamako. Junta spokesmen justified the crackdown by alleging a plot by these political leaders to destabilize Mali’s new (and ostensibly civilian) transitional government (RFI 2012), and on state television showed crates of weapons allegedly found in these leaders’ homes. The junta also claimed that political leaders were financing foreign mercenaries to bring the ousted president back to power. In Bamako in early May, security forces loyal to the junta engaged in operations targeting alleged mercenaries (mainly reported at the time to be from Cote d’Ivoire; see James 2012), in which dozens of men were arrested or killed. No evidence was ever made public to support the allegations of a plot by members of the ancien regime to mount a counter-coup. The crates of weapons shown on TV were never definitively linked to arrested political leaders, all of whom were eventually released without charge. Furthermore, although the junta had paraded young men in camouflage fatigues in front of television cameras, branding them as captured foreign mercenaries, it never even tried to prove to the public that these men were who it claimed them to be. Subsequent investigations have shown that its security crackdown was in fact directed against rival elements of the Malian army, namely members of the parachute regiment—which Touré had led in 1991—who had resisted junta control; many of these men were tortured and killed in junta custody (Human Rights Watch 2012). Nevertheless, at the time of these events I found Bamako residents extremely receptive to the junta’s narratives about counter-coups and foreign mercenaries. In conversations, even educated members of the city’s elite—those, at least, who had not been close to Touré’s regime—appeared to accept junta claims as truth. Public support for and trust in the junta ran high throughout the months following the coup (Hagberg and Körling 2012; Whitehouse 2013), and the junta communicated its message to the Malian public far more effectively than had the government it drove from power. Well aware of the deep levels of mistrust that Malians harbor toward politicians in general and presidents in particular (see, e.g., FES 2013), junta leaders succeeded in harnessing that mistrust and turning it to their own political advantage. In December 2013, following French military intervention, the junta’s exit from the national political scene, the election of a new president, and Sanogo’s arrest for allegedly ordering the killings of fellow soldiers, Mali’s new civilian government announced its intention to try expresident Touré for high treason. A judicial source said that Touré had “facilitated the penetration and occupation by foreign forces of national territory, notably by not offering them any resistance,” and accused him of having “willingly destroyed or degraded a means of national defense” and participated in “an operation to demoralize the army” (Jeune Afrique 2013). No trial date has been set as of this writing, and Touré remains in exile in neighboring Senegal. 8 Bruce Whitehouse AAA 2014 The inverse of suspicion My discussion of these events has highlighted the role of suspicion among the general public in Mali as well as among members of particular groups such as the army with respect to the country’s political leaders. To analyze these events and put them in theoretical perspective, however, I turn to a concept that is the inverse of suspicion: trust. Since the beginning of this century, Western scholars of various social sciences have argued that trust is the bedrock of civil society and a necessary condition for good governance and economic prosperity. Political scientist Robert Putnam (2000) contends that declining levels of public trust since the mid-20th century have weakened American society. Epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2010) find that high levels of trust in European societies are positively correlated with economic equality, and cite evidence suggesting that inequality generates a lack of trust. Economist Paul Collier (2013) distinguishes between “high-trust” and “low-trust” societies, and sees high levels of public trust (or what he calls “mutual regard”) as a necessary precondition for a country’s economic prosperity; the lack of trust, he writes, contributes to the “dysfunctional social models” prevalent in impoverished countries. In the African context, economists Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon (2011) link an alleged absence of trust to the historical legacy of the slave trade. Such studies often rely on survey data to measure trust at an aggregate societal level, and treat trust as a uniform phenomenon divorced from cultural context. In their analysis, some sociologists and anthropologists have applied the trust concept more critically and more narrowly. Guido Möllering (2001: 414), tracing the influence of Georg Simmel on social thought, conceptualizes trust as the product of a mental process dependent upon suspension (“the mechanism that brackets out uncertainty and ignorance, thus making interpretive knowledge momentarily ‘certain’ and enabling the leap to favorable [or unfavorable] expectation”). Corsin Jimenez (2011), who describes “public trust as the political epistemology of neoliberal society,” challenges the current predilection to apply trust as a metric of social robustness, and highlights the interplay between social relationships and the occult to illustrate the tenuous, contextual nature of trust. In a similar vein, Geschiere (2013: xi) posits a nexus linking trust, intimacy and witchcraft, and cautions that “trust is always precarious and situational (never ‘ontological’).” In other words, trust is not a given in any social collectivity, whether a kin unit, a village, or a nation-state; because of its inherent uncertainty, it must be constantly assessed, tested, and reaffirmed if it is to operate effectively. Such scholarship offers a valuable corrective to longstanding anthropological tendencies to portray families and small-scale communities as havens of social solidarity and reciprocity. Taking my inspiration from Geschiere’s work, I interpret the surge of public suspicion toward Mali’s president in the weeks leading up to the March 2012 coup as enabled by the trust Malian people put in him twice at the voting booth. Having already vanquished a tyrant and then willingly left the presidency in the early 1990s, Amadou Toumani Touré was widely considered a trustworthy figure when he stood for election to reclaim his former title as head of state in 2002. He then presided over several years of economic expansion and apparent progress, evidenced by the construction of new roads, schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure of the 9 Bruce Whitehouse AAA 2014 state. His status as a political independent appeared to lift him above the fray of partisan competition that has alienated so many ordinary Malians from their country’s political process. But heads of state, quite like witch-finders or healers (nganga) in Geschiere’s fieldwork, are highly ambiguous figures2: the very qualities that constitute their strength also make them potentially dangerous predators. Touré had won public favor during a period of relative tranquility in Mali’s post-colonial history, but his image changed quickly following the resumption of armed conflict and the specter of a rebel victory in the country’s northern regions. As bad news from the front filtered down to the capital city and its environs, public trust was transformed into public suspicion, and the erstwhile soldier of democracy came to be widely viewed as a traitor to his nation. The president’s efforts to “set the record straight” about military defeats in February 2012 only heightened suspicion against him by providing a highly public forum for the airing of grievances and allegations targeting Touré and his government. My investigation of suspicion and trust in Mali today leaves important questions unanswered. When do we interpret a leader’s acts as evidence of incompetence, and when do we interpret them as evidence of treason? How can we judge the motives of those who rule us? The “treason narrative” about Touré’s presidency remains highly popular in Mali, as reflected by the current government’s stated plans to put the former head of state on trial. And while, as a researcher, I prefer to be skeptical of this narrative, I also cannot prove that it is false—that he did not plot to extend his time in office by instigating unrest, that he did not collude with rebels, that he and his allies did not seek to return to power by hiring mercenaries. Given the regional context and the concerted efforts of many contemporary African heads of state to cling to power, it might be unwise to dismiss out of hand such a scenario in the Malian case. Public suspicion everywhere is a double-edged sword with respect to national politics. Although it can be highly destabilizing and based on inaccurate or unverifiable information, as the end of Touré’s presidency demonstrated, it also has the capacity to empower ordinary citizens to hold their leaders accountable. As Mali’s current popularly elected president faces manifold accusations of financial wrongdoing (Reuters 2014), he too is finding that public trust is easily lost. It would not be surprising to see Malian “political entrepreneurs” in the future take advantage of public suspicion once again to bypass state institutions, unseat elected heads of state and make their own bids for power. References 2 As Geschiere points out with respect to the nganga, “one has to kill in order to be able to heal” (2013: 73). 10 Bruce Whitehouse AAA 2014 Aljazeera.com. 2013. “Investigating 'massacre' of soldiers in Mali.” 24 April. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2013/04/20134242218374249.html. Ballo, Ousmane. 2013. « Seydou Badian, Ancien ministre de Modibo Kéïta : “Que Dieu nous préserve des gens comme ATT !” : “IBK est le cogneur qu’il fallait pour la situation actuelle’’. » Le Challenger, 25 September. http://www.lechallenger.com/seydou-badian-ancien-ministre-demodibo-keita-que-dieu-nous-preserve-des-gens-comme-att-ibk-est-le-cogneur-quil-fallait-pourla-s/. Bergamaschi, Isaline. 2014. “The Fall of a Donor Darling: The Role of Aid in Mali’s Crisis.” Journal of Modern African Studies 53(3): 347-378. BBC. 2012. “Mali’s junta ‘may charge’ President Touré with treason.” 4 April. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-17604755. Camara, Dado. 2009. « 3ème mandat : ATT va-t-il céder à la pression ? » L’Annonceur, 2 April, http://www.afribone.com/spip.php?article18410. Collier, Paul. 2013. Exodus: How Migration is Changing our World. Oxford University Press. Corsin Jimenez, Alberto. 2011. “Trust in Anthropology.” Anthropological Theory 11(2): 177-196. 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