Michael Kevane

I dropped off copies of our book Promotion de la Lecture au Burkina Faso at the Librarie universitaire… A nice spot on the center of campus. Mostly just textbooks, but a small section with novels… including a Mongo Beti novel I had never read. We bought about 20.000 FCFA ($40) of books for the libraries.

An old colleague Magloire Somé and I agreed to meet for dinner, after a panel he was on for the American Political Science Association “study tour”of Burkina Faso…. so I went to the panel. It looked like it might be pretty boring at the beginning, but Magloire, true to form, launched a provocation that got everyone talking. His historian colleague Isa Cissé brought up what he called a “fusillade” at the mosque of Dassasgho after some incidents at the mosque of Zanghoettin in February-April 1995. I vaguely recall this, though of course we are talking pre-Internet here so searches do not come up with much. I wonder why, and whether, this incident really is a touchstone for the Muslim community in Burkina?

What looks like a very good source is this MS thesis from Laval: Frédérick Madore “Islam, Politique Et Sphère Publique À Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) : Différentes cohortes d’imams et de prêcheurs entre visibilité nouvelle et reconfiguration des rapports intergénérationnels (1960-2012).”

Magloire and I over dinner wondered whether there are good examples of intra-Christian sectarian violence in Africa… I guess Lords Resistance Army was one, though they targeted the state, I think, and not really other Christian groups, though I may be wrong especially in their early days.

The CDP is planning a march this Saturday and opposition talking of counter-march… responses to last Saturday’s march against the Senate. Opposition finally found a nice wedge issue… average person has hard time agreeing with fairly lame justifications for Senate, and instead is sympathetic to evocative “budgetivore” characterization, as well as “backdoor trap to revise two term limit, article 37, of constitution.” Perception here is all that really matters, as with any good wedge issue.

Anyway, people will be a bit nervous about what may or may not be planned… Burkina usually does not have a big problem with provocateurs, but you never know.

Not remorse over what I’ve been reading/viewing lately (with one exception, you guess), but rather, sometimes you find the same theme in very different materials… a straight flush this time, actually.

1. To Have and To Have Not.  Found it on the bookshelf of place we are house sitting.  I had never read it.  First two parts fantastic, as they introduce Harry Morgan. Typical straightforward Hemingway.  Apparently they were published as short stories first.  Then book goes into a long novella, with a very silly digression on a writer in Key West (hmmm, what could that be based on).  But the ending is decent, and Harry Morgan’s remorse (over certain choices he made, not over what he did) is prominent.  A nice book for a philosophy or ethics class, I guess, as the ambiguity in Morgan’s position is very sharply drawn by Hemingway, who uses multiple points of view to reinforce the ambiguity.
2. “Il n’y a pas de petit querelle” by Amadou Hampate Ba.  Published posthumously, the title story of a collection of folktales… the animals one by one decide they are above “doing the right thing,” with bad consequences for them all.  Beaucoup de remorse.  I’m sure the story is told often in management seminars.
3. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.  At first I really was enjoying the fine writing, but it slowly dawned on me that this was a “writing exercise.”  Please write a novel about remorse.  The situation really begins to become quite contrived, and Barnes tries to throw in some twists in the end.  But the whole thing didn’t work for me as a reader.
4. Survivor: Nicaragua Matthew “Sash” Lenahan was a great example of someone who should have felt remorse. He should not have double-crossed Brenda.
5. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan probably the ultimate remorse book… found it on the bookshelf also.  Was fun to read; I had read it at 17 myself, so I vaguely remembered the plot.  I don’t know that it stands the test of time well.  Probably in 1954, Cécile’s lifestyle would have seemed to most readers almost like a fairy-tale… the leisure time, and the apparent extremely comfortable living.  Like a daydream for working class people, recovering from World War II, whose children were enjoying much better lives and far greater literacy.  But I wonder in a world of reality TV (Survivor?) Cécile doesn’t come across like Paris Hilton.

Kerfluffle in Burkina Faso over some stolen, smuggled gold, magistrates demand resignation of Minister of Justice…. (and before you think that 23,000 kg is a lot, remember that in French numbers , is a . so it is 23 kg only… about $1 million worth).

Le 6 mars 2012, le sieur DAMBINA Sékou était arrêté sur la route nationale n°4 au poste de péage de Koubri, route de Pô aux environs de 2 heures 30 du matin par les éléments de la Brigade Nationale de Lutte Anti –Fraude de l’or BNAF en possession de 23,528 kg d’or.

via MONDE JUDICIAIRE – Les Editions Le Pays.

I think you have to be a development economist with a 15 year old indeed to appreciate this line which made me burst out laughing two minutes ago (11:25 pm Ouagadougou time) while we house-sit at unnamed European embassy staffer house with air-conditioning full blast!!!!!

… explaining why societies with a high degree of sharing nevertheless exhibit selfish game play, Ensminger suggests that ‘self-enforcement need not develop when second party enforcement is ever-present’ (2004:359). This seems somewhat improbable, since second party enforcement is an ineffective approach, involving massive transaction costs, however small and face to face the group, as anyone who has ever had to enforce domestic labour by teenagers will know.

Massive indeed!  Getting the table cleared often requires a long lecture that goes back to first principles… “A. The moral foundations of civil behavior  B. Consequences throughout history of uncivil behavior. C. Digression on internal logic of consequentialism” … Thank you Cecile Jackson.