AFRIQUE XXI EDITORIAL
At 56, Tchang, as he is affectionately known in Niger, arrested at his home a year ago, has been involved in every struggle. His friends remember the activist he was even in high school and later as a philosophy student in the early 1990s, caught up in the wave of the student movement that would overthrow, not without the loss of life, the heirs of General Seyni Kountché and his regime of exception. A revolutionary, a Marxist, deeply attached to the Kanuri community in the far east of Niger, where he was born, Moussa Tchangari participated in the National Conference that shattered the one-party system, giving birth to multiparty politics and democracy. Students were present in large numbers. But very quickly, Tchangari devoted himself to human rights, founding in 1991, with others, the Nigerien Association for the Defense of Human Rights (ANDDH) which played a decisive role in the fight for public freedoms until the end of the 2000s.
After a career as a journalist marked by a brilliant and erudite writing style, he created his own organization in 1994, a hybrid of popular education and activist training: Alternative Espace Citoyens. Several figures in the media, civil society, and even politics emerged from this melting pot, where community radio stations, films, newspapers, and tireless civic education programs flourished.
This persistent and uncompromising work earned Tchangari several arrests and prison sentences under various regimes and throughout his various activism: against the high cost of living in 2005, against arbitrary arrests in villages in the east of the country plagued by Boko Haram in 2015, against the 2018 budget law, and, after the coup that overthrew Mohamed Bazoum on July 26, 2023, against the new military leaders and the threat they posed to the country. This episode marked a break with some of his former comrades-in-arms who, for their part, applauded the fall of the socialist regime that had been in power since 2011.
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