France: Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron advance to second and final round of presidential poll. There isn’t a more opportune time for African peoples to embark on an Africa “francophonie”-exit

 (Marine Le Pen, front national)

(Emmanuel Macron, en marche!)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe 

(Charles de Gaulle, [Brazzaville, 1944]: “Self-government [restoration-of-African-independence] must be rejected – even in the more distant future”)

(François Mitterand [Paris, 1998]: “Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century”)

(Jacques Chirac: [Paris, 2008] “[W]ithout Africa, France will slide down into the rank of a third [world] power”)

(Jacques Godfrain, head of French foreign ministry: [Paris, 1998] “A little country, with a small amount of strength, we can move a planet because [of our] … relations with 15 or 20 African countries”)

For the first time since the 1958 founding of the French 5th republic by Charles de Gaulle, two supposedly outside politicians not from the alternate “right” (spectrum of Gaullist republicans) and “left” (socialists) parties of the country’s political establishment have won the stipulated first round of the French presidential election. Marine Le Pen of the front national and Emmanuel Macron of the en marche! (not totally an “outsider”, having been economy minister in the outgoing, unpopular Hollande government, quitting in August 2016 to form his so-called centrist movement) will now go on to contest for the decisive second round in a fortnight.

Tenor

Despite the tenor of the epigraphs (above) that illustrate, definitively, the role of Africa in France and French life, Africa hardly features as a substantive subject in French elections, not least yesterday’s. Apart from the course and consequences of non-EU immigration in the country and tangentially islamist terrorism which is viewed more as one in a range of manifestations of the aftermath of its history with the Middle East/islamist world, French politicians, irrespective of ideological/political leanings do not find France’s relationship with Africa any contentious. Whatever may be differences in the “vision” of the future of France between Le Pen and Marcon, for instance, in the wake of the tumultuous “anti”-establishment aftermath of yesterday’s poll, both accept the salient formulations encapsulated in each of the epigraphs on Africa and France, beginning with the founder of their 5th republic, a right-wing politician, and including that of the respected socialist Mitterrand. 

Equally, the duo Nicholas Sarkozy (“right”) and François Hollande (“left”) illustrate this trend. Even though Sarkozy belongs to the so-called establishment right, his thinking on Africa (see, for instance, in the link below, his infamous Dakar, Sénégal, address to students, academics, state officials, and specially invited members of the public at the Cheikh Anta Diop University, 2007) is more gratuitously racist and dehumanising than anything Le Pen or indeed Jean-Marie Le Pen, her father, founder of front national, both members of the “non-establishment right”, have said or written on this very subject.

WHAT IS PRECISELY at stake here, for the French state, is that incorporated in the provisions of the 1958 5th republic conceptualisation, following the humiliating defeat and collapse of its “French Indo-China” in 1954, its agelong French-occupied African states and peoples, a total of 22 countries, become effectively la terres richesse – wealthlands, to serve France and the French in perpetuity.

Plaque

This is why the French have such a supercilious antagonism to any conceivable notion of African restoration-of-independence and sovereignty (“Francophonie Africa works!”,
http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/herbert-ekwe-ekwe-since-the1960s-there.html). This is the background to Gary Busch’s excellent study in which these countries which France still controls, occupies, calls “francophonie”,  “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” (see link above).

This is why the French military has invaded this African enclave 53 times since 1960 (see link above). 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 sitting president in Paris wishes. For the French president and policy to “francophonie” Africa, from de Gaulle in 1958 to Hollande in 2017, all members of the French establishment, the operationaling plaque for action in the Elysée palace has been: invade, intimidate, manipulate, install, antagonise, ingratiate, indemnify, expropriate, invade, intimidate...

THIS PLAQUE awaits either Le Pen or Macron, “non-members of the French establishment”, to implement as usual as it has been in the past 59 years, irrespective of which of them wins the 7 May second election presidential poll. Except, of course, African peoples in the 22 states bring this staggering expropriation and indescribable servitude to a screeching halt.

“Francophonie”-exit: freedom

The first move of the Africa “francophonie”-exit from this debilitating conundrum couldn’t be more predictable: do not transfer your hard-earned revenues, the “85 per cent”, not one euro, to that dedicated Paris bank account. This transfer must stop at once, now. One mustn’t ever be a party to their own subjugation. The African publics in Bujumbura, Yamoussoukro, Dakar, Bamako, Ouagadougou, Ndjamena, Buea, Douala, Brazzaville, Kinshasa, St Louis, Bangui, Lome, Younde, Cotonou, Abidjan, Touba... should at once embark on consultations with their varying state officials to work out the parameters of implementing this great freedom movement and other interlocking features in each and every space of this occupied hemisphere. “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” must surely be for all…

(Andrew Hill Sextet, “Refuge” [personnel: Hill, piano; Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone; Joe Henderson, tenor saxophone; Richard Davis, bass; Tony Williams, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 21 March 1964])

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

Peoples in Africa insist: The state is transient; the people endures

The right to self-determination is for every people. It is inalienable and is guaranteed by the United Nations. No people, any peoples, is exempt from exercising this right. This is why the slogan that proclaims such gibberish or ahistoricism as “indivisibility”/”indissolubility”/“indestructibility” of a state, any state, sometimes expressed in some retrograde circles in Africa, is not really worth the paper it is written on except of course it is an embedded code by a slaughtering-horde for the plot of the next pogrom or the reinforcement of the terror of an ongoing genocide as a Nigeria, for instance, objectifies. 

As everyone knows, the states that Europe created in Africa, in the aftermath of its November 1884-February 1885 Berlin conqueror-conference, cannot provide the fundamental needs of Africans.  This “Berlin-state”, with its “cursed” name (Nigeria, Niger, the Sudan, Central African Republic, Chad, whatever!), cannot lead Africans to the reconstructive changes they deeply yearn for after the tragic history of centuries of occupation. Such change was and never is the mission of this state but instruments to expropriate and despoil Africa by the conquest (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/net-capital-exporters-exiting-africa.html, accessed 19 October 2015). Essentially, the “Berlin-state” still serves the interests of its creators and those of the ruthless cabal of African-overseers which polices the dire straits of existence that is the lot of Africans currently.

(Oliver Nelson Septet, “Stolen moments” – personnel: Nelson, tenor saxophone; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, flute; George Barrow, baritone saxophone; Bill Evans, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Roy Haynes, drums [recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 23 February 1961])

Not-gods’ gift(s)

As in Berlin, the state is not a gift from the gods. On the contrary, the state is a relationship painstakingly formulated and constructed by groups of human beings on our planet earth to pursue aspirations and interests envisioned by these same human beings within a shared historical and geographical articulation. 

The African humanity is presently gripped in a grave crisis for survival. It is now time that it abandoned the contrived “Berlin-state” in order to survive. This state is a bane of African existence. It is not fit for purpose but a neo-EuroWorld-run enslavement estate but now located east of the Atlantic. It freezes African re-development and transformation. It is, instead, an agglomeration that exists primarily to enrich its West World creator in perpetuity (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/net-capital-exporters-exiting-africa.html).

African nations, namely the Igbo, Ijo, Wolof, Ibibio, Asante, Baganda, Bakongo, Gĩkũyũ, Bambara, Luo, etc., etc, are the the basis for the regeneration of Africa’s redevelopment. These nations are the sites of the continent’s intellectual and other cultural creativity and must hence free themselves from the extant “Berlin-state” .

Path to civilisation – even 1001 states

What is being stressed here is that African peoples, themselves, must decide on the issue of sovereignty in the post-“Berlin-state” epoch even if the outcome were to lead to the creation of 1001 states in Africa – or more. In this epoch of freedom, any of African peoples who, for instance, wishes to chart a future based on the precepts of their forebears in the 12th century Contemporary Era (CE) or even way back, to say, 8th century Before Contemporary Era (BCE), has the right to pursue this goal. Equally any African people who believes that their aspirations lie in working through challenges of the 21st century CE and projecting targets of creativity and transformations subsequently, must exercise this right: “Let the kite perch and let the eagle perch too. If one says no to other, let their wing break”.

To achieve the goal(s) of any of the stipulated paths does not therefore require anyone to embark on murdering someone else or have themselves murdered, as typified, again as an example, a contemporary Nigeria.  For the future survival of the African humanity, let no more die for the path to their envisaged civilisation or, in other words, howsoever this civilisation a people chooses is construed. It surely can be attained and sustained without committing a crime, particularly genocide – a crime against humanity.

(Andrew Hill Sextet, “Refuge” [personnel: Hill, piano; Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone; John Henderson, tenor saxophone; Richard Davis, bass; Tony Williams, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 21 March 1964]

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe