A farming cooperative whose members also use theatre, radio, photography, and film to raise awareness about the social and ecological importance of permaculture in bolstering communities in the wake of colonial occupation, economic migration, drought, and increasing climate change
Context
After Mali became independent of France in 1960, many Malians migrated to Paris to work in the automobile industry, in underpaid and overworked positions, transferring much of their salaries home to families in Mali. Disconnected from Mali’s economic infrastructure, and without local resources including adequate housing, the Paris migrants were confined to cramped and insanitary hostels. Endangered by the spread of tuberculosis, poisoned by the hostels’ coal fired stoves, and charged high rent, these migrants began widespread demonstrations across Paris in 1971. In 1973 and 1974, the Sahel region of semiarid lands in western and north-central Africa that include Mali experienced droughts that resulted in crop failure, famine, and more migration. Migrant workers were often considered traitors to the national projects of the countries from where they had come, while peasants in those countries were tasked with surviving drought and leading proto-socialist communities with very little state support or power in decision-making. Many Malian migrants in Paris wondered what they could do in the face of such challenges. Approaching soil and social devastation as combined forms of colonial and neocolonial exploitation enacted on the Sahel region and its exiled populations, they called for revitalised lands and livelihoods through a form of solidarity that was at once locally situated and planetary in its understanding of migration and global climate breakdown.
Practice
In 1977, 14 activists and migrant-workers from the Sahel region met in Paris as the Cultural Association of African Workers in France (ACTAF). They self-educated in political reform and agrarianism, learned from French farmers in the Haute Marne region who were resisting industrial mechanisation, and returned to Africa to cultivate alternative economic and farming practices that did not rely on forced migration.
On the banks of the Senegal River near Mali’s border with Senegal and Mauritania, the activists established the Somankidi Coura cooperative. In agreement with villagers of Somankidi, local authorities gave the group 60 hectares of land to establish Somankidi Coura (meaning “the new Somankidi” in Bambara). The site sat opposite an agronomic research centre housed within a former colonial sisal plantation, and a collectivised granary built by Mali’s first independent government. This location was a crossroads of migratory routes very near the Senegalese border, and somewhere where historical layers of slavery, colonisation, and the incompleteness of independence in the countryside was felt and could be learned from.
The collective turned 25 riverside hectares of the site into polyculture gardens watered with a common irrigation system, and alternated their use of the remainder between pasture during the dry season and farming during the rainy season. Somankidi Coura rapidly became a regional model for other migrant-return projects or local farming groups. Part of its success was due to its media communications. The cooperative co-founded the free Rural Radio of Kayes, made films and photographs, established a regional farmer network, and produced theatre and education projects in Bambara, Soninke, and Fula languages, as a way to inform and unite in ways “led by and for peasants”. Members of Somankidi Coura played themselves in the film Safrana or Freedom of Speech (dir. Sidney Sokhona, 1977) which was broadcast on both French and Malian television. One of Somankidi Coura’s founders, Bouba Touré, travelled between Mali and Paris for decades, cross-documenting peasant and migrant life on camera. Beyond informing publics of its farming and community work, Touré and others in the cooperative used image-making to escape persistent paternalist, racist, colonial systems of representation that characterise much media coverage of the Sahel and, more broadly, the “Third World”. Photographs and films were regularly shared with migrant workers in hostels in Paris, to examine ways that colonialism had exploited African lands and labour forces and left little socioeconomic infrastructure or soil vitality after independence. Mapping this connection between the former colony and its ruler was a way to resist imperialism’s separation of spaces by taking what Édouard Glissant called an “All World” view.
In recent years Mali has endured civil war, a military coup, a protracted period of unstable state governance, and heightened precarity due to the Covid-19 pandemic (nicknamed “Coronafamine” in Dakar). The global increase of zoonotic diseases due to forms of farming and extractive capitalism, combined with increasing desertification, are pushing more people in regions including the Sahel into migrancy – despite the perils of becoming a refugee today in the face of Europe’s increasing border controls and carceral practices. To this day, Somankidi Coura uses permaculture farming technologies to sustain a situated community and its ecosystems, its organic approach to people and land drawing from figures such as Amílcar Cabral who worked between agronomy and Pan-African activism to think about climate damage and colonisation as interconnected injustices. Somankidi Coura’s approach is in stark contrast to techno-scientific approaches endemic to international development and industrial farming. Solidarity-farming networks such as Somankidi Coura, and the “militant images” Touré and others produced there, are pivotal in dismantling (neo)colonial exploitations of land, labour, rights, and capabilities.