What Is the Sahel?

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The sahel, the name itself, means the shore. It's supposed to be this arid step right south of the sahara desert and kind of crosses west africa from the atlantic ocean to to the nile region. Senegal is actually part of the sahel, even though many people don't think of it as being part of thesahel. And chald of course, so it's its an akind of ecological region. Hathat the term itself is ecological. But it's also a civilizational term, in a way, because it's this place where sobsaron africa is, the western part of it, meets a the culture of islam

Featuring Rahmane Idrissa on Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. The region has been beset by jihadist insurgencies and, in the case of Mali and Burkina Faso, recent military coups. This is a comprehensive interview that puts the present conflict—which has drawn in French military and then Russian mercenary intervention—into deep historical and political-economic context from struggles over the slave trade, through French colonialism, to the neocolonial imposition of neoliberalism. Idrissa’s work: newleftreview.org/issues/ii132/articles/rahmane-idrissa-the-sahel-a-cognitive-mapping newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/kabores-defeat nybooks.com/daily/2022/05/25/potent-policies-of-empire lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n04/rahmane-idrissa/coup-contrecouplrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n23/rahmane-idrissa/countries-without-currency Special outro music from Ali Farka Touré. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out Inside the Second Wave of Feminism: haymarketbooks.org/books/1887-inside-the-second-wave-of-feminism