Grandstand. The anti-French passion that seems to animate crowds across the central Sahel, from Bamako to Niamey to Ouagadougou, has finally caught the world’s attention. It apparently has consequences. Governments have fallen one after another like skittles, knocked out of the square, so to speak, by the boot of soldiers cheered by crowds waving the Russian imperial banner and declaiming anti-French slogans that smack of national liberation and the struggle against colonialism. As if we had left as in 1960, the vintage of independence
For the vast majority of the world who only became aware of the Sahelian question when faced with this spectacle, it is obvious that France is to blame. It’s unclear exactly what she did, but so much fury cannot be without purpose. In my capacity as a Sahelian expert on the Sahel, I have received a number of journalistic requests aimed at probing me on the special wrongs of France, undoubtedly, one supposes, dating back to a colonial adventure which must have been – inevitably – worse than that of other metropolises.
Everyone has vaguely heard of the CFA franc, sometimes of Françafrique, all things that arouse shivers and emotions in the face of what we imagine to be an extraordinary neocolonial malfeasance. So much so that the general impression is that France is tormenting its former colonies, which would explain the visceral rejection of which it is the object, although one can deplore that this is done for the benefit of Wagner. From this point of view, the men of the late Yevgeny Prigojine are thus the Russian Scylla of the French Charybdis. And many first imagined that the recent Gabonese putsch was in the same series as those in the Sahel: a “Wagnerian” and anti-colonial putsch.
It’s clearly time to calm down a bit. In Africa, there is in reality no rejection of France’s policy, for the good reason that France no longer has an African policy. France has had a single African policy, the one that was put in place by Charles de Gaulle in 1958 and which aimed to put the former sub-Saharan colonies at the service of the “greatness” of France – that is to say, to a certain measure of autonomy vis-à-vis the two superpowers, the USSR and the United States – in exchange for assistance measures generally implemented by a dedicated agency, the Ministry of Cooperation.
From allegiance to partnership
Even the CFA franc was presented as a form of assistance, which was inaccurate but could have been true under certain conditions. And, naturally, a pact which is based on the principle of allegiance and not on that of partnership must sometimes be implemented through violent or corruptive means: hence the low works labeled “Françafrique” by Jacques Foccart, le Monsieur Africa of de Gaulle, and other lesser known figures, repeated military interventions.
This policy had its heyday under de Gaulle and Pompidou, declined in the more inhospitable conditions (for it) of the 1980s – ultraliberal globalization, end of the Cold War – and was liquidated during the 1990s, somewhat on the run. Some of its practices persisted, but with the inconsistency that comes from the absence of a master plan – the important thing being that Africa allowed France to continue to imagine itself as a great power.
Africa has also changed in the meantime, and in an equally ambiguous way. His political leadership has often preserved the habitus linked to the period of the pact, which is particularly the case of those – generally in Central Africa – who came to power when it was still in force (Paul Biya in Cameroon, Denis Sassou- Nguesso in Congo) or who received it from their father (Ali Bongo in Gabon, Faure Gnassingbé in Togo, Mahamat Déby in Chad). But these habits are modified by the new context of globalization, diversification of partners and more or less democratic political practice within countries, particularly in West Africa.
We have moved away from allegiance and towards partnership. And, in this context, African public opinion has taken a lead. Precisely because partnership tends to become the reality of relations between France and Africa, the residue of allegiance becomes real irritants for it, hence, for example, the shock felt by the somewhat feudal style of the summit of Pau where Emmanuel Macron summoned the Sahelian presidents in January 2020. As Hugh Schofield, BBC Parisian correspondent, notes in a detailed analysis of the subject, there is undoubtedly a psychological law which dictates that “the perception of the seriousness of ‘a problem increases in proportion to its manifest improvement’.
The pragmatists and the ideologues
But even here it is necessary to qualify. African public opinion is not a monolith. Schematically, it can be divided into three groups. The vast majority is made up, here as elsewhere, of what the American thinker Walter Lippmann called the “Bewildered Herd”, the “bewildered masses”, preoccupied mainly with their personal affairs and easily disconcerted by sudden or shocking events. These people rely on more informed people to enlighten them.
However, in Africa as elsewhere, these more informed people are divided into two groups, the pragmatists and the ideologues. As far as France is concerned, the former aspire to an aggiornamento which makes partnership the effective reality of its relations with Africa, while the latter advocate a rupture, invoking in particular historical sins, Françafrique and an alleged evil essence from France. This last category is in the minority, as radicals and extremists usually are, but in the conditions which have emerged in the Sahel due to the security crisis which has persisted there for more than ten years, its voice has carried.
In times of crisis, the “bewildered masses” want simple, even simplistic, explanations, and those of the ideologues, who designate a single and identifiable cause of all misfortunes – France – respond to this need. The pragmatists have become inaudible. They are all the more so since the juntas which have seized power in the three countries in question – Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger – rely on ideologues to give a populist basis to their power. Hence the organization of anti-French demonstrations which are in no way spontaneous, even if they skilfully exploit the emotions implanted in the minds of the masses by ideologues – sometimes helped by Russian agencies – through social networks.
These turbulences do not agitate “Africa”, but the countries facing the security crisis. The ideologues of the Sahel were, for example, disconcerted by the fact that the Gabonese putsch was not part of the anti-Francafrica revolution that they imagined taking place in their countries. In fact, even the Guinean putsch, which occurred near their territories, is not included: anti-French demonstrations and Russian banners remained remarkably absent in Conakry. The same ideologues exist in this country, and, in fact, throughout all of Africa (including non-French speaking), but their voice carries less in conditions that are more peaceful and more favorable to pragmatists.
It is certain that France would strengthen the position of the latter by consistently adopting a partnership attitude in French-speaking Africa. But let’s not misdiagnose: what is in question at the moment is not so much his politics as the distress and disorientation into which the persistent security crisis has thrown the populations of the central Sahel, and which is expressed, in part, through a sort of ritual rejection of France.
And the real challenge is how to help these populations get out of the rut in which, by struggling, they have got themselves entangled.