A transnational decolonisation: Britain, France and the Rhodesian problem, 1965–1969

Southern Rhodesia turned, in the 1960s and 1970s, into a very complex problem. Joanna Warson discusses the ways in which France’s African diplomacy attempted to have a role in the processes concerning a former British colony. She analyzes this unknown facet of a French Rhodesian policy and its effects on the British vision of decolonization. According to Warson, these French activities existed both at a state and private level, being comprised of direct military, financial, diplomatic and cultural involvement, and were crucial to the course of events on the ground and to the wider story of Anglo-French relations in the post-war era. In this context, France’s Rhodesian policy was (at least in part) shaped by its own experiences of decolonization in Francophone Africa, and thus closely intertwined with forces that crossed the Channel and the artificial national boundaries in Africa.

French coopération in the field of education (1960–1980): a story of disillusionment

Sami Mesly investigates the cultural dimension of continuities between France and various states of ‘Francophone Africa’, as expressed through the co-operation agreements between the independent governments and the French state under the Fifth Republic. These latter guaranteed, initially, a steady exchange between the partners in the field of education. As France’s former colonial territories in sub-Saharan Africa were suddenly confronted with a greatly reduced public budget, French financial help was crucial, in the early years after independence, both for the physical construction of a school infrastructure and for the deployment of thousands of coopérants who became an important part of the staff in African schools. As late as the early 1980s, this French presence remained very significant. It spanned the whole of school education, including the primary and secondary sector, technical education, and higher education (French funding was instrumental in the creation of African universities). Mesly points out that while it is obvious that the French effort has made a major contribution to the growth of the education sector on the African continent, French aid in education offers nevertheless an ambivalent picture. The programmes implemented were poorly adapted to local realities, which in the end led to the installation of a system conditioned by the French view of African populations and not by local needs.

Transfer of military power in Mauritania: from Ecouvillon to Lamantin (1958–1978)1

Camille Evrard discusses the transfer of military power in Mauritania during a long process of decolonization (between 1956 and 1977). Her approach links the history of institutions and politics, defined through state and system, with the perspectives held by individuals, notably by former military officers who served in the Sahara. The Mauritanian example, where French troops were over two decades actively engaged in counter-insurgency at the service of and in partnership with the Mauritanian government, is particularly instructive for an interpretation of the direct consequences of military decolonization. Evrard’s interpretation offers a scenario that had implications for actors on both sides, Mauritanian and French. On the one hand, French officials had to interact with local issues, and entered into what may be described as an experimental process of reorganizing their presence on the ground. On the other hand, they contributed to the Mauritanian vision of their own independence, to the ‘national identity’ of Mauritania, and to Mauritanian relations with neighbouring Morocco.

The French Army and Malian independence (1956–1961)

In Mali, as analyzed by Vincent Joly, military continuities led in 1961 to a real crisis. In January 1961 Modibo Keïta, the President of the independent country, enforced the evacuation of the remaining French troops. The worries of the Malian government had been intensified by French activities during the Algerian War and by French nuclear tests in the south of the Sahara. Under the pretext of Malian anger over French behaviour during the split of the Federation of Mali one year earlier, the government in Bamako – defender of increasingly ‘radical’ positions – gladly used this occasion to get rid of structures that effectively constituted a counterweight in the country. The new Malian political elite were particularly distrustful of the presence of the French military forces because French officials maintained close relations to army veterans and to the nomadic populations in the north of the country. Joly interprets the process leading to the 1961 crisis as characteristic of the complex decolonization processes, in which the French army had its own clients and networks in the now-independent countries.

French officials and the insecurities of change in sub-Saharan Africa: Dakar, 19 August 1960 revisited

How would French services operating on the ground, charged with ‘decolonizing’ African territories, adapt to the new situation? This question is posed by Alexander Keese with regard to a dramatic incident in the decolonization process, the August 1960 stand-off between Senegalese and Soudanese politicians and officials in Dakar, an event that led to the end of the short-lived Federation of Mali between Soudan (present-day Mali) and Senegal. French military commanders were still in charge of the vast majority of the armed forces in these former colonial territories. These commanders were faced with an unfamiliar process of decision-making. Keese analyses the behaviour of these remaining French representatives on the ground, and comes to a new interpretation of a crucial event in the early history of Franco-African networks.

A vocation for independence: Guinean nationalism in the 1950s

Mairi MacDonald addresses one of the most spectacular cases of a post-independence break with the Franco-African links and networks. In Guinea-Conakry, territorial leader Sékou Touré refused, already in 1958, to participate in Charles de Gaulle’s French Community project, and accepted French economic ‘punishment’ instead of entering into the forms of collaboration chosen by many of Guinea’s neighbours. However, the author shows the ambivalence behind a façade of an apparently clear case. MacDonald analyses the expectations that Sékou Touré and other Guinean nationalist leaders had of France in the 1950s, and sets them in contrast with the experiences of the postcolonial years. This discussion includes an interpretation of the shifting attitudes taken by Sékou Touré towards the French after 1960, between attempts at reconciliation and accusations of conspiracy and espionage.

Chad’s political violence at 50: bullets, ballots and bases

David Styan interprets the evolution of political violence in Chad between independence in 1960 and its fifty-year anniversary of 2010. Styan first looks at the successive phases of military rule and their effect on violent practices. The author argues that, given the repeated attempts to violently seize state power in N’Djamena, Chad is probably the least cohesive state produced by the decolonization of French Equatorial Africa in 1960. Styan links these observations to Idriss Déby’s efforts to extend his two decades as president through an electoral victory in 2011, in which the author sees a clear relationship between violence, power, and electoral legitimization. In this context, the chapter comes to the role of France’s ongoing political and military links with Chad, contributing to the maintenance and regulation of internal political violence. Styan notably questions the effects of the defence accords between N’Djamena and Paris, and of the presence of the French units of Opération Epervier, thereby linking post-colonial violence to supposedly neocolonial politics.

‘Saving French West Africa’: the French army, African soldiers and military propaganda during the 1950s1

Continuities of military structures and of protagonists within these structures are a particularly important aspect of the process of transforming colonial domination into the uneven partnerships of the post-colonial period. Ruth Ginio discusses in this context the role of the so-called tirailleurs sénégalais (becoming soldats africains), West African (veteran) soldiers mobilized by the French for service during the Second World War and the wars in Indochina and Algeria. Ginio shows that the necessities of the anticolonial revolts and widespread discontent among African soldiers in the aftermath of the campaigns in Europe in 1944/45, led to a strategic reorganization of the treatment of these individuals. Notably, the author analyses the contribution of French propaganda in the context of psychological action. The French military employed audiovisual means, namely cinema, to influence the African soldiers. Another aspect of this complex relationship was the priority given to attempts at separating the African units from the local populations during the campaigns – a strategy that did not work out in all cases. By the end of the colonial period, the experience of these various methods had, as Ginio argues, qualitatively changed the attitudes of African veterans. The latter would retain a bond to the military officers of the former colonial power beyond the threshold of independence.

The changing boundaries of resistance: the UPC and France in Cameroonian history and memory

Thomas Sharp elaborates on the case of the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), which became an underground guerilla movement in Cameroon after 1955. The UPC attempted in this period and well into the 1960s to build up an international anticolonial network, to mobilize against the structures of collusion between the Ahidjo Government and French institutions. Sharp notably offers a fresh interpretation of UPC activities between 1962 and 1966, which as a phase of the movement has not yet attracted scholarly interest. He links these experiences to the new situation of Cameroon under multi-party democracy from the 1990s, in which many opposition groups have attempted to ‘reveal’ this ‘hidden history’, as a method to secure international support for their political projects. This is especially true of secessionist Anglophone groups, whose leaders, like those of the UPC, claim to have been dispossessed of a ‘true’ independence by the continuation of neo-colonial relationships, as brutal and marginalizing practices.

Whitehall, the French Community and the Year of Africa: negotiating post-independence diplomacy in West Africa

Melanie Torrent highlights the perspective of British officials, who had to make sense of a process regarded as entirely different from their own experiences. The British impression was that, while they had efficiently planned their own retreat over a longer period, and guaranteed the survival of the Commonwealth, this stood in sharp contrast with the imperfections and the lack of vision inherent in the short-lived French ‘Community’ initiative (1958) from Paris. Torrent holds that the British believed their pattern of decolonization produced very different, more challenging but overall more equal and better relations between the former metropole and the newly independent African countries. There never was any suggestion to regard French policies as a model. Even so, according to Torrent’s interpretation, the French retreat from its former colonies internally put pressure on British officials, given that the Colonial Office was still in charge of affairs in Sierra Leone and the Gambia, and that the conflict-ridden situation in large parts of the territories of Eastern and Southern Africa was still unresolved.