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In long intertwined constructions of political and household authority, the figure of the domestic patriarch has served as an analogy for the centralized postcolonial state of Mali, even as it clashes with discourses of natural rights stemming from the European Enlightenment. In early twentyfirst-century Mali, anxieties ran rampant among senior men who feared losing their status and privileges. These anxieties came to a head during efforts by the Malian government and civil-society groups to eliminate gender discrimination from Malian family law in the early 2000s. A broad coalition of patriarchal interests emerged to defend senior males' prerogatives against the perceived threats posed by gender equality. This backlash challenged the legitimacy of Mali's governing elite and exposed its weaknesses in the run-up to Mali's 2012 political collapse.
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
-Antonio Gramsci (1971, 275-76)
Introduction: The Midnight Callers
A few days before Mali's coup d'état of March 2012, I was invited to a private radio station in Bamako to attend the broadcast of a popular phone-in program that had been on the air for almost twenty years, since nearly the onset of political pluralism in the country. The three panelists receiving calls and dispensing advice on family affairs were meant to represent different segments of Malian society: a panelist in her thirties framed her advice explicitly as representing a woman's perspective; another panelist, a part-time Arabic teacher in her forties, came to speak from an Islamic perspective; a man in his sixties, an adept of the neotraditionalist N'ko writing system, situated his advice within the register of Manding tradition passed on from the founders of the thirteenth-century Empire of Mali. Finally, the program's host, a genial man in his thirties called Tonton, directed the group's conversation by introducing callers, eliciting their questions or problems, asking the panelists for their views, and moving the group toward consensus. The program was conducted entirely in the Bamanan language.2
The first discussion of the evening concerned Madu, a young man who had recently returned to Bamako after three years of graduate study abroad. He had been raised in the home of his paternal uncle,...