Yet change was around the corner. The old world was disappearing and a push from the shoulder was enough to bring it down. They were the working-class years of the assemblies, of the 150 paid hours in the factory for the middle school diploma and Don Milani’s flagship text ‘Letter to a Professor’. Terrorism and the manipulations of the so-called proletarian revolution. The suspicion, over time, that everything was played for a surplus and that the Italian country, a colony of the Vatican United States, became the chosen prey of subversive maneuvers of the massacres that would have bloodied banks, squares, trains and stations. We believed that change was a matter of seasons.
The same happens in this part of the world which is usually called the Sahel. A push towards the ancient world, born, nourished and perpetuated by neocolonialism, an expression of the globalization of the world as a single market. The military, not coincidentally, has seized power in coups d’état in various countries in West and Central Africa and elsewhere, often. Some disguised themselves as civilians to perpetuate themselves. They also promise a new world, freed from corrupt people, fixers, sold to foreigners and therefore traitors to the homeland. Finally the good, the just and the vigilantes arrived because the new world was around the corner.
Until, in the midst of the process of change or perhaps even from the beginning, they, the impostors, arrived. They are those who ‘take advantage of their habitual recourse to falsehood and lies’. This and more is the definition of this evocative word. The impostures do not date back to today and in the recent history of this area of West Africa they were called colonialism. An imposture cloaked in a veneer of civilization with a universal flavor that was supposed to highlight the ‘white man’s burden’, the prototype of the human to be exported everywhere. Then came independence which appeared as the only truth of history.
falsehood and lies, a scam’, according to the dictionary consulted for the occasion. It created its own space and borrowed the idea and possibilities of democracy. The latter, often oriented and manipulated, could only lead to the collapse that the international community and its classical economic institutions have concerted. The structural adjustment plans of the 1980s constituted the application of the system’s deception aimed at normalizing the recalcitrant and putting them in the school of total capitalism.
The latter is the great ‘transformation’ that has governed a large part of the world for several centuries but in particular since, as the historian and sociologist Karl Polanyi reminds us, the economy became disconnected from society. Due to asymmetrical power relations, he then put it at his service. Since then the economy has transformed social relations, production systems and, indeed, imposed the market as the only pretext of history. The imposture continues and is perpetuated thanks to an increasingly consistent use of impostors who, with the habitual recourse to lies, convince.
Here, fortunately, by choice or by divine design, impostors are made of sand. That is, they belong to the universe that constitutes the horizon of our world. We come from the sand, we live and grow in the sand and, sooner or later, we will be welcomed by the sand. Precisely what happens with impostures, which are also conditioned by the sand and which are, despite themselves, unmasked by the wind. A wind that power is unable to stop and which, with stubborn determination, over time unmasks as an ally the impostors who think they are creating a new world with false promises.
