A French journalist talks about his time as a hostage in Mali, and how he sees the future
Oliver Dubois tried to escape from his captors in Mali four times. Once, he got lost. Another time, he barely was able to get out of the compound where he was being kept before the guards woke up. But his true prison, he says in a fascinating interview for Jeune Afrique, was the desert itself. The beautiful wide horizons, the flatness: all this, he says, is merely an “illusion of freedom”.
“I escaped at ten in the evening and gave myself until four the following morning to walk. I was able to cover 20 kilometres. My jailers would wake up at five in the morning, pray, notice I was gone, jump on their motorbikes and in 15 or 20 minutes they’d have caught up my 6 hours of walking. The desert is a terrible prison”
If Dubois tried to hitch a lift from a passing truck, he would be refused. “They all need the permission of the jihadists to be where they are”, he tells Jeune Afrique. Rather than helping, “they no doubt told the jihadists where I was”.
In television interviews around the publication of a new book recounting his captivity (Prisonnier du désert: 711 jours au mains d’Al-Qaïda, 2025), Dubois’ sang-froid is striking. In one remarkable hour-and-a-half-long interview available here, he talks about the strange rhythm of captivity; long periods where nothing changes followed by something abrupt and unpredictable, a change of scene a change of guards; how to build confidence with his captors while constantly observing in the hope of learning some detail which will help him to escape them. He talks about the silence of the desert and the challenges of returning to an entirely different soundscape when, two years after he was taken prisoner, he was finally released and able to return home to his family in France.
Dubois had arrived in Gao, a city in northeastern Mali, in April 2021, for an interview with a leader of an Al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadist group known as Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM), trying to get to the bottom of an apparent power struggle between JNIM and a rival jihadist group. His fixer Suleyman had helped set up the interview. Things started to feel odd soon after Dubois got into the 4×4 supposed to take him to the meeting at an apartment somewhere in town and instead the vehicle began heading off into the desert. Still, the driver told him not to worry.
It became clear only after nightfall, a change of clothes, a change of vehicle and a change of driver that this was not merely a change of interview location. “If you and your government do what you’re told”, the second driver told Dubois “you’ll be free in no time”.
In captivity, Dubois was shown the places earlier hostages had been kept (hostages that, as a journalist, he had written about). At one point he was held in an open-air prison with a South African paramedic Gert Jacobus van Deventer (originally kidnapped in Libya, then sold to the JNIM). That helped, Dubois says: “when one person is weak the other can be strong, and vice versa”. (van Deventer was ultimately released at the end of 2023).
Nearby there were nine Tuareg prisoners chained together, as Dubois puts it, “Guantanamo style”. One was said to be a member of Daesh/ISIS and had a radio. Others, Dubois says, had broken sharia law or engaged in contraband activities. Or were members of groups with different political aims: separation for a part of Mali, rather than using Mali as a springboard for global Islamic revolution.
Hostage-taking, Dubois explained, is a chiefly an economic calculation. If its frequency has decreased, that may point to a change of tactics not a fundamental weakening. JNIM are playing a long game. “Look, in 2000 we had a single camp”, a JNIM member tells Dubois during his captivity, “twenty years later we’re in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso”.
The organisation is, in Dubois’ words, “metastasising” – in spite of the presence of the Wagner mercenary group working with Malian armed forces (Dubois discounts Wagner as far less effective than the French-led military operation Barakhane, discontinued in 2022).
In any case, there’s no military solution. After three years observing and talking to his captors, Dubois is convinced governance is the real key. “I covered a lot of ground in the Kidal region during my time as a hostage”, Dubois explains, “there’s not a square inch of tarmac anywhere, completely unlike the south [of Mali]”. One time he asked one of his guards whether he preferred holding someone else’s Kalashnikov all day, rather than working for himself. “The long silence which followed says it all”, Dubois tells Jeune Afrique. “Who would want to make war when you can get up in the morning, kiss your wife, work, and then come home safe and sound at 5pm?”, he asks.
He still wonders what his fixer Suleyman knew about what was going to happen, back on that April day in 2021. “Maybe I was caught in a trap”, he says, “certainly I was betrayed”. For now, he needs distance. One day though, Dubois says, he’d like to speak to Suleyman again – “to understand”.
Original interview by Matteo Maillard in French published 1 February 2025, available here under the title ‘Olivier Dubois : “Dans le Sahel, les jihadistes continueront d’exister tant que la corruption et le népotisme séviront” ’
Dubois’ book, Prisonnier du désert: 711 jours au mains d’Al-Qaïda, was released by French publisher Michel Lafon in January this year.
An excellent interview with Dubois (in French) about his time in captivity is available here.
Jeune Afrique is a French language website and magazine based in Paris covering African politics and economics.
