These are the three words I have heard most often since I returned from the Sahel. In these few months, weapons, war and security that’s what I thought I had left behind when I left Niger. After 14 years of living among Africa’s most ‘critical’ regions, I thought I had found it very different music back home. The military in power in the three confederation countries in the central Sahel, armed groups affiliated with Al Qaeda and ISIS, self-defense groups, mercenaries of various origins and numbers of weapons. This seems to be the feeling and everyday life in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Where company military field it appears to be so widespread that it influences the political rhythms and seasons in those countries. I am wrong.
In other parts of the world, people are called according to unilateral convention ‘North’, we find the same climate only in the context that defining democracy is also misleading. We need to arm and rearm, increase the power to attack before the enemy attacks. We need to prepare for the war to come, perhaps soon or when necessary. One’s security will be sought, promised and guaranteed, first and foremost and everywhere. For our peace of mind, there are video-controlled areas on buses, trains, public places, churches, borders, and at every type of entrance worthy of the name. We also operate in this part of the world militarization of society.
A special channel for the increasing militarization of society is, of course, the language used pre-packaged narrative adjusted to the reality you want to apply. For some time now, what really matters is not reality, but rather the type of reality or rather the consensus it seeks to convey. The media found out what he said to journalists Ron Suskind from New York Times in 2004 an adviser to then US president George W. Bush: “This is no longer the way the world works. Now we are a kingdom and when we act, we create our own reality. As you study, wisely as you see fit, this reality, we operate again and create another new reality… which you can study accordingly: this is how it works… We are historical actors and all that remains for you is to study what we do.”
To bring the operation to a successful conclusion, development enemy, true, presumed, possible or impossible, it remains a primordial stage. From this point of view, it is sufficient to reread ITartar desert From Dino Buzzati. The young soldier Giovanni Drogo who spent his life in the frontier fortress and just when the enemy finally arrived he was the last to go down and a definite journey. We live as if in a fortress waiting for the barbarians and meanwhile we arm ourselves and prepare for war to provide the security that, as is known, only the grave can guarantee. Western countries seem determined to turn themselves into a massively organized construction site dream grave.
Demilitarize thoughts and words. Listen to which reality the poor are the censored faces. And most importantly, as language teacher Nurith Peled Elanan, whose 13-year-old son was killed, said in 2002 in Bari, “terms such as freedom and honor, God and peace, the good of the state and even democracy can become deadly weapons… we are the people who know that there is no peace or freedom, no goodness and no God after the death of a child.”
Casarza, November 2025
