Decades after independence, many African countries are increasingly troubled by the ongoing influence of their former colonial power.
By Ruth
Maclean
Published April 14, 2022Updated April
18, 2022
BAMAKO,
Mali — Many French guests came through the guesthouse where El Bachir Thiam
worked as a security guard, a small oasis of greenery in busy Bamako, the
capital of the West African country of Mali. They were friendly, usually, and
he liked them.
But after
he had welcomed them in, shown them to their rooms and reassured them that
Bamako was safe, not the hotbed of terrorist activity it might seem from
outside, he went back to his phone, where his activist WhatsApp groups were
focused on one thing. Getting the French — their businesses, diplomats and
thousands of troops — out of Mali.
Over
the past few years there has been a sharp rise in criticism of France across
its former colonies in Africa, rooted in a feeling that colonialist practices
and paternalistic attitudes never really ended, and propelled by a tide of
social media posts, radio shows, demonstrations and conversations on the
street.
In Senegal, young people attending protests last year accused
the president of being a puppet of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who is currently vying for a second
term. They smashed the windows of French gas stations and set fire to French
supermarkets.
In Burkina Faso, as a coup d’état unfolded in January, tailors
tore up French flags and pieced the tricolors back together horizontally to
make Russian ones.
Image
A ransacked Total gas station in Dakar, Senegal, in March 2021.Credit...John Wessels/Agence France-Presse — Getty
Images
In
Niger last November, after protesters shouting “Down with France!” tried to
block a French military convoy, the soldiers opened fire. They killed two people,
the Nigerien government said.
Nearly
half of the countries in Africa were at one time French colonies or
protectorates. Six decades after most of them gained independence, young people
like Mr. Thiam — born long after the colonial French departed — are driving
this uprising, tapping into a wealth of online information that older
generations, often less educated and
literate, never had access to, and trying to use it to promote
change. And their elders are paying attention.
“There’s a new awakening in sub-Saharan Africa that the world
should know about,” said El Hadj Djitteye, a Malian analyst who recently founded
a think tank, the Timbuktu Center for Strategic Studies on the Sahel. “If a
foreign minister makes a speech today, there’s a group of young analysts that can
look at it and say this paragraph is paternalist, that one is aggressive, this
isn’t diplomacy.”
Though
the tide of information they consume and share sometimes veers into
misinformation, including unfounded rumors about France working with jihadists
or stealing gold, much of the criticism in countries with ties to France is
aimed at the perceived arrogance of the former colonial master. There have
always been critiques of France, particularly in more educated, urban circles
in West Africa, but now that almost everyone either owns a cellphone or knows
somebody who does, these ideas have spread.
In
Mali, where for almost a decade French soldiers who initially came at the
invitation of the Malian government have tried and failed to stop the spread of
armed Islamist groups, France stands accused of disrespecting Malians not just
by activists like Mr. Thiam, but by the country’s highest officials, including
the prime minister.
“They want to humiliate us,” said Prime Minister Choguel Maiga
in a recent speech which
drifted into unfounded conspiracy theory. This kind of rhetoric has helped the
military junta that seized power in 2020 retain huge popular support. “We’re
not a people that submits.”
Image
Prime Minister Choguel Maiga delivers a speech in Bamako in June.Credit...Michele Cattani/Agence France-Presse —
Getty Images
This is
a stark turnaround from a decade ago. When jihadists took over its northern
cities in 2012, Mali appealed to France for military help. And when French
soldiers arrived, Malians greeted them as liberating heroes.
Now
they are effectively being chased from the country. They are blamed for
sanctions imposed by the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS,
aimed at trying to get the junta to commit to handing over power — France is
assumed to be the group’s puppet master.
The French are blamed for their failure to stop an insurgency
that metastasized and spilled over Mali’s borders, destabilizing a vast stretch
of arid territory known as the Sahel — even though troops from Mali have also
been fighting the insurgents and now stand accused of massacring hundreds of people
together with their new partners, Russian mercenaries. The French are blamed,
too, for their support of former rebel groups from the north considered by many
in Mali’s powerful south to be no different than the jihadists.
The
deteriorating security situation was one of the main things Mr. Thiam posted
about on social media during his night shifts at the guesthouse. He built up a
following of more than 35,000 friends and followers on Facebook at one point.
But he wasn’t just an online warrior: He co-founded an
activist group, On A Tout Compris — French for “We’ve
Got it All Figured Out” — which organized demonstrations outside the French
embassy and targeted French-owned businesses like the petroleum company Total.
Soon, he found he was having to duck out of his activist meetings early to get
to work on time. Then he left the guesthouse job for full time activism.
Image
During night shifts at a guesthouse in Bamako that welcomed many
French visitors, El Bachir Thiam posted messages on social media criticial of
the French role in his country, Mali. Credit...Nicolas
Réméné for The New York Times
His
favorite trick was to post videos of himself burning the French flag on
Facebook — something that eventually got him banned from the social network, he
said. (Facebook said that the burning of flags does not violate their policies,
but he could have been banned for another reason). He said he posted pictures
of dead French soldiers, labeling them “other terrorists,” just for shock
value.
“We
knew that was mean, but it was part of our battle plan,” he said.
French
soldiers are now packing up in their bases, preparing to leave, while their
leaders focus on their relationships with other, friendlier countries like
Niger and Ivory Coast, where this month they will hold a training session with
local troops, as they have done for years.
For years after African nations got independence, France
maintained a web of political and business ties with its former colonies, often
in effect propping up corrupt governments or dictators for its own benefit, a
system widely known as Françafrique.
When Mr. Macron became president, it initially seemed that
things would change. He promised to declassify secret files related to the assassination of Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso’s
revolutionary leader, killed in a putsch in which many suspect France played a
role. He asked Rwanda for forgiveness over France’s role in the genocide.
Image
French soldiers patrolling the village of Guintou near Gao, Mali
in December. When the French military first arrived, Malians greeted them as
liberating heroes. Now they are packing up their bases to leave the country.Credit...Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty
Images
“I am
from a generation that doesn’t come to tell Africans what to do,” he told students in
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, in 2017.
But
this rang hollow in January 2020 when he summoned five African leaders to a summit, partly to
disavow rising anti-French sentiment in their countries. To many of their
citizens back home, Mr. Macron came across as insufferably arrogant.
And in
Mali — often, of late, the harbinger for the region, whether in terms of coups
or destabilizing Islamist groups — people felt that the arrogance just kept
coming — notably, in French ministers’ condemnations of the military junta
that overthrew the president, France’s erstwhile ally, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.
France and Its Colonial
Past in Africa
Card 1 of 6
A troubling history. Decades after independence,
relations between several African countries and France, a former
colonial ruler, remain complex. Here are key things to know:
Anti-French sentiment. Over the last few years, there
has been a sharp rise in criticism of France across
its former colonies in Africa, rooted in the idea that colonialist practices
and paternalistic attitudes have never ended. Demonstrations against France
have taken place in Senegal, Burkina Faso and other countries.
In France. The French president, Emmanual
Macron, has tried to address his country’s legacy as a colonizer, acknowledging crimes by the French and pursuing reconciliation efforts. But far-right
politicians have pushed back, invoking France’s supposedly glorious colonial past during
a heated presidential campaign.
In Mali. One source of grievance is France’s failure to stop an Islamist insurgency that
destabilized Mali. After launching a military operation there nine years ago,
France announced in February that it was withdrawing,
after a fallout with Mali’s leadership.
In Rwanda. A two-day visit by Mr. Macron
last year was celebrated as a new chapter between the two countries,
after nearly three decades of recriminations over France’s role in Rwanda’s
genocide of 1994.
In Benin. Mr. Macron was also responsible
for the formal return of 26 artifacts to
Benin that were forcibly taken by French colonial troops more than a
century ago. It was the first large-scale act of restitution to Africa by a
former European colonial power.
The
relationship between the two countries broke down fast.
After
France’s foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, called the junta “illegitimate”
and “out of control” in January, its ambassador in Bamako was instructed to leave.
On a
recent afternoon at the embassy, the ambassador’s spacious office was hushed,
the only sign of him a photograph atop his office chair, where he jokingly
propped it on his way out.
Many Malians still bristle at that “illegitimate” label: of
course, they say, the junta was not elected. But many feel they have been
failed by democracy as France conceives it, and that the junta speaks for them.
French Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian (left) and
French President Emmanuel Macron (second right) with the then President of
Mali, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita (right) visiting soldiers of Operation Barkhane in
Gao, Northern Mali, in 2017.Credit...Pool
photo by Christophe Petit Tesson
“Stop thinking
we are inferior,” said Pierre Togo, a former soldier, addressing France as he
nursed a mango juice at a Bamako bar on a recent evening. “France is plotting,
playing games, and Africans understand that now.”
Across
town, at a busy roundabout where vendors sold Malian flags, Lassina Keita, a
mechanic, wiped oil-stained hands on his shirt, to which was clipped the source
of all his information, a small yellow radio. “It’s better to say thank you,
and let them go,” he said of the French.
But
while these sentiments are common in the capital, some Malians from the north
and center, where the insurgency is raging, see things differently.
In a
quiet suburb of Bamako, Ami Walet Idrissa and Bintou Walet Abdou, both 22,
chatted in Ami’s house, its rough cinder block walls heating in the sun. They
reminisced about their lives back home in Timbuktu, which was taken by Islamist
militants, after arms and men flooded into the country in the wake of
Libya’s descent into chaos.
“France
helped Mali a lot,” said Bintou.
“They’re the ones who chased the jihadists out,” Ami said.
Image
Ami Walet Idrissa, right, and Bintou Walet Abdou, are from
Timbuktu, and credit the French for trying to help oust the jihadists there.
They now live in a suburb of Bamako.Credit...Nicolas
Réméné for The New York Times
When jihadists took over Timbuktu in 2012, Ami was 13. Her
parents had fled, but she stayed behind with her siblings. One day, walking
home after bathing in the river, armed men stopped Ami and her brother. Males
and females were forbidden from walking together, they said — siblings or not.
They whipped them both, she said.
Both
women worried about what would happen if the French left, but they never said
so in public, even when people equated the French with jihadists, as they often
did. Their opinions could invite trouble in Bamako.
Were
France’s harshest critics living in areas threatened by extremists or abusive
military forces, rather than safely in Bamako, things could be different.
At the
leafy guesthouse, one of Mr. Thiam’s former co-workers was amused to hear what
his old colleague was up to.
“Send him to Dogon country, let him hear a bit of gunfire,” he
said with a smile, referring to an area often attacked by the armed groups that
France fought. “He’ll run back yelling ‘Vive la France!’”
Image
A flag vendor selling Malian and Russian flags in Bamako.Credit...Nicolas Réméné for The New York Times
Mamadou Tapily,
Mohamed Ag Hamaleck and Mady Camara contributed reporting.
France and Africa
No comments:
Post a Comment