The Shudders that Rumble Through French Colonialism
Vijay Prashad
MAYOTTE, just north of Madagascar, has been part of the overseas French empire since 1843, continues to exist as an ‘overseas territory’ despite the irresistible anti-colonial hunger. France, apart from most of the other European colonial powers, continues to hold large parts of the world under its dominion (from French Guiana in South America to New Caledonia in the Southwest Pacific Ocean. Many of these overseas territories are small islands, which had provided bases and coaling stations to the French navy when it commanded larger territories, such as Indochina and French West Africa. Several of them continue to be the sites of French military operations (including the Guiana Space Centre, used by the European Space Agency, and the nuclear test sites in the Pacific atolls).
In mid-December, Cyclone Chido built up in the Indian Ocean and rushed westwards to strike the islands of Mayotte (population 320,000) before making landfall in Mozambique. Dhinouraine M’Colo Mainty, the deputy mayor of Mayotte’s capital Mamoudzou, said that the death toll would be ‘catastrophic’ for the islands, and that ‘there is no water, no electricity, the toilets do not work’. ‘You feel like you are in the aftermath of a nuclear war’, said Mohamed Ishmael who lives in Mamoudzou. ‘I saw an entire neighbourhood disappear’. ‘Entire neighbourhoods were wiped off the map’, said Ousseni Balahachi, a retired nurse at Mayotte Central Hospital. The ‘apocalyptic scenes’ define the landscape of the main island, but also of the littler islands that form the archipelago of Mayotte.
France, which is responsible for the governance of these islands, sent some aid in the early days of the disaster. But, Amalia Mazon, a Belgian midwife who works at Mayotte Central Hospital said, ‘We feel completely abandoned. And we don’t even know if help is coming. We have no news. We have no idea’. A few days later, French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Mayotte and went to meet some residents on the street. When Macron began to speak, the residents booed him and began to yell at him about their feeling of abandonment and asked him to resign. Macron was visibly shaken. He responded: ‘Don’t pit people against each other. If you pit people against each other, we’re screwed, because you’re happy to be in France. Because if this wasn’t France, you’d be 10,000 times more in the shit’.
A few days after Macron faced the crowds in Mamoudzou, French troops began to pull out from the Sahel region of Africa. Over the past two years, French troops had been expelled from Burkina Faso and from Mali, where the new governments had said that the French operations against al-Qaeda in the Maghreb had been counterproductive and that their countries wanted to exercise their sovereignty. By the end of December, French troops will have left Niger, the third country in the Sahel to expel French forces. These troops began their exit through a long drive through south-eastern Niger to Chad’s capital N’Djamena. Some of the heavier French equipment was sent from Chad to Douala (Cameroon), where they will be sent to France by ship, while the rest of the troops will be flown back to France. This is one of the largest French military withdrawals in recent years.
The three Association of Sahel States (Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger) have taken a political decision to expel France’s military due to the popular sentiment against their presence on the soil of these countries. This sentiment has become contagious as Chad and Senegal – not part of the Association of Sahel States (AES) – have followed suit. In November 2024, France’s foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot met with Chad’s president Mahamat Idriss Déby and then received a statement from Chad’s foreign minister Abderaman Koulamallah saying that Chad will end its military agreement signed at Chad’s independence in 1960. On the same day as Koulamallah released that statement, Senegal’s president Bassirou Diomaye Faye told Le Monde, ‘There will soon be no more French soldiers in Senegal’.
What remains of France’s military presence on the African continent is the following: forward operating bases in Djibouti and in Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire), regional cooperation bases in Dakar and Libreville (Gabon) and naval bases on the islands of Réunion and Mayotte. The emerging mood in countries like Côte d’Ivoire and Gabon is for France to exit its bases. In August 2024, Macron’s envoy to Africa Jean-Marie Bockel met with Côte d’Ivoire’s president Alassane Ouattara and told him that France wants to ‘remodel’ its presence on the African continent. It is trying to camouflage its retreat as a strategic transformation. As early as December 2023, the French government’s Defence Council met to discuss this reduction of the military footprint in Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, and Senegal. Three bases, however, will not be touched: the military base in Djibouti, and the two naval bases in Réunion and Mayotte, the site of the cyclone devastation.
The French remodelling should not be fully seen as a retreat. In June 2024, Macron’s government created a Command for Africa (similar to the US African Command), which will be in place by 2025. Based in Paris, the Command will train special forces units alongside pro-French armies on the African continent and will be prepared, as they say, to deploy at a short notice to African countries to defend French interests. Secondly, France has worked to created special forces units from European Union countries that will operate through a European outfit called the Takuba Task Force (set up in 2020). This will be a European shell for French intervention, which had been tried out in the Sahel region previously but was shown to be largely a mask for the French. But in fact, the French operations on the African continent will not be only about French interests, but about providing capacity for the United States in its imposed contest on the continent around its New Cold War against China and Russia.
Macron’s Airbus A330 left Mamoudzou after his lightening visit and flew to Djibouti, where he had dinner with French troops at their Base Aérienne 188. Then Macron met with Djibouti’s president Ismail Omar Guelleh (who has been in power since 1999) and discussed France’s long-term needs from the small country on the Red Sea. It is understood that the base in Djibouti will provide the various French forces under its Command for Africa with a lily pad to hop into any area of the African continent. But Macron did not talk about that. Instead, he placed the French base in the terms of the US new cold war on China, talking about how the base ‘is geared towards the Indian Ocean and the Indo-Pacific’. Djibouti hosts military bases of eight countries: China, France, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Camp Lemonnier). These bases are not far from each other, even though there is a posture of hostility between the western bases and the Chinese base.
The Chinese base, set up in 2017 to join in the United Nations’ anti-piracy campaigns, is in the Port of Doraleh, west of Djibouti City (most of the western bases are to its south). The Doraleh port, which can berth fifteen cargo vessels, was built by Dubai Ports, but then in a dispute between Guelleh’s government and the United Arab Emirates, a large stake was sold to China Merchants. The entry of this Chinese firm into the port project, and the building of a Chinese base there, has created a controversy between the government of Djibouti and the United States. Pressure on president Guelleh to remove the Chinese from control of the port has been high on the agenda of the United States and its allies, including France. That is why the language of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ is significant. It suggests that the French ‘remodelling’ on the African continent is about the increasing role of France in playing a subordinate role to the United States in the New Cold War that will heat up on the African continent against both China and Russia.
Disentanglement with France will not be easy for most African states that had been its direct colonies before 1960. Fourteen of them use the CFA Franc, an arcane currency that is only used by these countries, and which imposes on them the burden of placing their external reserves in the French Central Bank. To break with the CFA Franc, which has been the goal of several of these states, is not going to be an immediate act. As well, many of these states do not have the capacity to process their raw materials by themselves – such as the uranium in Niger – and have relied upon French multinational corporations; it will take time for them to build their own technical and industrial capacity, which will likely require deals with Chinese or other countries that the west sees as an adversary. It is easier to remove the French military than it will be to remove all the tentacles of French neo-colonialism. That has already placed a major burden on the AES states, who will struggle to establish their sovereignty. But it is precisely the road down which they intend to travel.
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