{"id":3450,"date":"2022-04-11T00:05:54","date_gmt":"2022-04-11T00:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rasa-africa.org\/en\/?p=3450"},"modified":"2023-01-07T06:59:39","modified_gmt":"2023-01-07T06:59:39","slug":"colonial-nostalgia-continues-to-define-frances-relationship-to-africa-by-joshua-craze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rasa-africa.org\/ens\/2022\/04\/11\/colonial-nostalgia-continues-to-define-frances-relationship-to-africa-by-joshua-craze\/","title":{"rendered":"Colonial Nostalgia Continues to Define France\u2019s Relationship to Africa BY JOSHUA CRAZE"},"content":{"rendered":"

At home, French politicians mainstream far-right conspiracies about the replacement of whites by African immigrants. Abroad, they continue to intervene militarily and economically in the continent. Both are signs of a nation unwilling to accept its decline.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2017, six months after his victory over the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the second round of the French presidential elections, Emmanuel Macron\u00a0delivered a speech<\/a>\u00a0in front of a packed crowd in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. \u201cI am from a generation that has never known a colonized Africa,\u201d he told his audience, before promising a new relationship with the continent, one between friends, shorn of the arrogance that has characterized France\u2019s conduct in\u00a0Fran\u00e7afrique<\/em>\u00a0in the half century since formal independence was achieved in 1960.Macron\u2019s promise of a new relationship with Africa is one trotted out by every French political luminary in recent memory. In 2006, it was the turn of Nicolas Sarkozy, then an ambitious minister of the interior with his eye on the upcoming presidential election. Fresh from sponsoring a restrictive immigration bill, Sarkozy arrived in Benin to be greeted by\u00a0protests over his racist policies<\/a>. Unbowed, he gave a speech promising that Franco-African relations would dispense with the informal elite clientelism beloved by previous French presidents, who had conducted foreign policy in Africa through secret agreements made behind closed doors, reliant on a network of elite actors. A year\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0a long time in politics. After Sarkozy became president in 2007, Fran\u00e7afrique was rife with the sort of\u00a0personalized elite relationships<\/a>\u00a0based on friendships between African rulers and French politicians that he had decried in Benin.<\/p>\n

Sarkozy\u2019s reign offers the basic formula of French politics in Africa: a lurch to the right in the metropole, characterized by strident anti-immigrant policies and fearmongering about an endangered \u2014 white \u2014 French electorate; a promise of a new dawn made in Africa; and a politics of elite connivance and manipulation in what France has long considered a zone of limited French sovereignty, and in which ultimate power has always rested in Paris.<\/p>\n

After independence in 1960, the\u00a0CFA franc<\/a>, the French-backed and -controlled currency used in many of its former colonies, ensured export markets for French goods and access to African resources at below market rates. For many years, French energy security was guaranteed by its African satellites, while frequent military interventions \u2014 one every fifteen months \u2014 ensured that the rulers of the post-colonies met with the approval of the French political class.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

\n

Macron\u2019s Rebrand<\/h1>\n

Macron\u2019s promise of a new relationship with Africa has consisted in putting lipstick on\u00a0Fran\u00e7afrique<\/em>\u00a0without changing the basic logic of Franco-African relations. This is not to say that the application of this makeup has been completely unsuccessful: Macron\u2019s visit to Rwanda in May 2021 came with an apology for\u00a0France\u2019s role in the 1994 genocide<\/a>\u00a0and enabled Paris and Kigali to normalize relations, and the return of twenty-six artifacts to Benin, looted by colonial soldiers in 1892, was a landmark in the\u00a0long struggle<\/a>\u00a0to restitute African objects held in French museums.<\/p>\n

Often, though, even the symbolic accomplishments of Macron\u2019s presidency have been thrown off course by France\u2019s\u00a0rightward tailspin<\/a>. Published in January 2021, a report that Macron commissioned, aimed at the \u201creconciliation of memories between France and Algeria\u201d and written by the\u00a0historian Benjamin Stora<\/a>, stopped short of recommending that France apologize for its crimes during the Algerian War of Independence. In introducing the report, a spokesman for Macron underlined that there would be \u201cno repentance, no apologies<\/a>\u201d for French colonialism. Striking a less adversarial tone on the campaign trail in 2017, Macron had called the colonization of Algeria a crime against humanity.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

\"Macron\u2019s rebrand is focused on memory and representations rather than on changing the\r\n fundamentally unequal economic relationship of Franco-African dealings\"<\/strong><\/em>.<\/pre>\n
By 2021, he was on the campaign trail again, this time attempting to ward off the threat of the far-right demagogue and enthusiast for the halcyon days of French colonialism\u00a0\u00c9ric Zemmour<\/a>. The founder of the political party Reconqu\u00eate (Reconquest) insisted on the need for France to decolonize itself from immigrants and Islamists. In October 2021, after Macron claimed that the ruling Algerian regime was built on the exploitation of the memory of the war of independence, and then halved the number of visas available to the North African nation\u2019s citizens, Algiers \u2014 already angry about what it saw as a whitewashed report by Stora \u2014 recalled its ambassador to France and banned French military planes from its airspace.<\/p>\n
Macron\u2019s rebrand, successful or not, is focused on memory and representations rather than on changing the fundamentally unequal economic relationship that characterizes Franco-African dealings.<\/em>\u00a0His proposed reforms to the CFA franc are symbolic at best and regressive at worst. Macron announced, for instance, that French representatives will be\u00a0withdrawn<\/a>\u00a0from the board of the central bank of the West African CFA franc zone \u2014 a meaningless gesture, given that the fixed exchange rate between the euro and the franc ensures the role of the board is largely symbolic.<\/p>\n
The CFA franc will also change its name to the \u201ceco\u201d \u2014 a move designed to head off the threat of a regional currency, also called the eco, spearheaded by the Economic Community of West African States. None of Macron\u2019s cosmetic reforms actually change the continued French\u00a0domination of the monetary policy\u00a0<\/a>of its former colonies, a dominance that has created significant sources of revenue for the metropole and\u00a0limited regional economic development<\/a>.The talk of a new relationship with Africa reached its apogee with an\u00a0Africa-France summit<\/a>\u00a0in Montpellier in October 2021, just as Macron was\u00a0halving the number of visas<\/a>\u00a0available to a number of countries in the Maghreb in retaliation for them not taking sufficient numbers of deportees from France. Rather than being a closeted meeting between African heads of state and the French political class, as is traditional, the Montpellier summit was to be the beginning of a dialogue between African youth and Macron, shepherded by the doyen of postcolonial theory,\u00a0Achille Mbembe<\/a>.<\/p>\n
The summit came on the back of\u00a0Senegalese protests<\/a>\u00a0that targeted French property in April 2021 and a wave of anti-French feeling around francophone Africa from people angry that the former colonial power had still not relinquished its control of the region. While the summit featured ambitious proposals for the transformation of development aid and the restitution of looted artworks, it came just months after the old Fran\u00e7afrique had reared its head. Macron was the only Western president at the funeral of the authoritarian leader of Chad (and loyal French client)\u00a0Idriss D\u00e9by<\/a>, in April 2021. France\u2019s president then oversaw the coronation of D\u00e9by\u2019s son as dictator and de facto president. Despite talk of a transformed relationship with Africa, Chadian troops remain useful for France\u2019s ongoing efforts to combat an Islamist insurgency in the Sahel. Dictatorship in Chad is a worthwhile price to pay for advancing France\u2019s foreign policy objectives.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n
\n
Imperial Decline<\/h1>\n
The continuities of Franco-African relations, however, shouldn\u2019t blind us to how much has changed on the continent since 1994, the annus horribilis of Fran\u00e7afrique, when France, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, suddenly cut the value of the CFA franc in half. This move led to\u00a0widespread protests<\/a>\u00a0across West Africa and lasting resentment. In the same year, France backed the Hutu elite in Rwanda. In March 2021, a\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0written by an expert commission established by Macron found that France bore \u201cheavy and overwhelming\u201d responsibility for the genocide that followed.<\/p>\n
Since then, the French presence in West Africa has decreased: its military presence is but a third of what it was in 1990, and the expatriate French population has shrunk. France can no longer count on being the privileged actor in its former colonies. While France has slashed development aid to francophone Africa since 1990,\u00a0Chinese direct investment<\/a>\u00a0has rocketed, increasing by 400 percent in Niger from 2009 to 2019 and 750 percent in Chad. Rather than being dependent on French political will, West African countries now find themselves courted by any number of admirers, including wealthy Gulf states and Russia.<\/p>\n
If Fran\u00e7afrique lives on, it is largely as a function of the elite compact that has always defined it. For the remaining rulers of an older Africa who were put in place before contemporary electoral cycles, such as\u00a0Paul Biya in Cameroon<\/a>, France remains a useful ally. For France, the fiction of a still functioning Fran\u00e7afrique in which it remains the central power broker in West Africa allows politicians to assuage France\u2019s wounded pride and make a claim for their country\u2019s continued global importance, with its own sphere of influence outside American dominion.<\/p>\n
The reality of France\u2019s changing relationship with francophone Africa seems of little interest to the French electorate. Certainly, no questions of actual foreign policy toward Africa have bedeviled the current elections. The continent is worthy of only two mentions in the manifesto of Val\u00e9rie P\u00e9cresse, the beleaguered right-wing candidate for Les R\u00e9publicains, squeezed between the rightward swing of Macron and Le Pen and Zemmour\u2019s implacable demagoguery. Africa fairs little better on the left, earning only one mention in Anne Hidalgo\u2019s lengthy socialist manifesto \u2014 predictably, in relation to the need to control migration.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n
\n
Fighting at Home and Abroad<\/h1>\n
Although policy toward Africa \u2014 let alone the lives of Africans \u2014 is of little interest to the French electorate, the continent continues to play a symbolic role in the country\u2019s political imaginations. Until the war in Ukraine turned the French public toward more\u00a0quotidian concerns<\/a>\u00a0about gas prices and purchasing power, the election had been fought over France\u2019s diminished place in the world, Islamism, immigration, and French identity. Amid historically low crime rates, Macron tried to head off the right-wing threat to his presidency by announcing that he would combat the\u00a0ensauvagement<\/em><\/a>\u00a0of the country by getting tough on crime and combatting radical Islam.<\/p>\n
This election campaign has also seen the previously marginal theory of the \u201cGreat Replacement\u201d becoming mainstream. Proposed by\u00a0Renaud Camus<\/a>, the theory holds that Europe is being invaded by migrants bent on replacing its white population. It has been taken up not only by Zemmour but also by P\u00e9cresse, who, at a\u00a0rally in February 2022<\/a>, announced that her only problem with the theory was that there was still time to stop it. All the main candidates in the election rely on the image of a dangerous \u2014 black, Muslim \u2014 invader threatening the true France.<\/p>\n
Africa is no longer the site for a fantasy of\u00a0France\u2019s civilizing mission<\/a>\u00a0but rather the locus of fears about foreign immigrants and evil Islamists. The countries stretching along the Sahel belt provide something of a\u00a0perfect storm<\/a>\u00a0for these anxieties. A necessary staging post for migrants on their way from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe, over the last decade, the Sahel has also become the battleground for an Islamist insurgency that now controls swathes of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger.<\/p>\n
This is the ugly militarism of a diminished country in the spell of nightmares about immigration and Islam.<\/pre>\n
If France fails to deal with the security crisis created by the insurgency, or so the rhetoric goes, then the population explosion in sub-Saharan Africa will soon deposit Islamic immigrants at the gates of France. But if Africa largely figures in French politics as a racist specter used to court voters, what is less remarked upon is the military framework required to enact the material elements of that vision: the restriction of migration via\u00a0EU-sponsored partnership agreements<\/a>\u00a0with governments in the Sahel, which often violate the human rights of migrants, and French military campaigns against the Islamic insurgency.<\/p>\n
A relatively successful initial\u00a0French campaign<\/a>\u00a0in 2013 \u2014 Operation Serval \u2014 disrupted a jihadi threat to Bamako, Mali\u2019s capital. The insurgency, however, then dispersed and became harder to combat. The French mission had its own ambiguities.\u00a0Operation Barkhane<\/a>\u00a0had five thousand French troops engage in a drawn-out guerrilla war for six years, which saw two million displaced and tens of thousands killed, but the insurgency unbowed. The French might have won every battle, or so the saying goes, but they lost the war. In June 2021, France announced the\u00a0drawdown<\/a>\u00a0of the operation, but by then the damage had been done. France had lost the confidence of the region, and its military was disgraced.<\/p>\n
\n
In the aftermath of French defeat, West African politicians played up their anti-French credentials as a means to court voters. In Mali, the French failure to combat the insurgency in the north of the country was instrumental in the May 2021 coup d\u2019\u00e9tat that brought Assimi Go\u00efta to power. Since then, Go\u00efta has\u00a0spun away from France and toward Russia<\/a>, whose Wagner mercenaries are already active in another former French colony, the\u00a0Central African Republic<\/a>. Go\u00efta\u2019s gambit is that Russia can both vanquish the jihadis and humiliate France, as Mali tries to leverage one imperial power against another. After Go\u00efta\u2019s ascension, the remaining French troops in Mali were clearly living on borrowed time.It is in this context that Macron\u2019s announcement of the withdrawal of French forces from Mali in February 2022 was inevitable. At pro-junta rallies in Bamako, Russian flags fly and France \u2014 only a decade ago celebrated for its 2013 defeat of the jihad \u2014 is an \u00e9tat non grata. While the withdrawal marks a real defeat in a region France once considered its own, it does not indicate the end of French militarism. All the troops withdrawn from Mali will be redeployed in the surrounding countries.<\/p>\n
With the exception of\u00a0Jean-Luc M\u00e9lenchon<\/a>, the left-wing activist for La France Insoumise, every leading French presidential candidate has insisted on the necessity of a continued military presence in francophone Africa. For candidates like Zemmour, this is a contentless boast designed for domestic digestion, intended for French stomachs upset by a loss of global influence. However, there is unanimity among the country\u2019s political establishment: France\u2019s military must stay in Africa.<\/p>\n
The nature of this military presence looks rather different from the heyday of Fran\u00e7afrique, when the French army would swoop in to determine presidents and support its chosen regimes. Since the drawdown of Operation Barkhane, Macron has attempted to share the burden of military security in the Sahel with the EU, the UN, and an\u00a0American government<\/a>\u00a0that has long provided drones, intelligence, and logistical support, despite its\u00a0hesitations<\/a>. Macron\u2019s vision is of counterinsurgency on a shoestring budget, enforced by local conscripts \u2014 hence Chad\u2019s importance \u2014 and special forces operations.<\/p>\n
This is the ugly militarism of a diminished country in the spell of nightmares about immigration and Islam, no longer in a position to determine the internal policies of francophone Africa. As France is expelled from Mali and anti-French sentiment runs high across the region, what remains of its postcolonial domination of West Africa is the enduring economic exploitation enabled by the CFA franc zone and the military bases strung across the Sahel. These are the material correlates of the politics of fear chanted back in the metropole.<\/p>\n
That these bases are everywhere unremarked upon indicates the degree to which the French political class is virtually unanimous in its agreement on political strategy in Africa. Only Jean-Luc M\u00e9lenchon, who has surged to third place in the polls, offers another possibility. Unusually for a French presidential candidate, his\u00a0manifesto<\/a>\u00a0includes actual discussions of policy issues in relation to Africa \u2014 to wit, ending the French military presence in the Sahel, the fundamental reform of the CFA franc, and respecting the rights of refugees.<\/p>\n
During the current election campaign, M\u00e9lenchon has\u00a0repeatedly referenced<\/a>\u00a0the concept of\u00a0cr\u00e9olit\u00e9<\/em>, drawn from the work of Martinican poet and philosopher\u00a0\u00c9douard Glissant<\/a>. It is simply a fact of life, M\u00e9lenchon claims, that cultures come together and create something new. In a television debate with Zemmour in September 2021, M\u00e9lenchon claimed that assimilation \u2014 so beloved of the French right \u2014 is a meaningless concept. There are no hordes at the gates. A unitary French cultural identity is a fantasy. Nothing needs to be protected. And if there are no hordes at the gates, M\u00e9lenchon continues, then the Sahel does not need to be militarized to prevent them arriving.<\/p>\n
This last claim is one that is in sync with an increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan French social reality excluded from the confines of political debating halls, in which the candidates remain deeply out of step with the political present. In contemporary French political debates, Africa itself, as it protests the continued practices of Fran\u00e7afrique and continues to be devastated by the crisis in the Sahel, has disappeared from view.<\/p>\n
Source: www.jacobinmag.com<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At home, French politicians mainstream far-right conspiracies about the replacement of whites by African immigrants. Abroad, they continue to intervene militarily and economically in the continent. Both are signs of a nation unwilling to accept its decline. In 2017, six months after his victory over the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the second round […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4529,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3450","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-palaver"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasa-africa.org\/ens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasa-africa.org\/ens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasa-africa.org\/ens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasa-africa.org\/ens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasa-africa.org\/ens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3450"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/rasa-africa.org\/ens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4530,"href":"https:\/\/rasa-africa.org\/ens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3450\/revisions\/4530"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasa-africa.org\/ens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasa-africa.org\/ens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasa-africa.org\/ens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasa-africa.org\/ens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}