Rethinking Africa is a forward looking blog dedicated to the exchange of innovative thinking on issues affecting the advancement of African peoples wherever they are. We provide rigorous and insightful analyses on the issues affecting Africans and their vision of the world.
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe THE Fulani islamist/jihadist-led genocidist Nigeria, not Europe, not the United States, not“the white
man”,not any extracontinental aggressor state, constitutes, currently, the principalretrograde agent of genocide and underdevelopment and immiseration and wretchedness across Africa:
1. It has murdered more Africans in Biafra, southwestcentral Africa, since 1945 than the total number of Africans murdered in Africa since 1900 by all of Europe’s conqueror-powers in Africa: Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain – including the number of Africans the Germans murdered in the genocide of the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples of southwest Africa (1904-1907). It is still murdering, murdering, murdering...
2. It now rates a not-too-distant second to Belgian King Leopold II’s notorious position as lead génocidaire of African peoples since the 19th century in the Leopold II/Belgian state’s genocide against Africans in the central regions of the Congo River basin (1878-1908).
(Wayne Shorter Octet, “Mephistopheles” [personnel: Shorter, tenor saxophone, Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Alan Shorter, fluegelhorn; Grachan Moncur III, trombone; James Spaulding, alto saxophone; Herbie Hancock, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Joe Chambers, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 15 October 1965])
*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is author of the recently published The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019)
(...the state in history is transient... the peoples endure:USSR/The Soviet Union, 30 December 1922-26 December 1991)
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
“On a personal note, the phased end of the USSR was a turning point for me. It convinced me that change can be brought about without firing a single shot”
(Muhammadu Buhari, the barely educated***** genocidist Nigeria commander, north/northcentral Biafra, during phase-III of the Igbo genocide, 6 July 1966-12 January 1970, “addressing” a meeting at Chatham House, London, England, 1000-1030 Hours GMT, Thursday 26 February 2015, arranged by his British establishment minders just a month before then British Prime Minister Cameron and ex-US President Obama, two well educated persons in their respective publics, expectedly, who are both brazenely contemptuous of African peoples’ education and transformative opportunities, imposed the Buhari as Nigeria’shead-of-regime)
VERY MUCH interpellated in this thought processin Muhammadu Buhari’s mind of not-firing a single shot and the fall of the Soviet Union must be his realisation, even if belated, that despite the staggering pulverising force his genocidist military deployed to destroy Igbo people during phases I-III of the genocide of 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, the Igbosurvived whilst contemporary Nigeria is a staggeringly, withering wretch.
The Soviet Union supported the genocide by sending in the squadrons of MiGs to Nigeria, flown by loaned failed Egyptian pilots whose air force had virtually been destroyed by Israel in the 6-Day War just a few months earlier (not Nigerian pilots as the country no longer had such prized personnelsince the genocidists murdered outstanding Igbo pilots who made up the then Nigeria air force service during phase-I of the genocide [29 May 1966-4 January 1967] and slaughter-survivors escaped to Biafra to begin the construction of the Biafra air force), specialists in the carpet bombing of Igbo homes, offices, markets, churches, shrines, schools, children’s playgrounds, hospitals, railway stations, trains, cars, car parks, refugee centres… This same Soviet Union, this seemingly redoubtable state, soon, beginning December 1991, collapses “without (sic) a single shot fired”(!) but its constituent peoples survive– a reminder, if ever there was one, that the state, including this one conqueror Britain ignominously called Nigeria in 1914, is transient; peoples endure (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/state-is-transient-peoples-endure.html).
(...the state in history is transient... the peoples endure:post-USSR/The Soviet Union – 15 new sovereign states emerged after the collapse of this colossus of a state, beginning December 1991...)
IT SHOULD now be evident to Buhari (and others) that those reptilian epaulettes for “majors” and “sergeants” and “corporals” and “generals” and“lieutenants” and “colonels” decked by genocidists who streamed to Biafra during those 44 dreadful months to murder 3.1 million Igbo children and women and men are nothing else but signifiers for perpetrating this heinous crime against humanity. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- *****ACCORDING to the 1999 genocidist Nigeria “constitution”, an aspiring candidate for the position of the state’s head-of-regime must possess a WASSCE certificate (school certificate/WASC/WAEC/high school/GCE “O” Level/GCSE “O” Level equivalent). Muhammadu Buhari does not have this basic qualification but was imposed regardless as head-of-regime by Cameron and Obama, a decision implemented on the ground in this British client-state by a ruthless overseer oligarchy led by Fulani islamists/jihadists, this unabashedly indolent and sleazy anti-African peoples’ grouping immanently obsequious to the diktats of its bature overlords, adamantly opposed to the freedom of African peoples from the British conquest and occupation which Igbo people had spearheaded during mid-1930s-October 1960.
(Wayne Shorter Octet, “Mephistopheles” [personnel: Shorter, tenor saxophone; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Alan Shorter, fluegelhorn; Grachan Moncur III, trombone; James Spaulding, alto saxophone; Herbie Hancock, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Joe Chambers, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood, NJ, US, 15 October 1965])
(Leoplold II, genocidist king of the Belgians/state of Belgium, the epitome of this monstrous epithet that calls its “francophonie”Africa, murdered 13 million African peoples in the Congo River basin of central Africa, 1878-1908 – the most expansive
and devastating genocide recorded in Africa, prior to the Germanstate-organised genocide of Herero people in Namibia, where the Germans murdered 65,000
out of 80,000 Herero or 80 per cent of the total Herero
population wiped out, 1904-1907, and the German state-organised genocide
of Nama people in Namibia, where the Germans murdered 10,000 Nama or 50
per cent of the Nama population wiped out, 1904-1907, the British state/its African-led Nigeria client state organised genocide aganist Igbo people of Biafra, 29 May 1966-present day, in which Britain and its Fulani-overseers in Nigeria and its pan-African constituent nations’ allies of particularly Yoruba, Jukun, Tiv, Urhobo, Edo, Bachama, Jawara, Kanuri, Hausa,Nupe murdered 3.1 million Igbo people, 25 per cent of this nation's population wiped out, during 44 months, 29 May 1966- 12 January 1970, phases I-III, and tens of thousands of additional Igbo murdered by the Anglo-Nigerian African designated genocidists during 13 January 1970-present day, phase-IV) (SEEalsoupdate on entry below on former French President Jacques Chirac, made on Friday 11 october 2019)
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
SINCE THE 1960s, there has been a persistent populist myth in North World-South World
international politics and relations that the country that retains the
“accolade” as the North World’s most military-interventionist power in the
South is theUnited States.
Interestingly, this remains the case as a myth! In reality, though, this
unenviable “accolade” in global politics is in fact not held by theUnited StatesbutFrance.
And the South’s geographical focus whereFranceappears not to have anything else but
invasion as its own definitive credo
in foreign policy isAfrica
(Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from
Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature, 2011: 28-34).
In March
2014,The Washington Postran an editorial on the events in theCrimea
(“President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy”, Washington Post, 2 March 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/president-obamas-foreign-policy-is-based-on-fantasy/2014/03/02/c7854436-a238-11e3-a5fa-55f0c77bf39c_story.html,
accessed 15 October 2015). Here the paper likensRussia’s policy on this peninsular to
that of a 19th century conqueror-state. Surprisingly, the editorial does not
mention the contemporary world’slead“19th century-style” invader:France. In the past five years,Francehas invadedCôte d’Ivoire,Maliand
theCentral African Republicand co-led the invasion ofLibya.In December 2013, France invaded Central
African Republic (CAR). It is its second invasion of the CAR in 12 years. More
importantly, this is the 52nd French invasion of the so-calledfrancophonie Africacountries since 1960. In early 2013,
it invadedMali(invasion no. 51); in 2011, it
spearheaded the invasion ofLibya(no. 50) which also involved Britainand theUnited States; in 2010, it invadedCôte d’Ivoire, its no. 49 since 1960.
BACK IN 2003, it was
extraordinary to fathom how very hypocritically encased French foreign policy
considerations could be especially when it focused on Africa. Or so it seemed.
For a country that had displayed unrelenting opposition to the then US and
British military intervention in Iraq, France appeared to be basking in the
global populist imagination as, perhaps, the country that not only had invented
the concept of “non-intervention” in other countries’ internal affairs, but was
guided, unambiguously, by this
principle in its own policy in practice. The robust performance of foreign minister Dominique de Villepin during those dramatic January-March 2003 UN security council debates on Iraq would have added vivid credibility to this
assumption (Dominique de Villepin, “Speech by Dominique de Villepin, Minister
of Foreign Affairs, at the United Nations Security Council, New York,
14.02.2003”,
http://www.ambafrance-uk.org/Speech-by-M-Dominique-de-Villepin,4954,
accessed 29 September 2015). In one memorable session in those debates, de
Villepin’s opposition to the impending US-British-led invasion of Iraq drew
unprecedented applause from even usually reticent diplomats. Such were the
liberatory contents in de Villepin’s address that one would not have been too
mistaken if they thought that these had been derived, unedited, from the
seminal papers of Amilcar Cabral (Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source, 1973;
Cabral, Revolution in Guinea, 1974),
one of the world’s leading restoration-of-independence theorists and
philosophers. De Villepin had in fact stated the following in his 14 February
2003 speech to the security council: “[T]he use of force is
not justified at this time.There
is an alternative to war … Such intervention could have incalculable
consequences for the stability of this scarred and fragile region. It would
compound the sense of injustice, increase tensions and risk paving the way to
other conflicts … This message comes to you today from an old country, France,
from a continent like mine, Europe, that has known wars, occupation and barbarity … Faithful to her values, she believes in
our ability to build together a better world” (added emphasis).
YET A FEW weeks after these eloquent declarations and coupled with the
preoccupation of an international media audience intensely focused on the
unfolding Iraqi crisis, France invaded Central
African Republic (CAR). In the wake of a coup d’état that had toppled the pliant,
pro-Paris Angé-Felix Patassé regime in Bangui (CAR capital), France sent its
troops into the country, with that invasion being no. 48 in Africa since 1960.
Quintessential
target
“Francophonie” Africa constitutes a
total of 22 countries, mostly in west, northeast, central and southeast Africa
(Indian Ocean) that France conquered and occupied in Africa during the course
of the pan-European invasion of Africa during the 15th-19th centuries. Despite the
presumed restoration of independence, since the 1960s,France, right from the post 1939-1945 war leadership of Charles de Gaulle to the current
François Hollande’s, has such glaring contempt for the notion of
“sovereignty” in these “francophonie”Africa.
Indeed, in practice, the “Brezhnev Doctrine” of the Cold War-era Soviet Union (L S Stavrinos, The Epic of Modern Man, 1971:
465-466; Matthew Ouimet, The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine
in Soviet Foreign Policy, 2003) that had constricted the sovereignty of
the contiguous east European alliance-states, within the strict ambience of the
Warsaw Treaty universe, is a far more progressive relationship than the
typologisation and operationalisation of “francophonie Africa”.
FOR FRANCE, the 22 countries of Africa that are classified as
“francophonie Africa” are France’spersonal
propertyin perpetuity. As a
result, Africa has been the quintessential target of French military interventionism
for 55 years because immanent in the worldview of the French political
establishment, irrespective of ideological/political colouration, none of the
former French-conquered and occupied African states is really seen as independentorsovereign by
any breadth or shade of either of these definitions. Instead, according to this
conception, these are “francophone” backwoods, which, at best, have some
measure of local administrative autonomy (hence, “francophone Africa”!), with
ultimate sovereign power lodged back in Europe – in Paris, as it has been since
the 1885 Berlin conference in which the pan-European World formalised its conquest of Africa (Herbert
Ekwe-Ekwe, “Age of freedom or post-Berlin state Africa”, Pambazuka News, Issue 680, 29 May 2014,http://www.pambazuka.net/en/category/features/91922,
accessed 18 October 2015).
IF EVIDENCE from the highest level of
political authority of the French state is required to buttress this line of
thought, we should recall that very introspectively frank declaration made on
the subject in 1998 by François Mitterand, a former socialist president of
France: “Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century” (Tom
Masland, “African Duel”, 1998: 19). This sentiment is underscored by Jacques
Godfrain, former head, French foreign ministry, who frames his own response in
vivid geostrategic terms: “A little country, with a small amount of strength,
we can move a planet because [of our] … relations with 15 or 20 African
countries” (Masland, “African Duel”, 1998: 19). Ten years later, in 2008, another
French president, Jacques Chirac, still indulges in this French obsession to
control Africa in perpetuity when he himself intones: “[W]ithout Africa,
France will slide down into the rank of a third (world) power” (George Bauer,
“Françafrique: Bangui, and the monster”, Graphite
Publications, 9 February 2014, http://graphitepublications.com/francafrique-bangui-and-the-monster/,
accessed 27 August 2015).
(François Mitterand: “Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century”)
(Jacques Godfrain: “A little country, with a small amount of strength, we can move a planet because [of our] … relations with 15 or 20 African countries”)
(Jacques Chirac: “[W]ithout Africa, France will slide down into the rank of a third (world) power”)£££££
It was however France’s post-1939-1945 leader, Charles de Gaulle, who, in 1944, had inaugurated this now
well-known French obsession to control Africa ad infinitum. The irony of the circumstances was indeed not lost on
anyone. Despite France’s early capitulation to Germany in 1940 in the latter’s
war of aggression against its neighbours, de Gaulle, then exiled leader of the
anti-German “French free forces” struggling desperately to effect French
liberation, was himself vociferously opposed to the liberation of Africa.
Africa, we mustn’t forget, was then under the jackboot of French occupation as
well as those of its British and Belgian wartime allies. During the 1944
Brazzaville conference of French overseas-conquest governors which de Gaulle
chaired, he was adamant in what he saw as his vision of the future of
French-occupied Africa: “Self-government must be rejected – even in the more
distant future” (Hubert Deschambs, “France in Black Africa and Madagascar
between 1920 and 1945”, in LH Gann and Peter Duiganan, eds., Colonialism in Africa, 1870-1900. Vol. Two:
The History and Politics of Colonialism 1914-1960, 1970: 249).
(Charles de Gaulle: “Self-government [restoration of African independence] must be rejected – even in the more distant future”)
Supercilious antagonism
De Gaulle’s supercilious antagonism
to African liberation was of course not unique at the time. Similar sentiments
were evident in the position of Winston Churchill, the British prime minister,
who insisted in 1942 that he had not attained his position as head of
government to “preside over the liquidation of the British empire” (“From our archive: Mr Churchill on our one aim”,The Guardian [London], 11 November 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2009/nov/11/churchill-blood-sweat-tears,
accessed 24 September 2015). The Belgian king and government, who barely
resisted Germany’s attack and overrun of their country beyond three weeks in
May 1940, were themselves equally unwilling to discontinue their occupation of
the Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo) after Germany’s eventual defeat in
1945. This was in spite of the central role that the Congo played in the
financing of the Belgian war effort (including the entire expenses of the
country’s exiled royal family and government in London) which totalled the
grand sum of £40 million. “In fact, thanks to the resources of the Congo, the
Belgian government [in exile] in London had not to borrow a shilling or a
dollar, and the Belgian gold reserve could be left intact”, recalls Robert
Godding, the then Belgian government-in-exile secretary with direct
responsibility for the occupation of the Congo (Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 1972:
188). Besides, Belgium had, earlier on
in Africa, carried out a catastrophic 30-year trail (1878-1908) of genocide
against Africans in the Congo basin in which it annihilated 13 million
constituent peoples (Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem,Histoire
générale du Congo: De l'héritage ancien à la République Démocratique, 1998: 344). Leopold II, the génocidaire king who
supervised this carnage was equally obsessed with Belgian’s own share of the conquest and occupation
of Africa: “I do not want to risk … losing a fine chance to
secure for ourselves a slice of this magnificent African cake” (Adam
Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 1999:
58).
(Leopold II: “I do not want to risk … losing a fine chance to secure for ourselves a slice of this magnificent African cake”)
BUT UNLIKE British and Belgian
leaders (the latter were ultimately welded into the encompassing French-led francophoniedom), de Gaulle pursued
France’s long time ambitions in Africa with almost megalomaniac intensity in
the years after 1945 – opposing African liberation projects in the west and
central regions of the continent, under French occupation, as well as on the
islands off the east coast in the Indian Ocean especially Madagascar. However
in 1958, de Gaulle changed track, somewhat, in his anti-African independence
drive. Stung and disillusioned by the 1954 spectacular and humiliating defeat
of French forces in Vietnam and the looming disaster in its ongoing war in
Algeria, de Gaulle produced a document for a purported future of African
freedom. In the main, this document envisioned a circumscribed African independence outcome that would ensure
continuing French political and economic hegemony in Africa (Jean Allman,
“Between the present and history: African nationalism and decolonization”, Oxford Handbooks Online, December 2013, http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199572472.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199572472-e-005,
accessed 16 August 2015). Apart from Guinea, which opposed it when it was put
to a referendum, France succeeded in imposing the document on the rest of its
occupied states, with evident compliance with some segments of the African
leaderships of the restoration-of-independence movement and the all too
familiar tragic consequences since.
Operationalisation…
The stage was now set for France to
invoke the licence, at its own choosing, to intervene in the political process
of any of its prized African lands of “francophonie”: invade, intimidate,
manipulate, install, antagonise, ingratiate, indemnify, expropriate, invade,
intimidate... Hardly any of the 22 African countries in “francophonie” escaped
this epoch of witnessing the invasion of their territory by some contingent of
the French military from one of its numerous bases in the region or from those
further away back home in Corsica. Each of these African “francophonie” states
“hosts” a French military base of varying capabilities and configuration as
part of this overarching network in which Dakar, Sénégal, is at its epicentre,
in turn linked to requisite interventionist brigades positioned in Corsica.
Thanks to this network, the French military has invaded this African
“francophonie” enclave 52 times, since
1960, as we have stated – from Chad to the Congo (Congo Democratic
Republic), Côte d’Ivoire to the Comoros. Such invasions provide the French the
opportunity to directly manipulate local political trends in line with their
strategic objectives, install new client regimes, if need be, and expand the
parameters of expropriation of critical resources even further as unabashedly vocalised
by many a president.
ON THIS SCORE, the so-called Congo Democratic Republic
(or Zaïre or Congo-Kinshasa as it has been variously called), the jewel in the crown of “francophonie”, is
aptly illustrative. Between 1961 and 1996, France intervened militarily in the
country 17 times to prop up the notorious dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko
which ravaged one of Africa’s richest economies. Countries such as Central
African Republic (or Central African Empire as it was known when it was ruled,
literally, by the very francophile acolyte and dictator, Jean-Bédel Bokassa),
Rwanda (French military intervention was ongoing in the country as the forces
of the pro-French central government perpetrated its dreadful genocide against
the Tutsi in 1994), Burundi, Djibouti and Chad bore the brunt of the invasions
as France sought to enforce or safeguard the fortunes of one client regime or
the other. For France, therefore, its hegemonic control of “francophone Africa”
in the past 55 years has been a lucrative and “prestigious” rearguard quest to
maintain a stranglehold of influence in the Southern World, despite the obvious
militarily weakened position of its overall international status after the end
of the Second World War – or as from indeed 27 years earlier, following the end
of the 1914-1918 war (Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings
from Reading: 57-58). Former head of French foreign ministry Jacques
Godfrain’s geostrategic observation, quoted earlier, couldn’t have been more correctly
stated: “A little country, with a small amount of strength, we can move a
planet because [of our] ... relations ... with 15 or 20 African countries”.
(Mobutu Sese Seko)
(Jean-Bédel Bokassa)
SO, keeping a stranglehold on “francophonie
Africa” enablesFrance, with an
astonishingly fragile, struggling economy, to scoop gargantuan levels of
capital, mineralogical and agricultural resources that it couldn’t
ever generate in its own homeland, year in, year out. Furthermore, so brutally a double-jeopardy,
Africans,themselves, pay
for France’s military invasions of “francophonie Africa” as Gary Busch, a
political economist, shows in his 2011 excellent research on the subject with
the stunning title, “Africans pay for the bullets the French use to kill them”.
Busch draws the world’s attention to the key “settlement documents” mapped out
byFrance, back in 1960, that
marks its envisaged future relations with “francophonie Africa” (Gary Busch,
“Africans pay for the bullets the French use to kill them”, nigeriavillagesquare, 29 July 2011, http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/articles-comments/64584-africans-pay-bullets-french-use-kill-them.html, accessed 15 August 2015):
France is holding billions of
dollars owned by African [“francophonie”] states in its own accounts and
invested in the French bourse … [“Francophonie”] African states deposit the
equivalent of 85% of their annual reserves in [dedicated Paris] accounts as a
matter of post-[conquest] agreements and have never been given an accounting on
how much the French are holding on their behalf, in what these funds been
invested, and what profit or loss there have been.
(Paris Bourse)
IT IS PRECISELY because of this
French blanket control of the critical finances of “francophonie Africa” that
no French president, during this epoch of consideration (from de Gaulle to
Hollande), has found it necessary to go to the national assembly and seek
authorisation for any of the 52 invasions of Africa in 55 years not to mention
seek a franc or euro from the legislature to fund the escapade! In effect,Franceappropriates crucial African financial
resources generated in Africa but transferred to and reserved and
controlled inParisto invade Africaand secure even more African
resources… As a result of this continuing inordinate leverage exercised by
France in Africa, in addition to that of Britain’s, these two foremost
pan-European World conqueror-states of Africa currently have a greatersecuredaccess toAfrica’s critical resources than at
any time during decades of their formal occupation of the continent (Herbert
Ekwe-Ekwe, “Rethinking the state in Africa …
Whose state is it? Paper read at Conference on ‘Rawls in Africa’ in honour of Professor Ifeanyi Menkiti, Wellesley College”, 10 May 2014, http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/rethinking-state-in-africa-whose-state.html, accessed 18 October 2015).
Origins
BUT WHY THESE these 22 countries in Africa – at least
3000 miles away from France? Why Africa? Why not Asia, perhaps, or the Arab
World, a people closer home to France? But aren’t these 22 African countries sovereign or rather “francophonie”, as
France insists? Are these categorisations, “sovereign” and “francophonie”
synonymous? If so, how? If not, why not? Yet the crucial question remains: Why Africa?
France has long been wracked by chronic
anxieties about its “status” and “prestige” in the world since its military was
dealt a humiliating defeat during the 12-year old uprising (1792-1804) by enslaved
African military forces led by Toussaint L’Ouverture in French-occupied San
Domingo (Haiti) in the Caribbean – the “greatest individual market” of the 18th
century European enslavement of the African humanity, which accounted for
two-thirds of French foreign trade at the time (CLR James, The Black Jacobins, 2001: xviii). The Africans of San Domingo, “The
Black Jacobins”, as CLR James, the illustrious African Caribbean scholar would
describe them in such searing irony if not sardonicism in his 1938-published
classic of the same title on the subject, “defeated in turn the local whites
and the soldiers of the French monarchy, a Spanish invasion, a British
expedition of some 60,000 men, and a French expedition of similar size under
[Napoleon] Bonaparte’s brother-in-law” (James: xviii). Following the latter’s
victory in 1803, the Africans proclaimed and established their republic of
Haiti on 1 January 1804.
(Toussaint L’Ouverture)
FRANCE HAS YET to recover from the catastrophic
damage to its psyche, elicited by its losses in San Domingo, effectuated by the
transformation of enslaved Africans,
as James notes perceptively in his study, “trembling in hundreds before a
single white man … into a people able to organise themselves and defeat the
most powerful European nations of their day … [This] is one of the great epics
of revolutionary struggle and achievement” (James: xviii). Consequently, in its
relationship with Africans, wherever this occurs on earth, France feels that it
is still fighting Toussaint L’Ouverture and his formidable forces all over
again and again… Furthermore, San Domingo is gravely etched indelibly in French
consciousness as the precursor to the catalogue of crushing French military
defeats in the subsequent 150 years of its history, aptly illustrated by the
following: the 1871 Franco-Prussian War, the 1914-1918 war, the
1939-1945 war and the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu resulting in the débâcle
of its elite French Far East Expeditionary Corps’s occupation garrison in
Vietnam, inflicted by the resolute Viet Minh commanded by General Giáp (Peter
MacDonald, Giap: The Victor of Vietnam,
1993).
It would require another site of examination to
discuss, more fully, how this indelible French angst over San Domingo must have
worked through the mindset of Nicholas Sarkozy, a latter day occupant of the
Élysée palace, whose regime thrived in its serial fantasy as the neo-Napoleonic
imperium of these early decades of the 21st century. Evidently convulsed by the
legacy of San Domingo, Sarkozy, in July 2007, engaged in a thuggish foul-mouthed
theatrics of a so-called address “on Africa” to an African audience in Dakar, Sénégal,
that should have sought auditioning elsewhere rather than the stage of the
hallowed auditorium of the Cheikh Anta Diop University, named after the great
African polymath (“The unofficial English translation of Sarkozy’s speech”, africaResource, 13 October 2007,
In essence, the audience in that
July 2007 Dakar auditorium detected that Sarkozy, head of the French state of
the day, was already reading the unmistakable handwriting on the wall about the
prospects of “francophonie” in Africa. Despite its near-monolithic activity in
the lives of generations and the resultant semblance of durability, the
importance and influence of “francophonie” in Africa is beginning to wane.
Events in Africa in the past 21 years have seriously weakened and undermined
its efficacy. The Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, organised premeditatedly by
France’s ruthless local clients in power in Kigali whilst a French
expeditionary force was operating in the country, was a monumental indictment
of the entire “francophonie” project in Africa, reinforcing the gory
legacy of the earlier, Belgian-francophonie genocide in the Congo basin which destroyed
the lives of 13 million Africans. France could not escape complicity in the
murder of 800,000 Africans in Rwanda in 1994. Pointedly, there has been a
partial eclipse of French influence in this central/southern Africa region
since the latter genocide.
THE POPULAR overthrow and subsequent death in exile of Congolese dictator
Mobutu, during the same period, was a further blow to the fortunes
of “francophonie” in the region. Elsewhere in the empire, the
tentacles of “francophonie” were also beginning to unravel. The
situation in the Côte d'Ivoire economic powerhouse was of particular relevance.
The sudden death in 1993 of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the Ivorian political
colossus who had been state president since 1960, created a serious crisis of
succession in the country that still remains unresolved. In 2002, it became the
background of a tragic war between the state and insurgents in its north region
and the precipitate collapse of Africa’s most successful economy that followed
a decade later by the French invasion of the country and its installation of a
client regime in Abidjan. But in Sénégal, France’s attempt to continue to
dictate its choice of leaders in this northwest stretch of “francophonie” was
rejected massively in the 2000 presidential elections when Abdoulaye Wade, the
veteran opposition politician, defeated Abdou Diouf, the incumbent president
and Paris’s much preferred candidate, and in the choice of president, 12 years
later, in the post-Wade era.
In a desperate effort to stem the steady decline of “francophonie”, France
embarked on its biennial so-called African-French summit that extends
invitation to leaders of non-league states. It was in this context of
“francophonie”-extension in the 1990s that France intensely courted the
friendship of Sani Abacha, the Nigerian dictator and génocidaire military
commander who participated in the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide, who was at the time
internationally quarantined as a result of his regime’s continuing deteriorating
human rights records. Abacha’s predictable appreciation at this gesture of
breaking out of painful political and economic isolation was followed by a deft
regime decision that keyed into the inner workings of the infrastructure of “francophonie”:
Nigeria would hence embark on an intensive educational/allied cultural
programme to “adopt” French as an “additional” lingua franca to English! Paris
was of course delighted! But it was very short-lived indeed. The lingua franca
opportunism died with the génocidaire and dictator in 1998!
Tenuous
IT IS NOW clear that the tenuousness
of “francophonie Africa” lies right in its foundational premise of operationalisation:
the incorporation of a league of countries that exists solely to serve French interests whilst critically dependent on its
day to day overseeing on usually ruthless anti-African local regimes. This
ruthlessness is a feature of its overarching moral and intellectual bankruptcy
which ensures that it does the bidding of such projects as “francophonie” or “francophonie-extension”
because of the firm grip that it exercises within a designated “home turf”.
This is why the head of this “home turf” is bereft of any disposition of
responsibility to “home”, howsoever this is defined, but is existentially
sutured to the palace of Élysée’s priorities and
diktat.
Paradoxically, though, this French grip
on these regions of Africa is all too brittle as can be seen in the immediate
consequences on “francophonie” in the event of the overthrow or death of the
dictator. The leaderships of the French state find it extremely difficult to
contemplate that, with the steadily growing and expansive African grassroots’
pressure on their inept African-led regimes which can only intensify, “francophonie” has
no long-term prospects in Africa. While the overall socio-economic situation
across the continent is currently in a state of flux, Africa is unlikely to
return to that spurious stability epoch of the Houphouët-Boignys and Senghors
or the murderous repression of the Mobutus and Bokassas which enhanced the
development of “francophonie”. Inevitably, if
“francophonie Africa” is France’s comprehensive subjugation of the African
humanity, as French leaderships since the 1960s, from de Gaulle to Hollande, have
hardly had any cause to disguise, the dual prime questions of the age must be:
When will the Africans involved in this staggering 21st century outrageous subjugation
bring it to an end? Isn’t it now obvious that “francophonie Africa” – CAR,
Mali, Niger, Congo Democratic Republic, Congo Republic, Burundi, Mali,Côte d’Ivoire, whatever, wherever, cannot
hold?
FRANCE WILL realise much sooner than
later that it cannot continue to enrich itself from Africa and consequently construct
some phantom prestige in international relations based on its control of the
destiny of Africa and Africans. --------------------------------------------- £££££: ACCORDING TO THE RECENTLY released major indictment made by Richard Dearlove, former head of the mi6
British military intelligence, there wasn’t anything “principled” or “honourable”
in Jacques Chirac’s opposition to the US-British invasion of Iraq as Saddam
Hussein, the Iraqi head of regime, “bribed” Chirac with the sum of £5
million, paid through “intermediaries” into Chirac’s personal bank accounts
during the period, to enable him take that position (see Abul Taher and Peter
Henn, “Saddam Hussein ‘bribed Jacques Chirac’ with £5million in bid to make the
former French president oppose the US-led Iraqwar”, Mail on Sunday, London, 29 September 2019, accessed 29 September 2019)
(Wayne Shorter Octet, “Mephistopheles” {composer Alan Shorter} [personnel: Wayne horter, tenor saxophone; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet;Alan Shorter, fluegelhorn; Grachan Moncur III, trombone;James Spaulding, alto saxophone;Herbie Hancock, piano;Ron Carter, bass;Joe Chambers, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood, NJ, US, 15 October 1965])
Works
cited
Africa
Resource. “The unofficial English translation of Sarkozy’s speech”. 13 October
2007,
Deschambs, Hubert. “France in Black Africa and Madagascar
between 1920 and 1945”. In L.H. Gann and Peter Duiganan, eds., Colonialism in Africa, 1870-1900. Vol. Two:
The History and Politics of Colonialism 1914-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1970.
Wayne Shorter Octet. “Mephistopheles”. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US: Van Gelder Studio, 15 October 1965. ******Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe’s books on the Igbo genocide and Biafra include Readings from Reading, Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (2011), Biafra Revisited (2006) and African Literature in Defence of History: an essay on Chinua Achebe (2001)
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe THERE COULDN’T be a more appropriate text from which to embark on an on-the-spot
reminder to the world of the role of Africa and Africans in the intra-European World
war of 1914-1918 or the Great War or the First World War than Unbowed: One Woman’s Story, the
inimitable memoirs of Wangari Maathai, the award-winning celebrated environmental
activist and biologist (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=wangari, accessed 28 August 2014). In those
poignant passages memoralising on uncle Thumbi, conscripted by the British
occupation regime in Kenya in 1914 to fight the Germans in neighbouring
Italian-occupied Somalia and German-occupied Tanganyika (contemporary Tanzania),
Maathai notes (Unbowed, 2008, 27-28):
In my
family there was a missing member, someone I did not find out about until I was
well into adulthood. During the First World War, Africans in the colonies were
conscripted to fight or serve as porters. In Kenya, if parents had an
able-bodied son old enough to go to war, they were … expected to surrender him
to the authorities. My grandparents had such a son, Thumbi. My grandmother did
not want her son, who was more than twenty at the time, to join the war. She
was in despair. So she advised him to hide in the dense vegetation near a high
waterfall in the TuchaRiver … [but Thumbi was
eventually caught … and the British] went and seized him … “He will never come
back,”my grandmother … cr[ied]. And he
never did. He became one of the more than one hundred thousand Kikuyus who died
on the battlefield or from starvation or influenza during the First World War …
My grandmother cried for her son for the rest of her life…
(John Coltrane Quartet, “Tunji” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison,
bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 11
April 1962])
Cataclysm
All of
Africa lost one million of its peoples fighting in this intra-European World
war in battle fronts in East Africa, Cameroon (west Africa) and in Europe
itself – for Britain, France, Belgium, Czarist Russia and their allies against Germany, Italy,
Austro-Hungary, the Ottomans and their allies andfor Germany, Italy, Austro-Hungary, the Ottomans and their allies against Britain, France, Belgium, Czarist Russia and their allies.
ESSENTIALLY,
this was a war, in addition to the follow-up 1939-1945 confrontation, that Africa and African peoples had no business, whatsoever, fighting
in. The two principal protagonists in each conflict, Britain
and Germany, were lead
powers in the pan-European World conqueror-states that had formally occupied Africa since 1885. Britain was indeed the foremost
conqueror of Africa from the group, having occupied the continent’s prized
lands – lands with major population centres and vast and multiple natural
resource emplacements in south, central, east and west regions: South Africa,
Namibia (proxy control, post-1918 – after the defeat of Germany in 1914-1918
war), Zimbabwe, Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda,
Tanzania (post-1918, after the defeat of Germany in 1914-1918 war), the Sudan,
Nigeria, south Cameroons (post-1918, after the defeat of Germany in 1914-1918
war), Ghana, Sierra Leone, Gambia. Britain is also the lead beneficiary of
this same pan-European World states’ 400 years of enslavement of African
peoples, mostly in the Americas, since the 15th century CE (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African
Politics, Genocide, Literature, 2011, especially chap. 1). As for Germany,
beginning in 1904 and ending in 1911, i.e., prior to the 1914-1918 war, it had
carried out the genocide of the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples in its
occupied Namibia in southwest Africa with the following catastrophic outcome
during the period: wiped out 8o per cent of Herero, 51 per cent of Nama, 30 per
cent of Berg Damara (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, African
Literature in Defence of History, 2001: 37-38). For Belgium, an
Anglo-French ally in the 1914-1918 war, indeed the state whose initial attack
by Germany triggered this conflict, it, too, entered the intra-European war in 1914
in the wake of committing a 30-year trail (1878-1908) of genocide against
Africans in the Congo basin in which it annihilated 13 million constituent
peoples (see multiple
research by historian and linguistIsidore Ndaywel e Nziem, especially Histoire
générale du Congo: De l'héritage ancien à la République Démocratique, Paris: Duculot, 1998: 344).
(Wayne Shorter Octet, “Mephistopheles” [personnel: Shorter, tenor saxophone, Freddie
Hubbard, trumpet; Alan Shorter, flugelhorn; Grachan Moncur III, trombone; James Spaulding, alto saxophone; Herbie Hancock, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Joe Chambers, drums; recorded:
Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 15 October 1965])
Perverse
IT is against this cataclysmic
background of history that Africans found themselves conscripted by both sides
of the confrontation line in 1914-1918: clearly, the double- jeopardy of
conquered and occupied peoples at once fighting wars for and against ruthless
aggressors. In commemorations of a century of this war that have been underway
across Europe recently, a recurring theme in
the media (and academia) that has been used to articulate African role in the
war is “hidden” or “silent”, even “unknown”. There was indeed an academic
who appeared in one of the BBC frontline current affairs newsmagazine
programmes who used the bizarre phrase “not really well known” in describing “African
involvement”. “Hidden”, “silent”, “unknown”, “not really well known” – by whom?!
OF COURSE nothing about the role of Africa and Africans in this conflict is “hidden” or
“unknown”. On the contrary. What has duly been the difficulty that the presumed
“gatekeepers” of this history (who have all along been tireless “rationalisers”
of the European conquest and occupation of Africa)
have had is how to explain the very perverse role of desperately occupied
peoples fighting a war of/for their occupiers. I have argued severally (see,
for instance, African Literature in
Defence of History, chap. 1 and Ekwe-Ekwe,
Africa 2001: The State, Human Rights and
the People, 1993, especially parts I-II) that two critical developments of the
20th century – the wars of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 – shatter the cardinal
features of the position of these “rationalisers” irrevocably:
(a) The 1919 treaty of Versailles that
ends the 1914-1918 war frees all subjugated European peoples in Russia,
Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman whilst African peoples in German-occupied Africa [Namibia, Tanzania, Cameroon, Togo,
Rwanda, Burundi] do not have the
restoration of their freedom but are, instead,
occupied by Britain, France and Belgium [ironically, latter two countries hardly withstood the 1914 German juggernaut!]
(b) Africans in mostly
British-occupied, French-occupied and Belgian-occupied Africa are again
conscripted, beginning in the autumn of 1939, to fight against Germany, as the
new war erupts, even though Germany had, since
1918, ceased to be a conqueror/occupying-state in Africa
(c) Africans in mostly
British-occupied and French-occupied Africa are conscripted, beginning in the
autumn of 1939, to fight against Japan, in the forests of Myanmar, even though
the Japanese were not and have never been conquerors or occupiers of Africa
(d) Belgian king and state which
barely resisted the German assault on their territory beyond three weeks in May
1940 had the entire financing of the Belgian war effort [including the entire
expenses of the country’s exiled royal family and government in London],
totalling £40 million, paid for by Belgian-occupied Congo; this is the same
Belgian-occupied Congo where the Belgian monarch and state had murdered 13
million Africans in the 30-year old genocide cited earlier
(e) Thousands of Africans perish in
the battle fronts of east Africa, Europe and south Asia fighting for
Anglo-Franco-Belgian conquerors/occupiers of Africa
(f) Restoration of African
independence in the post-war epoch is distinctly rejected by British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill in a November 1942 speech in London [“I have not become
the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the
British Empire”, he stresses, “From our archive: Mr Churchill on our one aim”, The Guardian {London}, 11 November 2009] in his own interpretation
of the August 1941 “Atlantic Charter”, formulated by him and US President
Franklin Roosevelt, which declares unambiguously: “all people had a right to
self-determination”
(g) In similar vein, Charles de
Gaulle, leader of the “Free French Forces” who had been on exile in England since Germany
overran France in 1940,
rejects African independence in the post-war era during a 1944 conference of
global French occupation-governors in Brazzaville,
Congo
(h) Writing recently in The Mail on Sunday [London,
23 August 2014], George Carey, a former archbishop of Canterbury, recalls: “This year we are
reminded by the commemoration of two world wars that the values of our
democratic traditions are precious. Our fathers and grandfathers … fought
against totalitarianism for the survival of democratic virtues”. Pointedly,
Carey’s hearty summation does not incorporate the African experience as we have
highlighted here. Such has been the asymmetrical character of this history that
besides Japan, Czarist Russia/Soviet Union and Austro-Hungary, Africa
has been largely under an unparalleled totalitarian straitjacket enforced,
since 1885, by each and every dominant state across those two strategic battle
lines that map the 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 wars. FOLLOWING from (f) and (g) [above], it is in fact no
coincidence that Britain would wage two devastating wars against two African nations at the forefront of
terminating its occupation of Africa in the immediate post-1939-1945 war era:
against the Gĩkũyũ in the east in the
1950s, with the death of tens of thousands of Gĩkũyũ and others and in
co-perpetrating the Igbo genocide in west Africa with the state in Nigeria,
1966-1970, with the murder of 3.1 million Igbo or one-quarter of this nation’s
population. Both the Gĩkũyũ and Igbo had spearheaded the liberation of Kenya and Nigeria respectively from the British occupation.
It should now be evident that on a
broader stretch of examination, there can’t be any such thing as “hidden”
history. Instead, what some practitioners wish to do is obfuscate or, worse,
deny. Writing on the “Concept of History”, Walter Benjamin has argued that the “past carries a secret index with
it, by which it is referred to its resurrection” (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm, accessed 19 August 2014). He poses two pressing
questions: “Are we not touched by the same breath of air which was among that
which came before? [I]s there not an echo of those who have been silenced in
the voices to which we lend our ears today?” He is uncompromisingly forthright
in response:
…The
Angel of History must look just so. [Its] face is turned towards the past.
Where wesee
the appearance of a chain of events, [it] sees
one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and
hurls it before
[its] feet … nothing which has ever happened is to be given as lost to history.
Indeed, the past would fully befall only a resurrected humanity. Said another
way: only for a resurrected humanity would its past, in each of its moments, be
citable. Each of its lived moments becomes a citationa
l’ordre du jour[order
of the day] – whose day is precisely that of the Last Judgement.
AT THE CRUX of trying to manufacture this phantom of “lost to history”, as far as Africa and Africans are concerned, Chinua Achebe’s invaluable insight
follows and we will quote him at length:
[The European conquest ofAfrica]
may indeed be a complex affair, but one thing is certain: You do not walk in,
seize the land, the person, the history of another, and then sit back and
compose hymns of praise in his honour. To do that would amount to calling
yourself a bandit; and you won’t to do that. So what do you do? You construct
very elaborate excuses for your action. You say, for instance, that the man in
question is worthless and quite unfit to manage himself or his affairs. If
there are valuable things like gold and diamonds which you are carting away
from his territory, you proceed to prove that he doesn’t own them in the right
sense of the word – that he and they had just happened to be lying around the
same place when you arrived. Finally if the worse comes to the worse, you may
even be prepared to question whether such as he can be, like you, fully human.
From denying the presence of a man standing there before you, you end up
questioning his very humanity …[I]n the [European conquest] situationpresence was the critical
question, the crucial word. Its denial was the keynote of [this conquest’s]
ideology.(Chinua Achebe, “African Literature as
Restoration of Celebration”, Kunapipi, 12, 2, 1990: 4; emphasis added.)
In her
closing testimony on uncle Thumbi, Wangari Maathai writes (28): “My
grandparents … never received any official word about what had happened to
their [son], or any compensation. This is still an open wound. I want to say to
the British government ‘My uncle went to war and never came back, and nobody
ever bothered to come and tell my grandparents what had happened to their son’”.
APPROPRIATELY,
one would wish to modify Wangari Maathai’s note to the British government and then
re-address it, on behalf of African peoples, to all the governments and parliaments of all states involved in confrontation in the wars of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945,
bar Japan, Austro-Hungary and Czarist Russia/Soviet Union: “Our conscripted
daughters and sons went to war to fight for you and never came back, and nobody
ever bothered to come and tell us what had happened to them”.
Works
cited
Achebe,
Chinua. “African Literature as Restoration of
Celebration”. Kunapipi, 12, 2, 1990: 4.
Carey,
George. “Why I, as a Christian, believe we have to banish evil British
jihadists from these shores”. The Mail
on Sunday, London,
23 August 2014.
Ekwe-Ekwe,
Herbert. Africa 2001: The State, Human Rights and the People. Reading: International Institute for African
Research, 1993.
Ekwe-Ekwe,
Herbert. African Literature in Defence of History: An Essay on Chinua Achebe. Reading
and Dakar:
African Renaissance, 2001.
Ekwe-Ekwe,
Herbert. Readings from Reading : Essays on African Politics,
Genocide, Literature. Reading and Dakar: African
Renaissance, 2011.
Ekwe-Ekwe, Herbert. “Daughter-of-the-soil”. Rethinking Africa, http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=wangari, accessed 28 August 2014. Guardian, The. “From our archive: Mr Churchill on our one aim”. London, 11 November 2009.
Isidore Ndaywel e Nziem. Histoire générale du Congo: De l'héritage ancien à la République Démocratique. Paris: Duculot, 1998.
John Coltrane Quartet. “Tunji”. Recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 11 April 1962, accessed 29 August 2014.
Maathai,
Wangari, Unbowed: One Woman’s Story. London:
Arrow Book, 2008.
Wayne Shorter Octet. “Mephistopheles”. Recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 15 October 1965, accessed 29 August 2014.
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is specialist on the state and on genocide & wars in Africa in the post-1966 epoch – beginning with the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-present day, the foundational and most gruesome genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of this nation’s population were murdered by Nigeria and its allies, principally Britain. Africa and the rest of the world largely stood by and watched as the perpetrators enacted this horror most ruthlessly. The world could have stopped this genocide; the world should have stopped this genocide. This genocide inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. During the period, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in further genocide in Rwanda (1994), Zaïre/DRCongo (variously, since the late 1990s) and Darfur – west of the Sudan – (since 2004) and in other wars in Africa. African peoples have, presently, no other choice but exit/dismantle the extant genocide-state (the bane of their existence & progress) & construct own nation-centred states that serve their interests. He is author of several books & papers on the subject and his new book is entitled The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019).
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