Of Francophone Africa, neo-colonialism - Deconstructing roots of persistent exploitation by France

It’s insane: these relentless images of cruelty that for decades continue to plague the subregion. I’m referring to the cancerous turmoils that must come to an end in the Francophone countries such as Niger, Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso. 

The periodic skirmishes in the others —  Chad, Mauritania, Cote d’Ivoire, etc., — all have to be resolved quickly, once and for all.

Cause, effect

The American novelist, Mark Twain, once said, “If you catch 100 red ants as well as 100 black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen.

However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground, the ants will fight until eventually, they kill each other.”

He explained further:

“The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar.

” Isn’t that exactly what continues to happen in the Francophone countries?

And that begs the question: Who is rattling the darned jar?

Something has to give for the simple reason that such blatant abuses cannot be allowed to go on.

There was a time when the graphics were so controlled by the exploiters that the atrocities got hidden or whitewashed by their media.

These days, with the advent of video phones, things are now in the wide open.

We can’t go on living like that in Africa when other countries are progressing in leaps.

However, for both the external and internal opportunists, it’s yet another glorious day for exploitative profits.  

All that caused Kwame Nkrumah — from way back in the 1950s — to say, “Africa is rich, but Africans are poor.” 

Neo-colonial exploitations

The European exploitation of Africa began a very long time ago.

It did not start today! It began in the 1500s/1600s when the first merchant slave ships docked on African coasts, some with delightful missions to “Christianise” the so-called “heathens”.

King Leopold of Belgium, for example, used that wonderful veneer as an appetiser in claiming personal ownership of a vast piece of land — he named it the Belgian Congo — with an area about 75 times the size of Belgium.

He then proceeded to maim and kill millions of the natives, as depicted in Joseph Conrad’s novel, the Heart of Darkness.

That heartless greed continued thereafter in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), for which Patrice Lumumba was mutilated and killed and replaced by a Western-appointed despot.

Earlier, watching such inhuman atrocities from the sidelines, the Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, was to say: “I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible … except by getting off his back.”

Doesn’t that sound like a familiar story, considering the centuries of racial suppression and exploitation in Africa?

There’s no fury like the fury of an exploiter whose cup was full, and days numbered.

As is said in Akan, “Se kwasia eni te a, na agoro no egu”.

[To wit, No sooner had the fool wised up than the game was over.]

A classic case in point was when Sekou Toure asked the French to quit Guinea in the 1950s/1960s.

The French president at the time, Charles de Gaulle, became so ruffled that he got his agents to ransack and destroy basic infrastructure in that country, including conduct as petty as bashing furniture and removing light bulbs from the electric sockets.

With colonial friends like these, who needs enemies?

During the pre-independence years, Kwame Nkrumah recognised those local elite groups that sat in a queue on the fence posturing.

Those privileged actors were so comfortable with the status quo that rocking the colonial boat was out of the question, a taboo.

Deconstructing both the colonial and neo-colonial exploitation preoccupied Nkrumah till his death.

Right from the beginning, in his book, “Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah”, he said: “It is only when people are politically free that other races can give them the respect that is due to them.”

For the Francophone nations, political and economic freedoms are still controlled from without.

Best identified these days by the likes of Julius Malema (of South Africa) who asked why we still have Francophone reserve banks in France and not in Africa itself.

Africans should have control of their own currency.

That foundation has to be laid today to overcome the mass poverty in the region for the benefit of generations to come.

The Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has consistently expressed her disgust about the persistent mistreatment of Africans by France.

For her, the issue of mass migration of Francophone Africans to Europe, for instance, can be curtailed when the exploitative habits of France cease.

It’s clear, France’s neo-colonial skirmishes in Africa fester various shades of mayhem and awful poverty. 

These days, it’s almost impossible to flip your phone without being soaked with horrific images of coups and bloody localised in-fighting resulting from France’s persistent connivance and exploitation of Africa’s rich mineral resources. 

The writer is a trainer of teachers, leadership coach, motivational speaker and quality education advocate.E-mail: anishaffar@gmail.com