In August 2022, France’s President Emmanuel Macron went on a major visit to the north African country of Algeria. As part of the tour, Macron visited the coastal city of Oran, where he drove out to see Disco Maghreb – the home of raï music. Raï, which means opinion or advice, refers to a musical genre developed in Oran out of popular wedding music performed with hand drums, flutes and clapping. With the influence of Egyptian popular music and new instruments from the trumpet to the guitar, raï or wahrani music took up modern themes of love and despair, and of course politics. With the start of the anti-colonial war led by the National Liberation Front (FLN), raï singers were encouraged by the FLN and by society to sing about the struggle. In the 1964 song called El Khayene, Ahmad Saber sang, O traitor, your days are numbered. No matter how long it takes us, we will hold you to account! It was to the home of this form of music that Macron had come.
After his brief stop at Disco Maghreb, Macron was expected to get into his car and drive off. Seeing a crowd at the other end of the street, Macron decided to walk over and greet them. But, as he did so, his security detail sensed the crowd’s mood and tried to remove him. Before that could happen, the crowd began to chant old anti-colonial slogans, viva l’Algérie, and then, ‘We are against France. It has done us a lot of harm. We don’t want Macron here’ (On est contre la France, elle nous a fait beaucoup de mal. On ne veut pas de Macron ici). Somebody spat at Macron and he was hastily guided out of the melee.
The mood in Africa
Macron’s failed walk in Oran indicates the mood not only in Algeria, which had been the heart of the French empire in Africa from 1830 to 1962, but across the Sahel region from Senegal to Chad. In late November 2024, the governments of Chad and the Sahel announced separately that they had ended their military cooperation agreements with France, and that they wanted France to withdraw its troops from their territories. These statements came after the governments of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger had made similar decisions over the past two years. Now, from the coast of the Atlantic to the western border of Sudan, a distance of about 6,000 kilometres (six times the longest length of France), there will be no French troops for the first time since the 17th century.
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The key word in both Chad and Senegal is sovereignty. Chad’s foreign minister Abderaman Koulamallah said that his country must ‘assert its full sovereignty’ and ask France to withdraw its troops. On the 80th anniversary of the French massacre of West African troops at Thiaroye in 1944 (immortalised in Ousmane Sembène’s 1988 film Campe de Tiaroye), Senegal’s President Bassirou Diomaye Faye said, ‘Sovereignty does not allow for foreign military presence on our soil’.
What these leaders of different political persuasions affirm is the 2016 resolution by the African Union’s Peace and Security Council, which noted ‘with deep concern the existence of foreign military bases’ and urged member states to be ‘circumspect’ when they enter into agreements with foreign countries.
At that time, the United States had 29 known military facilities in 15 countries on the African continent, while France had bases in 10 countries. No other country from outside the continent had a base in Africa. Chad has asked France to withdraw its 1,000 soldiers from the country, while Senegal’s president has merely said it is inappropriate for France to have 350 soldiers within Senegal’s territory. There is no timetable for this withdrawal, but France expects to move its troops to Côte d’Ivoire (where it had intervened militarily in 2011 to install Alassane Ouattara, the current president who is in his third term).
‘France, get out’
France Dégage or France, get out! is a broad movement that goes far beyond the call for the exit of France’s military in the Sahel region. What these protests reveal is the depth of French control of what had once been its colony.
‘Independence’ in 1960 meant that the countries of West Africa and the Sahel, which had been French colonies, became members of the French Community (Communauté française), established in 1958, and through that short-lived organisation adopted various institutions that kept them under the control of the French government.
Three of these aspects that kept West Africa and the Sahel in the French neo-colonial structure were:
- The CFA Franc (the colonial currency imposed on the region that is controlled by the Banque de France),
- The freedom of operation by French corporations to extract raw materials,
- The presence at any time of French troops along this region of Africa.
The term France Dégage refers not only to the removal of the military but to the removal of the CFA Franc and French corporate domination.
During Senegal’s protests in 2011, several journalists and musicians formed the platform Y’en a marre (Fed Up). Over the years, this platform has articulated a strong position from Senegal to Benin to Mali against both the CFA Franc and against the presence of French corporations.
‘We cannot call ourselves sovereign and depend on a currency like the CFA Franc’, said Simon Kouka of Y’en a marre in 2017 in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. ‘Auchan Dégage’ said the signs next year across Senegal, to protest the presence of the French retail giant Auchan. In the years that followed, signs to protest the Economic Partnership Agreements (APE) between the European Union and the countries of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific – namely, all the French colonies from French Guiana (South America) to New Caledonia (Southwest Pacific Ocean) – came up.
The election of Bassirou Diomaye Faye to the presidency of Senegal in 2024 has as much consequence for the development of sovereignty as a keyword of politics as the popular military coups in Burkina Faso (January and September 2022), Mali (2021 and 2022), and Niger (2023).
French President Emmanuel Macron standing with leaders from the African Development Bank. Photo: X/@EmmanuelMacron
President Diomaye, as he is known, comes from the group PASTEF (African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics, and Fraternity), whose founder (2014) Ousmane Sonko is now the country’s prime minister. Both Diomaye and Sonko were tax inspectors, and both emerged out of deep frustration with the failure to tax the Senegalese wealthy and the foreign corporations and with the existence of the CFA Franc.
Sonko and Diomaye, through PASTEF, formed several coalitions (including Yewwi askan wi or Free the People) that brought together those angered by the CFA Franc, the dominant role of French corporations, and the French military. There is very little that differentiates the politics of the governments that emerged from popular military coups and from the election of Diomaye and Sonko in Senegal: they all stand for sovereignty over all else. As Maïmouna Dieye, the minister of family and solidarity in Senegal, told me, ‘We want to put the Senegalese people first. Not the International Monetary Fund, but the people of our country’.
While Chad was courted heavily by the French and seen as a bulwark against the mood in the Sahel, its president, Mahamat Déby, and Prime Minister Allamaye Halina appointed Abderaman Koulamallah as the foreign minister. Koulamallah, born in 1955, comes from a long tradition of pan-African socialism that started with the African Socialist Movement (MSA) and went through the Democratic Union for Change (UDC) and the Union of Resistance Forces (UFR) to bring a strong advocacy for sovereignty against the French to Chadian politics. It was impossible for Chad to be immune to the development of France Dégage in the region.
African sovereignty
The mood across the Sahel is against the constraint of sovereignty of the region by French colonialism. That defines the unities that are growing below the Sahara Desert between political forces that are entirely different from one another. None of these governments are explicitly socialist, but each of them is committed to the defence of their sovereignty. To genuinely defend sovereignty means to fight for monetary independence, to be able to make decisions about which foreign corporations can operate in one’s country and under what legal requirements, and to deny foreign militaries the right to use one’s territory for their interests and not your own. These decisions have already put the countries of the Sahel in a direct confrontation with France, at the very least, if not with the United States, which has the world’s largest drone base in Agadez, Niger.
The first major test these governments will face is how they will deal with the confrontation: will they surrender to the pressure, or will they find the strength necessary to face the threats?
The second major test that they will face is whether they will find the means to solve the immediate problems of the people that welcomed their coups and their elections; if they cannot deal with the immense social and economic problems, including the jihadist insurgency in the north of Burkina Faso and Mali, then they will face a hostile population that will be unwilling to support their confrontation with France and the United States. These two tests are already upon these countries.
The Conference in Solidarity with the Peoples of the Sahel, held in Niamey (Niger) in the Mahatma Gandhi Hall between November 19 and 21, was an example of the strong anti-imperialism of these governments. The Niamey Declaration released from the Conference affirmed that the governments of the Sahel will not easily buckle before their tests. ‘These governments currently enjoy widespread support from their citizens, who drive and rally around these revolutionary actions’, says the Niamey Declaration. ‘This unity is crucial for achieving democratic and patriotic ideals and is an aspirational development model for other African nations’.
Vijay Prashad is the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and editor of LeftWord Books (India), Inkani Books (South Africa), and La Trocha (Chile). He has reported from across the Sahel for the past decade. He lives in Santiago, Chile.
