#french imperialism

[thoughtportal]

Captain Thomas Isidore Noel Sankara

[fatehbaz]

The franc CFA (originally denoting Colonies françaises d’Afrique) is the official currency of Senegal and most other former French colonies in Africa, from before national independence through the present-day. This monetary system and its history are the subjects of a new book by Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency (2021), translated by Thomas Fazi from a 2018 French edition. The book brings to the attention of Anglophone readers the peculiar institutions through which the French Republic continues to exercise colonial rule over nominally independent African states. France’s recent “counterterrorism” operations across the Sahel region (supported and rivaled in scope by the United States’ Africa Command, AFRICOM) represent only one phase in what the Black Alliance for Peace (2020) has called France’s “active and aggressive military presence in Africa for years.” [...] One of Pigeaud and Sylla’s commitments and achievements is to show how “French ‘soft’ monetary power is inseparable from its ‘hard’ military power” (2021: 99). In their telling, the CFA franc has for decades been France’s secret weapon in “Françafrique,” the zone in Africa where France, its representatives, and its monetary system have never really left. [...]

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The franc CFA was born in Paris on the 25th of December, 1945 [...]. The embattled empire was compelled to “loosen its grip” in Africa [in the midst of anticolonial fervor outside of Europe, and with rise of “decolonization” in metropolitan/European public discourses] [...]. Consequently, argue Pigeaud and Sylla, the creation of the CFA franc was “actually designed to allow France to regain control of its colonies” (13). What Minister Pleven called generosity might better be called a swindle. [...] French goods-for-export, now priced in a devalued currency (made cheaper), would find easy markets in the colonies [...]. African goods - especially important raw materials, from uranium to cocoa, priced too expensively for domestic consumption [...] -- would find buyers more exclusively in France [...]. In effect, the new CFA monetary policies re-consolidated France’s imperial economy even as the monopoly regime of the colonial pact could be formally retired in recognition of demands for change from colonial subjects. [...] [T]he egalitarian parlance of community and cooperation modernized French colonial authority, making it more invisible rather than marking its end. [...]

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Most importantly, France has held up a guarantee of unlimited convertibility between CFA francs and French currency [as its so-called most benevolent feature] [...]. [But] CFA francs can only ever be converted into France’s currency [...] before being exchanged for other currencies [...]. In 1994, in conjunction with the International Monetary Fund and against the wishes of most African leaders, French authorities adjusted the franc zone exchange rate for the first time, devaluing the CFA franc by half. This blanket devaluation was the shock through which structural adjustment was forced upon Françafrique [...]. 

And the devaluation proved, to Pigeaud and Sylla, that France’s “‘guarantee of unlimited convertibility’ was an intellectual and political fraud” (74). Nevertheless, French authorities have continually held up - that is, brandished and exploited - this guarantee, without honoring it. [...] Pigeaud and Sylla do not mince words: “France uses its presumed role of ‘guarantor’ as a pretext and as a tool to blackmail its former colonies in order to keep them in its orbit, both economically and politically” (38). [...] In that respect, the CFA franc system has ensured [...] the stabilization of raw material exportation and goods importation, hierarchy and indirect rule, [...] accumulation and mass impoverishment, in short, the colonial order.

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And all along, France has found - or compelled, coerced, and more-or-less directly put in place - useful political partners in Françafrique. [...]

The CFA franc has been central to the French strategy of decolonization-in-name-only. [...]

When and where demands for self-determination and changes to the monetary system (usually more minor than exit or abolition) have been strongest, from charismatic leaders or from below, they have been met with a retaliatory response from France and its African partners, frequently going so far as “destabilisation campaigns and even assassinations and coups d’état” (40). [...]

The first case is exemplary. In 1958, Ahmed Sékou Touré helped lead Guinea to independence [...]. Guinea was alone in voting down De Gaulle’s “Community” proposal [...], and [...] the new state established its own national currency and central bank by 1960. [...] [T]he decision was ultimately made to make Guinea a cautionary tale for the rest of Françafrique. French counter-intelligence officials plotted and hired out a series of mercenary attacks (“with the aim of creating a climate of insecurity and, if possible, overthrowing Sékou Touré,” recalled one such operative), in conjunction with “Operation Persil,” a scheme to flood the Guinean economy with false Guinean bills, successfully bringing about a devastating crash (43). [...] Yet, Sékou Touré was never removed, only ostracized - unlike Sylvanus Olympio in Togo or Modiba Keita in Mali, others whose (initially minor) desired changes to the CFA status quo were refused and rebuffed and who were then deposed in French-linked coups. [...]

So too the Cameroonian economist Joseph Tchundjang Pouemi, an even more overlooked figure since his death at the age of 47 in 1984. Pouemi’s experience working at the IMF [International Monetary Fund] in the 1970s led him to recognize that the leaders of the international monetary system would “repress any government that tries to offer their country a minimum of wellbeing” (60) and could do so especially easily in Françafrique because of the CFA franc.

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All text above by: Matt Schneider. “Africa’s Last Colonial Currency Review.” Society and Space [Book Reviews section of the online Magazine format]. 29 November 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"MADAGASCAR FORCES SEND FLAG OF TRUCE," Toronto Star. October 14, 1942. Page 3. --- A tall. French officer carries the flag of truce through the Madagascar port of Majunga after the town's surrender to advancing British troops.

[pimentogirl]

Meanwhile in Canada

I'm sorry what the fuck did you just say ??? This has to be fake.

[natandacat]

Ok so the translation on how france used dialectics, debates, and psychosocial intervention as a mean of brainwashing young Algerian students is actually ok so here it is.

[illustratus]

[elbiotipo]

I honestly think this map is a bit fucked up no les parece

oh nothing it's just the US military casually (not so casually) admitting "we aren't a force to defend our country, we are a force to enforce our empire, and that empire is the entire planet"

[vorbarrsultana]

i finished rereading the first four vorkosigan books (+ "the flowers of vashnoi" because ekaterin!!!), and you really have to feel for piotr vorkosigan because what a nightmare life, truly.

imagine you are born just in time for your world to be unified by dorca vorbarra and rediscovered by people from wider galaxy. things are finally looking good, for the first time in 600 years of isolation there is no more feudal infighting, and the promise of galactic medicine and technologies being available lightens everyone's perspectives. sure, your grandpa is called count pierre "le sanguinaire", but who doesn't have terrible relatives?

then you are 15, and suddenly your planet is attacked by the aggressive eugenecist space empire hell-bent on subjugating your people and turning them into disposable material for unethical genetic experiments. you flee into the mountains, away from your family, and create guerrilla forces from locals sworn to your dad, and it's really terrible for a very long time. you have no high-tech weapons and no food, you sleep in a cave in the dead of winter, and the cetagandans try everything (from carpet bombing to chemical weapons) to murder you.

but hey, at least you now have your bff ezar vorbarra, and (from the bff's words on his deathbed) it sounds like you two had so much fun between unimaginable horrors and despair, and it's not surprising, since no one really believes in death after life at 20. then the emperor makes you a general at the tender age of 22. fortunately for him, you & bff make a frighteningly competent dream-team, and the joke's on cetagandans.

then, several years later, you ask the emperor for weapons, because you still sleep on the bare cave floor, there are little resources, and every ghem on the planet is trying to murder you. he offers you the hand of his granddaughter instead, like it's some sort of twisted fairytale, but you grow to love your olivia more than anything, and the tide of war is finally turning, and you allow yourself to entertain the idea of peaceful life, and then...

the space eugenecist empire nukes your hometown, killing your mom, dad, surviving brothers, and two hundred thousand of your people. plus your bff (ezar) gets a radiation doze large enough for it to cause severe cancer thirty years later. great.

but you win! your district is in shambles, your capital is an irradiated crater, your castle is in ruins, but you win! the old dorca dies, and yuri ascends the throne, but politicking is secondary to the fact that you are alive.

yes, you are probably not entirely sane, and you've long forgotten what the peaceful times look like, but you are alive, just under 35, and your entire life is ahead of you. olivia is alive too, and ezar, and you now have three wonderful children, and the extended vorpatril-vorbarra family that hosts regular get-togethers. sure, your mom-in-law is a betan with all sorts of crazy ideas in her head, but she is not pierre vorrutyer. small mercies.

but then the new emperor goes mad, and decides to murder your entire family overnight. your brothers-in-law are gone, one of your sisters-in-law too, and all your nephews and nieces except little padma. but all of this pales in comparison to the facts that olivia is murdered, and that your heir and daughter lay dead beside her.

all you have left of her, of your house, of the family you've lost in vashnoi not a ten years ago, is aral, whom you keep by your side throughout the bloody civil war to put your bff on the throne.

but you win again. you are 43, and ezar vorbarra is now the emperor. you are responsible for the imperium's entire ground forces. you are also responsible for a severely traumatized boy of 13, and the only children you've interacted with without olivia's genle guidance were little messengers of guerilla companies.

what a mess.

[empirearchives]

[thoughtportal]

uranium in Niger

okayafrica.com

[dyspunktional-leviathan]

[Image description:

A screenshot of tags that someone left on the original post. They read:

i was taught in school that all the archives were made public

should find the source

/End image description]

Just got an ask from someone who wants to stay anonymous asking me why Algeria doesn’t sue and ask for reparation.

It’s simply because France made it impossible. Basically whenever there was a massacre France would burn or hide the proof especially the registers of births and deaths. When they left they also took a lot of archives and they refuse to give us access to those archives. The law actually says that archives must be made fully public after 50 years. Well guess what? The majority of the archives related to Algeria are still not public and its been 61 years. At first they promised to make them public. Then they said they had to check each page before making it public in case there some stuff that should stay classified. Then they decided that if in a box there’s just one single page that says “classified” then no page from said box can be made public. All of that for one simple reason. France voted a law giving a full amnesty for the colonial crimes committed by the French in Algeria. That law means that nobody can be judged for anything they did to Algerians during the war (let alone before the war). The only way for that law to be considered illegal is if the colonial crimes committed by France in Algeria are officially labeled as a crime against humanity. Because amnesty is not valid for a crime against humanity. That’s why they hide the archives because they prove that there was indeed a crime against humanity and that would force France to pay back for what they did.

Basically imagine there’s a murderer and everyone knows he did it he says that he did it but you still need the evidence for the trial… except the murderer has the evidence everyone knows he has them he says he has them but he can choose which one he keeps and which one he shows… France is the murderer in this scenario.

P.S: I talk about Algeria because I’m Algerian and because the situation was very specific but France should pay for ALL its colonial crimes (settler colonialism is very different because it’s a form of colonialism that doesn’t see indigenous people as merchandise or cheap labor they are seen as a threat something to be eradicated)

[fatehbaz]

There was a line in the sand - a border, or rather the idea of one. This idea described a frontier, delineated a boundary. In 1852 transgression of this idea and the sovereignty it represented angered Bey Ahmad of Tunis. [...] [T]he government of [French] Algeria accelerated plans to undertake a tour of the frontier [...], to define the spatial limits of French power. [...] [T]he bey wrote a letter to the French consul [...]. The two powers had to work together, each having representatives present [...]. The response came from Paris. The prince-president (Napoleon III), the minister of foreign affairs, and the minister of war all agreed with the bey [...]. The barrier was real, the border inviolable, the idea held. So the bey and the president understood each other. [...] [But] [a]n internal letter [among French officials] explained the thinking behind the military's territorial violation: [...] it was necessary to "display clearly [the French military's] position on the frontier and to act to take possession of the country that we have claimed." This was important even if the act itself exposed the border's unreality. [...]

In such a way, belief in the border exposes a kind of irrationality at the heart of modern state power: the very basis of modern sovereign claims - territoriality - was an abstraction that only distance from the influence of local events could make appear real. The idea of the frontier that the French president and the Tunisian bey shared was the modern belief in the reality of borders, of their existence as barriers. That these two shared this idea tells us something about the appearance of modernity in the Maghrib in the late nineteenth century. [...]

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Anxiety about the situation along the frontier was manifested not only in French military sorties and "inspection tours": we can also see it in the positioning in the colonial imaginary of migratory and transhumant populations as anti-modern. Seemingly unconcerned with national boundaries [...], these populations were cast as mere violent holdovers of the "traditional" practices of the Maghrib, soon to disappear before the progress of modern social organization and governmentality. [...] The [French] minister of war held that the government of Algeria should secure the border because unrest was "hampering the industrial development of the La Calle region and slowing the normalization of our authority among the tribes [...]." His reasoning did not necessarily reflect that of the cultivators who were accustomed to moving to lands on either side of the line drawn by Randon or moving their flocks within a generally elastic space. The dictates of imperial economics (i.e., mineral exploitation) were here locked into a territorially-bound sense [...].

The government of Algeria - which was at that point, legally in any case, the French government - [...] based claims to sovereignty on the ability to control violence [...]. This [French military] officer led soldiers across the northern Algerian-Tunisian border, stopping to talk with all the groups [...]. The minister of war wrote that, while this action was indeed problematic on the diplomatic scale, it was necessary and right on the local scale. "Our administrative interests cannot be left outstanding - our dignity itself is at stake in giving to the tribes evidence of our [power] [...]" and "this operation is necessary to tranquilize our tribes and organize the means of repression." [...] In effect, the local scale necessitated a processional display of state power [and literal physical violence] to ensure its claims, while the international scale necessitated the abstraction of fixed and territorialized power. [...]

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[I]n the winter of 1876 [...], [t]he territorialized nation-state was finally achieved. This rosy picture did not last. Even after the French occupation of Tunis [...] in 1881, belief in the border failed to spread to the scale of local life and governance. [...] Certainly the border, even a border that had largely been agreed upon and understood at the level of high politics for nearly three centuries, was a problematic and vexed ides. Only those removed from its immediate reality seemed to believe in it.

Despite the continued efforts of those apostles of modernity on the Algerian side of the border, the border was never as fixed as they thought it should be. Concerned reports about it continued [...] to fill the saddlebags of imperial postmen well after the establishment of the protectorate in Tunisia. The “realness” of the border was a matter of both material reality and socio-juridical imagination. The border between the Regency’s tribes and those of the dey in Constantine, for instance, had existed (more or less) since the 1500s. But these were obviously different conceptions of what made the border. [...] The border would be “real” for these French officials when groups on either side stopped transgressing the imaginary barrier the Regency and France had erected. Vexing to the French imperial imagination was the apparent breakdown of the concept of state power based on maintaining the monopoly of violence in a certain region: “We reserve to ourselves the right to penetrate into the territory of neighboring tribes that breach the interests of our tribes or territory and to punish them emphatically.” [...] Beyond informing people of their legibility to the state vis-à-vis taxes, the point of the multiple tours, meetings, raids, and trades [...] was thus to show off the power of the French war-making apparatus in order to claim for it sole legitimacy. [...] [T]he land claimed by the French becomes practical, modern territory only when the people living there accept the claims to sovereign authority of the French - not before. There is effectively no border until the people believe there is and act on that belief. [...]

That this type of thinking was not the special purview of the “recalcitrant” tribes themselves is reflected in a letter a French advisor to the Tunisian army wrote to the French minister of war in 1862: “Some have wanted to have a frontier delimination between the Regency [of Tunis] and Algeria; it is necessary, as Your Excellency has recognized, that the frontier remain vague. Let us not commit the present, let us reserve for ourselves the future, and let us not raise barriers between the rich valley of the Medjerdah, and the metallurgic deposits and the cork forests of the Tabarka mountains, [and Algeria].” From his vantage point on the ground, this officer saw a different relationship between the border and the territorial position of sovereignty than did the president or bey. The importance of the imperial project was better reflected in not securing a border. But this understanding did not make its way up the chain of command. There a "real" border was necessary.

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All text above by: Brock Cutler. "Believe in the Border, or, How to Make Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century Maghrib". Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 60. 2017. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Un pacha marocain essaie une mitrailleuse," Le Soleil. May 1, 1943. Page 1. --- Des pachas, des indigènes et des officiers français regardent Son Excellence le pacha ALI D'OUEZZANE, qui est en train de tirer avec une mitrailleuse, son arme favorite. Le pacha Ali, qui est âgé de 75 ans, est le chef de l'une des dernieres tribus a se soumettre à l'occupation du Maroc par les Français, au début du siècle présent.

(International News)

[usafphantom2]

Another painting l did in 2018.

The Nieuport 17 of French WW1 ace Charles Nungesser. He was credited with 43 German aircraft 1916-1918. Despite multiple wounds & injuries, Nungesser survived the war. He vanished in 1927 while attempting the first Trans-Atlantic flight.

@PeteHill854 via X

[unitedfrontvarietyhour]

Crazy times, eh? No quote this time, I think everything speaks for itself. Last 2 slides included for no "discernable" reason ;)

[queenfredegund]

Women in History Month (insp) | Week 3: Consorts and concubines