Mamadou Diouf, historian: “Relations between Africa and France are in a sorry state”
Historian and professor at Columbia University, the Senegalese intellectual Mamadou Diouf cast a critical eye on the historical relations between France and Africa. According to him, their intimacy has disappeared.
Is the relationship between Africa and France broken and, if so, definitive? To Jeune Afrique’s question, the author of Africa in World Time (ed. Rot Bo Krik, 2023) responds: “It is in a pitiful state anyway. On the one hand, France’s economic, military and migration policies, the racism and xenophobia of a seemingly color-blind society cause many frustrations among Africans. On the other hand, the personal and intimate bond that had developed thanks to the circulation of African students and researchers and French ‘cooperators’ and researchers was also broken.
According to Diouf “France is nothing more than a distant historical presence. It is reduced to the position of a partner, in the same way as China or Russia. His intimacy with Africa has disappeared.”
Washington-Africa?
What about Washington’s relations with Africa, after three years of Biden’s presidency? Here too, the preface to the French edition of The Invention of Africa, by Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, thinks that the black continent “is almost absent from the American diplomatic space”. According to the historian, Africa is not an important political issue for Washington.
“This marginalization,” confides Diouf, “derives from the concerns of American foreign policy, centered almost exclusively on the economic rivalry with China, on the containment of Russia and, at the moment, on the war between Israel and Hamas.”
He explains: “the voice of the United States is inaudible, whether regarding military coups or battles related to third or fourth terms or even dynastic devolutions of power.”
Alliance of Sahel States (AES)
Furthermore, regarding the rapprochement of military regimes (Mali, Burkina, Guinea), the Columbia University professor does not think that it echoes the history of the large groups imagined by pan-Africanists of different persuasions.
According to Mamadou Diouf, “military regimes can under no circumstances promote the emergence of open societies or offer representative leadership. Their proximity is rather the appropriate consequence of their exclusion from regional, continental and international spaces.
However, continues the Senegalese intellectual, “we cannot say that their understanding derives from a simple change of mood. We must see it as the objective alliance of those excluded from the diplomatic spaces dominated, in the Sahel, by France and French interests. From there, the military will be able to easily exploit anti-French sentiment.”
Author: Aminata SARR – Seneweb.com
2024-01-02 14:01:05
#Relations #Africa #France #bad