France was perhaps not the worst foreign power in Africa during colonial rule but it is, without question, the cruelest post-colonial tormentor of former African colonies. I will elaborate. But first, let me explain what prompted this intentionally angry outburst: an account by Sahara Reporters titled “France Honours African Fighters in Ceremony to Commemorate WW-II”, a ceremony at which French President Emmanuel Macron reportedly paid tributes to about 260, 000 brave soldiers from Francophone Africa who fought alongside allied troops for the liberation of France from the clutches of Nazi Germany 75 years ago this August. Helpless under Nazi military oppression, France could only be rescued by the combined expeditionary forces of the Allied Powers, including hundreds of thousands of brave soldiers from several African colonies, during and immediately after the Normandy invasion in 1944.
At the event held in Saint-Raphael in southeast France, and surprisingly witnessed by presidents of two Francophone West African countries (Alpha Conde of Guinea and Alassane Ouattara of Cote d’Ivoire), President Macron said of the African fighters that “the names, the faces, the lives of these heroes of Africa must be part of our lives as free citizens.” That would ordinarily pass for a noble and laudable sentiment, except for the uncomfortable fact that the same France not only committed and is still responsible for the most horrendous atrocities imaginable in and against African nations and their peoples. France is directly and indubitably culpable, although I do not excuse the agency and culpability of African leaders, in the severe retardation and backwardness of its former African possessions.
What is most ironic is that the President of Guinea-Conakry, the colony whose open defiance of continued French domination of Africa in 1958 opened the floodgates for independence for the rest of Francophone Africa, and which President Charles de Gaulle deliberately subjected to the most callous punishments, would grace such an occasion. Let me quickly remind us that it was in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, during his tour of the colonies in 1958 to market his proposal for a French African community, that the arrogant President de Gaulle suffered his worst public humiliation at the hands of the radical trade unionist and political mobilizer, Ahmed Sekou Toure, who trenchantly demanded for independence for Guinea rather than to be part of any nebulous French community. Angrily, he agreed to grant independence to Guinea but subjected it to the most callous and malevolent punishment to snuff life out of the new sovereign country. Whatever the French could not cart away from the country they destroyed, including physical infrastructure, schools, buildings, agricultural equipment, vehicles, even books, thereby sending it back into a state worse than its pre-colonial existence, exactly what they did to Haiti more than 200 years ago. It had to take Ghana’s immediate injection of a grant of ten million pounds to prevent the country from going under. Much more horrible treatment awaited Algeria, the territory that the French loved to regard as an overseas extension of mainland France; it had to fight a most brutal war of independence in which millions of lives were lost and extensive physical destruction deliberately inflicted on it.
But enough of colonial history already. A cursory look at France’s atrocious and sadistic treatment of its former colonies in the so-called ‘post-colonial’ era will not fail to convince even the most skeptical that France takes the prize for the cruelest post-colonial (read neo-colonial) power in Africa. Since the grant of independence had been made inevitable by Guinea from 1958 onwards, most French colonies became independent in 1960, and France enslaved all of them by setting the most ignoble neo-colonist traps for them, traps that validate Nkrumah’s assertion that any country in the clutches of neo-colonialism is never a master of its own destiny. No Francophone African country is a master of its own affairs. At so-called independence France corralled them into signing one-sided military and defence agreements, which included basing French troops on their soils, infusion of French military intelligence personnel into their defence and security establishments. France is the only former colonial power with its troops permanently based in several African countries (Senegal, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, etc) to pursue and defend exclusively French national interests, including to support friendly governments, as well as to overthrow and assassinate recalcitrant leaders such as Sylvanus Olympio of Togo and Jean Bedel Bokassa of Central African Republic.
As if that is not pernicious enough, it cleverly wove their economies into France’s economy, tied them together into a single currency whose value is dictated from Paris, compels them to save their external reserves in the French treasury in Paris, from which it gives them loans for development, collects and pockets the accrued interests! This is apart from compelling them to sell most of their primary produce to France, and import mostly French-made products and award their most important infrastructure development contracts only to French firms, and then to other countries only if there are no willing French takers. And this is besides forcing them to pay millions of dollars annually for whatever infrastructure – roads, railways, airports, dams, electricity station, and bridges – that the French had built in colonial times to facilitate resource plunder, and at rates determined by Paris. Have you ever wondered why Africa is full of failed states!
I don’t know any neo-colonial peonage worse than this, and France is the sole author and beneficiary of it. Now you may understand my assertion that France is the cruelest foreign power in post-colonial Africa. That is why Macron’s egregious tributes to fallen African soldiers who helped to liberate France from German oppression are not sincere. What can be more sincere and honourable than ensuring that peoples who made such enormous sacrifices for France are treated with respect rather than their countries being held in perpetual servitude?
Today, France exhibits all the outward impressions of a prosperous first world power only because of the tyranny of its ne-colonialism, its relentless pillage of the vast resources of its former African colonies, its control of their national economies and the callous extraction of colonial debts, a national wealth built on sheer inhumanity. Even Jacques Chirac, former French president, sincerely owned up to this in 2008 when he noted that “without Africa, France will slide down into the rank of a third world power.” Take for example Niger Republic’s rich uranium mines which are guarded by French forces, providing security for French firms exploiting the strategic mineral. France is nothing but a country whose prosperity is based on the proceeds of heinous crimes against the humanity of Africans and a country whose leaders are hardly better than conscienceless armed robbers. It is frankly nauseating that such people also have the guts to condemn us for being unable to develop the same states they selfishly pauperized.
Not making excuses for the two African leaders who attended that ceremony in France, they are not unaware of how vicious and vengeful French leaders could be if humiliated, and attended to avoid any unpleasant consequences. The French should be exposed for their ignoble role in retarding Africa’s progress.
- Prof Fawole writes from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.