Un petit essai ou je discute le symbolisme et les usages de Nelson Mandela dans le contexte tunisien. voir le reste du dossier dedie a cette figure marquante de notre temps: boundary2.dukejournals.org/content/41/2/24.full.pdf+html Mandela, Tunisia and I I have experienced Mandela as a presence, an absence and a label. During the historic first free elections in Tunisia, held on 23 October 2011, I voted early then set off to tour the polling stations in my hometown of Kasserine, a neglected and rebellious part of the country which brought the Tunisian revolution to sharp pitch early in January of the same year. The mood was buoyant and long queues of determined men and women have already formed. I took lots of photos to mark the moment but also to tell the story when I go back to Oxford. But when I wanted to express what the elections were like on my facebook page, my mind went back to one picture I have had in my office in the United States and in the United Kingdom for many years. It was an AP photo of two Zulu women carrying an infirm friend to the voting station in Usuthu, in the Natal Province in South Africa on 26 April 1994. Their determination and hope was galvanized by Mandela. Those images and the inspired hope which fed them had stayed with me until the day when that Mandela moment came to North of Africa, 15 years later. The elections were part of a continuing transitional phase in Tunisia. After several traumatic decades, the country sorely needed reconciliation and healing. But for all the good will, active civil society, several conferences, money and speeches, Tunisia risks either failing its transitional justice and reproducing structures of authoritarianism or be torn apart, like Syria, Egypt and Libya. Throughout this period, three years now, I kept thinking that what we needed was a Nelson Mandela of our own. We missed national hero, a father figure, a reassuring face, a man of consensus able to forgive and inspire feelings of genuine leadership in reconciliation and healing. Mandela seems to have set a model for transitional justice that the Arab revolutions need at the moment. For cultures and societies which have been ruled by strong men and have been internalising models of authoritarian power, a revolution has been a welcome levelling of authority. But at the same time, the atomisation of the scene among numerous parties and figures of limited appeal and influence, as well the return of harmful and fractious identity politics, left people without a moral force which could broker differences and show the way, the Mandela way. But then again, Arab revolution may have shown how specific to South Africa Mandela has been, and how difficult his example was t to transfer or to emulate. Mandela had indeed been an inspiration to many Tunisian progressives in the student and labour movements for decades before 2011. But things being what they are in the market machine, Mandela has become an iconic image, and therefore consumed and misquoted at will. The wide dissemination of it, made it inevitable that local versions of Mandela would be invented and circulated, regardless of how flimsy resemblances may be. But for me, the peak of this instrumentalisation saw a figure of Islamism in Tunisia, someone who did so much to divide the country and erode its modernity and freedoms before and after the revolution, dubbed “the closest thing to an “Islamic Nelson Mandela”. Aside from the absurdity of the phrase “Islamic Mandela”, the label was conferred on Rachid Ghannouchi, by an American “expert” and Harvard academic, keen on pushing two agendas which could not be furthest from Mandela’s ideals. The first was first developed in Iraq and driven by dreams of reconquest and repartition of the Middle East, led by the Busch Junior. The second one points to the desperate need “experts” and pundits felt to assign leaders to Arab revolutions and anoint political Islam at the helm. Mandela has become then a convenient metaphor at the service of grotesque opportunism to usurp the ideals of Arab revolutions. Mohamed-Salah Omri, University of Oxford
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 09:29:42 +0000
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