In August 1958, Charles de Gaulle, who had just returned to power in France, set off on a tour of his country’s sub-Saharan African colonies. His purpose was to present them with a plan to join France in a new kind of “community.” Paris would continue to control what it called “state services,” which included defense, monetary matters, customs, as well as media and communications. A new quasi-limited autonomy, meanwhile, would more or less allow African countries to manage their domestic affairs and to carry the costs, once largely borne, by France of doing so.
De Gaulle presented the novel scheme under a veneer of magnanimity. Via a planned referendum, its African possessions would be given the liberty to accept or reject his community. This offer did not come without a warning though. There would be no debate, only an up or down vote, and any colony that rejected the proposition would face secession from France “with all its consequences.”
It was not long before the world learned what this meant in practice. When de Gaulle visited Guinea the following month, that colony’s leader, Ahmed Sékou Touré, spoke defiantly to a crowd as the French statesman looked on. “We do not and never shall renounce our legitimate right to independence,” he said. This angered De Gaulle, who canceled a planned dinner with Touré that night and disinvited him to fly together on his presidential plane to nearby Senegal the next day. Yet these were but the merest hints of the consequences to come.
After de Gaulle had returned home to Paris, he ordered the immediate withdrawal of the thousands of the French civil servants who had made the colony’s bureaucracy run and staffed its clinics and schools. And before they flew home, many of the French workers engaged in an orgy of petty destructiveness, smashing furniture, trashing official records, breaking equipment, and even shattering lightbulbs.
What happened back then in Guinea is one of most famous episodes in an inglorious history of French colonial rule and domination over large parts of West and Central Africa, but it is only a single chapter in a very long story. Guinea is a better place than most to begin a discussion of this topic because in the 1880s and 1890s, the era of rapid French imperial expansion in the region, it was the site of a fierce campaign by Paris to subdue local political rulers, seize control over gold and other natural resources, and extend France’s authority over new territories.
The most famous of these leaders was a man named Samory Touré, who ruled over a polity called the Wassoulou Empire. Its core was in the Guinea highlands, and to France’s great frustration, it sometimes fielded armies numbering as many as 35,000 soldiers. When his empire was finally subdued just before the close of the century, Touré was exiled to an island in Gabon, a faraway equatorial colony (now country), where he died.
France is of course not the only European country to have ruled over Africans, but its history is unique for its persistence, its geographic spread, and its adaptability. A struggle for independence in Algeria, then a large North African French settler colony, brought down France’s Fourth Republic and threatened a civil war in the heart of Europe in 1958, the same year as de Gaulle’s sub-Saharan tour. That is because of the fantastical claim by the rebellious French general, Raoul Salan, that Algeria was actually a physical part, or geographical extension of France. “The Mediterranean traverses France the way the Seine traverses Paris,” Salan claimed.
In the wake of events in Guinea and Algeria, when other Black African figures began to push for more autonomy than de Gaulle had envisioned, or worse, for outright independence, bad things tended to happen to them. A little remembered anti-colonialist figure from Cameroon named Félix-Roland Moumié, for example, was assassinated by French agents whose actions anticipated the dark methods of Vladimir Putin. They poisoned him with radioactive thallium in Geneva in 1960.
More than 60 years later, there is a remarkable uprising against French influence underway in the Sahel, one of the African regions where French domination has been most thorough over the decades. One after another, the leaders of three states in this semi-arid region—Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali—have spoken out against French sway in West Africa and moved to reduce or eliminate the presence of French soldiers, corporations, and diplomats in their countries. In doing so, they have blamed Paris for a host of problems, ranging from a long-running but ineffective and often disruptive French-led campaign to contain the spread of Islamic insurgencies in the Sahel, to interference in their domestic politics, to profiteering from starkly unequal economic ties.
In stiff rebuffs of France, these three landlocked countries, which rank among the poorest in the world, have sometimes welcomed a larger role for Russia, both in helping bolster their internal security and in the extraction of mineral wealth like the gold and uranium in their soils. And with Russia (as with France for so long) these two things often go together.
They have also hinted at ending cooperation with France on controlling the northward flow of African migration across the Sahara toward Europe. And they have been discussing exiting a long-standing monetary union and currency, the CFA franc, which was created by France prior to independence mostly as a way of sustaining French exports in the region. African critics of the CFA franc have long said that it perpetuates French domination, in part through its historic requirement that member countries of the union deposit their foreign reserves with the French treasury. The three states are even discussing establishing a new Sahelian currency to replace the CFA.
The military president of Niger, Abdourahmane Tchiani, has called for France to pay damages to longtime African client states like his for years of what he has likened to looting. In Burkina Faso, next door, another military leader, Ibrahim Traoré, has vowed never to allow his country to be dominated by Europeans again.
In so strongly calling into question relations with France, these three Sahelian countries have captured the imagination of millions of Africans living in other former French colonies and beyond, including in wealthier coastal states, whose official relations with France so far have not been seriously disrupted. To the clear chagrin of French President Emmanuel Macron, though, this has come to feel increasingly like a major reckoning.
Some in France have long seen this coming. In an interview in 2007, his last year in power, former French President Jacques Chirac said as much. “Don’t forget one thing, and that is that a large portion of the money that we have in our purses comes precisely from the exploitation of Africa over the centuries … So we need a little measure of good sense, I didn’t say generosity, but good sense, and justice to render to Africans, I would say, what we took from them. This is necessary if we want to avoid the most severe turmoil and difficulty, with all of the political consequences that this will bring in the near future.”
In fairness to France, with all there is to criticize, its entire legacy in sub-Saharan Africa has not been uniformly abysmal. France once oversaw the construction of large infrastructure projects in its African colonies and clients—major ports, railroads, and highways. Part of the current anger toward this former colonial power is that it has largely exited this business, ceding the realm of big projects to China.
A few of France’s former colonies, Ivory Coast in particular, are well developed by the standards of the region. Even the much-criticized CFA franc has not been thoroughly bereft of benefits, hence its staying power. The relationship with France, and through Paris, with the European Union, has long kept the CFA convertible and relatively stable, if typically overvalued—affecting the balance of trade by making these countries exports expensive and imports, notably from the Eurozone, cheaper.
Surveying Africa below the Sahara in its entirety, though, it is hard to avoid the impression that France’s former colonies generally trail their former British colony counterparts in economic development, in democratic governance, and in political stability. And this is no paean to British colonial rule or influence, which gradually dissipated after independence.
But even if one wishes to take the most benign view of colonialism and capitalism in Africa, it is hard to argue that France has done nearly enough to help foster development in its former possessions or usher them more fully into the global economy. And to some extent, this stands to reason. France, at best, is a medium-size country with a matching economy. These attributes stand in disproportionate relation to Paris’s grand and long-standing ambition of buttressing its own stature in the world by clinging to the reins of neocolonial power in the continent to the south. Africa’s galloping demographic growth makes the absurdity of this mismatch more evident by the year.
On one level, the ongoing uprising against Paris in the Sahel can be understood as a cynical ploy using populism to sustain the political power of military elites in states that have been flirting with failure for years. But there is something much more interesting going on.
There is another challenge being posed by the leaders of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger that is likely to be far more impactful over time: they are challenging other African countries—both French and English speaking—to tear down the barriers that cripplingly divide them. More than a century ago, Europe “broke” the continent by subdividing it into cookie cutter-shaped countries, many of them small and landlocked.
Deeper African unity and federation is a dream with a surprisingly long pedigree. This was the cry of African intellectuals like J.E. Casely Hayford, in the former Gold Coast, now Ghana, early in the 20th century. More famously, it was also the obsession of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah. Less well-remembered, this was also the cause of Barthélemy Boganda, the early leader of the Central African Republic, who hoped to federate French-speaking countries in that part of the continent under a proposed United States of Latin Africa.
What remains certain today is that a start toward the greater prosperity and well-being that all Africans yearn for will only come when these divides are eradicated, and outsiders can’t do this for them. Anger towards France is only useful if it becomes a catalyst for greater agency by Africans, who build their own regional currencies, construct their own regional rail and highways, and constitute political and economic unions that exist on more than paper.
