Nicholas Sarkozy’s Unacceptable Speech (Dakar, Feb08)

It is probably written somewhere that between Paris and its former colonies in Black Africa, nothing should follow the norms accepted by the rest of the world. Nicolas Sarkozy’s brief visit to Senegal could have gone unnoticed; instead, it served as a pretext for him to make for an unacceptable speech, one which he would not have dared give outside France’s “pré-carré” (backyard) and in front of the most insignificant of his peers. In Tunisia and Algeria, he understood that it would be improper for him to behave as if he was in a conquered territory. In North Africa he could not even gain automatic access to the popular, folkloric and degrading reception that was reserved for him in Dakar. Within the context of Dakar that reminds one of the “commandants de cercle” of colonial times, he gave a sort of State of the Union address, that is, the State of the Union française, without anyone being able to reproach him for having mistaken the historical era.

However, one must not be swayed; for even though he claimed to address the whole African continent, he was not naïve enough to believe that his country’s position would cause ripples as far as Johannesburg, Mombasa or Maputo. If intellectuals from these regions have now paid attention to the remarks of the French president, it is because they have been given a brief summary of the president’s speech beforehand. Over the last few days, they have discovered, with bewilderment, the realities of Françafrique.

Their anger is understandable. Even in francophone countries where it has been thought that things had hit the rock bottom, everyone agrees that this time the limit has been breached. Being a relatively young and inexperienced head of State does not give anyone the right to be so irresponsible. When one leads a country as important as France, he or she cannot protract the lame game of “I-am-not-like-the-others.” This arrogance, displayed by a man who could be judged as still surprised by having so easily achieved his goal, led him to entertain the most distressing clichés of 19^th century ethnology in front of a particularly well-informed audience. Political science may one day take interest in this unique figure: a foreign president, from his height of 1.64 m, dares to condemn the inhabitants of an entire continent, calling upon them to distance themselves from nature in order to enter human history and invent their destiny. These statements, kept up to date by French authors anxious to comfort the prevalent Negrophobia, serve to comfort historical revisionism of colonialism, the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda and the slave trade.

The remarks “It is Africans who sold their compatriots to the slave traders” are grossly inappropriate and particularly disingenuous coming from the president of the Republic. They are an insult to the memory of the victims and a despicable moderation of the fundamental violence of the Transatlantic trade.

Never, in the history of humanity, has a nation oppressed another without the complicity, if not zeal, of the elite of the conquered nation. According to Robert Paxton, whose work on Vichy is a classic reference text, Adolf Hitler was not particularly interested in occupying the whole of France; he was primarily keen on neutralizing the country and turning it into an aerial base. It was the French state authorities of the time who actively pressured him to be more ambitious than the devil. Who else, but French writer Charles Maurras, saluted the entry of German tankers into Paris on June 14, 1940 as a “divine surprise”? The same principle applies to other parts of the world. Without the shameful hesitation of Moctezuma – a man of weak character at the head of the powerful Aztec empire – and the petty rivalries between the numerous Indian tribes, Hernan Cortès and his handful of conquistadors would not have succeeded in submitting almost the entire continent of what is today known as Latin America under their rule.

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(by Boubacar Boris Diop; from The Zeleza Post)