Is the European
colonization of Africa a thing of the past?
The easy answer is: yes. However,
the more complex and more honest answer is: no.
Officially, the colonizing forces of France left Africa
decades ago. And yet, the French
government continues to hold absolute
control over the currency and financial affairs of many African nations.
A common US/UK/EU justification for ongoing intervention
and control over Africa is that Western nations are helping
improve the economic, political and social conditions of nations in need. One can speculate on the
veracity of this, yet even so: can US/UK/EU domination of Africa truly be
seen as consensual, sustainable or beneficial in the long term?
Will France, the US/UK and other European nations ever
release their grip on Africa – and specifically, how can Africa gain
true independence from France’s financial gerrymandering?
14 African states once occupied by France, including Niger
and Ivory Coast, are still today tethered to the CFA Franc, which unlike the
dollar or euro, cannot be converted into other currencies. And as such, these 14 nations are excluded
from the International Foreign Exchange Market (FOREX), which is the largest
market for options in the world.
Furthermore, the “Central Bank of each of these African
countries is in fact compelled to maintain at least 50 percent (it was 65
percent until 2005) of its foreign exchange reserves in an "operations
account" controlled by the French Treasury. Moreover, each Central Bank is
required to maintain a foreign exchange cover of at least of 20 percent of its
liabilities.”
From an article entitled “Torpedoing
Africa, and then complaining about 'migration'” by Lorenzo Kamel:
It could be claimed that the countries that operate with these
currencies might freely leave the arrangement at any time. In truth, dozens of
African leaders, from Silvanus Olympio in Togo to Muammar Gaddafi in Libya,
have tried in recent decades to replace these tools of monetary and financial
control with a new common African currency. Almost all of them - with the
possible exception of Malian President Modibo Keïta (1915-77) - have been
killed or overthrown the very moment in which their attempts were close to
succeeding.
A year ago when I decided to begin research for my book Beyond Oppression: Colonization
and the Language of Heroes, I was thinking about how to write a
cohesive narrative speaking to the colonization of American Indians, and
Africans. It didn’t take long for me to
realize that in addition to a critical analysis on how colonial history has
almost entirely been told, at least in writing, by Europeans, I would have to
spend time exploring and dissecting how the legacy colonization permeates and
echoes into socioeconomic constructs present today, with a particular focus on modern
day prisons mirroring old world slave plantations, and how the Indian
reservation system keeps native people perpetually dispossessed.
Never ending dispossession – perhaps this has to do with
something Kenyan writer and intellectual Ngugi wa Thiong’o says in his book Decolonising the Mind. It’s a concept that he calls the “cultural
bomb” that brings down flaming hell on an occupied population, saying that
imperial powers and colonizers use cultural bombs “to annihilate a people’s
belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their
heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in
themselves.” And that this teaches the
[vanquished] indigenous population to “see their past as one wasteland of
non-achievement,” resulting in making “them want to distance themselves from
that wasteland.” The cultural bomb
deeply instills self-hate in every aspect of the original culture, so that they
“want to identify with that which is furthest removed” from their original
culture, likely to have been thousands of years old.
The culture bomb, Thiong’o says, also “plants serious
doubts about the moral righteousness of struggle,” and thus making ideas “of
triumph or victory” to be perceived “as remote, ridiculous dreams.” Ultimately the culture bomb achieves the goal
of “despair, despondency and a collective death-wish” within the enslaved
and/or colonized population.
But language can sometimes be a tricky thing. It’s not that all words are malleable and
subjective, yet as a culture evolves, so does its language, as does the
implication of certain words. And the
presence or absence of particular key word, like colonization, has strong
implications – sometimes political and financial, or even more far reaching.
The Economic Community of
West African States (ECOWAS) is a group of 15-member member states in the
West Africa region, “with a mandate of promoting economic integration in all
fields of activity of the constituting countries.” Thus far ECOWAS has not been successful in
creating its own currency.
At The
African Exponent, Takudzwa Hillary Chiwanza writes “Colonialism has now
disappeared from the continent but some of its problems are still haunting the
continent and have to be addressed.”
ECOWAS has been in existence since 1995, and with more time it may
provide a path toward deeper African autonomy and financial independence.
