It was only 10 years after the fall of the Soviet Bloc, a shock whose ‘Eastern wind’ cleared out the dead wood in many an African nation. In 1991, Niger was ruled by a broke, praetorian regime that finally came to the end of its rope. It collapsed under pressure from a democracy movement that took inspiration from two countries: France, for its Enlightenment philosophies; and the US, as a beacon to the future.
Just a few years before, the shelves of the reading public had been groaning with books from the Éditions du Progrès (Progress Publishers), the literary propaganda arm of the Soviet Union. Now the books of Nouveaux Horizons were circulating briskly among those same readers – that is, among the people who mattered for the country’s political orientation.
Nouveaux Horizons was an imprint of the US State Department that published American bestsellers and political works about democracy and free markets, in translation, for the edification of Haitians and Francophone Africans. By the mid-1990s, Francis Fukuyama had become a household name. The Soviet products became useless paper, sold by the kilo to meat and beignet sellers as wrapping material, and Marx’s Capital, the erstwhile Bible of the intelligentsia, was consigned to the same dusty niche as the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
These changing orientations were not limited to the intelligentsia. Many others were affected too, in their own ways, and migrating to the US suddenly seemed the thing to do. Those were the days when, inquiring about someone you had not seen for a while, the likely response was, “Oh, they’ve gone to the States.” I noticed there were long queues outside the US consulate, where there had been none before. “The Nigeriens have discovered America,” one of my fellow students quipped. He called it “Statemania”.
I was not quite taken by Statemania. In the diary I kept back then, I called it a “federal error”. The adjective “federal” was meant to stress that it affected all sorts of people, that it transcended differences of age, sex, education levels and so on. And I called it an “error” for reasons I will come to shortly. But within a few years, I was headed to the US myself.
The rise of Statemania is only three decades old, and yet it has begun to feel ancient. A historical change is anthropological: it turns the era just passed into something like an alien culture; it demands the cold analysis of the scientific observer, not the passionate views of those who were once caught up in its excitement. But Statemania is not yet gone; we are still in the midst of its passing.