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France: The #1 Obstacle to Pan-Africanism
French President Emmanuel Macron elicited howls of derision when he declared himself a ‘true pan-Africanist’ at the recently concluded Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, Kenya. Under his rule, France’s once-iron grip on its former West African colonies has succumbed to a wave of popular revolt in one country after another. Leading the way are Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, whose Alliance of Sahel States took up the real pan-Africanist mantle by expelling French troops and embarking on a program of sovereign regional development.
Sovereign Media’s Ahmed Kaballo sat down with Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report to recount this history and its bizarre repercussions on the other side of the continent. Because in July 2023, as Niger completed the hat-trick of popular coups in the Sahel, Kenyan president William Ruto took the opportunity to audition for the role of East Africa’s most loyal Western asset. So began his road to perdition: endorsing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, enforcing imperialist diktats in Haiti, and finally embracing a French president so despised he can no longer convene a France-Africa summit anywhere in Francophone Africa.
But France, with its incurable colonial arrogance, will not accept defeat gracefully. As Kaballo reminds us, an unbroken chain of terroristic sabotage links its 1960 plot to destabilise Ahmed Sékou Touré’s Guinea to its alleged support for militant extremists in Mali today. And now Kenya is offering Macron a new base of operations in East Africa.
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