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 the United States.
Interestingly, this remains the case as a myth! In reality, though, this
unenviable “accolade” in global politics is in fact not held by the United States but France.
And the South’s geographical focus where France appears not to have anything else but
invasion as its own definitive credo
in foreign policy is Africa
(Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from
Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature, 2011: 28-34).
In March
2014, The Washington Post ran an editorial on the events in the Crimea
(“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 likens Russia’s policy on this peninsular to
that of a 19th century conqueror-state. Surprisingly, the editorial does not
mention the contemporary world’s lead “19th century-style” invader: France.
In the past five years, France has invaded Côte d’Ivoire, Mali and the Central African Republic and co-led the invasion of Libya. 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-called francophonie Africa countries since 1960. In early 2013, it invaded Mali (invasion no. 51); in 2011, it spearheaded the invasion of Libya (no. 50) which also involved Britain and the United States; in 2010, it invaded Côte 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”,In the past five years, France has invaded Côte d’Ivoire, Mali and the Central African Republic and co-led the invasion of Libya. 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-called francophonie Africa countries since 1960. In early 2013, it invaded Mali (invasion no. 51); in 2011, it spearheaded the invasion of Libya (no. 50) which also involved Britain and the United States; in 2010, it invaded Côte d’Ivoire, its no. 49 since 1960.
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.
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”.
(Soviet Union’s Leonid Brezhnev: “limited sovereignty”)
FOR FRANCE, the 22 countries of Africa that are classified as
“francophonie Africa” are France’s personal
property in 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 independent or sovereign 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” enables France, 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
by France, 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, France appropriates crucial African financial
resources generated in Africa but transferred to and reserved and
controlled in Paris to invade Africa and 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 greater secured access to Africa’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?
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,
http://www.africaresource.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=36:essays-a-discussions&id=437:the-unofficial-english-translation-of-sarkozys-speech,
accessed 19 August 2015). Undoubtedly, Sarkozy knew, fully well, that his
audience was made up of none other than the proud heirs and heiresses of those actualisers of
history on the estates of San Domingo just 210 years earlier.
Handwriting on the wall
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!
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.
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£££££: 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 Iraq war”, Mail on Sunday, London, 29 September 2019, accessed 29 September 2019)
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£££££: 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 Iraq war”, 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
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******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’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)
Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe
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