With this slur against Africans, Macronâs radical pretence is over | Eliza Anyangwe | Opinion
Franceâs newly elected president, Emmanuel Macron, when asked in a press conference at the G20 summit in Hamburg why there was no Marshall plan for Africa, explained that Africa had âcivilisationalâ problems. He added that part of the challenge facing the continent was the countries that âstill have seven to eight children per womanâ.
The condemnation online was swift and relentless. The US political scientist Laura Seay summarised the problem many had with Macronâs words in a series of tweets: âIt is RICH for a French president to criticise Africa this way,â she said. âFranceâs colonial theory was called the âmission civilisatriceâ, which purported to bring all the benefits of Frenchness to the continent. Part of the âmissionâ was the institutionalisation of Catholicism as the official religion of French colonial territories in Africa.â
âWe see all kinds of effects of the âmission civilisatriceâ in Francophone Africa today,â she continued, âlike the churchâs teaching against contraceptive use, which most African adherents take very seriously. Do women in Francophone Africa want to give birth to far more children than they can reasonably feed, clothe, and educate? I doubt most do.â
Macronâs words had commentators asking whether the âhoneymoonâ was now over as a chink appeared in the Golden Boyâs armour, but perhaps the signs were there all along. While still campaigning for the presidency, Macron called Franceâs colonial history in Algeria âa crime against humanityâ. But this centrist politician quickly changed his mind when his rebuke of Franceâs brutal past was met with criticism at home. In a speech in the south-eastern city of Toulon, Macron apologised for having hurt votersâ feelings, and dumbed down his accusation to speak instead of the need for France to face its âcomplex pastâ. But what about the feelings of the millions of Africans you casually slur, Monsieur Macron?
It seems that despite his youth and vitality, the new president is sticking to a very old line when it comes to Franceâs position on Africa. Take Nicolas Sarkozy, who on a visit to Dakar, in Senegal, in 2007 said that âthe tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history ... They have never really launched themselves into the future. The African peasant only knew the eternal renewal of time, marked by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words.â Delivered with the poetry you would expect from a Frenchman, erroneous and haughty as hell â" but also plain old racist. I would say that, in large part, Africans havenât entered into history because Europeans keep writing them out of it. But thatâs for another day.
Many will decry the comparison to the harder-right Sarkozy. And granted, Macronâs full response in Hamburg, while rambling and hamfisted, is not too dissimilar from what a classical development economist might say: stable government, corruption, population boom as economic burden. But for a leader whose election victory was imbued with the promise of radical change, sounding like a development economist is exactly the problem.
Macronâs statements make the blood boil not because they are novel but because they make no mention of the root causes of the challenges of which the president speaks. Gone is the lucid, welcome admission that Franceâs role in its former colonies was anything but laudable. He now says nothing of the fact that Franceâs future is indelibly tied to that of its former colonies, and that the relation between the two remains largely neocolonial: Francophone Africa still trades heavily with France, and French companies â" particularly in the extractive industries â" have a strong presence on the continent.
More controversially, Franceâs relationship with its former colonies â" known as Françafrique â" is perhaps best captured by the use of the CFA franc currency, which offers little benefit to the Francophone nations. As the Cameroonian journalist Julie Owono has written: âCFA zone countries have to deposit 50% of their currency reserves into a so-called operations account managed by the French treasury.â
Militarily, France also continues to embroil itself in issues of state in its former colonies, but is often silent on human and civil rights abuses. Again, look at Cameroon, where the strongman Paul Biya imprisons opponents with no charge, meets peaceful protest with violence, and turns off the internet in order to silence his people â" all of which has elicited not a peep from the French regime.
The test of Macronâs presidency is his foreign policy, particularly on Africa. At the moment heâs doing a fine job of proving he is cut from the same cloth as every leader who has come before him: adopting a paternalistic tone and happy to moralise, while profiting from the carnage France helped create â" to which, at best, he turns a blind eye.
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