WHY AFRICANS SHOULD TAKE OFFENSE AT NICOLAS SARKOZY’S SPEECH (IN DAKAR)

It is perhaps written somewhere that between France and its former colonies nothing should be done according to the rules the rest of the world abides by. Nicolas Sarkozy’s short visit to Senegal could have gone unnoticed, had he not used it as a pretext to deliver an intolerable speech in front of the most insignificant of his peers, something he would have never done outside Paris’s pré-carré (France’s neocolonial pet countries in Africa). In Tunisia and Algeria, he understood quite well that he would not be allowed to act as if he were in conquered territory. Actually in the Maghreb, Sarkozy didn’t enjoy the popular and excessively folkloric welcome he was given in Dakar. In an atmosphere calling to mind the bygone period of colonial district administrators, he delivered an anachronistic speech on something like the “State of the French Union,” knowing that no one among his listeners would bother to provide him with the proper historical lenses. One should not, however, take his audacity at face value: even though he was pretending to speak to Africa as a whole, Sarkozy is not so naïve as to delude himself into believing that his voice would be heard as far as Johannesburg, Mombasa or Maputo. If, for once, intellectuals in that part of the continent are paying attention to the words of a French president, it is because someone took the trouble to sum it up for them. For the last couple of days, they have been in a state of shock after coming to grips with the troubling realities of Françafrique. Their anger is understandable: even in our francophone countries, where it has been long thought that the bitter cup of neocolonial humiliation was drunk down to the dregs, everybody agrees that this time things have gone too far.

One could argue that Sarkozy is a relatively young and inexperienced statesman, and so his foolhardy childishness can be excused. But when you lead a country like France, you can’t afford to indulge too much in the me-I’m-not like-the-others attitude. Such a lack of humility, coming from a man who seems to be still overwhelmed by the easy achievement of his lifelong dream, has led him to regurgitate, in front of a particularly sensitive crowd, all the inanities and fairly dated clichés of 19th century colonial ethnology. Political scientists may one day find some interest in this truly unique case: a dwarfish foreign president condescendingly prosecuting, from the height of his five-foot pulpit, the case of African people, whom he urges to move away from nature so as to ride with the tide of world history and create their own destiny. These well-worn statements, which have been refurbished by a bunch of French intellectuals primarily interested in catering to the negrophobic bias so predominant in present-day France, were pressed into service to bolster a revisionist reading of colonization, the Rwanda genocide and the slave trade. The sentence, “It was Africans who sold their African brothers and sisters to slave traders,” is a stinking lie. It is simply unbecoming for a president to say such things which are an offense to the memory of the victims and an outrageous relativization of the sheer violence of slavery. No nation has ever, in the history of humankind, oppressed another nation without the complicity, at times overzealous, of the conquered land’s elite. According to Robert Paxton, whose work on Vichy is a mandatory reference, Hitler was not really going for a total occupation of France; he saw no point in that: he just wanted to neutralize it and use it as a home base. The French authorities themselves urged him to be much more ambitious than that. Wasn’t it Charles Maurras who hailed as a “divine surprise” the entry of German tanks into Paris on June 14, 1940? The same holds true for other parts of the world. Were it not for the fateful hesitations of Montezuma—a weak-willed man reigning over the powerful Aztec empire—and the support of dignitaries in many Indian tribes, Hernan Cortes and his handful of conquistadors would not have succeeded in ruling over the quasi-totality of Latin America.

The French president has a knack for making himself insufferable, but this time he has not only aroused the indignation of Africans in the notorious pays du champ (vassal African states remote-controlled by France), but also of many continental Africans and descendants of enslaved Africans in the diaspora who will ask themselves this question: How come a European leader can afford to make such public statements on the slave trade, and, adding insult to injury, on African soil, the crime scene itself? How come, really? The reference to Césaire will not do; comparison is not proof. And what’s more, while he was pretending to be stirred by the evocation of Césaire’s “the sound of one thrown overboard,” at the same time a Black—or an Arab—was cuffed and beaten senseless in Roissy airport.

In Dakar, the French president refused to call the university by its name, no doubt because it would have cost him too much effort to pronounce the name Cheikh Anta Diop. This attitude only compounds his pettiness, to say the least. It lays bare the limitations of a man seemingly bent on showing, on that day, that he could talk, in a different tone, about things other than “the scum of the slums” and “Kärcher clean-up.” He may have been carried away by his desire to commune with a public he knows is entertaining strong feelings about him. The tailor-made suit he designed for himself (I’m young and I speak to you, young African) belies, in passing, a real lack of tactfulness and respect for his most venerable host, the octogenarian president of Senegal.

We will not have the indelicacy to point out to Sarkozy that for us the use of the colloquial “you” brings back bad memories. This is however of lesser import than his repeated use of a presumptuous “I.” One must be indeed conceited to think that neither life, nor their parents, nor their professors have ever imparted young Africans with any knowledge, that a gap has always separated them from the Truth and that he, Nicolas Sarkozy, was going to fill it on that historic July 26, 2007, once for all. But the least politically conscious student among the attendees had read and analyzed, over and over, Discourse on Colonialism and taken note of Césaire’s minute, concise and accurate rebuttal of every argument brought up by Sarkozy. The latter may not be aware of it, but his Dakar speech is way older than himself. You can always claim to be definitely turned toward the future, while in fact you are just lost in the contemplation of your own past.

Nicolas Sarkozy also saw fit to invite his audience to distinguish between the “good” and the “bad” colonizers. Would he have it that Germans today apply the same reading framework to one painful chapter in the history of his country? Germany occupied France for only five years—and under conditions that were far less cruel than colonization—but we have yet to see the day when, instead of reflecting on a foreign, violent and illegitimate system of domination, someone will have the gall to separate the well-meaning Nazis from the others.

In his enumeration of the ills that have plagued the African continent, Sarkozy discreetly mentioned the “genocides” for which colonization can in no way be held “accountable.” Let us make a pause here, as always when we encounter the word “genocide” used in the plural by a French government official. The new president came to power in a context of highly tense relationships between Paris and Kigali. France’s involvement in the genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda has been so well documented that one senses sometimes among certain French authorities something like a pressing need to confess the crime and get over this burdensome guilt-feeling. Actually, there is no room left for another course of action in this difficult case; it is the only sensible one. Unfortunately, Paris runs the risk, in so doing, of prying open the Pandora box of Françafrique’s bloody excesses. To get away with it, some try to propagate the idea that Rwanda was, all in all, nothing but another African genocide and that it would be wrong to make a meal out of it. Before Sarkozy, François Mitterand and Dominique de Villepin—to name but these two—had tried to shrug off the millions of Rwandans who died during the genocide. However, this strange theory of quasi-routine “final solutions” in Africa flies in the face of historical evidence. As a matter of fact, genocide, considered to be the absolute crime by the community of nations, has been strictly defined by the 1948 Geneva Convention. Under the latter, the only genocide on the African continent in the twentieth century is the 1994 Rwanda genocide. The two others, the Shoah and the Armenian genocide, took place in Europe and the fourth in Cambodia. Sarkozy cannot be ignorant of these basic facts. So it is on purpose that he tried to entertain confusion regarding this painful matter, which deserves better than a mere political treatment.

Curiously enough, the speaker was more concerned about our distant past than about the present. Not once did he allude to Françafrique, thus sidestepping this long-standing issue, “the longest scandal of the Republic,” in the words of the late François-Xavier Verschave. Everybody was anxious to hear Sarkozy on this count, for there is surely much to be said about France’s neocolonial policy in Africa since the early sixties. Sarkozy is well aware of the fact that after granting them sham independences, France kept a tight hold on the economic levers and the political leadership of its former colonies through military coups and support to dictatorial regimes. It has been like that since De Gaulle and his successors who, whether they are from the left or the right, have always stuck to a code of conduct that is, in the final analysis, very advantageous: benumbing slick-talking and parlaying in golden wood-paneled palaces and, behind the scenes, the language of crude force, with the inexorable dirty tricks and political shenanigans of various secret networks and services, military interventions and the targeted assassinations of political figures.

In any event, we did not expect Sarkozy to publicly voice any regret for his country’s involvement—by now an established and indisputable fact—in the Rwanda genocide; nor did we expect him to indulge, in a sudden fit of sincerity, in a soul-searching confession on the role played by Elf and some big financial groups—with which he is said to have close ties—in the plunder of Africa’s resources. Nobody, even in their wildest dreams, has ever hoped for any dramatic confession of this kind: in the real world, things are never like that. And still, who has not, in the last couple of weeks, found themselves on the look-out for a sign suggestive of some budding change? Things are so rotten in the higher spheres of Françafrique that its players know it is irredeemably doomed, that the end is drawing nigh. For nearly fifteen years, warnings have been issued more than once, from Rwanda to Ivory Coast, including the tumultuous succession of Eyadema in Togo. It would have been a clever move on Sarkozy’s part to pass for a bold reformist by making virtue out of necessity. But even this little step forward, prompted by a lucid analysis of contemporary realities and of changes taking place in so-called French-speaking Africa, has seemed too bold a move for Françafrique’s moguls. The presidential candidate Sarkozy thought he could simply declare, “France doesn’t need Africa”—just for the thrill of it; but it must not have been hard to show him how reckless and detrimental such statements can be. His deafening silence on Françafrique proves clearly that he doesn’t intend to initiate a politics of rupture which would embarrass Idriss Deby, Sassou Nguesso and, above all, his old accomplice Omar Bongo. Also, let us not forget the new friends he will soon make: it is said that current young presidents and freshly designated heirs still in political infancy are bumping into each other at the gates…

All these collaborators have heard him cast aside any notion of atonement on the very day of his election, and they will never dare annoy him by mentioning this most sensitive of all issues. Of all European powers, France is the only one which entertains this nearly obsessional relationship with its colonial past. MPs pass, with incredible candor, negationist laws and its political class seems to regard the issue of atonement as a state affair of the utmost importance. One is tempted to simply tell all these people that it is time they sober up. To atone for the crimes of one’s ancestors is a moral act that only the inner voice of consciousness can urge a human being to perform. For this very reason, it is an act that loses all authenticity if it results from an external injunction. Although it will never reawaken the dead or completely heal the wounds of the past, such an act can nevertheless impart moral greatness to those who can raise themselves to such a level and foster reconciliation and mutual understanding among the younger generations. Now if one doesn’t have the strength to repent, one should at least have the decency to keep one’s mouth shut. When Nicolas Sarkozy emphatically declares, “Young Africans, I have not come to speak to you of atonement”, he operates an impossible role-reversal. It is the victim’s prerogative, not the torturer’s, to decide whether or not the issue of so ignominious crimes should be addressed. The torturer’s dogged insistence on his refusal to repent is, simply put, a psychopathological symptom. A country whose leaders and so many of its citizens can relate to their past only through this compulsive, balking denial is necessarily sick and caught up in an uneasy double-bind. Such a morally beleaguered country deserves, more than contempt, our deepest compassion.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s irreverent attitude toward the slave trade can easily make one lose sight of the fact that over many centuries it has caused more than 200 millions victims. The latter figure is provided by Senghor himself—in the major work Janet G. Vaillant, an American academic, devotes to his life. Senghor was little inclined to make lofty overstatements, and in a letter to his biographer, he calmly explains why the “ebony traffic” still heavily weighs down on both the present and future of Africa. More than once, Nicolas Sarkozy quoted the poet of Joal in flattering terms. Ironically, it is quite unlikely that Senghor—whatever one may think of him—would have allowed a guest to make such inflammatory comments on that July 26 without talking back, one way or the other. Being a skilled politician didn’t prevent him from nurturing a certain pride and an acute sense of history.

Beyond the master/slave relationship, Sarkozy may entertain with the sycophantic, ingratiating figureheads of Françafrique that what happened in Dakar should bring the francophone intellectual community to its feet. The disenchanting shortcomings of the independences—monopartism, infallible-leaders-of-the-nation, epidemics of military coups and corruption—have led some authors to formulate a scathing critical discourse on Africa. From the late 80’s onwards, our well-meaning sociologists, philosophers and historians published scores of texts purported to diagnose the chronic disease that is plaguing Africa and to create the psychological conditions for a real collective stand against the status quo. Novelists on their part, in less elaborate terms but often motivated by the same desire to jolt Africa out of its lethargy, were bashing postcolonial political systems—with the exaggeration and magnifying-glass effects that are fiction’s stock-in-trade. Unfortunately, all these people tended to conflate African state with African society. The latter, for simply staying true to itself, was suspected of harboring the seeds of its own destruction, which was at that time more than once heralded by some “disaster specialists”—then immediately postponed sine die. This is a perfect example of a purely essentialist view on African society, seen as the proverbial snake turning around itself and biting its tail with an exasperating monotony. Overlooking the actual internal political dynamics and the decisive impact of the French state on the struggles for power waged in each of its former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, intellectuals were focusing their reflection, with a manic obstinacy, on the visible effects of the disaster, thereby failing to probe the underlying root causes. The critical literature and the literary works which resulted from this misleading perception of continental realities, supposedly meant for an African readership, were mostly read by Westerners, who delighted in the exquisite feeling of innocence these books gave them. Our authors were thus, without meaning it, paving the way for a negrophobia that is today a little bit more subdued and less inhibited but which can be at times crude and offensive. Within only a few years, afropessimism had been, so to speak, racialized and divested of the liberating energy it was potentially entailing. In France and other Western countries, essayists claiming to be knowledgeable about Africa have largely used afropessimism to breathe new life into the most ludicrous preconceived ideas about the continent. More often than not, they pressed these books into service to bolster their claims and convince a rather unsuspecting public that they had no vested interests or hidden agenda. Indeed, it was hard to accuse them of racism since they were merely taking up the analyses of their colleagues in Dakar, Yaoundé or Abidjan.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s statements neatly dovetail with this loose Africanist discourse quick to vituperate against the overemphasis on competing memories and the alleged tendency of Blacks to present themselves as the eternal victims of others. His Agen meeting, held on June 25, 2006, brings to light his close ties with these pseudo-Africanists. In a virulent speech, Sarkozy railed against “those who have deliberately chosen to live on the labor of others; those who think they are entitled to everything and have no duties toward the others; those who want everything at once without doing anything; those who, instead of rolling up their sleeves and working to earn a living, prefer to look in the footnotes to our country’s history for an imaginary debt France is supposed to owe them and that in their view is still to be settled; those who prefer to exacerbate the proliferation of particular memories to pressure for a compensation nobody owes them, instead of trying to integrate society on their own merits, through hard work; those who don’t like France and want to exact everything from her without giving her anything in return… Now let me tell them one thing: nobody is forcing them to remain on the national territory.” Four days earlier, he was a guest on the talk-show Culture et dépendances, hosted by Franz-Olivier Giesbert. Here is what he said, word for word, with his usual cocksure arrogance: “I’ve received the Malian father and brother [of one of the two young men electrocuted in an EDF generator where they sought refuge while trying to escape two chasing policemen, a tragic event which triggered the November 2005 riots]. The father, who has been living in France for thirty years, didn’t speak in French. The son, who was born in France and goes back to Mali only during holidays, was wearing a boubou [an African ceremonial cloth].”

That this political leader could have held against these Malian immigrants, mourning the death of their child and brother, the wearing of a boubou and not speaking in French, shows the extent to which he has only contempt for Africans and African culture. It would be, however, mistaken to overlook the fact that many people in France think exactly the same. Sarkozy’s Dakar speech has drawn so much attention because he is the president of France, but he didn’t say anything that, during the last decade, wasn’t heard or read from European intellectuals and, sadly enough, from African thinkers as well. For afropessimism, a rather fuzzy philosophical school that it is nearly impossible to define accurately, the time has come to reconsider some of its premises. From one part of Africa to another, nay, from one country to another, complex and fascinating historical processes are taking place. It would be quite fitting to bring under close scrutiny these contemporary phenomena, without resorting to reductive presuppositions. To put it another way, it is not an either/or case between a stultifying celebration of the continent’s “glorious past” and its unbridled vilification. These are two similar ways of locking ourselves into a pernicious stand-off with a Western world that is too often called upon to recognize our “good old days” or our “curse”—in the name of what? There is nothing wrong in formulating a critique of African societies, but it is crucial that we know exactly whom we are speaking to. And if we don’t find the best way to speak primarily to Africans, things will remain the same and the sufferings our people are going through will never end.

One is curious to know what the French president himself, in his twisted mind, thinks he has achieved with this blitz visit to Senegal. Could it be that he has sensed how deeply offended we have felt? From a strictly political standpoint, his speech is a blunder. He will realize in due course that Africans and Black people from the diaspora will never forgive him. The old habit of talking politics with a forked tongue would have better served the interests of his country. It would have spared him these oratorical theatrics which were in such bad taste that at times they verged on the pathetic. In the end, one is almost tempted to thank Nicolas Sarkozy for having brought us, willy-nilly, the good news: since May 16, 2007, in Françafrique the King is null and void.

Notes and References

1 This essay was first published in Le Quotidien (August 10-11, 2007), the Senegalese journal which has kindly granted us permission to republish it in translation. We must thank author Boubacar Boris Diop, Babacar Diop of Le Quotidien and translator El Hadji Moustapha Diop for enabling us to make this statement available in English.