President Macky Sall
Since at least the 1990s, there’s been a major question about the leaders of Senegal’s Sufi orders and their relationship with formal politics: given that succession to the high leadership positions is hereditary and complex, how will the increasing number of younger leaders (often called marabouts) react? Will younger members of major families attempt to create their own constituencies? Will charismatic marabouts from outside the major families attempt to do the same? What effect will their moves have on Senegalese politics?
One of the “politicized marabouts” scholars have long watched is Modou Kara Mbacke (b. ca 1954), a grand-nephew of the founder of the Mouridiyya Sufi order. In 2004, after long activism as a religious leader for youth, he created a political party, the Party for Truth and Development (PVD in French). Yet he has tended to support incumbent presidents – in 2000, he backed Abdou Diouf (who lost to Abdoulaye Wade that year), and in 2007 he backed then-incumbent President Wade. The PVD did not run its own candidate in the 2012 presidential elections (nor in 2007), but in the 2012 legislative elections, the PVD won two seats. The Senegalese press has reported that Kara will be a candidate for president in 2017, a race that is already in its nascent stages.
Now, however, there is speculation that Kara might enter Macky Sall’s government. The two men recently met, and afterwards Kara told journalists that he wants to “accompany President Macky Sall” – a phrase open to multiple interpretations. He also called for the appointment of “people who don’t do politics.” Perhaps Sall just met him to be polite. But it is interesting that Kara has access to the president.
For more on Kara (and the Tijani Sufi Shaykh Mustapha Sy, to whom he is often compared), two references:
- Fabienne Samson, “Islam, Protest, and Citizen Mobilization: New Sufi Movements” in New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal
- Linda Beck, Brokering Democracy in Africa, especially the chapter “Influential Brokers”
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