[A deep dive into the many sharpening contradictions in
de-colonized Africa]
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GLOBAL LEFT MIDWEEK – AFRICA AND FRANCE  
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September 13, 2023
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_ A deep dive into the many sharpening contradictions in de-colonized
Africa _

A protester holds a sign that reads, 'No to France the thief of
Africa' as people gather to show their support to Burkina Faso's new
military leader Ibrahim Traore, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Jan. 20,
2023. Credit, Reuters

 

xxxxxx NOTE: FOR THIS WEEK ONLY, Global Left Midweek is shifting its
usual format to bring your attention to this important article on the
crises facing Africa and France, as the vestiges of colonialism
crumble to dust. It was translated from French by xxxxxx. You can
read the original, with footnotes and charts, _HERE
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_Achille Mbembe_ is a Cameroonian historian, political theorist,
and public intellectual who is a research professor in history and
politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economy Research at
the University of the Witwatersrand. 

Africa-France: nine theses on the end of a cycle

_Achille Mbembe_ / Le Grand Continent (Paris)

How should we interpret the long-term transformations that are
currently taking place in Africa? How do internal factors enter in?
What are the key contradictions induced by the new political economy
now in the process of crystallizing on the continent? [...] This
exercise in collective intelligence is all the more urgent if we are
to address the issue of security, peace and stability on the continent
in the most useful way possible, and also to open up new avenues for
future relations between Africa, France and Europe.

1. AFRICA IS TURNING ON ITSELF

It is important to affirm from the outset that the seizure of power by
the military in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger and Gabon, as well
as other more or less bloody conflicts in the African territories
formerly colonized by France, are only _symptoms of a deep shift _that
has long been hidden, whose sudden acceleration takes many observers
by surprise. In formulating a policy for the future, these symptoms
should not be mistaken for causes.

In order to avoid making such a mistake, we must return to a
historical perspective. In this regard, many historians want to see,
in recent or current events, the last agonized jolts of the French
model of _incomplete decolonization._ These struggles are, for the
most part, _carried out by eminently endogenous forces_. If anything,
they herald the end of a cycle that began in the aftermath of the
Second World War and has lasted almost 80 years.

This _historical perspective_ enables us to understand in context a
dogma that many continue to nurture, namely the permanence of a system
of relations between Africa and France that combines official
mechanisms, either assumed or claimed, with shadowy logics. Erected by
France against the African peoples, with the consent of some of their
elites, “Françafrique” continues to prosper despite promises of a
break with the past. This argument is far from totally false. But
equally true - and decisive - is the fact that despite the permanence
of many vestiges of a bygone era, _France is no longer in a position
to make every decision in its former colonial possessions_. Most of
the military, monetary or cultural tools it uses to maintain its
presence and safeguard its interests in Africa are now obsolete or
lack legitimacy. It’s time to get rid of them. [...]

In the historic turning point now underway, France, like its other
competitors, is no longer more than a secondary player. Not because it
has been ousted by Russia or China, scarecrows that its enemies and
local critics know only too well how to conjure up in order to hold it
to ransom; but because, in an unprecedented and perilous move
towards refocusing, the full extent of which many are struggling to
grasp, _Africa has entered another historical cycle_. Driven by
forces that are essentially endogenous, it is in the process of
turning in on itself. In the new historical cycle, the struggles
between Africans themselves and between the ruling classes and their
societies will be more decisive than any external factor. If we want
to understand the deep-rooted causes of this shift, the multifaceted
struggles it entails and its long-term implications, we need to get
away from conventional wisdom, change our analytical framework and
start from other premises.

Above all, we must begin by taking seriously the understanding that
African societies themselves now have of their own historical life.
The continent is undergoing multiple and simultaneous transformations.
Of varying scale, they affect all levels of society. In concrete
terms, they result in _a cascade of ruptures_. At the top, the ruling
elites who had profited from the colonial revolution sought to
consolidate family fortunes and secure rents by privatising the State.
From below, the struggle for access to the means of existence
intensifies. With the advent of a multi-party system, mass issues are
back while new inequalities continue to grow and new conflicts appear,
especially between genders and generations.

The arrival in the public arena of those born between 1990 and 2000 in
particular, who grew up in a time of unprecedented economic crisis and
insecurity, is a pivotal event in this respect. It coincides with the
technological awakening of the continent, the growing influence of
diasporas, an acceleration in the processes of artistic and cultural
creativity, the intensification of practices of mobility and movement,
and the relentless search for alternative models of development
drawing on the richness of local traditions. As a result of the gaping
demographic divide, Africa’s demographic, socio-cultural, economic
and political issues are now intersecting, as evidenced by the
challenge of the political and institutional structures that emerged
in the 1990s, changes in family authority, the silent rebellion of
women and a worsening of generational conflicts.

2. FROM PAN-AFRICANISM TO GOOD GOVERNANCE

This first groundswell has been joined by another, _the rise of
neo-sovereignism_, an impoverished and adulterated version of
pan-Africanism.

This trend dates back to the 1990s, when, under the so-called
structural adjustment plans and on the initiative of international
financial institutions, heavily indebted African states were called
upon to unleash market forces. The idea was simple, at the time. The
strategy of increasing public and social spending financed by debt had
shown its limits. The idea was to revitalise stagnating capitalism by
using, paradoxically, a new form of functional state.

In order to breathe new life into capitalism in Africa, states had to
be brought into line with the financial markets and the continent had
to be more closely integrated into the global economy. Above all, it
meant freeing up the processes of economic value creation. Thus, in
the context of globalisation, the choice was made to stabilise the
economy, consolidate state finances, restore solvency and rebuild the
institutional and material infrastructures of economic prosperity. At
the political level, the so-called _good governance_ approach
prevailed.

In a word, the primary objective of the ideology of good governance
was to impose and protect, at the national level, a free global market
by using states as the engine of this transition. Such a state had to
be “strong”, that is, capable of reducing the extent of the social
controls on capital. It had to be able to finance public spending not
through more debt, but through taxation, by tightening the
distribution policy for the benefit of companies in the long term. In
the paradigm of good governance, it was legitimate that, since their
solvency had ceased to inspire confidence, indebted states should be
placed under the surveillance of the international financial industry
in proportion to their indebtedness, in a structural dependence on
their creditors. National governments were now to serve as relays for
implementing reforms at the national level.

From this point of view, good governance was a political and economic
theory based on market freedom. This freedom had to be guaranteed by
the state, which could legitimately use state means of coercion to
achieve it. In Africa, the notion of a free economy dependent on a
strong state very quickly degenerated into a justification for states
capable of resorting to anti-democratic practices. This vast social
engineering effort had two direct consequences: the _neutralisation of
the democratic agenda_, despite it being one of the great aspirations
of social movements in the early 1990s; and the endorsement, including
by international institutions, of a _multipartyism without democracy,
_that many researchers at the time described as an “authoritarian
restoration”._ _The second consequence was the emergence, in the
1990s, of the neo-sovereignist movement.

3. FROM GOOD GOVERNANCE TO NEO-SOVEREIGNISM

Originally, neo-sovereignism is an intellectual response to the diktat
of international financial institutions. In particular, it takes the
form of a refutation of the World Bank’s theses on the conditions
for African growth and calls for an endogenous model of development on
the continent. It also appears in the form of a critique of liberal
democracy itself and its “feasibility” in the African context.

Around 2010, with the defeat of second-generation citizens' movements,
a populist version of neo-sovereignism emerged. In the current context
of ideological disarray, moral disorientation and crisis of meaning,
this is less a coherent political vision than a grand fantasy. In the
eyes of its proponents, it acts first and foremost as _the catalyst of
an emotional and imaginary community_, and this is what gives it all
its strength, but also its burden of toxicity. Its main battalions are
recruited from the fringes of continental youth present on social
networks, but relatively few from within formal institutions. It also
draws on the immense reservoir of diasporas. Often poorly integrated
into the countries where they was born and raised, and sometimes
treated as second-class citizens by the countries that welcomed them,
many young people of African descent readily equate their ordeals with
the great post-war pan-Africanist battles against colonialism and
racial segregation.

_Yet neo-sovereignty is not the exact equivalent of pan-Africanism._
What has not been sufficiently emphasised is the extent to which
anti-colonialism and pan-Africanism contributed to the deepening of
three major pillars of modern consciousness: democracy, intrinsic
human rights and the idea of universal justice. But neo-sovereignism
is precisely at odds with these three fundamental elements. First,
taking refuge behind the supposed primordial character of races, its
supporters reject the concept of a universal human community. They
operate by identifying a scapegoat that they erect as an absolute
enemy against whom anything goes. Even if it means replacing them with
Russia or China, neo-sovereignists believe that it is by pushing the
old colonial powers out of the continent, starting with France, that
Africa will complete its emancipation. They are also opposed to
democracy, which they see as a gimmick, a Trojan horse for
international interference. They prefer the cult of “strong men”,
proponents of virility and critics of homosexuality. Hence the
acceptance of military coups and the reaffirmation of force and
brutality as legitimate ways of exercising power.

This populist version of neo-sovereignism is rampant in a context
marked by a significant weakening of civil society organisations and
the collapse of intermediary bodies, against a background of the
intensifying struggles for livelihoods and the unprecedented
interweaving of class, gender and generational conflicts. In a
perverse result of the long years of authoritarian deep freeze,
informal approaches have spread to many areas of social and cultural
life. A striking sign of this development is that individual charisma
and material wealth are now favoured at the expense of the slow and
patient work of building institutions, while transactional and
clientelist visions of political involvement are taking precedence
over voluntary work.

Faced with a tangle of seemingly inextricable crises, _electoral
democracy no longer appears to be an effective lever for the profound
changes to which the new generations aspire_. Permanently rigged, the
elections themselves have become the cause of bloody conflicts. Recent
democratic experiences have done little to curb corruption. On the
contrary, they have fed on it, legitimising the perpetuation in power
of old elites who are also responsible for the current impasses. Under
these conditions, coups d’état increasingly appear to be the only
way to bring about change, to ensure a form of alternation at the top
of the state and to speed up the generational transition.

Disorientated and without a future, a significant proportion of young
people born in the 1990s and 2000s experience their condition as an
interminable blockade that can only be ended by violence and direct
action. This desire for cathartic, even purgative, violence is gaining
ground at a time of extraordinary intellectual stagnation among the
political and economic elites and, more generally, the middle and
professional classes. Added to this are the effects of mass
cretinisation brought about by social networks. In most countries, the
media sphere and public debates are colonised by representatives of a
generation plagued by functional illiteracy, a direct consequence of
decades of under-investment in education and other social sectors.

What else can we say about the absence or narrowing of autonomous
spaces for alternative reflection likely to enrich public
deliberation? In fact, the entire sub-region has been ignored or even
abandoned by the major international private foundations that, since
the 1990s, have contributed to the consolidation of civil societies in
Africa. Hasn’t the bulk of the international funding in support of
democracy been allocated as a priority to English-speaking Africa?

4. GENERATIONS SACRIFICED

In addition to these sociological markers, it is important to consider
the political economy itself. In all African countries, the end of the
twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first have been
marked by an intensification of predation and extractivism.

A frantic race to privatise soil and subsoil resources has begun.
Important regional markets for violence have emerged, involving all
kinds of actors in search of profit, from multinationals to private
military security services. Their main function is to exchange
protection for privileged access to scarce resources. Thanks to these
new forms of barter, Africa’s ruling classes are able to maintain
control over the state, secure major areas of extraction, militarise
trade with distant countries and consolidate their links with
transnational networks of finance and profit.

This new phase in the history of private accumulation on the continent
has been matched by the brutalization and downgrading of entire
sections of society, and the establishment of a regime of confinement
that is more insidious than in the colonial era. The main victims of
this downgrading and the confinement that goes with it are the social
cadets [family members deprived of inheritance claims], a waste of men
and women condemned to perilous migration. It also led to pronounced
social fractures. The generation sacrificed during the period of
structural adjustment (1985-2000) has been joined by another, blocked
within by a rapacious gerontocracy, and barred from external mobility
as a result of European anti-migration policies and archaic border
management inherited from colonisation. Thus, the child soldiers of
yesterday’s predatory wars were replaced by crowds of adolescents
and minors who today have no hesitation in cheering on the putschists
- when they are not in the front ranks of the urban riots and looting
that follow.

5. COUPS D’ÉTAT FOR NOTHING?

The coups in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger or the “palace
revolution” in Gabon will not be the last. It would be an illusion
to think that they have put an end to democratic regimes.

They have not. The facts that paved the way for these events have been
established by research since the 1990s. Very early on, numerous works
described the contradictory dynamics and ambivalences that have
characterised the trajectories of democratisation on the continent.
They also highlighted the long-term restructuring that has been made
possible by the opening up to pluralism. Despite the popular unrest,
however, there has been no radical upheaval in the balance of power
between the state and society. In some cases, transitions were simply
aborted and the _status quo ex ante_ was more or less restored. In
other cases, the aborted civil changeover and the end of the
democratic experiment were followed by a long cycle of repression and
an exacerbation of predatory practices. However, despite the muzzling
of frontal opposition, the most repressive practices were able to
coexist with the dynamics of pluralisation.

On the other hand, the coups d’état will not necessarily put an end
to the logic of predatory practices. All African states are
characterized by a more or less strong grip of the military on
positions of power and accumulation. In many places, state violence is
exercised through the police apparatus, paramilitary organisations and
business circles, which are themselves linked to criminal circles. The
relative autonomy of the security apparatuses encourages their
involvement in all kinds of trafficking, and turns them into
legitimate economic operators.

6. THE STRUGGLE FOR A NEW AFRICAN ORDER

We have just shown how, thanks to the structural adjustment plans of
the 1990s and the reforms under good governance, we have moved from
military and single-party regimes to a _multiparty without democracy_.
In response to the failure of the transitions of the 1990s and the
attempts at authoritarian restoration, authoritarian counter-movements
began to appear at the turn of the 2010s, at the same time as the
so-called citizen movements. In most cases, these have taken the form
of a defence of local and group-interested orders. Good governance
reforms notwithstanding, _much of Africa entered a period of
institutional stagnation from the 2000s onwards_. During this period,
as the waves of protest waned, the ruling classes sought to free
themselves from a web of obligations, apart from those they had chosen
themselves. Where they had acquired sufficient autonomy, they used a
considerable amount of political repression within their respective
borders.

However, the political economy of the state imposed in the early 1990s
has run out of steam. This explains the resurgence of tensions within
the ruling blocs. It also explains the exacerbation of criminal and
punitive practices, the resurgence of ethnicity and factional
struggles, the worsening of rentier management of the economy to the
detriment of competing networks, and even political assassinations.
Another African state order is in the making. It will take a long time
to crystallise. Two countries in particular have shown the way:
Ethiopia and Sudan. They each tried to shape a nation through the war.
This emerging state and social order will be determined in large part
by endogenous forces. This new order will be made up of blocs of
states that will have to coexist together. Not all of them will be
able to claim to be democratic states.

The battle to crystallise this order will be a long one. But it has
already begun. Not all existing national states will survive it.  Nor
will the borders inherited from colonisation. Several configurations
will emerge. It is therefore important to identify the tectonic
plates, and especially where they rub against each other, the areas of
future conflict. In the immediate term, the danger is that Africa will
be transformed into a place of confrontation between powers on the
decline and others on the rise, in the wider context of the global
conflict currently unfolding between the United States and China.

For example, the European Union dreams of stability where the younger
generations of Africans, tired of waiting, swear by radical change.
Paradoxically, what many European leaders call instability is
precisely what is being celebrated today in African capitals and deep
in the villages, where the desire for coups d’état (in Cameroon,
Côte d’Ivoire, Congo Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea and elsewhere)
has replaced the desire for democracy in its electoral form. Why?
Because for many people, coups d’état appear - wrongly - to be the
only way to break the deadlock. Furthermore, over the last thirty
years, support for substantive democracy in Africa has not been one of
the EU’s strategic objectives. This is still the case. Europe has
never ceased to endorse the kind of multiparty system without
democracy that has become the norm against which the younger
generations are now rising up. Europe is not primarily interested in
the articulated interests of Africans themselves. Europe has its own
interests, starting with migration control, border management, the
fight against terrorism, and the fight against the presence of Russia
and China on the continent.

7. A SUBSTANTIVE DEMOCRACY

Repeating the same response to each putsch, namely economic sanctions
accompanied by the threat of military intervention, is hardly
sustainable. Such coercive measures simply do not attract the support
of African populations. Trying to justify them in the name of
defending the constitutional order ultimately undermines the cause of
democracy and only serves to consolidate the neo-sovereignist current,
which will only become more radical. On the other hand, it is
important to understand _why, in a spectacular reversal against the
1990s, the demand for putsches replaced the demand for democracy. _

Instead of _fetishising elections, we need to focus on a substantive
democracy, which will have to be built step by step and over time, by
rearming thought, by rehabilitating the desire for history instead of
the desire for new masters, and by drawing on the collective
intelligence of African men and women._ It is this intelligence that
must be awakened, nurtured and supported. This is how new horizons of
meaning can emerge, since democracy in this planetary era only makes
sense if it is ordered towards a higher purpose, which is the repair
and care of the living.

Such work involves inventing new ways of relating to each other on the
ground, on every site. So it’s not just a question of relieving
debts, increasing market share, building dams, bridges, schools,
clinics and wells, or financing projects, but of _initiating a
long-term grassroots movement backed by new social, intellectual and
cultural coalitions. _

8. AN APPROPRIATE DISTANCE: SAVING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FRANCE AND
THE AFRICAN CONTINENT

France has a place in this _project to reanimate the movement_,
provided that it sheds the trappings of the past and its illusions of
grandeur. In practice, it is faced with three options. The first is
the choice of _colonial stubbornness_. Taken to its logical
conclusion, such blindness should lead to repeated military
interventions or, at the very least, to an endless series of external
operations conducted by special forces. It is difficult to see what
the long-term objectives of this policy of force would be. In the
current climate, it would be the exact equivalent of (self-)sabotage.

The second option is to _break away unilaterally_. This scenario was
implemented in 1958 in Guinea at the time of decolonisation. A
“_soft_” version is underway in Mali, where France is no longer
at the centre of the game. For the time being, it is reflected as
concrete action on the ground in a beginning of a drying up of rents
of all kinds (military rents, official development aid rents and
humanitarian rents). For the moment, it is difficult to measure the
consequences on both sides. Once the purge is over, may opportunities
arise to rebuild something different, on a different basis?

The third option, which the times demand, is to consciously forge
another path, that of _appropriate distance_. This would make it
possible to salvage what could still be salvaged on both sides. A long
period of reinvention could then begin, with new cultural,
intellectual, social and economic coalitions on both sides.

To achieve this, France will have to reconstruct its entire diplomatic
toolkit on the continent. It must also turn its back on a static and
decontextualised vision of peace, security and stability. As important
as it is, the fight against jihadist groups cannot be the alpha and
omega of human security on the continent. Nor can it be seen solely in
terms of European interests, prioritizing the protection of the
Union's external borders and the transformation of the continent into
a double enclosure.

Moreover, effective protection of Europe’s borders paradoxically
depends on guaranteeing and extending Africans’ right to mobility
and movement within the continent. Mobility on the continent cannot be
secured in a system made up of closed entities. It is impossible to
ensure the reproduction of activities linked to movement, such as
pastoralism, within closed territories. To meet the new
spatio-demographic challenges, Africa needs new territorial
assemblages that incorporate corridors, nodes, portals - in short, the
full range of relational functions inherent in an open space. What’s
more, everything points to the fact that stability and security will
not be achieved by repeated military interventions, or by supporting
inveterate tyrants, or by untimely sanctions whose only effect is to
further wound populations already on their knees, but by deepening
democracy.

This raises the question _of the meaning and purpose of France__’__s
military presence in Africa_. It’s not just a question of
reorganising the presence, particularly in the Sahel. The time has
come to radically question the justification for this presence, for
its legitimacy is being called into question by the younger
generation. In this respect, the strategy of locking the doors will
not suffice. Leaving Mali to settle in Burkina Faso, then Burkina Faso
for Niger, and eventually Chad, without an in-depth examination of the
reasons for the successive failures and the moral and intellectual
defeat suffered by France in Africa, amounts to applying a poultice on
a wooden leg. Military reason and civil reason have always found it
difficult to coexist on the continent.

In the long term, _stability and security will require the effective
demilitarisation of all areas of political, economic and social life_.
This means tackling head-on the deep-rooted movements that feed the
forces of entropy and encourage violent breakdown. Hence the
importance of a fresh look at the state-form. One of the distinctive
features of African states is that they encompass numerous
communities. If they are to be governed in a more or less egalitarian
and democratic way, they must be capable of balancing community and
class interests.

We also need to relaunch a new cycle of institutional and
constitutional innovation, and carefully identify the social forces
that have a stake in it. _Transforming the existing forms of the State
requires a policy on a scale that goes beyond decentralisation_. If
people are to regain a modicum of control over how they live and what
they do, new concepts of territory and locality are needed. In many
cases, centralised authority is not enough. Hence the need to grant
specific rights to the communities that these state entities
encompass.

9. SETTING UP A NEW AGREEMENT

Old societies, which France and Europe played a major part in forging,
have come to an end. The challenge is to create a new configuration.
This is not just a matter for Africans. We cannot continue to follow,
without questioning, political and cultural patterns that are
historically outdated and no longer relevant. Powerful stakeholders
are beginning to realise that things cannot go on like this.

If no decisive steps are taken, the situation will become increasingly
intolerable for France and the West. It will become ever more costly
for them to delay with improvised temporary solutions. As crises
follow one after another at such a pace that there will be no respite,
there is a real risk of getting bogged down in a long-term tug-of-war
that is as consuming as it is paralysing. If this scenario were to
materialise, it would pave the way not for a new global consciousness,
but for the partition of the world.

* Africa
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* France
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* colonialism
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* good governance
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* neo-sovereignism
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* Pan-Africanism
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* Mali
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* Guinea
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* Burkina Faso
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* Niger
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* Gabon
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* democracy
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* European Union
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* coups d'etat
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