Coups in Niger, Gabon and beyond signify the real end of France’s empire in Africa

Richard Poplak is a Canadian journalist and filmmaker based in Johannesburg.

What, one wonders, is the collective noun for coup d’état?

My preference is for “bousculade,” the gorgeous French word meaning “mad scramble.” Coups, of course, are notoriously contagious: one regime topples, then a neighbouring regime, then another. This has happened in South America, it has happened in Africa and – who knows? – if Donald Trump’s MAGA revolutionaries one day pull it off in the United States, perhaps it will happen across North America. A militia of suburban dads from Calgary seizing Parliament Hill? Ask a French African – stranger things have happened.

Indeed, a bousculade of coups is currently under way across the African continent’s expanding midriff. For observers of French Africa’s geopolitical convulsions, this has been as concerning as it has been inevitable. Since the fall of a number of dusty liberation regimes in the 1970s, dozens of African states have toggled between democracy, dictatorship and some mélange of the two. But politics, like fashion, is cyclical. Since 2020, straight-up juntafication has made a comeback: Chad, Mali, Niger, Guinea, Sudan, Burkina Faso and, last month, Gabon, have succumbed to the bousculade.

The current coup-fest is largely restricted to West and Central Africa, and is a response to the termination of a major historical phase: We have now arrived at the end of French colonialism, which didn’t end when most people insisted it did, back in the 1950s and 60s, but is most certainly ending now. What’s unfolding in Africa is a major inflection point, and may turn out to be more consequential than the revolutions that transformed the Arab world in 2010.

Abiding by the first rule of real estate – location – let’s start in the Central African Republic. Tied with South Africa for the most accurately named country on the planet, the CAR is, yes, situated in the centre of Africa. It’s a small country by population, with only six million people spread over extensive territory, severed at its northern tip by the 10th parallel, the line of longitude the journalist Eliza Griswold described as “the fault line between Christianity and Islam.”

In the 1880s, German colonialists considered Oubangui-Chari, now the CAR, as the strategic and mystical heart of their Mittelafrika project. The French engaged in neither strategy nor mysticism, but after the European powers divvied up their colonial properties in Berlin in 1884-85, France took control of nearly a third of the African continent, with Oubangui-Chari forming its eastern flank. (These included modern-day Senegal, Mali, Niger, Burkina-Faso, Gabon, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, among others.)

What would bind these disparate places, which in many cases shared neither language, political tradition nor culture? In short: language, political tradition and culture, which is to say, French language, political tradition and culture.

While British colonialism allowed its civilization impulses to fizzle away long before the 20th century, and while the Portuguese, Italians and Germans remained honest about their rapacious intentions, the French were different. For them, African colonialism was as much a paternalistic cultural project as it was an acquisitive one – a mission civilisatrice.

Sadly, as historian Alice L. Conklin’s authoritative study of the subject has noted, “French imperial ideology consistently identified civilization with one principle more than any other: mastery.” Not just mastery over people, but over nature, economics, social hierarchies and political impulse. This comprehensiveness may explain why the project has lasted so long.

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But longevity should never be confused for love. French colonialism has always been contested, both within the metropole and without. More than 200 years ago, the first successful slave rebellion occurred in the French plantation colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. A century later, thanks to the dissident Senegalese politician Blaise Diagne, there was a honing of the concept of négritude, the French version of pan-African Black Consciousness. The French intelligentsia itself engaged in more than two centuries of anti-colonial discourse, including André Gide’s widely discussed Voyage au Congo (1927), which made certain that no one in Paris was confused about how the system functioned on the ground.

It functioned like a business, maintained by the whip. The French assembled their African colonial properties into two large conglomerations, called French Equatorial Africa and French West Africa. The colonies inside these federations were small by population, their borders arbitrary, their sense of nationhood spectral. For many of the African leaders within these federations, “independence” – whatever that term meant – was neither desirable or sustainable. Libération, on the other hand, was a non-negotiable.

Unlike with the British, French African politicians served in the National Assembly of France prior to independence, and were deeply entrenched in the French political matrix. They foresaw the future complexities as clearly as did the political class in France. “It is necessary,” said Mamadou Dia, the socialist who would become Senegal’s first prime minister in 1957, “that the imperialist concept of the nation-state give way definitively to the modern concept of the multinational state.”

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The political establishment appeared to agree. In 1946, Charles de Gaulle declared that “the future of the 110 million men and women who live under our flag is an organization of federative form.” How did this play out in forgotten Oubangi-Chari? The CAR’s liberation hero, a sharp polymath named Barthélemy Boganda, similarly demanded a version of de Gaulle’s “federative form.” In a battle for the soul of the region, Boganda pitched a federation he called the Republic of Equatoria, which would act as a permanent replacement for French Equatorial Africa. But he was also thinking bigger: Les États-Unis de l’Afrique Latine, the United States of Latin Africa, a prize cut of the continent’s western spine that ran from modern-day Angola in the south, through the two Congos, Cameroon and Gabon, to Central Africa and Chad in the north.

While fantastically ambitious, the idea was no less feasible or unwieldy than independence for each lonely colony. Yet the ancien régime, especially in Gabon, foiled Boganda at every turn. He was thwarted by entrenched mining, coffee and business interests, the remnants of the old compagnies who served as colonialism’s capitalist engine, and who understood that the nation-state was the surest way to maintain the plunder. For this cohort, the chaos of ungovernable statelets wasn’t to be avoided, but actively encouraged. When Oubangui-Chari was granted self-autonomy in 1958, Boganda wondered how 500 newly minted local “politicians,” all of whom were replacing colonial administrators, none of whom had any training or experience, would be able to run the country. He called them mboun-zou veko – black whites.

They rule to this day.

In 1959, Boganda was mysteriously blown up in an airplane. Since then, the CAR suffered a series of dictatorships, until a loose version of democracy was initiated in the early 1990s, resulting in the election of Ange-Félix Patassé, who served as president until being removed from power in 2003 in a coup led by General François Bozizé. In March, 2013, a rebel group called Séléka rolled in from the north of the country, nominally supported by neighbouring Chad. The subsequent Battle for Bangui was brutal and bloody, resulting in the ouster of Gen. Bozizé, who was replaced by a decade of febrile will they/won’t they governments, propped up by the military, sort of propped up by the French.

Why were the French bothering? As far as the Séléka rebels and their supporters were concerned, it was diamonds and the promise of major oil concessions in rebel-held regions in the north that concerned Paris. But that elides too many psycho-political factors, to say nothing of the region’s macroeconomics, which surely played a greater role than a few shiny stones in the CARian outback.

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Here is the major quirk of Francafrique independence: After the liberation era, France’s former African colonies did not start minting their own currencies. Instead, they were bundled into two monetary unions, either the Communauté économique et monétaire de l’Afrique centrale (Central African Economic and Monetary Community), or the Union Économique et Monétaire Ouest Africaine (the West African Economic and Monetary Union).

Both blocs use a version of the CFA Franc, pegged at first to the French franc, and later to the euro. While each union has a central bank, CFA bank notes are printed by the Bank of France, and all member nations must keep just over 50 per cent of their central banks’ assets in the French Treasury.

These monetary policies are poorly understood outside of France and Francafrique, but they point to a vast and troubling problem: French Africans got the federation system exactly backward. On the economic front, colonialism was replaced by something stealthier and, in a way, more insidious. This form of monetary trusteeship linked African elites to the French political class in a toxic loop of interdependence.

In practice, it resulted in an unwritten arrangement in which the French military would prop up the government of the day, hold its nose until it couldn’t stand the stench, and then tacitly back regime change if it felt things were getting out of hand. In exchange, money flowed from African states into French political coffers, supporting the ambitions of a succession of men who hoped to take up residence in the Élysée Palace.

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This obscene deal has guaranteed more than seven decades of maniacal corruption, which had dirtied both French and African elites, the results of which are there for all to see. Despite the occasional telegenic protest, France remains a bucket-list holiday destination. The CAR, less so. While it’s tempting to describe the country at the time of the 2013 civil war as medieval, that would be an insult to medievalism. Driving through the country’s interior on rutted pathways only loosely qualifying as roads, one encountered children brandishing rifles, called bandaleka, standing sentry at roadblocks, while the jungly interior had no – as in, zero – electricity, services, or governance.

I met with a number of rebel leaders in the capital Bangui at the time of the war, and their grievances were simple: The (sort of) Muslim population in the north was cut out of the diamond and oil concessions that accrued to the (sort of) Christian leadership in the south. The regime in Bangui was legitimized by Western support, with the understanding this region belonged to the French, and was their sphere of influence.

But it was waning. During the pandemic, ominous reports started to emerge from the jungle. Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group, at the time a secretive private military contractor, was working in the CAR’s north, securing diamond concessions in exchange for providing muscle. This sort of arrangement was mirrored across French Africa – actors other than the French had started to infiltrate the barely licit commodities trade that had been the preserve of the French since anyone could remember. It hardly matters that Mr. Prigozhin’s life recently came to a particularly Russian end – across Francafrique, the landscape has been altered. Regime after regime has fallen because the ancient relationship between African and Parisian elites has irreversibly frayed.

This is all to ignore the particulars in countries such as Niger, Mali and Gabon, which have specific problems, which may not be shared across the bousculade. It also doesn’t help that the 10th parallel has indeed become a fault line, driving the Islamic north down into the Christian south, causing a slew of civil conflicts in which the French have insinuated themselves militarily, always with disastrous results.

The region has now tipped into something new, a moment where liberation from France becomes a possibility. But the negotiations will take place in an environment of deep chaos, where military juntas preside over a destabilized region, and the vacuum left by fading France is filled with something else, not yet named, and not yet defined. This is how history is made. Slowly at first, and then in a bousculade.

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The Decibel: Geoffrey York on the African upheaval