Macron pays the price for France’s bloody history in Africa

Coffins containing the remains of 24 Algerian resistance fighters are displayed at the Moufdi Zakaria Palace of Culture in Algiers, Algeria, on July 4.
Photographer: Ryad Kramdi / AFP via Getty Images

Photographer: Ryad Kramdi / AFP via Getty Images

October 14, 2020

The severed heads of the resistance the fighters were first exhibited in a market place. Then they were sent back to private collections in Paris. For decades, they have been locked in a museum basement and finally, last July, Emmanuel Macron sent them home.As the Algerian military transport stopped, the head of the country, the head of the army and a Muslim cleric looked down and 24 coffins draped in green, white and red with their national flag were transported to the tarmac.

For President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, the moment was the recognition of a massacre by the French more than 170 years ago. For Macron, this is part of his efforts to project a modern image of the French state at a time when ethnic divisions at home have been exposed by the Black Lives Matter protests against police violence.

While the Group of 20 finance officials were due to discuss a strongly French-backed plan for African debt relief on Wednesday, Macron might have expected to be granted special status. But in fact, it struggles to preserve the historic role of France in a part of the continent that it has dominated for more than a century.

Macron said he wanted to see the return of many other African relics and artifacts taken during the colonial era. It supports efforts in West Africa to separate from thecommon currency and promised to open the archives on the genocide that took place under a French-backed government in Rwanda.

It will not be enough.

With more than a billion increasingly urbanized people, the engine of rapid economic growth, Africa is attracting interest from rising powers like China, Russia, the Gulf states and Turkey. This means the continent’s rulers are no longer so dependent on France as Macron’s bridge-building efforts are held back by the political threat at home from Marine Le Pen, the right-wing populist who won a third of the vote when ‘she ran for president in 2017.

Charles de Gaulle was taken to Algiers in 1958, the same year he became president.

Photographe: Loomis Dean / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images

Social tensions in French cities and the loss of influence abroad can be traced back to the same problem: France’s failure to confront its bloody past, according to Brahim Senouci, professor of physics at the University of Cergy-Pontoise who campaigned for 10 years. so that the skulls of the combatants are returned to Algeria.

“Macron is at the forefront of this battle and he plays for the survival of France’s place in the world,” he said in an interview.

After the independence of a large swath of countries in northern Africa some 60 years ago, Charles de Gaulle established a network of relationships to maintain French influence.

Paris has provided military support to friendly regimes in return for diplomatic support and lucrative deals for its businesses, often turning a blind eye to domestic abuses. Even after independence in 1962, French nuclear tests exposed thousands of Algerians to radiation poisoning.

Previous presidents have condemned this legacy. But none have tried to do much about it.

Colonial calculation

France faces challenges in former African colonies Macron pays the price for France's bloody history in Africa | FR24 News English

Source: National Archives of the United Kingdom

Macron, 42, is the first French leader born after the colonial era and the difference can be seen.

During a campaign stoppage in Algeria in 2017, he called French actions in the country a “crime against humanity”, words unprecedented for a presidential candidate.

Of all the former African territories of France, Algeria provokes the strongest reaction. It was run like another part of the French state and only gained independence after a brutal war that left huge fractures in French society.

An official close to the president said Macron believed that for years France had taken its relationship with its former colonies for granted. Now the administration has woken up Until the fact that he has work to do, the official said.

Macron himself argued in an October 2 speech that France must also come to a new understanding of its past so that those whose ancestors suffered from colonialism can feel that they belong just as much as those whose families have benefited from it.

France “has an unresolved trauma with facts that laid the foundations for our collective psyche, our project, the way we see ourselves,” he said.

The scale of the challenge in Africa itself was made painfully evident to the president during a visit to France’s largest overseas military base in Djibouti last year.

Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech to soldiers at the largest French overseas military base, in Djibouti, in March 2019.

Photographer: Ludovic Marin / AFP via Getty Images

When he took office three years ago, the land next to the French base was empty. At the time of his visit in March 2019, it was occupied by a Chinese camp intended to eclipse the French presence.

Djibouti President Ismail Omar Guelleh also lives in a Chinese-built palace and is connected to neighboring Ethiopia by a new China-built railway.

Its people worship in a giant Ottoman-style mosque, known as Turkey’s Gift to Djibouti.

As Macron addressed a select audience in the capital, one of Guelleh’s main collaborators said the focus would be back on China from the moment he left – they come with real money, said the manager.

It’s not just trade and investment that gives China and Turkey an advantage in Africa. They do not have to face the colonial history which hangs over France and the other European powers.

Erdogan, in particular, seeks to present Turkey as a benevolent alternative, wholeheartedly supporting Islam, as he challenges European influence in the eastern Mediterranean and Libya.

“The history of Africa is literally the history of France,” Erdogan said in a televised speech in September, speaking directly to Macron. “You are the ones who killed a million people in Algeria. You are the ones who killed 800,000 people in Rwanda. You can’t lecture us.

Such words have resonance.

After the remains of Algerian fighters were buried this summer, President Tebboune asked Macron to issue a formal apology and open classified files on the war of independence.

In Mali, protesters burned the French flag last year, accusing French troops of failing to quell an Islamist insurgency that France has been helping fight since 2013.

When there is no anger, France is often greeted with indifference by a new generation of Africans.

“Our common history remains important,” said former Prime Minister Soumeylou Boubeye Maiga. But young Malians “have other priorities. They identify first and foremost as Africans. ”

In response, Macron is trying to move away from crisis management and focus on cooperation in the fields of education, entrepreneurship, culture and sport. He wants France to be seen as a champion of Africa’s interests, said an official familiar with French politics.

When Covid-19 arrived in Africa, it was Macron who called for a debt moratorium, telephoning European allies to ask for a unified response, a French official said.

But again and again, these efforts are thwarted by the inner dynamic.

Macron learned the price of discussing the story during the 2017 campaign, when his comments on Algeria later drew fierce attacks from Le Pen.

Gerald Darmanin, an aide to former President Nicolas Sarkozy whose Algerian grandfather fought alongside the French in the War of Independence, said Macron should be ashamed of himself.

François Fillon, the majority right-wing candidate, declared that “Macron’s hatred for our history” was “unworthy of a presidential candidate”.

On the stump in the southern city of Toulon, where many settlers fled after the war, angry voters criticized Macron for “treason”.

Ahead of the 2022 elections, Macron is seeking to protect himself against these attacks.

In July, he elevated Darmanin from budget minister to interior minister and made him responsible for restoring trust between the state and the police. In October, he unveiled a bill that would create new powers to suppress those who threaten the republic’s secular values.

These gestures took away much of the luster from his efforts to restore relations with Algeria and its neighbors.

When campaigning for the return of the skulls, Senouci wrote inan open letter to Macron indicating that their return would usher in a new era in France’s relations with Africa.

He doesn’t believe it now.

“I was a little too excited,” he says.

Much remains to be done to open up the country’s colonial history and prevent it from “poisoning the imagination” of young people growing up in the immigrant communities of French real estate projects, he said.

But in the basement of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, 18,000 other skulls are still locked up.

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Macron pays the price for France’s bloody history in Africa

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