Surveillance in Niger in Historical Perspective

Systematic surveillance by state agencies started in Niger during the French colonization, particularly with the arrival of the colonial police. Today, a wealth of research exists on what the police did in French colonies (see, e.g., Bat & Courtin Reference Bat and Courtin2012; Glasman Reference Glasman2010). They were first introduced in French West Africa in 1930 and located exclusively in urban centers. Their tasks were not so much the detection and prevention of social deviance or criminal offenses; rather they served the colonial administration as a political police. Their main responsibilities were to maintain hygiene in the colonial capitals, control movements into the urban centers, prevent any anticolonial manifestations and propaganda, and eliminate political opponents of the colonial regime. In most independent African states this political function was transferred to what are now national police forces, such as the Police Nationale in Niger (see Blanchard & Glasman Reference Blanchard, Glasman, Bat and Courtin2012; Brunet-la Ruche 2012; Fourchard Reference Fourchard, Fourchard and Albert2003a, Reference Fourchard, Fourchard and Albert2003b; Pratten Reference Pratten2008).

Policing outside the urban centers was very different. The gardes de cercle (often called gardes-cercles) were the main colonial rural police force. Instituted in Niger in 1905, they were recruited from former tirailleurs, African recruits of the French colonial army, most of whom were from the French Sudan and the Upper Volta (Dramé Reference Dramé2007; JO AOF 1920, 1950). As a “local gendarmerie” these police officers served as intermediaries between French colonial administrators and the local population (Tidjani Alou Reference Tidjani Alou and Idrissa2001).

In Niger, the first gendarmerie unit, the Brigade de Niger, was put in place in the late 1940s (see JO Togo 1945); although precise numbers of gendarmes are unknown, they were probably fewer than a dozen, given the usual composition of future brigades. Significantly more came in the 1950s. In 1954 there were twenty gendarmerie brigades in Niger and all the units were under the command of French gendarmerie cadres. A brigade like the one in Zinder usually comprised two French gendarmes and four African auxiliary gendarmes; smaller posts such as Magaria or Birni-N’Konni consisted of one French gendarme and two auxiliaries (Cabry Reference Cabry2009; Temps du Niger 1961). All in all, at that time there must have been about thirty French gendarmes and some sixty African auxiliaries. But still, as the historiographer of the French colonial gendarmerie, Gérard Cabry, notes, Niger was “a forgotten, under-administered, under-equipped, and under-policed territory” (2009:129). ^{Footnote 3}

Given the large distances that needed to be patrolled and the lack of an adequate communication infrastructure, most Nigerien guards were neither closely controlled nor well equipped by French colonial administrators. Consequently, more often than not they overused their right to collect taxes, be it in the form of millet, cattle, or forced labor (Dramé Reference Dramé2007; Fuglestad Reference Fuglestad1983) and sometimes radically in violation of local codes of mutuality, as described by Miles (Reference Miles1993). However, they could not overstretch their prerogatives arbitrarily. As they were often not from the particular locality, did not speak the local tongue, and were not familiar with the areas and people they were supposed to control, they needed the cooperation of local chiefs, guides, or other intermediaries (Fuglestad Reference Fuglestad1983). Even after Niger’s independence in 1960, the collaboration between public administrators and chiefs, with their knowledge of the local populations and state-backed power to control them, was the foundation of effective police work.

The institution of chieftaincy, however, had a hard time under Hamani Diori’s one-party rule between 1960 and 1974. As Miles notes, Diori, a typical French-African évolué, “looked askance at the chieftaincy as an anachronistic institution, at best old-fashioned and quaint, at worst a potential drawback to modernisation and change” (1987:251). As a consequence, chiefs were replaced by party committees as intermediaries between the government and the people and excluded from any formal role in the actual governing of the country. The army and gendarmerie were also under pressure and increasingly put to work on nonmilitary tasks such as in agricultural projects, and Diori turned parts of his party’s countrywide youth organization into a party militia that was ultimately supposed to supplant the national army (Higgot & Fuglestad Reference Higgot and Fuglestad1975; Mignon Reference Mignon, Almeida-Topor and Georg1989). Surveillance, particularly of potential civilian and of political or military adversaries, was an essential part of his militia’s duties.

This situation changed after Lieutenant Colonel Seyni Kountché’s military coup in 1974. A dramatic increase in state surveillance occurred during the Kountché regime (1974–87), especially on the part of his powerful secret police, La Coordination (Amuwo Reference Amuwo1986). Every taxi driver, street vendor, and hawker roaming public buildings, restaurants, and bars was suspected (sometimes correctly) of snooping on private conversations and reporting to the Coordination (Issa Reference Issa and Idrissa2008). The result was “an extremely policed state” (Idrissa Reference Idrissa and Idrissa2008:199) in which hundreds of people were arrested, interrogated, imprisoned, or killed for their political views. Kountché’s regime was very efficient in meting out instant and draconian punishments for rumors and hearsay, and it was extremely effective at spreading uncertainty and instilling fear in the civilian population (see Bozzini Reference Bozzini2011). But while its policies had the intended effect of squelching pluralist expression and creating a frightened citizenry, this kind of “low-tech surveillance” (Bozzini Reference Bozzini2011:94) was limited in its capacity to collect, store, and evaluate intelligence.

In the late 1980s, after Kountché’s death, things began to change gradually when the military-controlled, one-party system ended, and then during the period of democratization in the 1990s. Pluralist expression was allowed, the Coordination was suppressed, and both police and gendarmerie were largely discredited and kept a low profile (Lund Reference Lund2001:859–860). ^{Footnote 4} Systematic surveillance and oppression came to a halt, and the hawker-informants returned to their old trade. The next shift, which took place in the early 2000s, persists until today. After 9/11, Niger, Chad, Mali, and Mauritania were counted among the West African “frontline states” in the global war on terrorism (Davis Reference Davis and Davis2007:1). Since the abduction of thirty-two Europeans in March 2003 by the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), renamed al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb in 2007, the U.S. military presence in the Sahara has been augmented significantly (Ellis Reference Ellis2004; Keenan Reference Keenan2009b). ^{Footnote 5} From 2002 onward, Nigerien military and paramilitary forces have been assisted by foreign initiatives such as the U.S.-led Pan-Sahel Initiative (renamed the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership in 2005), which has mounted multinational military operations financed by the U.S., trained by U.S. Special Forces, and operating under U.S. command (Ellis Reference Ellis2004). ^{Footnote 6} These operations have resulted in increased militarization in Niger, with a remarkable rise in army and gendarmerie personnel. ^{Footnote 7} In addition, since 2009 France and the U.S. have provided Nigerien security forces with more and more high-technology surveillance assistance and training (Keenan Reference Keenan2008, Reference Keenan2009a).

The intelligence and surveillance apparatus has increased rapidly since the crisis in Mali triggered by the proclamation of the independent state by the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) in 2012, and particularly since the Islamist group Ansar Dine and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) seized power. The French led a military intervention in northern Mali and have increased their intelligence operations throughout the Sahel; France and the U.S. have strengthened their surveillance apparatus in the region, have started training and equipping police and paramilitary units to gather and process intelligence more efficiently, and have intensified operational cooperation with local intelligence services. France is operating surveillance aircrafts in the Sahel and the U.S. is operating unarmed Predator drones from a base outside the capital, Niamey (Whitlok Reference Whitlok2013). In 2009 and 2010 I talked to diplomats in Niger who expressed fear that the Sahel region could turn into a “second Afghanistan.” Today, it even has its own name, given by Laurent (Reference Laurent2013): “Sahelistan.”

Niger itself has also been making considerable investments to strengthen its surveillance capacities. As in most African countries today, since 2012 mobile phone users are required to register and provide personal identification details when purchasing a SIM card (Donovan & Martin Reference Donovan and Martin2014). This makes it much easier for Nigerien police and intelligence agencies, in close collaboration with the U.S., to monitor mobile phone communications. In October 2014 Niger purchased a reconnaissance plane to be operated by its own intelligence service (Reuters 2014).

Thus high-tech surveillance is on the rise in Niger. But at the same time, low-tech surveillance by street-level, generalist police and gendarmes through personal contacts, although barely targeted by international initiatives, is still the most important means for collecting information. Even pieces of intelligence produced by wiretaps or airborne surveillance need to be verified on the ground. In addition, all these high-tech measures are not only of limited value in this vast, predominantly rural country, but also are beyond the reach of most street-level policing agents. The latter need to work with informants, and particularly with ones they can trust.

Informants as Knowledge Brokers

The gendarmes whom I interviewed were strangers in the places where they worked, but communicating with locals was not a big problem. Most of the time, both sides spoke (or at least knew a little) Hausa or Zarma. Only on rare occasions—when the gendarmes were confronted with somebody who only understood a language (i.e., Arabic, Fulfulde, Tamasheq, or Tebu) that none of them understood—would they have to call for an interpreter, mostly a chief or his representative. But even if communicating was quite easy, knowing the identities of the people they talked to and gathering intelligence was far more difficult. Here they needed informants—to locate or identify a person, to understand the context of a particular complaint and the disputants’ relationship, to know their families’ previous history, and so on. I suggest that these informants can be thought of as “knowledge brokers”; I borrow the term “broker” from Giorgio Blundo’s (2001, 2006) studies of intermediaries in public bureaucracies, although I use it in a slightly different manner. Whereas Blundo focuses on the role of these intermediaries in the citizens’ access to bureaucracies, I focus on the bureaucrats’ access to citizens, or more precisely, to knowledge of them. ^{Footnote 8} Brokers are those who can draw back the curtain between the local state and its citizens, not only by acting as administrative brokers who provide access to public services (Blundo Reference Blundo2001), but also by acting as knowledge brokers and providing the bureaucrats with information about the citizens they interact with. Administrative brokers help citizens deal with an administration that they don’t understand; knowledge brokers allow bureaucrats to deal with a population that they don’t understand.

The gendarmes’ relationship with their informants was always a balancing act between suspicion and trust. As Sally Engle Merry argues, community intermediaries are “often distrusted, because their ultimate loyalties are ambiguous and they may be double agents. They are powerful in that they have mastered both of the discourses of the interchange, but they are vulnerable to charges of disloyalty or double-dealing” (2006:40). This resonates well with the three golden rules of intelligence work, which a gendarme who had learned it from CIA instructors recited to me:

• Rule number one: Never trust an informant.

• Rule number two: Never trust an informant.

• Rule number three: Never trust an informant.

But, given these rules, what could a gendarme do with a piece of information from somebody he or she fundamentally distrusted? The gendarme could, of course, try to verify this information through independent sources—but in the tight social networks in the rural communities where the gendarmes work, the existence of independent sources is highly unlikely. In addition, every potential informant has good reasons to lie or say nothing at all, since being visibly friendly with the gendarmes, or appearing to be a “double-dealer,” could cause stigma and social exclusion and lead to threats and violent attacks on oneself and one’s family. This is why potential informants need to trust the gendarmes not to make the assistance publicly known and to provide protection in case of trouble. In short, whether the gendarmes are able to bridge the knowledge gap that separates them from the local population depends on their ability to establish networks of trustworthy relationships that involve particular forms of reciprocity (see Beek Reference Beek2012). In the following sections, I describe the relationships the gendarmes establish with three types of potential informants: “intelligence agents,” chiefs, and ordinary acquaintances.

Intelligence Agents

One morning, the commander of a brigade where I was conducting my research received a letter from headquarters. It contained a photo, the mobile phone number, and a description of a suspected terrorist’s supposed domicile. The brigade commander, Adjudant-Chef Souley, immediately called Issa, one of his intelligence agents (agents de renseignement).

Souley had about ten intelligence agents dispersed throughout the department, he told me. About half of them were former prison inmates, some of whom Souley had personally jailed and kept in touch with since their release. The others were small-time offenders whom Souley had decided not to send to trial after reaching a settlement at the gendarmerie station. Some of these intelligence agents had already supplied him with information—for example, about drug trade networks, which had led to arrests. Sometimes they were even operationally involved in Souley’s work. The former drug dealer had actively helped him squash a group of drug traffickers; Souley and a handful of gendarmes had stood on the outskirts of town waiting for his intelligence agent to call him and describe the target group’s vehicle as soon it left the bus station. In another case Souley had sent one of his intelligence agents to a town some 300 kilometers away to gather information about alleged Boko Haram terrorists spilling over from nearby Nigeria.

Men whom the gendarmes call “les enfants de la gendarmerie,” the gendarmerie’s children, are unofficial employees who work at the brigade as cobblers, errand-boys, moto-taxi (kabou-kabou) drivers, or general handymen. They are often town natives and thus possess much deeper knowledge of the place and people than most gendarmes. Issa had been working at the gendarmerie for about twenty years when I met him in 2010. He had started out working as a “boy” for a former brigade commander, running errands, shopping for groceries, cleaning his house, doing the laundry, and ironing the uniforms. Bit by bit he became acquainted with the other gendarmes, and once his former boss left he began spending most of his time at the brigade. He told me that his daily job now consisted of sweeping the station’s courtyard early in the morning and washing the gendarmes’ cars and motorbikes for tips, but occasionally he would also go into town and gather information about people selling drugs or stolen goods. Now Adjudant-Chef Souley was giving Issa a specific task. He sent him out to search for the domicile of the alleged terrorist, to casually talk to neighbors and shopkeepers in the same street, and to listen in on conversations at the neighborhood mosque.

A few days later I asked Issa if he liked his job. “Ina so, bani so,” he said (in Hausa): “I like it, and I don’t like it.” Many people from town think of him as a “secret agent,” as a “karen jendarmomi” (the “gendarmes’ dog” in Hausa), as somebody who spies on people’s private lives. ^{Footnote 9} The distrust with which people look at him complicates his life and limits his social contacts to his family, close friends, and the gendarmes. When he married his second wife, all the gendarmes donated a little money and visited him in his humble home. This only did more to nurture people’s suspicions. Issa asserted that he did not spy on others, but I often heard him talking to gendarmes about this or that neighbor or merchant, indicating who lived where, traveled where, and was acquainted with whom. Apart from the rare intelligence missions, his work was mostly to provide this kind of general information that was not available to the gendarmes who were constantly in transit, “de passage,” as Issa put it. These pieces of simple information therefore contributed to the gendarmes’ general knowledge of the civilian population.

From the gendarmes’ perspective, the relationship between the gendarmes and their intelligence agents is pragmatic. The gendarmes often give them mobile phones that allow them to keep in touch, as well as money or clothes. They will also, if necessary, help them file their own complaints against another citizen, and they turn a blind eye to whatever dubious activities the agents themselves may have been involved in. It is thus a give-and-take relationship, sometimes with explicit and at other times more implicit terms of trade. And yet trust plays an essential role therein because the consequences of such a relationship could be terrible. Adjudant-Chef Souley told me about one of his former intelligence agents, a pharmacist, who had been arrested for forging documents and almost went to jail. Souley had negotiated an out-of-court settlement for the man and had then entered into a privileged relationship with him. The pharmacy was located on the premises of the town’s little bus station, and like any bus station, it was a “hotbed of vice,” as both gendarmes and civilians said. Several times the pharmacist had informed Adjudant-Chef Souley about criminal activities at the bus station, and some of these tips had led to an arrest. One day, however, the pharmacist was found dead in front of his shop, with a bullet in his head. This weighed heavily on Souley’s conscience, he told me. According to Souley, in a town as small as the one he was working in, such crimes are rare. Souley knew that somehow information about the pharmacist’s working as an intelligence agent had gotten into the wrong hands.

Chiefs

Right after Adjudant-Chef Souley sent Issa to town to search for information about the suspected terrorist, he took out his mobile phone and called Gado—a baruma (i.e., representative of a village chief) who was in charge of the neighborhood where the terrorist was supposed to live. Gado was a well-known guest at the gendarmerie brigade. He came there almost every other day. He greeted all the gendarmes with a handshake, knew everybody by name, and would sit down on the gendarmes’ benches, where no other civilians were allowed to sit.

The hierarchy of chiefs in Niger parallels the overlapping territorial units of counties (départements), villages/towns, and neighborhoods. The corresponding chiefs are the chefs de canton, chefs de village, and chefs de quartier. In the case of pastoralist nomads (e.g., Tuareg), the smallest unit of reference is not the village but the group (i.e., a cluster of families), and the chief is the chef de groupement (even though the large majority of pastoralist families have become sedentary).

The chiefs and baruma are administrative brokers in that they help civilians gain access to state institutions, help them make complaints at the gendarmerie station, or, if they are accused of an offense, negotiate in their favor. And they are knowledge brokers in that they know the people and the area under their influence more deeply than anyone else; their knowledge of local citizens proved invaluable to colonial administrators a century ago, and it is still invaluable to gendarmes today. The latter, for example, cannot rely on or access public registers, and most people in rural areas do not have identity cards. So the gendarmes rely on the chiefs’ cooperation when they need precise information about specific individuals in order to identify and locate a suspect: two necessary and crucial steps in any criminal investigation (see Brodeur & Ouellet Reference Brodeur and Ouellet2005), whether it concerns a terrorist or a thief. In criminal investigations, a chief was like a joker in a game of cards: if you had him in your hand, you would probably win.

Chiefs were aware of the importance of their role, and so were the gendarmes, although not all gendarmes were entirely satisfied with this arrangement. One day in 2010, during Souley’s leave of absence, I accompanied Chef Tahirou, a noncommissioned officer second in rank under Adjudant-Chef Souley, the interim brigade commander, and two gendarmes on a mission to a remote village to arrest a man for financial fraud. It was market day, and Chef Tahirou had the driver pull up right on the market square. Instantly a group of agitated people gathered around the vehicle. Chef Tahirou got out and shouted that he was looking for a man named Ali Hassan. At first nobody replied, but then a man came forward and told us that we should come to his house and wait for him to call the man we were looking for. After waiting two hours, Chef Tahirou decided to leave and forced the host to pay for the gendarmes’ “travel expenses,” including the gas consumed on the drive to the village. While Tahirou was collecting the money, I talked to one of the gendarmes, Amadou, who was sitting under a thatched roof in the shade, shaking his head in disbelief. “With Souley we never returned home empty-handed,” he told me. ^{Footnote 10} As Chef Hamza, a noncommissioned officer in the same brigade, later explained to me,

The chiefs and their knowledge are crucial to the gendarmes’ work. But winning over the chiefs demanded experience and tact, and Tahirou lacked both these qualities. Amadou explained that on his arriving at the village and before going anywhere else, Tahirou should have gone to the chief’s domicile. The chief would have felt respected, important, and proud to have the shiny blue gendarmerie truck parked outside his house and honored with the brigade commander’s visit before any other business was conducted. After a couple of minutes of casual conversation, Tahirou could have casually asked whether this or that person was around, and the chief would immediately have sent his people to deliver this man to the gendarmes. “But bursting in on the market, just like that? Never!”, Amadou added. ^{Footnote 12}

In fact, neglecting the chiefs could prove risky, even dangerous—because it jeopardized the whole investigation, and because the villagers’ noncooperation could easily turn into openly hostile opposition. Some chiefs refused to provide any kind of cooperation with the gendarmes and banned their subjects from talking to state officials altogether—under the threat of divine punishment. In such a situation, the gendarmes not only have no way of finding suspects, but often do not even hear of crimes. In areas where the chief has absolute control over the flow of information, the gendarmes are little more than the chief’s cavalry: active only when he wishes and then generously recompensed for their services. The gendarmes were aware of the situation, but there was nothing they could do about it, they said—nothing but try to be on good terms with the chiefs.

Friends and Acquaintances

After having called Gado, the baruma, Adjudant-Chef Souley learned that neither Gado nor his chief had any idea of the identity of the suspected terrorist, but that he had already moved to an unknown location. He had only lived there for a couple of months and was a nice person who distributed sacks of rice among his neighbors, but he was a bit strange, too, because he did not pray with everybody else in the public mosque around the corner. That was all they knew. (And this was also the information Issa later brought back.) This information could have been helpful for Souley if he had learned it earlier. He told me that he needed to receive information about such occurrences in real time and from individuals providing it proactively, rather than just upon inquiry and, as in this case, after the suspicious man had moved away. “As a gendarme, you need to see things,” he said. You need to know what is happening around you. This is why the contact, the mingling with the population, is strongly recommended. You need to know everything. You need to know everybody. This is how a gendarme can do his work well.” ^{Footnote 13}

“Mingling” with the civilian population gives the gendarmes what Brodeur and Ouellet call “connaissance” (2005:60), a kind of general knowledge about the people they face in their everyday work and whom they rely on in order to contextualize the fragmentary and inconclusive information received during criminal investigations. Mingling also creates useful friends and acquaintances (see Bittner Reference Bittner1967). When Souley was tired of sitting at his desk, he would often take an afternoon drive around town in the brigade’s Toyota. Often he would call me, “Come, let’s make a little trip,” and we would drive around the different neighborhoods for about an hour, just slightly faster than walking speed; often he would slow down and greet passers-by or people sitting on the street; sometimes he would turn off the engine and chat with them for a couple of minutes about their families, their businesses, and casually about news or recent events in their neighborhood, sometimes giving them a small bill for another round of tea. On one level, strolling through the village was proactive police work, the prevention of crime by making the presence of gendarmerie known, demonstrating the presence of the gendarmerie’s blue Toyota, and managing the gendarmerie’s visibility (see Paperman Reference Paperman2003). ^{Footnote 14} But on another level, as Souley told me, his objective was to cultivate and maintain friendly relationships with civilians. One might say that this was part of what is called “community policing” in the Anglophone world (Purdeková Reference Purdeková2011:488; Ruteere & Pommerolle Reference Ruteere and Pommerolle2003).

Adjudant-Chef Souley and all the other gendarmes I talked to agreed that in order to develop relationships with such acquaintances—and potential informants—they needed simply to be modest, open, and accessible—to be good people. Chef Hamza even went a step further in his effort to find informants.

And indeed, on several occasions, when I was with Hamza in his own fada or favorite bar, people told him about this merchant who had just bought ten plots of land with God knows what kind of money, about this soldier who received a big and suspiciously wrapped packet from a bus arriving from Libya, and about that suspicious looking bearded man who had just moved into the neighborhood and did not pray in the little mosque just around the corner. Not in the above-mentioned case, but in many others, these tidbits of information led to investigations, and sometimes to arrests.

Some gendarmes argued that people readily and openly talk to gendarmes because they live in a “culture of denunciation” (culture de dénonciation). But I did not find that this community cooperation had anything to do with a particular Nigerien “culture” of telling on people. Even though rural Niger is characterized by very strong social control, and most actions are public and thus the object of other people’s commentary and judgment, many people are highly skeptical of state authorities and would not to approach them. But the willingness of some people to do so, I would argue, is the result of the gendarmes’ clever way of bonding with them, of opening up to them, of building relationships of trust and reciprocity—not necessarily with many people, but with enough people who can help them to “see things.”