Local Elections, Elite and Political Generations in the Inner Niger Delta (Mali)

At the beginning of the nineties, Mali has undertaken the decentralization of the State, a huge administrative reform. Officially, it was presented as an ideal tool which would bring development and democratisation at the local level via the multiparty game and local elections. Based on the voluntary villages’ gathering, Mali has established three decentralized levels of authority: regions, circles and municipalities. The implementation of the main phases of this reform has widely relied on leaders and local powers. Furthermore, the decentralization has quickly been understood as being an opportunity to restore the ancient order and to relegitimize “traditional powers”. Although few studied in rural areas, municipal elections and electoral processes are among one of the most visible aspects of this reform for local actors and concern directly the exercise of power. Punctuated with three local elections, a decade has passed since the creation of the municipalities. This anthropological paper is about the case study of a rural municipality and its chief-town in the Inner Niger Delta. First, in a diachronic perspective, I suggest discussing the idea of the progressive constitution of a political elite at the local level, its maintenance and its renewal partly because of the municipal elections. Then, the second point explains the existence of different political generations which cross the multiple belongings of the political actors (ethnic groups, social status, gender, kinship, etc.). These political generations have their own relationship with the politics. This situation leads to some progressive transformations of the representations of the politics perceptible on the long term. That has an impact on the local political game and has to be taken in account when we are studying the social change