The first thing we breathe together, in this season of the Sahel called Harmattan, is dust. We all breathe it, albeit in different ways. There are those who wear Covid masks and those who, more respectful of tradition, cover a good part of their faces with a turban in the style of the ‘Tuareg’ who have great experience in this area. Breathing together is precisely what a ‘conspiracy’ means, etymologically. The dictionary remembers it…’ The word conspiracy derives from the Latin cum spirare (to breathe with), that is, to be animated by the same inspiration, to indicate a profound, intellectual and sentimental agreement, towards the achievement of the pre-established objective. breath and spirit sink into the same etymological root. That therefore the conspirators, in the end, are those who share the same spirit, an equal, brotherly impulse of the soul. Sometimes they also share the aversion or subversion of the system. In the Sahel there are indeed conspiracies and conspirators but not only because of the dust you breathe. There are those who conspire for a living and those for convenience, those who are satisfied with a change of appearance and those who want revolution. We have armed groups that aspire to a radical transformation of the social structure and in the same area we find bandits who today carry out the raids of the past with the support of dealers in weapons, drugs and human beings. Even the millions of displaced people, refugees and refugees, in their own way, live together the deepest and most unique conspiracy there is, that of silent and often unnoticed suffering. The migrants, the ‘exodants’, the adventurers with a destiny marked forever, in turn, conspire for a different world starting from the borders. Often without knowing it we contribute, by breathing together, to the creation of a common frontier that some persist in calling hope. The first thing we breathe together in this space, we conspirators and conspirators, is dust. Fine as it is, it unites us and betrays us just as human history does. One would then suggest that the pale wind unites the dust of the whole world! The dust of dignity joins that of justice to learn to resist as only the poor, made of dust, have learned to do to survive. Breath, puff, breath and wind are what unites the conspirators because they are made of the same wind dust. A wind that passes and heads where it doesn’t know, without borders or destination, anarchic and unpredictable, regardless of transitional, exceptional, civil and military regimes. A wind that the dust that politics in recent months from the coup d’état to today tenaciously tries in vain to silence. In the Sahel the real conspirators are those who chase the wind and entrust it with their lost freedom.
