Coups in Francophone Africa: Imperialism without an empire?

By Akinyemi Oyawale On the 5th of September (this year), I received a WhatsApp message with a link from a friend which conveyed the tragic but quite common news that there had been an apparent coup in Guinea. On Paul Eckman’s original range of emotions that humans could experience, I experienced sadness, disgust, fear, and […]

By Akinyemi Oyawale

On the 5th of September (this year), I received a WhatsApp message with a link from a friend which conveyed the tragic but quite common news that there had been an apparent coup in Guinea. On Paul Eckman’s original range of emotions that humans could experience, I experienced sadness, disgust, fear, and anger, and obviously, since I was very sad, I couldn’t be happy – axiomatic, I believe – but what’s more important was that surprise was unsurprisingly not one of these emotions.

The recent Guinean putsch had much of the hallmarks of African coups. It was carried out by a group of relatively young military officers against an ageing octogenarian president who had been democratically elected in 2010 and returned in 2015 and 2020, with the latest re-election an apparent pursuit of presidential immortality. Condé had followed the well-trodden but perilous path of term extension in 2020 through a referendum – some would say it was a sham. The coup plotters had broadcast their take-over through traditional mediums and had advanced a well-known narrative of a Manichean dichotomy where they were the ‘good guys’ who were patriotic, incorrupt, and selfless among others, with their vanquished foe – the ‘bad guys’ – occupying the binary opposite of being everything they weren’t, such as unpatriotic, corrupt, and selfish, among others.

Of course, we could also extend this further to find commonalities with other former French colonies (Guinea being a former French colony) and the ringleader of the coup Lt Col (now Col.) Mamady Doumbouya belonged to an elite unit and was a former French legion. While there have been several former legions that have been involved in coups, another notable one is General Gilbert Diendere, a former senior military chief to Blaise Compaoré, who spearheaded failed coup against Burkina Faso’s transitional government of President Michel Kafando. What is more, he was involved in the assassination of Sankara in a coup which brought Blaise Compaoré to power in 1987. So, what is the French Foreign Legion and why are these affiliations important?

The French Foreign Legion or Légion étrangère is a mercenary force that is an integral part of the French Army. It is often deridingly called an army of ‘thieves and cutthroats’ or a ‘band of killers’ and it (in)famously advertises itself to potential recruits as ‘the second chance of life’, i.e., a second chance to those who have blown their first chances at life, which it why it boasts of many ex-convicts within its ranks. However, being an arm of the French Army, the ‘foreign’ in its name does not imply a focus on foreign battles but rather, it is self-referential, to the Foreign Legion itself through its membership being mostly ‘foreigners’. Its motto ‘Legio Patria Nostra’ meaning ‘the Legion is our Homeland’ indicates that recruits do not swear allegiance to France but to the legion, and you may want to ask where the allegiance of the legion itself lies? Rather than being a finality in and for itself – it is largely an arm of the French Army which is the apex military institution of France – the legion is a vestige of colonialism which remains as an intelligently designed military component of French imperialism. How has this been made possible without a formal empire?

French post-colonial engagement with sub-Saharan African countries can be separated into two main spheres of ‘cooperation’ and ‘intervention’, which may be construed as two-means to the same end. Informally, the former can be traced to pre-colonial treaties while formally, it was established through the French Ministry of Co-operation as part of post-independence agreements. The latter has a similar history of militarism and some of us may remember the dramatisation of Sarraounia’s – a great Hausa warrior queen – heroism against the Paul Voulet and Julien Chanoine led French expedition to conquer Lake Chad Basin in 1899. Overt interventions have remained even after independence, such as Operations Caban and Barracuda in the Central African Republic (CAR) which morphed from protection – of French citizens – through intervention (removal of infamous despot and former French army officer, Bokassa I) to assistance (French Elements of Operational Assistance). Thus, both cooperation/assistance and intervention are mutually reinforcing and constitute two sides of an imperialist coin; they make each other possible and have been selectively sought by African elites at different times.

To understand the ‘foreignness’ of the legion, we must unpack its origin and main objectives. It was established by King Louis-Philippe on March 9, 1831, as a military unit to aid French colonial enterprise in Algeria – invaded in 1832 by France – which made both the initial imperialist and colonialist objectives clear. The legion has since been involved in brutal interventions, invasions, and suppressions across the world, most notably in North Africa, Indochina, and sub-Saharan Africa. While it may not surprise you that France has militarily intervened on African soil than any other external power – there were 19 military interventions between 1962 and 1995 – what may be less obvious is not only how the earlier cooperation-intervention nexus is crucial to the sustenance of imperialism but more importantly, how violence and counter-violence in Africa may occur without a direct evidence of an imperial smoking gun.

The legion was ‘foreign’, in that it sought to bring ‘foreign’ lands under French colonialism by enlisting ‘foreign’ fighters (obviously alongside its French officers), but it has remained to perpetuate French imperialism even after formal colonialism though empire has been abrogated. By exposing ‘foreign’ men, especially Africans with dodgy resumes of elite training, French military doctrine, Eurocentric ideology, and access to power on a continent where democracy is yet to be ‘consolidated’, outside active foreign meddling by France, coups d’état can become permissive where cause (French order) and effect (coups) aren’t directly linkable.

Within the realm of discourse, much can be unpacked; what about the politics of memory, where power memorialises as it finds suitable? For example, the shifting memorialisation of the 1961 massacre of Algerians in the heart of Paris with the eventual acknowledgement of ‘inexcusable’ atrocities by French law enforcement agents by Macron. Sarkozy’s opposition to extraversion or what has become known as ‘Françafrique’, which would discontinue France’s support for controversial dubious, corrupt, self-serving and illegitimate governments and leaders in Africa, or Marine Le Pen’s ‘hands-off’ populist rhetoric, all reflect the centrality of Africa to French national identity. And just as in de Gaulle’s France, what is done with or to Africa is of utmost importance. Similarly, the leaders of many former French colonies in Africa subsist on this patron-client system in what Jean-Francois Bayart has called extraversion, where African leaders mobilise resources and influences obtained from their asymmetric political and economic relationships with external actors to serve their personal interests. Some leaders wouldn’t last a fortnight without external ‘propping up’ which stifles political growth by weakening the will of the people.

In the realm of economics, 14 former French colonies must save half, i.e. 50 per cent of their foreign reserves with Banque de France with their currencies, the CFA, pegged to the Euro. For context, Nigeria’s foreign reserve today is 34.8 billion dollars meaning that Nigeria would have had to save 50 per cent, i.e. 17.4 billion dollars in the Bank of England (BoE). This economic chokehold was evident in the aggressive response of Charles De Gaulle’s France to Guinea’s president, Seikou Touré’s referendum to not join the Communauté Financière Africaine (CFA) at inception in 1958. 

De Gaulle instructed French expats to exit Guinea immediately which resulted in a massive exodus of over 4,000 French personnel mainly in the health, education and agricultural sectors, leaving behind a trail of widespread destruction including burning of books, demolition of buildings and farmlands, etc in what was termed ‘un divorce sans pension alimentaire’, i.e., a colonial divorce without alimony. This wasn’t mere wanton violence but rather a symbolic message to other newly independent states that the divorce from their (post-)colonial ‘overlords’ could get very ugly, and that complete disengagement would be perilous. Whereas, this economic dependency constitutes a significant neo-colonial challenge, it must be emphasised that it is not the sole bane of political and economic turmoil in most of these countries. Attention must be paid to how the ‘colonial tax’ rhetoric may be discursively deployed by political elites to excuse various forms of poor leadership, thus shifting responsibility to an external power but still desiring external military support, as was evident with Mali’s prime minister, Choguel Kokalla Maiga’s claim of abandonment due to the announced restructuring of Operation Barkhane.