Africa and France: Marine Le Pen or Emmanuel Macron?

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 recent 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 last Sunday’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 the 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, his infamous Dakar, Sénégal, address to students, academics, state officials, and specially invited members of the public at the Cheikh Anta Diop University, 2007, “The unofficial English translation of Sarkozy’s speech”, africaResource, 13 October 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 age-long 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 (see Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “‘African American son’, US foreign policy and Africa”, Pambazuka News, 7 April 2016). 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” (Gary Busch, “Africans pay for the bullets the French use to kill them”, nigeriavillagesquare, 29 July 2011).

This is why the French military has invaded this African enclave 53 times since 1960 (“‘African American son’, US foreign policy and Africa” ). 

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 of “francophonie” Africa, from de Gaulle in 1958 to Hollande in 2017, all members of the French establishment, the operational 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 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…

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