Thierry Perret: "Soumeylou Boubèye Maïga actively prepared the Malian revolt of 1991"

Former Malian Prime Minister Soumeylou Boubèye Maïga in October 2018 in Mopti.

MICHELE CATTANI / AFP

Text by: RFI Follow

3 mins

The death of the former Prime Minister of Mali arouses many reactions in his country and even beyond West Africa.

Thierry Perret, former journalist at RFI and author of 

 (Karthala, 2014), knew Soumeylou Boubèye Maïga well.

He looks back on the role played by this figure in Malian politics in his country since the 1990s.

Advertising

Read more

RFI: You knew

Soumeylou Boubèye Maïga well

Thierry Perret: 

 Boubèye Maïga was, as we know, a controversial personality, but no one will at least dispute his political and historical weight.

For my part, I will mention a long-term companionship, which began, if I remember correctly, in 1987 in the corridors of the

, during his stay in Paris for his DESS.

We were to see each other again, in Mali, at the Amap State Agency where he directed

, a periodical.

But already it is another facet that stands out in the memory: Boubèye, the militant of the PMT (Malian Labor Party, clandestine), actively prepared the Malian revolt of 1991, when for the first time I heard of the junction operated between the democratic movement and elements of the army.

For more discretion, our meetings took place at the basketball court next to the Grand Hotel in Bamako where he could keep an eye on the training of the national team basketball players, of which he was the technical director!

There were a number of other meetings, later, between Bamako and Paris, notably in a quiet street on the Champs-Élysées, at the Warwick hotel where he liked to stay and where the director of security at the time apparently mentioned unrestricted his current discussions with the DGSE.

Or in 2011 in Algiers where, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, he made a gloomy prognosis of the military situation and sensed with lucidity the end of ATT [Amadou Toumani Touré, Ed].

RFI

I wouldn't say that.

He has been said to be keen on security issues, and it is true that any interview with him on the subject was enlightening.

But not only: on all aspects of the political situation too, he reasoned with penetration.

It was really a beautiful intellectual mechanism, too rare in his milieu.

Was he said to be a concealer?

Above all, I believe that he was always one step ahead and had a lot of fun with the short-sighted calculations of his peers, while answering three phone calls at the same time... Humor and irony never left him, and that's it another character of the character who, in my eyes, kept the cheeky simplicity of the journalist he had been, talking about everything frankly, settling their account in a few words to the "

 – a term he had in common with another great friend, also a journalist, and which I have adopted for my part: direct, practical and so fair...

RFI: Would you say that his death symbolizes the end of a certain generation of politicians in Mali? 

With Boubèye, it is still a bit of the memory of 1991 that is fading.

Many of the actors of the democratic revolution of March 1991 left the scene, disappeared or were silent, and this corresponds to the very particular political moment that Mali is experiencing today.

Disappointment (and memory loss) have pushed many Malians to turn away from this historical sequence of which they ignore or want to set aside the profound achievements for Malian society.

But to confuse the impotence of politicians or the security impasses with the " 

 ", that is what makes us forget the essential: 1991 only opened the democratic field, the work remains immense and any desire to " 

 ” is historical nonsense.

Newsletter

Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox

I subscribe

Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application

google-play-badge_FR

• mali