A by force of being caricatured and put in all sauces, the qualifier “postcolonial” ended up serving as a foil whereas, handled with nuance, it expresses realities difficult to deny. No, immigrants established in France are not “colonized”, but the fact that some of them come from former possessions has multiple political, diplomatic and memorial consequences. Yes, this historical familiarity, sealed for better and for worse, is both a source of proximity and prejudice. Yes, more than sixty years after 1960, the great vintage of independence in sub-Saharan Africa, the emancipation movement of the former French protectorates and colonies is still underway.
By announcing, for decades, the end of “Françafrique” – in other words the renunciation of Paris to hold the reins in its former possessions – successive French executives have only admitted the opposite: decolonization is a unfinished process.
For not having understood that the successive ruptures (Mali in 2020, Burkina Faso in 2022, Niger in 2023) were part, well beyond the voracity of Moscow, in a new phase in the history of independence, and therefore for not having learned the lessons, the French executive has only precipitated a spiral with serious consequences.
The latest of the snubs inflicted on the former colonizer, the decision of Senegal and Chad, on November 28, to demand the closure of the military bases which these countries had wished to maintain since their independence marks a new stage in the postcolonial chronology. . The concomitant decision of these two countries, one democratic, the other authoritarian, but both pillars of the French presence – since the 17the century in Dakar, since 1900 in Chad, the first territory to join Free France in 1940 –, is undeniably a milestone.
Wave of neo-sovereignty
Certainly, anti-French rhetoric serves as an easy outlet for African leaders lacking answers to the immense problems of their countries: poverty, corruption, lack of prospects for young people, condemned to emigration. But the wave of neo-sovereignty which is submerging French-speaking Africa, this “unprecedented and perilous movement of self-centering which many struggle to grasp”according to the expression of the historian Achille Mbembe, cannot be reduced to this opportunism.
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