frindéthié

“Does Anyone Out There Love Me?”

June 19, 2009 · Leave a Comment

 

 

"Does Anyone Out There Love Me?" Is the Quintessential Cry of The Black Ego in Search of White Jouissance

"Does Anyone Out There Love Me?" Is the Quintessential Cry of The Black Ego in Search of White Jouissance

In the process of their education and of their functioning within colonial society, [the black elites] seem to have internalized and believed the malicious view of the black man’s past concocted and propagated by those who sought to distort and hide that past.

Chinweizu—The West and the Rest of Us[i]

 

“Does anyone out there love me?” asks the black ego in the theater of globalization. The ego of this interrogation, Jean-Luc Marion tells us, “addresses love like a poor man, who with fear in his gut because he is penniless, never imagines he could be dealing with anyone but usurers, each more pitiless and rapacious than the one before.” Assurance being for him more costly than certainty, he is ready to sacrifice more knowledge and tolerate more ascesis to leave the hyperbolic doubt that assails him with the heaviness that only Truth possesses.[ii] The ego of this interrogation is ready to pay the price of assurance; any price for assurance. What he expects in return for this price is honest exchange, that is, reciprocity. This, he will never get as long as he is so uncertain, so self-deprecating. Does he know it? The other, his lack, has already taken tenfold the price agreed upon and still has delivered nothing approaching reciprocity. The ego has noticed that. He has noticed that each time he pays the asked price for love, love is redefined and pushed further out of his reach, and made pricier, too. The lack taunts him from the core. And from the periphery where he stands, the black ego sees the distance to the core increase exponentially each day, each hour. Why does the black ego keep on giving? Why does he submit to the blackmail of his lack? He is henceforth merely a panicked ego; and a panicked ego in search of assurance does not think rationally. Irrationality is the fundamental mode of the ego in panic; compulsion is what characterizes his action. This is why he is willing to pay a thousand times the tenfold that has yet to yield anything close of reciprocity. The black ego in panic will steal, rob, lie, cut, sell abroad, and kill; he will launch in all sorts of acrobatics and contortions for assurance that will never come, precisely because he has revealed to his other that he is willing to pay anything for the other’s truth.

The ego is eternally at the periphery; and the subject of his lack taunts him from the core. Their relationships are defined by the properties of the cycloid. As has unveiled Pascal, if one takes a wheel and rolls it across a table, its axis traces a straight line parallel to the surface of the table. On the other hand, any given point situated on the external periphery of the wheel traces in space a curve, which is a geometric figure. This could explain the relationship of equality between two terms, being respectively, the core states at the core of the wheel and the peripheral states at the external periphery of the wheel, or the white self-assured of his position as purveyor of Truth and the black neurotic, trying desperately, through countless acrobatics and obsessive contortions to be within the truth content of the white as the wheel of human experience turns. What then is the value of each one of these two terms in the space of globality as the wheel turns? “Does anyone out there love me?” describes the relationship between the exclusive purveyor of Truth and the consumer of that truth; the former who, from a wittgenstenian perspective, is able within the language game to give values of grammatical propositions to empirical propositions, just as one would give value of truth to the proposition 12×12=143 by imposing the form of representation of those who believe in the accuracy of this equation, while it would only suffice, in order to dismiss this as mistake, to enforce the form of representation of those who believe that 12×12=144.[iii] In Wittgensteinian terms, grammatical propositions are those propositions that “shape what counts as intelligible description of reality,” that lay down the rules of the language game; whereas empirical propositions are these propositions that are merely descriptive without having rule-defining power in the language game. Nevertheless, “empirical propositions can harden into grammar and therefore be removed from the traffic of doubt. It isn’t that grammatical proposition can’t be proven; it is that they no longer need to be proven.” They need not be proven because they have been imposed by a whole machinery of power as truth.   

  From this perspective, truth is not created. It is simply interpreted from old opinions, old assumptions. The production and dissemination of truth, as Steven Ward reminds us, necessitate a number of expert centers whose task is to “transform the abstract, ill defined, and unknown into the concrete, systematic and understood.”[iv] Whoever controls these various expert centers that make the local opinion into universal truth controls the manufacturing of truth, not only as his truth, but also, as the truth of the other. Though no particular knowledge-producing group is outfitted to generate absolute truth, nevertheless, some entities are in better position to produce hard knowledge.[v] This is because, for truth to be sustained and to travel so fast and so far as to establish itself in the world of the other as universal truth requires enormous resources, such as financial capitals, the construction of equipment, the collection and storage of data, the production of artifacts, the recruitment of allies, the forging of a network of knowledge creators. The rest is merely a matter of transforming “fragile opinions” about the nature of an object, event or phenomenon as truth—by way of recruiting and attaching itself to “a heterogeneous array of allies.” A weak statement becomes fact “not by showing that a particular position corresponds with the real, as in traditional epistemology, but by establishing strong allies and associational networks that are capable of resolving dispute over data interpretation, ending controversies, resisting the deconstructionist tactics of adversaries and spreading the word.”[vi] Truth is soft opinion made hard knowledge, local proposition made universal fact.

However, for this hard knowledge to reach the masses, for it to be accessible by the majority of people, it has to go through a somewhat reverse process whereby it is softened, made appealing and approachable, decrypted from its hermetic form to a more user-friendly mode. This operation of reinscription of truth for mass consumption requires enormous means, too. It demands a network of media resource services, television stations, computers connections, libraries, newspapers, conventions and conferences, educational institutions, etc. The black ego does not have these resources; has not developed these resources. Has not the great white tutor—France for Francophone Africa, and Great Britain for Anglophone Africa—assured the black ego that he need not bother, and that in conformity with a cooperation design they signed together any technology discovered in Europe would be sent his way?  So, the black ego surrendered to the great white tutor the construction and ownership of the means of production of truth, being merely contented with consuming the other’s truth, the other’s travestied historical veracity.

For, indeed, “history,” too, is an invention of the other, a particular Western interest in aspects of the past, investigated through the written word as evidence, by means of a particular methodology, which ultimately rationalize the place of the West in the world. It is therefore not surprising that history has been so dismissive of the kind of interest in the past that informs memory or tradition.”[vii] In this sense the question “what is world history?” could call up a number of similar questions, of which “what is the World Bank?” the latter of which we promise to discuss in another chapter. For the time being, let us look at the effects of a certain particular proposition disguised as “world perspective on historical thinking” or world truth.

Has not the black ego grieved of seeing the great white tutor in grief, starved his kinds so the latter could have his fill? Has he not rooted for the unforgiving conqueror of his kinds upon the promise of a white bliss? Now he seats on the periphery, bellowing a pathetic cry: “does anyone out there love me?” How can anyone love you when you so hate yourself? How can anyone trust you when you so betray yourself? For it is indeed in betrayal, in self-hatred, that lies the malaise of the black ego for whom the “truths” of scholars like Best, Winckelmann, Gobineau and for whom the truth of institutions like the United Nations, the WTO and World Bank have become World Truth. To “does anyone out there love me?” The black ego could be objected that love has nothing to do with exchange; or more precisely, that in the international political and economic arena, it is less about love than about exchange; that “reciprocity has nothing to do with love and befits only the economy of and calculation of exchange.”[viii] The rapports of old globalization were less circumlocutory than those of the new globalization, and the black was therefore constantly reminded that love was impossible; that it was about interest. De Gaulle used to say that he had no friends, only interests. The black ego has a short memory. Before every international intervention, the American Congress unanimously inquires whether any action taken is in the interest of the United States. In 1981 President Reagan launched a wide scope investigation to see whether the World Bank was, as expected, still working for the interests of the United States or whether it was overtaken by compassion for the Third World and thus undermining its profit making assignment. During the Iraq war, the American Congress threatened to withdraw America’s support to the United Nations unless the institution reformed and revised its growing anti-American rhetoric. All these signs and a thousand others seem to have passed by the black ego without him deciphering their significance. Had he only read them correctly, he would have understood that love has nothing to do with exchange. “The loving actors have nothing to exchange (no object) and thus cannot calculate a price (whether fair or not),” whereas the exchange actors have real objects at stake upon which they make calculation. The bruised black ego’s most imperative drive is assurance of belonging. The verdict cast upon him by the harbingers of black inferiority is the most important element he has retained from history, and the Aryanists’ sentence haunts him like a shadow. The black ego, previously beaten and trodden, the black ego hitherto likened to the beast and the devil, the black ego historically denied love, wants some assurance of love. Bemused, he seeks love where exchange is called for. He gives the object of exchange for love where love does not presuppose exchange of objects; where love cannot presuppose exchange of objects and thus has no object to give, the black ego gives and by so doing, kills the possibility of both love and exchange; for the former deals not in exchange of objects, and the latter gives not out of love.

Eager to be accepted in the circle of humanity, the black elite will give away the object of exchange for assurance of love. His other knows it and will exploit this weakness to the fullest extent. In the age of the old globalization, the mantra was “better be poor, for happier are the poor, because they will inherit the heaven” or “it’s very difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of God;” so the black ego gave everything away, even put his children in chains and sent them to faraway lands to slave for others. Could one be poorer than he who loses his children? Could the gates of paradise be closed to he who is so deprived? Things have not changed much. In the age of the new globalization, the hymn is “surrender the object of exchange and you will belong to white paradise.” So what he has, the black ego gives away, and what he does not have he steals from his people so as to give it away for a place among the Chosen People of God.

 

A Case Study in Inferiority Complex 

On September 20, 1979, at two o’clock in the morning, Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic was awoken with bad news by one of his ministers who had accompanied him to Libya to seek financial help from Kaddafi. A few months earlier, operative of the French government of Valery Giscard d’Estaing, suspecting Bokassa of getting too close to Kaddafi, among other leaders unsympathetic to France, and thus of undermining French interests in Central Africa, had infiltrated the student movements and stirred up a revolt, which escalated gradually until the emperor’s panicked security forces arrested and tortured hundreds of students and even murdered some. Seizing the occasion of the students’ death, some newspaper articles in France reported that children as young as eight were among the dead, and that Bokassa himself participated in their beating, even gouging one of the students’ eyes with his scepter. President Giscard led an international chorus for an inquest into the matter on May 20, 1979, whispering to suspicious and reluctant African leaders that the aim of the inquest was more to exonerate Bokassa than to precipitate his fall. In the meantime, Paris was rounding up an assortment of defectors from Bokassa’s regime. Bokassa’s ambassador to France announced his resignation. Then followed his prime minister and former president David Dacko who, in a wire sent directly from the French embassy in Bangui, openly asked Paris to militarily support a coup they were standing ready to lead against Bokassa.[ix] However, Paris was less enthusiastic to move before the result of the inquiry. The result of the investigation finally came. Before its August 16 public release, it was unofficially disclosed to Bokassa in Gabon by Gabonese president Bongo and an emissary of Giscard, who urged Bokassa in vain to resign. The report was devastating for Bokassa. It claimed that between 50 and 200 children, many who were of tender age, were beaten and killed.[x] Despite this disturbing report, Bokassa had vouched to remain in power. Giscard decided to use a combination of military and economic pressure to topple Bokassa. Economically, France cut all aid to Central Africa except humanitarian help. Militarily, to avoid a bloody clash between the French military and Bokassa’s faithful guards, and thus an international embarrassment, it was decided to wait until Bokassa was out of the country to fight a less committed imperial guard;[xi] for, Bokassa’s imperial guard, constituted essentially by Mbaika soldiers drawn from his native village, were, not only the few Central African troops outfitted with live ammunitions, but they were also the most pampered soldiers and the best armed, in addition to being physically and psychologically trained to put their lives at stake for Bokassa.[xii] In the absence of the Emperor, however, his imperial guards might not be too motivated to resist. So, Paris decided to postpone any military action to until such time as Bokassa was out of the country.

In the meantime, however, Giscard suspended all financial and material aids to Central Africa and ordered all the French banks to repatriate their capitals from the Central African banks with which they were in joint venture. Overnight, the Central African Republic found itself on its knees. His coffers empty, incapable of ensuring the daily functioning of his country, Bokassa turned to Kaddafi for help. On Kaddafi’s invitation, Bokassa flew to Libya. He arrived in Libya on the night of September 19, discussed with Kaddafi from 11: 00 p.m. to midnight. Bokassa went to bed with the assurance from his host that a protocol of partnership would be signed between the two Heads of State at 8 a.m. the following day, which would lay down Kaddafi’s commitment to finance the daily functioning of the vital services of Central Africa for the following two years, that is, until the country got fiscally stable. Central Africa possessed huge uranium, iron and diamond reserves and could easily jumpstart its finances in two years. These reserves were being exploited since 1966 by French and Swiss companies without any substantial returns for the people of Central Africa. This was an indisputable statement. However, if Bokassa had to be believed, the only return he received from the Swiss exploitation of his country’s diamond mines was a Swiss watch mounted with diamonds. This, on the other hand, was highly doubtful. It is evident that Bokassa and his cronies profited directly from his dealings with the French and the Swiss on the back of the Central African ordinary people. Nevertheless, Bokassa’s inclination to seek new partners in this lucrative deal brought him the French ire and financial trouble at home. Fortunately, Kaddafi had promised to help.  

However, six hours before signing his agreement with Kaddafi, Bokassa was awoken with bad news by one of his ministers who had accompanied him to Libya. A French military operation was under way against his government back home. Operation Barracudas was a 30,000 troop strong occupation of all the neuralgic sites of Central Africa, from the capital Bangui to the most remote rural areas. The aim of Operation Barracudas was to topple the Bokassa government and put in place a government that would be unconditional friendly to Paris and untouched by the scandal of child killing that brought much scrutiny to Giscard’s strange relation with Bokassa. According to Bokassa, Kaddafi suggested that he offer a resistance to the French invasion. The Libyan leader was prepared to lend a hand with a few thousands troops. Bokassa refused, and perhaps wisely so. However, the reasons the Emperor of Central Africa gave his host for his reticence to oppose the French invasion was of the most entertaining. He was, said he, an officer of the French army and a French citizen. France was his motherland, which he loved dearly. Therefore, under no circumstances would he point a gun at a French soldier, for this would amount to the greatest act of treason—even when the French soldiers had their guns pointed at him. Instead, he would fly directly to France and speak personally to Giscard. After all, were they not the best of buddies—pardon, the best of relatives? So Bokassa ordered his private pilot to fly him to Paris. On their way, however, he changed his mind and decided to land in Morocco, a country with which he kept very friendly relations. Unfortunately for him, his French pilots had already received an order from Giscard to take him to France. Bokassa’s private plane was escorted by two French mirages to the discreet military base of Evreux. Bokassa’s following was taken into custody and the emperor was ordered to remain on the plane. Under heavy guard, the Central African sovereign was stripped naked and searched down to his most intimate orifice. He was then ordered to put on his clothes and kept on his private plane for four days and four nights, while negotiations were being conducted regarding a final landing place for him. Finally, on September 24, 1979, at 10 a.m., Bokassa was transferred from his private plane to a military DC 8 and flown to Houphouët in Abidjan, whence he offered the details of Giscard’s betrayal in a filmed interview with Jean-Claude Chuzeville four years later. For Chuzeville, given the French leaders’ claim that they are unaware to the torture, money laundering, exploitation, secular, economic and mental genocide that France is conducting in Africa under the pretense of cooperation, his film is meant to educate them. For us, however, it is illustrative of the black ego’s senselessness.

Giscard, as Bokassa recalls so naively, had first offered the most beautiful example of bilateral “cooperation.” He came to Bangui in 1967 on a private visit as France’s finance minister. This did not prevent Bokassa from offering him a very public reception, complete with a big banquet attended by foreign dignitaries, at the end of which the guest was offered expensive diamonds expressly selected for him from the best gems of national diamond harvest. From then on, Giscard kept coming to the Central African Republic every year, and was presented with lavish gifts in diamonds until he became president of France in 1974. It was Central Africa—rather than Germany as was the custom for every newly elected French president—that Giscard chose to visit on his first official trip as French president; a fact that Bokassa naively regarded as a strong assurance of love. Giscard and Bokassa had shared even the most public and personal aspects of their lives. When on December 4, 1977, Bokassa decided to inaugurate himself Emperor of Central Africa, Giscard went to great length to lend a hand and make the coronation of Bokassa I a success. The French navy marching band was especially flown to Bangui to play at the inauguration. The French defense ministry flew a battalion of French soldiers to ensure the protection of Bokassa, and the French government put 17 charter planes at the disposal of Bokassa’s guests.  

In gratitude for Giscard’s consideration, Bokassa granted the French president a private hunting ground; and although Giscard never paid his yearly license fees for the hunting zones, he would go to Central Africa twice a year, shoot elephants and have their tails and ivory delivered to him on cargo planes, from which cuffs and other luxury items would be manufactured and sold for his profit in sumptuous European boutiques. In Central Africa, Giscard the French president was also a savvy businessman. The diamonds and ivory he got for nothing in Central Africa brought him wealth once sold on international markets. Bokassa’s private villa in his village was Giscard’s frequent hideouts, where he would show up often in the company of young women for drug revelry and sexual orgies. When in the aftermath of Bokassa’s fall the French media started their intoxicating operation, claiming that Bokassa was a cannibal, and affirming without proofs that human parts and babies were found in Bokassa’s refrigerators, they must certainly have been informed by Giscard; for Giscard, who had made the Bokassas’ home his second residence and who had had numerous meals there, both in their presence and alone as a privileged guest, must have consumed some human flesh, too, to be able to give his denigrating media so much unsubstantiated negative information about Bokassa’s alleged cannibalism. Many Central Africans were angered and felt personally insulted by the allegations of Bokassa’s cannibalism.[xiii]

When Bokassa was still an angel and not a baby killer, a civilized man and not a beast and an anthropophagus in France’s eyes, when he was still a source of wealth for France and French politicians and not an embarrassing burden, Giscard signed the Bokassas’ golden guest book and offered Bokassa that their relationship be more like a family bond. He offered to be Bokassa’s “brother” instead of his mere “friend.” Here, one could easily imagine the black ego titillated to the core and stupidly nodding with enjoyment. At one time, Giscard, who had his eyes on the Empress of Central Africa, proposed to Bokassa that they swapped wives. Mrs. Giscard would spend some time in Bangui in the company of Bokassa, while the Empress would stay in Paris with the French president. This exchange, Giscard explained, would signal to the French and Central Africans that the bilateral relations between Paris and Bangui were excellent. Bokassa foolishly accepted; and though he remained always evasive as to whether he had any sexual relationship with Mrs. Giscard, he revealed, on the other hand, that his wife became Giscard’s mistress and was even impregnated by the French president and underwent at least one abortion to get rid of a compromising pregnancy by Giscard. In fact, in the aftermath of Bokassa’s arrest and confinement in Côte d’Ivoire, Empress Catherine was separated from her husband and was a frequent guest at the Elysée, where she entertained Giscard’s fetishism for dark and libidinous Africa. With the help of Giscard’s family members, Empress Catherine was also emptying the deposed emperor’s accounts and selling some of his property as payment for sexual favors.

[s]he had emptied [Bokassa’s] bank account in Romorantin of its contents—400,000 francs in all. She had also taken an undisclosed sum from his Swiss bank account and had helped herself to some of his most prized cars: two 1978 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadows, each of which was valued between 350,000 to 400,000 francs; a 1978 Daimler worth 150,000 francs; a Jaguar and several more.[xiv]

 

The Bokassa affair was one of France’s ugliest and most shameful dealings in Africa. France’s mafia-like transactions in Central Africa were so scandalous that in an attempt to hide what really went on between French officials and the Bokassa government in Central Africa, the French army was ordered by the President Giscard to strip Bokassa’s Palaces of all their contents and store them in a military consignment in Orleans. Every available document in the archives of the empire was removed and disposed of at undisclosed location in France as Giscard was preparing a defense of denial and half truths to Bokassa’s accusations.

 While Bokassa was at Evreux, his enemies were helping themselves with everything of value he had left behind in [Central Africa]. On the morning of Friday, 21 September, four puma helicopters of the Barracuda invasion force brought a squadron of paratroopers to Berengo. First, the soldiers raided the imperial residence and took away the coronation paraphernalia as well as quantities of cash, diamonds and [jewelry], the total value of which it is impossible to estimate. Then they sought out the government records stored in the Council of Ministers building nearby. Bokassa had been in the habit of keeping his personal papers in binders covered in green leather, and two hundreds of these were seized at the Council of Ministers. Filing cabinets filled with other important documents were emptied—imperial decrees, memoranda, and a dossier of forty letters from President Giscard addressed to “mon cher parent” [my dear relative]. There were items of nostalgic nature too—a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings on the coronation and the emperor’s guest book. All day long, the Puma helicopters were busy transporting the imperial archives and treasures from Berengo to the French embassy in Bangui.[xv]

 

Of all the dealings of Giscard in Central Africa, it is the “diamond affair” that created discernible waves in France. The story of the Empress’ pregnancy and subsequent abortion was immediately dismissed as a sham. White constituents don’t like to think of their elected officials as indulging themselves with black women. They are certainly too sophisticated, to refined for these kinds of lowly dreams. So when such stories appear, they are first treated with shocking indignation then dismissed as lies. A black elected official can easily be pictured desiring a white woman, because in the white’s imaginaire, all black men dream of possessing a white woman. On the other hand, the opposite is not conceivable. We shall recall the denials by both commoners and aristocrats which the allegations that Prince Albert of Monaco had a child with a black woman, an African women of all people, generated. Were we not in the age of DNA, the prince would be under pressure never to come forward and admit his paternity, and the litigant would have certainly met with an ill-timed fate. So, Bokassa’s allegation that his wife was the mistress of Giscard hardly created a shudder in France. On the other, it was highly probable that Central Africa being a diamond rich country, Giscard had received some of his previous “brother’s” precious stones. Faced with inquiries regarding the destination of the stones he indubitably obtained from Bokassa, Giscard alleged that these were diamonds of no high value, and that he only made about $ 4,000 out of them, which he sent to the Central African Red Cross. The director of the Central Africa Red Cross maintained in an affidavit that her organization never received a cent from the French president. On October 10, 1979, the French paper Le Canard Enchaîné published a signed correspondence by Bokassa, written on imperial letterhead, enjoining the Comptoir National du Diamant to prepare a 30 carat-diamond for Giscard. Days later, Le Monde gave weight to the story by dedicating a column to it. From then on, Giscard had no other choice but to mount a full, albeit failed, defense.

The “diamond affair” contributed to Giscard’s defeat by François Mitterrand in 1982. France is obviously unpardonable in its plunder of Africa. However, the greatest responsibility of Africa’s continuous poverty is ascribable to the black ego’s complex of inferiority and his quest for assurance of white love. While Bokassa was dancing the waltz of love with Giscard, giving away millions of dollars in gifts to foreign officials, and indulging in excesses abroad and at home, the Central African people were living in utmost poverty, lacking even the basic necessities. To secure his political power, Bokassa relied heavily on the loyalty of the army which he bribed heavily and whose excesses and corruption he pretended to ignore. Though the Central Africa Republic army’s allocation was continually increased, Bokassa’s officers were embezzling public funds with impunity and lower rank soldiers were left to swindle and intimidate the masses. The flamboyant lifestyles of Bokassa’s corrupt elite, close friends and family members—the Emperor had eight wives and more than thirty mistresses, each one with her own extravagant allocation—reflected on the country’s economy. Civil servants were often not paid for periods as long as three to four months; the prices of basic necessities, such as meat, sugar and petrol were out of reach for most people, and especially for the rural populations.[xvi] Bokassa was obviously oblivious of his people’s welfare. Bokassa was the quintessential black ego in search of assurance of love. His $30 million coronation was mimicry and accumulation at their most obsessive degree.

Bokassa crowned himself with a $5 million crown . . . accompanied by the strains of Beethoven, Mozart, and tribal drums. He ascended a two-ton gold encrusted throne and rode through Bangui streets in a refurbished antique coach pulled by specially imported white horses flanked by resplendently uniformed lancers. Trailing a 20-foot-long red-velvet cloak trimmed with white fur, he received as a symbol of office a 6-foot diamond-encrusted scepter, and while wearing a Napoleonic hat, later reviewed a parade that included both pygmy warriors and troops with Soviet weapons.[xvii]

 

Given his obsession for European pageantry and Napoleonian grandeur, the Central African emperor had certainly ingurgitated the Gobineauian “truth” that the ugliest of men were to be found in Africa and that the most beautiful of men were exemplified by French kings and princes of whom, of course, Napoleon.[xviii]

Would it not have been great if the passing of the deficient autocratic leaders afflicted by inferiority complex such as Bokassa and Bongo were heralding Africa’s new dawn, an age when a new generation of African men and women, confident, energetic and conscientious, could once and for all place the continent on its path for genuine development? Would it not be great for Africa if the “old Negritude” that Césaire so emphatically decried were dead for good? Would it not be wonderful if the new Millennium were signaling the coming of the new black man and woman who, with “a great display of brains,” could “force the vitelline membrane” that separates him/her from himself/herself and could psychologically “[leave] timid Europe which collects and proudly overrates itself?”[xix] Unfortunately, there is a new brand of African liberals, who, like the old agents of Western international imperialism, have a special job to do:

To spread the liberal ideology in Africa, to maintain a black front there for a neocolonial world order run by the West, to administer the neocolonial African territories for the West, and to restore the imperialized status quo if any genuinely African nationalist regime should storm its way into power anywhere in Africa . . . though they advertise themselves as serving Africa, they operate in an environment, with a mentality, and under conditioned attitude and direct advice that all tend to yield policies that primarily serve the neocolonial powers, policies that often are in direct opposition to the genuine interests of the African peoples. Conditioned by a pro-western miseducation, they see their class interests as tied to those of their imperialist masters, and they readily abandon the interests of their people to protect those of their class.[xx]

 

Today, the Bretton Woods institutions through the United Nations, the World Bank and the IMF are striving to impose some black apostles of Western economic liberalism everywhere in Africa in order to re-colonize the continent and better control its resources. In some places the positioning of the house slaves in pressed coats and shining shoes has been undertaken without many difficulties. A bamboozled African community has been persuaded to accept these traitors and applaud their almost messianic appointments. In other places, like in Côte d’Ivoire, the people were able to see through the masquerade. The messenger has been simply returned to his masters with a message that says “no, but thank you!” However, the price for this impertinence has also been heavy to bear. When despite all the imperial manipulations aimed at imposing Alassane Ouattara to the Ivorian people as the savior from the IMF he was exposed as a fraud and as a miseducated imperialist pun and, therefore, cast off, the punitive expedition that befell the people of Côte d’Ivoire was heavy in blood.[xxi] After failing to seize power by insurrectionary means, Ouattara seems resolute to go through the legitimate electoral process that he had hitherto shunned. However, the rebels that he has armed are still holding on to their weapons; which, should he lose the coming elections set for November 2009, augurs some more violence in perspective. The World Bank and the IMF’s shareholders are observing what is going on in Côte d’Ivoire with a keen interest. Ouattara, they know, is affected with the inferiority complex that causes the African petite bourgeoisie to “pander to Western opinion.” Ouattara, they know, is on a binge for praise. Ouattara was reared to seek approval from the West, and he would do anything to please the West and to avoid the West’ reprimand. On the other hand, he has been exposed by the people as a politician that is more concerned about protecting the interests of his imperialist masters than ensuring and safeguarding the welfare of the Ivorian people, a people that has vowed never to bend to the imperialist pressure. This sets the stage for another Ivorian calamity. One can only hope that with the departure of Kofi Anan, this other black apostle of Western imperialism, the United Nations will be genuinely attentive as to monitor and prevent any subversive activities no matter their origins.

 


[i] Chiweinzu, The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, White Slaversand the African Elite (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 389.

[ii] Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, translated by Steven E. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 68.

[iii] Peg O’Connor, Oppression and Responsibility: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Social Practices and Moral Theory (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2002), 34.

[iv] Steven C. Ward, Modernizing the Mind: Psychological Knowledge and the Remaking of Society (Westport: Praeger, 2002), 10.

[v] Ibid., 11.

[vi] Ibid., 19.

[vii] Hayden White, “The Westernization of World History,” in Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate, edited by Jörn Rüsen (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 112.

[viii] Marion, 69.

[ix] Brian Titley, Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University press, 1997), 121.

[x] Ibid., 122-23.

[xi] Ibid., 123-24.

[xii] Samuel Decalo, Psychosis of Power: African Personal Dictatorships (Gainesville: Florida Academic Press, 1998), 227.

[xiii] Titley, 136.

[xiv] Ibid., 144.

[xv] Ibid., 136.

[xvi] Decalo, 229.

[xvii] Ibid., 231.

[xviii] Gobineau, 150-51.

[xix] Aimé Césaire, “Notebook of a return to the Native Land,” in Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, translated by Clayton Eshleman, and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 59.

[xx] Chinwezu, 355.

[xxi] For a full discussion of the Ivorian situation see Frindéthié, Cinema, chapter 8.

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The Myth of Salvation from Christ to the World Bank/IMF, by Frindéthié

February 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment

 

 

 

mc_new_model_mediumIf thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury.

The Old Testament, Exodus XXII: 25 

 

[A] body within which . . . particular individuals treat each other as equal . . . if this body is living and not dying, it will have to treat other bodies in just those ways that the individuals it contains refrain from treating each other. It will have to be the embodiment of will to power. It will want to grow, spread, grab, win dominance,–not out of any morality or immorality, but because it is alive, and because life is precisely will to power. . . . ‘Exploitation’ does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect, primitive society . . . it belongs to the essence of being alive as a fundamental organic function.

Nietzsche—Beyond Good and Evil <!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[i]<!–[endif]–>

 

If the question of the partiality of the God of the Old Testament were a riddle, a puzzle to the mind, an inexplicable incongruity, then one could say that Nietzsche had just solved that riddle by giving an explanation to God’s startling support of the abusive commercial method of usury by his people. The God of the old covenant, being primarily the God of the people of Israel before being the God of all people, it is not surprising that he who is Omnipotent and foresees all events to come, and who has, consequently, prophesied the advent of the age of capitalism, should educate his people about capitalism’s fundamental law—exploitation of the alien—and warn them about the perils of self-exploitation. If then the essential process of life is “appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least, the very least, exploiting,”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[ii]<!–[endif]–> it would seem inconsistent for Paul the Apostle to hold the world of the old covenant as one of immoral living, and to reify Christianity as the locus of Jews’ salvation from a life of sins and disobedience of God.

 

And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience . . . and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others. But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[iii]<!–[endif]–>

 

Yet, thinking things through thoroughly, nothing is really contradictory here. Saint Paul’s letter does not address itself to the question of the morality or immorality of usury as such, but rather to that of the common evil of humanity before the conversion to Christianity, since the Ephesians were both Jews and Gentiles converted to Christianity.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[iv]<!–[endif]–> Paul the Apostle’s letter, thus, does not say that everything that was undertaken under the old covenant was sinful. Consequently, at least, some of the old Jewish habitus would be carried over into Christianity, as the new faith is, after all, the New Testament that “[got] pasted together with the Old Testament to make a single book, a ‘Bible,’ a book ‘in itself.’”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[v]<!–[endif]–> The language of the New Testament, however, differs from that of the Old Testament in that it is one that addresses itself both to Jews, Gentiles, and others. It is a language of universal brotherhood, a language of universality as opposed to the language of the Old Testament, which is one of partiality. Jews’ conversion to Christianity did not signify total desertion of Jewish habitus. Jewish mores were carried over and cross-fertilized with Christian customs. One of these Jewish mores, according to Marx, is usury, which helped put in place the infrastructure of modern capitalism. Modernity, with its economic form known as capitalism, it thus follows, is the result of a happy merger: the Jews’ flight from partiality to universality and the Christians’ dilution of universal brotherhood. In other words, and to speak like the Marx of On the Jewish Question,<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[vi]<!–[endif]–> capitalism, the birth child of Judeo-Christian compromise, came to being when Christian universality and Judaic partiality merged into a larger partiality; when flight from Judaic partiality and quest for Christian universality only repeated the alienation of the subject, this time, by a partial entity pompously called modernity or capitalism.

Today, as we shall argue here, the progeny of modernity, with its alluring name, globalization, has grown into a two-headed monster, the World Bank/IMF, stretching from 1818 H Street to NW to 700 19th Street NW, in Washington. D.C.; and this progeny is repeating the fundamental gesture of the mutant that birthed it, that is, the gesture of usury; perhaps, because, as Nietzsche has insisted, partiality is in fact the truest affirmation of human nature; which a spirit of fake liberalism and guilt has tried to water down, only to reaffirm it, this time, in a more cowardly way? “[These] days, people everywhere are lost in rapturous enthusiasms, even in scientific disguise, about a future state of society where ‘the exploitative character will fall away . . . [exploitation] is the primal fact of all history. Let us be honest with ourselves to this extent at least!”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[vii]<!–[endif]–> To be at least honest with ourselves also supposes that we face Marx’s inquiry in On the Jewish Question, and especially that we face his conclusion with great scholarly quietude.

This, however, is easier said than done; for, to take up any issue from a Marxist point of view, today, especially from the point of view of Marxist theorization of Jewish emancipation, demands of any critic a high level of temerity. The fact that every little writing of Marx and every single one of his relations have been looked through and poked at by critics too eager to demonstrate Marx’s alleged anti-Semitism, and thus self-hatred, has not escaped some scholars’ attention.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[viii]<!–[endif]–> This passionate condemnation of Marx has not always been propitious to advancing the scholarly debate, as it has often obfuscated the relevance of Marx’s thoughts, especially with the failure of the implementation, in the twentieth century, of Marxist ideologies. Perhaps it is also opportune, with the proven disappointment of aggressive capitalism today, to rehabilitate Marx, or at least to engage again with some of the issues that he raised. This, however, like the question of Marx’s anti-Semitism, is not what is at issue here. What is of concern to us at this time is to see how Marx’s view that Jewish bias was a vehicle for proto-capitalism and that modern capitalism was the synthesis of Jewish preferential treatment and Christian neutrality, resulting in a partial universality, will inspire a critique of post-capitalism or globalization as rendered possible by the World Bank/IMF’s politics of fractional neutrality. This is precisely where we shall refuse to throw away the baby with the bathwater.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[ix]<!–[endif]–>

Notwithstanding the refusal here to get into the debate of whether or not Marx was an anti-Semite, it is undeniable that Marx is relevant for a discussion that, far from being either a thesis on the Jew or on Judaism or a treatise on the Christian and Christianity, is rather an attempt to understand the spirit of the World Bank/IMF insofar as this institution has introduced itself to the world, and to the Third World precisely, as the Big Other, the yardstick of salvation. Here lies the analogy between Paul the Apostle’s reification of Christianity as the locus of dis-alienation of the Jew and the World Bank pledge of emancipating the Third World. Both promises are couched, one might appropriately argue, in the principle of universal brotherhood; a brotherhood that ultimately fails to come to fulfillment. Hoping for universal redemption, the Jew has fallen alongside a Judeo-Christian ethics of partiality. Hoping for universal brotherhood, the Thirdworldists have fallen compulsively alongside a post-capitalist principle of partiality, alienated as they are, as consumers of their own goods manufactured in Occidental factories, and victims of Western usurers. Marx’s metaphor becomes a very practical one when the question of the proclaimed neutrality of a financial institution like the World Bank is at issue.

For, in what is the World Bank worldly? Where does its worldliness lie? If not only in the brazen fact that in the dialectic of the part and the whole, the economic interests of the part have overtaken those of the whole, and that the whole has henceforth become a part of the part and not the other way round? From this ethical perspective, favoritism has been elevated to the order of neutrality; which, in a Marxist logic, could be explicated as the synthesis of a confrontation between Judaic and Christian ethics of salvation. “Judaism and Christianity,” writes Mészáros, “are complementary aspects of society’s efforts to cope with internal contradictions [of capitalism]. They both represent attempts at an imaginary transcendence of these contradictions, at an illusory ‘reappropriation’ of the ‘human essence’ through a fictitious supersession of the state of alienation.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[x]<!–[endif]–> The identity of the Jew as partiality and that of the Christian as universality shall only serve here, in order to avoid all bigoted, and especially anti-Semitic recuperation, as metaphors borrowed from Marx’s understanding that “for an early realization of [capitalism], Judaism as an empirical reality only provided a suitable vehicle.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xi]<!–[endif]–> What then is the partiality of Judaism and the universality of Christianity, how is one to explain the spirit of Judaism without inviting all sorts of scapegoating? By simply understanding the spirit of Judaism as that of capitalism, that is, as an ethos that permitted exploitation of aliens but not of brethren through the “most important vehicle of early economic expansion,” notably usury or saleability to the other. There seems to be inherent contradictions in God’s dictate that his people should not be submitted to usury by the fact that God recognizes the vile and exploitative economic method that usury is, but recommends that it be practiced on others but not on his people. “If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as a usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury.” <!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xii]<!–[endif]–>

This notion of Jewish partiality has abundantly been indexed as one more manifestation of the vengeful Jewish God, the God of “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xiii]<!–[endif]–> To be fair, this qualification of the Jewish God, though now a common place, cannot be without a rejoinder to the contrary, in the form of a similar indictment, a stronger indictment even, of the Christian God. Himmelfarb, for instance, insists that “the Jewish backwardness in the matter of hell is better than the Christian accomplishment. On the evidence of hell, the ancient formula of a merciful Christianity confronting a vindictive Judaism is wrong.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xiv]<!–[endif]–> His argument is that Christianity, for which “if the faithful have little chance of bliss, infidels have none,” has been more descriptive about the fewness of the saved ones than Judaism has. He cites a dogma of “no salvation outside the Church” that goes as far back as the 3rd century with St. Cyprian, and which was only revised in the 17th century. He goes on to rehearse, albeit synthetically, the hell to which the multitude is destined according to Joyce, and which differs only verbally from the Catholic Encyclopedia. It is a hell of “corpses putrefying into a jellylike mass of liquid . . . of brains boiling in the skull, bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, and eyes flaming like molten balls; nameless suffocating filth; fire kindled in the abyss by the offended majesty of the Omnipotent God and fanned into everlasting and ever increasing fury by the breath of the anger of the Godhead.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xv]<!–[endif]–> Thus claims Himmelfarb in a feat of irony, “[T]he religion of the cruel and vindictive Jews knows nothing about the doom of the majority of the faithful to eternal torment. As for those who are not Jews, the standard doctrine is the Talmudic dictum: ‘the righteous of the nations of the world have a share in the world to come.’”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xvi]<!–[endif]–>

 This having been said, and pour revenir à nos moutons, we shall only argue, on the evidence of the question of usury as it has been featured in the Old Testament, and following Marx, that the idea of capitalist Europe, as it is accepted today by most people, is a derivation of an old Judaic understanding of economic practice and an old Christian understanding of universal brotherhood welded together in the form of the partial universalism of the West. The World Bank/IMF this monumentalized Judeo-Christian economic power claims universality. On the basis of what does it claim it however? The World Bank claims its universality on the basis of its saleability, the ability to sell to others with big returns. Who does the World Bank lend to and what are its lending schemes? Telles sont les questions.

<!–[if !supportEndnotes]–>

<!–[endif]–>

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[i]<!–[endif]–> Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 259

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[iii]<!–[endif]–> Epistle to the Ephesians, Chapter II.

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[iv]<!–[endif]–> See John Wesley, The Works of the Reverend John Wesley, A.M., Vol.5 (New York: T. Mason and G. Lane, 1839), 542.

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[v]<!–[endif]–> Nietzsche, Good and Evil, Aphorism 52.

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[vi]<!–[endif]–> Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[vii]<!–[endif]–> Nietzsche, Good and Evil, Aphorism 259.

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[viii]<!–[endif]–> As Andrei Shapiro so perceptibly points out, “[T]here is a trend amongst Jewish thinkers to rummage around in the rich sources of Marx’s expressions against people of Jewish origin with whom he circulated, and to hold this record up as the background against which Marx’s attitude towards the Jewish question is interpreted.” See “Marx on the Jewish Question,” http://www.wzo.org.il/en/resources/view.asp?id=888 (accessed on 12-20-2008)

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[ix]<!–[endif]–> As wrote Shapiro, “[I]n the case of Marx, those who adopted [the approach of blind condemnation], seem to have taken revenge on a traitor and a lost cause, and have failed to penetrate the depth of Marx’s arguments and his intellectual contribution to the problem in question.”

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[x]<!–[endif]–> István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 1972), 30.

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xiii]<!–[endif]–> The Old Testament, “The Book of Exodus” 21:23-25.

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xiv]<!–[endif]–> See Milton Himmelfarb, Jews and Gentiles, edited by Gertrude Himmelfarb (New York: Encounter Books, 2007), 203.

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Of Nietzsche, Fanon, Heidegger, and Others … and Emancipation, by Frindéthié

February 16, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon

Da-sein is always its possibility . . . it can “choose” itself in its being, it can win itself, it can lose itself, or it can never and only “apparently” win itself. It can only have lost itself and it can only have not yet gained itself because it is essentially possible as authentic, that is, it belongs to itself.

 

HEIDEGGER, Being and Time<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[i]<!–[endif]–>

Heidegger is but one father amidst a crowded field of progenitors of theories of authentic existence that have proliferated since Aristotle’s assertion that life in society is human beings’ primordial instinct, and that outside of collective situations, individuals are necessarily faced with a life of insufficiency.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[ii]<!–[endif]–> In an attempt to expound what we shall name here Africa’s neurotic or inauthentic development, we shall revisit some of these fathers at this moment. The qualifiers “neurotic” and “inauthentic” call up, to a certain extent, Fanon and Heidegger, the latter whom we shall summon up before arriving, after some non-sequential but useful detours by way of Nietzsche and Lacan, at the former, whose debate with Hegel shall be our starting point for examining the problematic development of Africa in the theater of globalization. In fact, the route taken here, in this first chapter that seeks to comprehend the nature of authentic consciousness as illustrated by Fanon and others, has already been traced elsewhere. <!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[iii]<!–[endif]–> It is a trail whose pointers remain useful; though we do not necessarily travel it in the same direction nor stop at the same roadblocks.

The seminal question that threw Heidegger into theoretical inquiry in Being and Time<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[iv]<!–[endif]–> could be summarized as such: “What is authentic human?” Heidegger’s answer to this problem could also be summed up as follows: What differentiates an authentic human being, a Da-sein, from the multitude of other beings, or mit-dasein, is that the genuine human is a “who?” as opposed to a “what?<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[v]<!–[endif]–> This distinction is loaded with complex but insightful implications. By Heidegger’s account, beings are either existences or categories, either who or what. Initially, holds Heidegger, all beings live in the world, in the middle of others, as what; that is, as objects to be apprehended by the others’ consciousnesses. As such, they are just objectives categories, things of which one speaks.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[vi]<!–[endif]–> However, the proper of Da-sein is that it is endowed with the responsibility to either project itself into authenticity or fall prey to the world as inauthenticity; for, though in its everydayness Da-sein exists in the surrounding world as thing encountered or as what, the condition of whatness, the state of being a mere object of investigation or of speculation, is not the essence of Da-sein. The ontology or nature of Da-sein is more than being there as object in the world. Possibility is what defines Da-sein; but even more than mere possibility, understanding that possibility and acting upon it constitute the true mode of Da-sein. It is precisely the fact of acting on its possibility, the fact of seizing the possibility of becoming in order to throw itself from the condition of what is “caught sight of,” of “what is visible,” into the state of “who sees” that constitutes the essence of Da-sein. Its thrownness is what makes Da-sein existential and not merely categorical. As writes Heidegger, “thrownness is the primordial mode of Da-sein. . . . It is the mode of being of a being which always is itself its possibilities in such a way that it understands itself in them and from them (project itself upon them).”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[vii]<!–[endif]–>

Da-sein implies, thus, a double throw; it is a throw from the thrown; for there is a primordial throw, which is proper to all beings. All beings exist in the world of perceptions in relation to a past, a present and a future. The proper of Da-sein, however, is that it is first and foremost a historical being, that is, an individual placed in the course of a history that it understands as essential to its being. It is by assuming its historicity and by projecting itself into its futurality, forward toward its death, that Da-sein distinguishes itself from just being-there as a category. For Da-sein to assume its temporality is not easy, however. It implies a certain level of surplus; it presupposes that Da-sein should ride out anxiety, burden, and angst, while it could be just easier for Da-sein to go along with the flow, to live comfortably in conformity alongside others, among “. . . those from whom one mostly does not distinguish oneself, those among whom one is, too.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[viii]<!–[endif]–> Being-with-others is not necessarily a state of resentment. On the contrary, in the middle of others, in mit-dasein, the subject is both with others and with itself, and thus finds in the collective world much consolation and exuberance; though the subject remains inauthentic. “Inauthenticity can determine Da-sein even in its fullest concretion, when it is busy, excited, interested, and capable of pleasure.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[ix]<!–[endif]–> In fact, in mit-dasein, where Da-sein is nothing but an inauthentic host in the middle of others, Dasein’s most conspicuous characteristic is cheerfulness, but fake, inauthentic cheerfulness all the same.

So, the Aristotelian crowd or society where the individual, escaping the alienation of isolation, finds comfort and self-sufficiency, constitutes for Heidegger the site of alienation. For Heidegger, the genuine subject or Dasein is a leap out of group reassurance and crowd morality toward death; death which is not a negative state, but which, when faced with by the subject, rather affirms the subject’s recognition that potentialities are in the future and not in sick adoration of the present. From this perspective, Heidegger’s Dasein has much in common with Nietzsche’s Overman.

In fact, for Nietzsche, this rendezvous with affirmative death, with death that is the condition of concretion of the subject, is life outside of social enslavement, outside of the kind of life that is the promise of Christian norms of decency. For Nietzsche, the type of man that “must be reared, must be willed, as having the most value, as being the most worthy of life and the surest guarantee of the future,” must be as far away as possible from “the domestic animal, the sick animal man,–the Christian.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[x]<!–[endif]–> Christian morality is, to speak untimely, Nietzsche’s quintessential mit-dasein; insofar as the Christian crowd, with its adoration of pity and depression, is the multitude in the middle of which the subject supposed to be Uberman falls alongside, settles in weakness, antagonism, corruption of tonic passion, and denial of life.

Christianity has sided with everything weak, low, and botched. . . . I once ventured to characterise the whole of Christian training of penance and salvation (which nowadays is best studied in England) as a folie circulaire methodically generated upon a soil which, of course, is already prepared for it,–that is to say, which is thoroughly morbid. Not every one who likes can be a Christian: no man is “converted” to Christianity,–he must be sick enough for it.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xi]<!–[endif]–>

 

At this point, would it not be justifiably alluring to venture that Christianity is in Nietzsche’s pharmacy a mere metaphor for Western cultural, social and political moods; and, more importantly, that Heidegger’s Dasein is a rephrasing of Nietzsche’s will-to-power as it is embodied in the Overman standing in defiance of Western thought? The temptation to confuse Heidegger’s Da-sein with Nietzsche’s Overman comes from the perception, a legitimate one, that Nietzsche’s affirmation of freedom out of crowd morality is the starting point of Heidegger’s affirmation of authentic freedom out of the encapsulating mode of the mit-dasein; for, after all, is not the Uberman, Nietzsche’s new man, the antithesis of the multitude? Is not his refusal to comply with the rules of sociality that has caused the Overman to be indicted as a renegade, and his creator, Nietzsche, to be dubbed a nihilist, while in fact it is against the nihilism of Western Judeo-Christian thought that the Overman stands, while in fact, Nietzsche, as has been suggested in several places, posits nihilism as the condition for new bursts without actually advocating the denial of life?<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xii]<!–[endif]–> Nietzsche’s Dionysian ethics, with its refusal to settle in a world of presumed beauty and contemplation, with its aspiration to throw one at the mercy of danger and destruction, so as to see how disillusioned one could be with the kind of life that one pretends to so desperately seek through Christian morals, could rightly be regarded as the precursor of Heidegger’s Dasein throwing itself in the face of its death, in the face of its futurality.

It is perhaps tempting to assimilate Heidegger’s Dasein to Nietzsche’s Overman; this would not be necessarily prudent, however; for if Heidegger advises that one leap towards one’s futurality by facing death, Nietzsche had advised before him that the liberating jump should be that of a hyperborean; that it should take the subject beyond “the north, the ice, and death,”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xiii]<!–[endif]–> beyond modernity, outside of Western rationality, back into “[t]he wonderful Moorish world of Spanish culture, which in its essence is more closely related to us, and which appeals more to our sense and taste than Rome and Greece . . .”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xiv]<!–[endif]–> Heidegger’s remedy toward authentic consciousness is a crowd departing gesture. Nietzsche’s recommendation is more radical. It is a space surrendering gesture. Nietzsche asks that one leave the West and its decadent Judeo-Christian morality, and that one birth the new man away from the cowardly, compromised modern world. This, insofar as the bedrock of what is commonly referred to as the “West”—with its overall influence from the Roman Empire, with its economic system of wealth accumulation known as capitalism,<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xv]<!–[endif]–> with its cultural, social, technological, and encyclopedic system of knowledge understood as modernity—is first and foremost Judeo-Christian, more precisely Christian first, and slowly willing to accommodate Judaism.

Nietzsche’s escape-to-the-Orient-as-cure flies in the face of our 21st century narrow-mindedness that has grudgingly, though not entirely, gotten over a suspicion of the Jew but remains inflexible about the corrupting influence of the Black and the Arab, when technology, with its dilution of Western standards, with its de-compartmentalizing of moral codes, with its erasure of cultural dependability, is not indexed as the source of all evils. Indeed, many scholars, such as the political theologian Carl Schmitt or the Christian historian Albert Mirgeler, were convinced that the “true West” could only be saved if Jews, whose economic success they interpreted as condensing all that was evil in capitalism, abhorrent in American economic imperialism, and destructive of the Holy Roman Empire, were done away with, and that Christianity were restored. In the post-World War 2 era, however, this strongly held view of the 1930s made room for a less antagonistic, a less anti-Semitic discourse. The corruptor of Western civilization founded on Christianity was no longer necessarily the Jew. Technology became increasingly the new corruptor of Western ideal.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xvi]<!–[endif]–>

This triple gesture of anti-Semitism, gradual tolerance of Jews, and transfer of resentment toward technology illustrates the West’s difficulty to come to terms with its own characterization. As notes Gress, the idea of Europe was born out of a Grand Narrative of Enlightenment that understood Europe as the daughter of “Christiandom, which was particular,” and of civilization, which sought to be universal. There is a progressive and often radical thinking of Europe for which freedom could not emanate from Christianity, but from human effort, and which believes, in fact, that freedom is to be “asserted against Christianity, against censorship, ignorance, superstition, and irrationalism of hierarchical church and its theological apparatus of justification.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xvii]<!–[endif]–> Notwithstanding their political influence, the proselytizers of the idea of Europe as progressive, multicultural, and universal are not the most boisterous ones. There is a second narrative of Europe, also produced by the discourse of Enlightenment, whose members, albeit in disgrace today, are more inclined to creating polemics. The latter idea of Europe, the Europe of the skeptics, is grounded in a Christian past. It believes that inherent qualities to Christianity such as freedom and civilization are automatically bestowed upon particular societies that embrace Christ. This second idea of Europe is more afraid of universalism in the sense of multiculturalism. It bristles at the idea that “Western identity has . . . come to an end and been superseded by a lowest common denominator of communication, technology, capital markets, free trade, and doses of American entertainment.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xviii]<!–[endif]–> This is the idea of Europe that accepts Jews by biting its tongue to the blood and wags its finger at Islam. This is the idea of Europe that Nietzsche’s escape-to-the-Orient-as-cure might offend the most, insofar as Islam has always been for Europe a factor of great anxiety.

Indeed, Islam has in all times provoked ambivalent sentiments (curiosity and repulsion) in Europe, even as it is of Europe. There is a general sense in Europe, supported in recent years by the discussions over the inclusion of Turkey in the European Union, that Muslim faith contaminates the ideal of European-ness and its perfect model of romantic nativism derived from the nuclear family of the holy trinity; a model so jealously preserved in Western mythology through literature, arts and films. “[H]istorically,” as notes Talal Asad, “Europe was not . . . distinct from Christendom,” and even today, “for liberals and the extreme right the representation of ‘Europe’ takes the form of a narrative, one of whose effects is to exclude Islam.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xix]<!–[endif]–>

It is yet in the very world that the West or Europe, from antiquity to-day, posits as its antithesis that Nietzsche announces the dawn of the new being. In reality, Nietzsche’s cure is less about leaving at all than changing one’s attitude. Here Nietzsche’s cryptic language works for a very straightforward goal: politics. It is tortuous philosophical language at the service of basic quotidian lived experience, the call for the dis-alienation of the subject for the sake of its absolute realization. In the words of Robert Sinnerbrink, Nietzsche, like the (meta)physician he proclaims to be in The Antichrist<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xx]<!–[endif]–>, “takes a critical knife at the diseased body of [Western] culture, not only to diagnose [the West’s] malady but to prescribe a possible cure. The philosopher is a physician who diagnoses, an artist who transfigures, and a legislator who prescribes ‘remedies’—interpretations or values—for our decadent modernity.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xxi]<!–[endif]–> Nietzsche is able to take this stance of physician, artist and legislator, as remarks Peter Poellner in his insightful review of David Owen’s Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality,<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xxii]<!–[endif]–> by first giving up Christian belief and by detaching himself from the encapsulating Christian morality that obscures metaphysical investigation, which for Nietzsche amounts to investigation of the real. Nietzsche’s diagnosis reveals several societal maladies, one of which is at least directly relevant to understanding the soul of the alienated black in the plantation and colonial contexts.

 

[Nietzsche’s] genealogical story as reconstructed by Owen goes roughly like this: ‘slave values’ … originate in a post-tribal political community in which a group of “nobles” brutally rules over and instrumentalizes another group as slaves. The slaves in this setting cannot experience their agency as largely their own, nor can they experience and think of their typical capacities and dispositions as having intrinsic (rather than instrumental) value as long as they think in the evaluative terms espoused by their masters who value the very traits that enable them to express their agency–by ruling over the slaves, among other things. Since human beings, according to Owen’s Nietzsche, are characterized by a fundamental desire to experience themselves as agents, and the slaves cannot express this desire in physical action, there develops among them, unintentionally, an alternative evaluative perspective enabling them to conceive of and experience their very powerlessness as a kind of power–as their agency. This picture comprises, first, a notion of virtue in terms of the typical character traits of the slaves (humility, etc.) and, secondly, a concept of free choice according to which practising the slave virtues is a merit, not only in the sense of being good or praiseworthy, but presumably also in the sense of deserving favourable treatment or reward. In any case, Owen agrees with most other interpreters of the slaves’ ressentiment values that the new evaluative picture is not one that the slaves are genuinely committed to — their apparent commitment to humility (etc.) is self-deceived . . . and in reality expresses a desire for power over the nobles.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xxiii]<!–[endif]–>

It thus results that the condition of the slave is one of alienation; and that enfranchisement from slavery supposes first and foremost dis-alienation; it presupposes self-determination, independence from the inauthentic views of oneself, departure from the master-produced views of oneself and master-produced ethics offered as one’s ethics. Nietzsche and Heidegger are just saying, respectively, that within Judeo-Christian morality and in the middle of mit-dasein, the subject is just an exuberant slave; exuberance being that which keeps the slave from crying on a quotidian basis; thus the necessity for a space-surrendering gesture—for Nietzsche—and crowd-parting gesture—for Heidegger.

That which is only allegorical for Nietzsche and Heidegger becomes seriously real for Fanon. For the dis-alienation of the Black in the (post)plantation and (post)colonial contexts, Fanon suggests that both gestures are indispensable. The black enslaved in the obvious Manichean system of colonization cannot afford to intellectualize his freedom. He cannot afford to function at the levels of metaphors. Nothing is surreptitious in his oppression. His condition is blatantly real to him. In the colony, the black only has to raise his head to see the violent injustice that surrounds him.

 

The “native” sector is not complementary to the European sector. The two confront each other, but not in the service of a higher unity. Governed by a purely Aristotelian logic, the follow the dictates of mutual exclusion. . . . The colonist’s sector is a sated, sluggish sector, its belly is permanently full of good things. . . . The colonized’s sector . . . the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow. You die anywhere from anything. . . . The colonized’s sector is a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light. <!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xxiv]<!–[endif]–>

Consequently, for Fanon, the allegorical struggles for freedom, such as proposed by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and especially Hegel, the latter whom he takes directly to task, find little solution to the dilemma of the black colonized, when they do not forthrightly divert the black from his effort for independence. Nonetheless, Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s ideas are not totally absent in Fanon’s thinking. In fact, it would be fair to say that they inspire, support, and reinforce Fanon’s thinking, just as they have inspired, supported, and reinforced the thinking of Fanon’s elders, Senghor and Césaire.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xxv]<!–[endif]–>

If Nietzsche should be the father of Nihilism, as he is often referred to, he should hold that title not on the argument that he has cultivated nihilism and called for its permanence, but, on the contrary, because he has exposed nihilism as the cancer destroying modern Europe, and prescribed its expurgation through the bold actions of a ressentiment-free Uberman. For Nietzsche, ressentiment is a sign of weakness; it is the fundamental approach of the slave. It is a mark of the slave’s limitation, endless rumination, envy of and jealousy toward what the master possesses, and that the slave sees as unreachable. As observes Hayes, for Nietzsche, resentment “is a corrosive and contemptible attitude that contaminates anyone who experiences it.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xxvi]<!–[endif]–> There is, nevertheless, this particularity in resentment, that “hunger for revenge” is its fundamental cause. Nietzsche himself recognizes that this hunger for revenge makes of resentment the starter of revolution. It is thanks to plebeian resentment that Rome has been submitted to Judaic rule.

 

The Romans were the strongest and most noble people who ever lived. . . . The Jews, on the contrary were the priestly, rancorous nation par excellence, though possessed of an unequaled ethical genius. . . . Has the victory so far been gained by the Romans or by the Jew. . . . Rome, without a doubt, has capitulated . . . thanks to the plebeian rancor of the German and English Reformation, together with its natural corollary, the restoration of the Church.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xxvii]<!–[endif]–>

Likewise, it is resentment in the form of a “vindictive popular instinct” that has led to the French Revolution, thus occasioning the collapse of what Nietzsche mourns as “the last political nobleness Europe had known.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xxviii]<!–[endif]–> Fanon, like Nietzsche acknowledges the debilitating effect of resentment. Fanon, too, agrees that the resentful subject is a reactive subject and not necessarily a rational one. “Racism, hatred, resentment, and ‘the legitimate desire for revenge’ alone cannot nurture a war of liberation,”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xxix]<!–[endif]–> though resentment might be instrumentalized toward liberation. From this perspective, hunger for revenge is affirmative in the colonized’s struggle for emancipation. From this perspective, then, what we might call Fanon’s affirmative resentment, for instance, could be rightly credited to Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, Fanon acknowledges that the slave’s daily performativity, however exuberant it might appear, is misguided, inauthentic; it actually conceals the slave’s desire to perform exactly the contrary act. The slave that bows in front of his master actually wants to stand up and grab him by the throat. The slave that waits on his master wants to sit at his table. The slave that says “yes” actually wants to shout “no.” The slave is full of resentment. Where Nietzsche sees no positive value in resentment, Fanon, however finds in resentment a certain affirmative charge. However, the author of Black Skin, White Masks observes with much lucidity, too, that the necessary reactional attitude of the opening phase of the emancipation struggle has to be replaced with actional attitude.

 

I said in my introduction that man is a yes. I will never stop reiterating that. Yes to life, yes to love, yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to scorn of man. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom. Man’s behavior is not only reactional. And there is always resentment in reaction. Nietzsche had already pointed that out in the Will to Power. To educate man to be actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world, is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xxx]<!–[endif]–>

 

For the black colonized subject habituated to a life of mimicry, the Nietzschean/Heideggerian conceptual space surrendering gesture is urgent; it demands true action; which Fanon could not afford to let others perform for him lest he should relapse in the very space out of which it is necessary that he leap. So, when Hegel undertakes to devise a theory of consciousness that addresses itself to the relationship between the slave and his master, it is justifiably that Fanon, a man born in the plantation society, who, in his lifetime, had witnessed firsthand both the plantation and post-plantation racial divides, should hail him; especially when Hegel’s proposed solution for the freedom of slave is that the latter should melt himself into a happy universal synthesis with his master . . .

<!–[if !supportEndnotes]–>

<!–[endif]–>

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[i]<!–[endif]–> Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996).

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[ii]<!–[endif]–> As held Aristotle, “Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above the state . . . the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole. But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state. A social instinct is implanted in all men by nature.” See Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Chapter 2 (Kessinger Publishing, 2004),7.

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[iii]<!–[endif]–> See Kelly Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[x]<!–[endif]–> See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, translated by Anthony M. Ludovici (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000), 4-5.

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xii]<!–[endif]–> See Alessandro Tomasi, “Nihilism and Creativity in the Philosophy of Nietzsche,” in Minerva—An Internet Journal of Philosophy 11(2007) http://www.mic.ul.ie/stephen/vol11/Nietzsche.pdf (accessed on 01-23-2009).

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xv]<!–[endif]–> Property was European “to the extent that,” as notes Talal Asad, “European appropriated, cultivated, and then lawfully passed . . . on to generations of Europeans as their own inheritance” the world that, according to Lockean logic, “God gave the men in common . . . for their benefit.” See “Muslims and European Identity: Can Europe Represent Islam?” In The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, edited by Anthony Pagden, 209-27 (Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 2002), 216.

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xvi]<!–[endif]–> See David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and its Opponents (New York: Free Press, 1998), 432-35.

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xxi]<!–[endif]–> See Robert Sinnerbrink, “We Hyperboreans: Platonism and Politics in Heidegger,” in Contretemps: An Online Journal of Philosophy, vol. 3, July 2002, 161.

http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/3July2002/sinnerbrink.pdf (accessed 01-23-2009)

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xxii]<!–[endif]–> David Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (McGill’s-Queen’s University Press, 2007), reviewed by Peter Poellner, University of Warwick, in Notre Dame Philosophical Review,

http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15005. (accessed on 01-24-09).

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xxiii]<!–[endif]–> See Peter Poellner’s review of David Owen’s Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (McGill’s-Queen’s University Press, 2007), in Notre Dame Philosophical Review, http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15005. (accessed on 01-24-09).

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xxiv]<!–[endif]–> Fanon, The Wretched, 4 (version Philcox)

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xxv]<!–[endif]–> See Frindéthié, Black Renaissance,

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xxvi]<!–[endif]–> See Floyd W. Hayes, “Fanon, Oppression, and Resentment: The Black Experience in the United States,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, edited by Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renée T. White, 11-23 (

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[xxvii]<!–[endif]–> Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “The Genealogy of Morals,” in The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, translated by Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), 186.

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From Colonization to Globalization: Difference or Repetition? By Frindéthié

February 11, 2009 · Leave a Comment

. . . Since the collapse of the USSR, the dynamics of empire has changed. The World is now more multipolar and mercantile, with China and Europe emerging to compete against the US. Empire is more driven by multinational corporations, whose interests transcend those of any particular nation-state.

 

STEVEN HIATT—”Global Empire: The Web of Control,” A Game as Old as Empire

General Charles de Gaulle, this most beloved French president and iconic figure of French resistance and morality, once formulated an aphorism whose hideous veracity is only equaled by the unscrupulous zeal with which France put it into practice throughout history. “France,” he said, “has no friends, but only some interests.” This Gaullist maxim, which foreboded an unchanged paradigm of philosophical disinformation, economic strangulation, military persecution, and political destabilization, if it has proven factual over time and has helped France accumulate a colossal fortune to the detriment of its former colonies, is today being challenged by most French-speaking African countries (Algeria, Chad, Rwanda, Cameroon, Haiti, and Côte d’Ivoire). Perhaps, the most powerful counter-hegemonic social movement of the twenty first century witnessed in French Africa is the resistance movement taking place in Côte d’Ivoire since 2002, and which Sidiki Bakaba, the Ivorian filmmaker, has documented in his Bare Hands Victory.1 Bakaba’s documentary chronicles the mobilization and struggle against French disguised neocolonial agenda of several Ivorian youth movements gathered under the banner of La Galexie Patriotique (The Patriotic Galaxy) and led by the charismatic former student association leader Charles Blé Goudé.

To refer to Blé Goudé’s movement exclusively as a youth movement would not really do it justice. The Galexie Patriotique is actually a spontaneous multigenerational, multi-gendered, multi-party, and multi-professional block that has formed to unveil and defeat France’s imperial economic and political scheme wherever it will manifest itself in Côte d’Ivoire and under whichever form it will hide. On closer analysis, the movement is a resistance against a tripartite collusion represented by the United Nations, the northern countries, and local informants/collaborators, all united for the continued pillaging of developing countries. Côte d’Ivoire, the patriotes often chant, will be the graveyard of France’s deceitful policy in its former colonies. What they really mean is that, at least in Côte d’Ivoire, they are determined to put an end to the French arsonist policy by which France has historically schemed to set multiple fires in Africa in order to hire itself as emergency management agency via the United Nations and the world financial institutions.

No matter under which form they come into view, the various French interventions in Africa have never had a philanthropic thrust. French intrusions in Africa have always been driven by logic of maximum wealth through minimum or no effort. Historically, the French Republic has seldom won a war. In fact, the French have systematically lost most wars, even the ones that they confidently declared on their neighbors; and each time France was defeated, it turned to Africa or to the Caribbean with the most destructive designs to assuage its bruised ego and to rebuild its broken finances. An understanding of the French policy in Africa—and the Caribbean—whereby in moments of political and financial distress at home crises are implemented abroad as possibility for Hexagonal improvement could inform a discussion of the contemporary stance against France’s brand of globalization in Africa in general, and in Côte d’Ivoire in particular.

In 1871, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, a war that France declared and seemed so confident to win on its Prussian neighbor, France emerged a broken and demoralized nation with a diminished territory, a poor economy, and an injured reputation. The German Alliance had just defeated the army of Emperor Napoleon III, annexed French territories of Alsace and Lorraine, and handed the French government a reparation invoice the equivalent of one billion dollars to be paid within three years. Despite its drained reserves, France managed to acquit itself of the enormous bill long before the scheduled deadline. France’s alacrity to make good on the German humiliating tab would have seemed a casual occurrence if, almost fifty years before that event, a less powerful country, Algeria, asking that France reimbursed a loan it had owed for too long, had not paid a heavy cost for its impertinence.

THE WOLF AND THE LAMB

The immediate economic outcome of the 1789 French Revolution was catastrophic. Agricultural methods in France had remained archaic. Unlike British farmers, for instance, French farmers had not been able to develop large agricultural exploitations to sustain the local markets and garner much-needed revenues. The small French farms could hardly feed the French populations; furthermore, the price of grain and firewood had skyrocketed; bread, the quintessential French food, was being rationed. France was on the verge of famine, and an even more dangerous prospect was lingering: Napoleon’s hungry armies in Italy and Spain were getting irritable; a mutiny could break any time. Subsequently, France turned to two Algerian commercial houses, Bacri and Busnach, for a loan in money and grains in order to remedy the country’s hardship. However, Bacri and Busnach, too, owed some money to the Algerian sovereign, Dey Kodja Hussein, and they were waiting for France to honor its tab, so that they could settle their debt with the Dey. In 1815, by the end of the Napoleonic failed war, France’s debt to Algeria was about 18 million francs. Perhaps the merchants had asked Dey Hussein to use his authority and recover the money from the French authorities on their behalf. Whatever the case, Dey Hussein grew impatient with France’s tergiversations. In 1827, during a heated argument he had with Pierre Deval, the French consul in Algeria, regarding France’s long-due balance, Dey Hussein hit Deval with his flywhisk. King Charles X, who had by then been on the French throne since 1824, was not very eager to pay off his country’s delinquent debt to Algeria. So, Charles X seized this occasion to protest what he perceived in the Dey’s gesture as lack of respect for the French Crown. Despite Dey Hussein’s explanation that his gesture was in response to Pierre Deval’s personal insult to him rather than condescension toward the King of France, 600 French ships landed 37,000 troops in Algeria on June 14, 1830. The French soldiers engaged in the most despicable acts of religious vandalism and human right abuses. They raided mosques and transformed them in cathedrals. They destroyed private properties; they raped women, and executed hundreds of Algerians. Less than a month later, on July 5, the French deposed Dey Hussein. By February 1831, Algeria became effectively a French settlement colony, and French authorities invited 4500 French colonists to farm the fertile coastal lands of Algeria.2 the French occupation of Algeria did not remain without any response, nonetheless. The Algerians offered the French a prolonged resistance. Finally, in 1962, the Algerians handed the French one of their most crushing defeats in history and seized independence. Germany of 1870 was not 1830’s Algeria. France understood that it was not in its interest to delay its obligation toward the Germans. So, France paid its debt promptly and spent the ensuing years thinking of ways to assuage its defeat and to brighten its tarnished image in Europe. Many social engineers suggested that France should concentrate its efforts overseas and build itself an empire that would both replenish its depleted coffers and extend to “inferior races” its ideals of civilization.

GLOBALIZING OTHERWISE: FROM SLAVE TRADE TO COLONIZATION

France, it should be noted, had been present in Africa as early as 1642. France had actively participated in the slave trade that sold more than 28 millions Africans in Europe and in the Americas between 1650 and 1900. At that time, the purpose was clearly economic, and no one spoke of extending French “superior” civilization to the “inferior races” of Africa. In the later years of the 1800, however, the world’s opinion on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was changing. Many voices, among which the Quaker settlers in America, John and Charles Wesley (founders of the Methodist Church), the poet William Coleridge, the Evangelical writer Hannah More, had openly questioned the humanity of the slave trade; and an abolitionist wave initiated by Denmark in 1804 started to sweep Europe and America. In 1848, France reluctantly abolished the official practice of slave trade. Among the people who had expressed disapproval of the slave trade, was Olaudah Equiano, a former slave. Equiano was also a former slave owner who had understood that slavery could only be stopped if there could be an incentive for not practicing it. So, he tried to convince slave owners that slave trade was depleting Africa of potential consumers of European goods, and he urged Europeans to turn instead to disseminating European civilization to Africa, as they exploited the many African raw materials from which slave trade had distracted them.3 The functioning semantic pair was thus launched, commerce and civilization, which would henceforth be seized on as determining the scope of French—and European—new interventions in Africa. Taking Equiano’s suggestions to globalize otherwise at heart, European countries raced for the riches of Africa. Ivory, gold, timber, cocoa, coffee, rubber, palm oil, nuts, and tropical fruits, and not slaves—even though some “lawbreakers” were still trading in slaves, for seventy years went by between the Danes’ abolition of slavery in 1792 and the effective stop of slave importation to Europe4—became the new commodities that brought huge profits to European markets. By the late 1800s, Africa became so crowded with European fortune seekers that conflicts were inevitable.

In the absence of roads, rivers were the principal communication means, and Portugal, which had first claimed the Niger River and the Congo River, would not share navigation rights with other European countries. British trading companies were also scheming to have exclusive control of the whole Niger River. Among the British shrewdest traders was George Goldie, founder of the National African Company. Goldie was so profit-driven that he coerced local chiefs along the Niger to sign treatises that would “for ever” cede their territories to his company and to the descendants of his shareholders. Goldie’s deceitful commercial methods were not that much out of the ordinary. They were common occurrences among traders and constituted the sources of many international frictions. To better regulate trade in Africa and to avoid conflicts among the international actors in the region, the European powers held a conference in Berlin between November 15, 1884 and February 26, 1885, under the chairmanship of German Chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck. Although the European powers publicized the conference as a meeting for discussing issues of humanity, peace, and the “civilizing” and “welfare” of the native populations of Africa, what actually dominated the talks was definition of the rules that would govern the Europeans’ claims of territories in Africa. The Conference resolved the question of territorial conflicts among European countries by deciding that any European nation that formally gave other nations notice of its occupation of a territory would be recognized as the rightful owner of that territory; and so, the rules of the game settled, European powers rushed to slash as larger morsels as they could of the African pie.

However, still haunted by the specters of defeat, the French had yet to be convinced. Their 1870 humiliating loss to the Germans had dampened all their previous enthusiasm for overseas conquests. Furthermore, their Algerian colonies had not turned out to be what India had been to Great Britain. Algerians continued to oppose long-drawn-out resistances to the French occupation, and the North African colony had cost more headaches to France than it had brought in profits. French financiers were hesitant to spend money in more African adventures; they preferred less uncertain governments bonds, and French politicians preferred for their constituencies a good pot-au-feu to the bad bread that they ate during the 1870 German siege of Paris. On the other hand, the wounds of dishonor inflicted by the Germans were slow to heal, and many government officials believed that France could shine again if only it could secure for itself a large African empire. Five months after the Berlin Conference, a debate between proponents and opponents of colonial expansion was raging in the hall of the French Assemblée Nationale. The two most memorable protagonists of this debate were Jules Ferry and Georges Clémenceau. On July 28, 1885, five months after being driven out of office for overseeing the failed 1885 Chinese-French war in China, Jules Ferry was making a case for colonialism in the chamber of the National Assembly.

Ferry invoked three arguments in favor of France’s colonial expansion. Economically, within the logic of its industrial aspirations, France needed to find new markets outside Europe and the United States for its export commodities, as Germany and America had become increasingly protectionist at the same time as they had been flooding France with new agricultural and industrials products. Economists like Leroy-Beaulieu, who tried to establish a nexus between Britain’s wealth and its possession of an overseas empire, and who argued that the acquisition of a colonial empire would indubitably bring economic wealth to France, supported this argument.5 The lack of knowledge on the interior of Africa often led to sizeable exaggeration about what the continent could offer Europe. During the French colonial campaign of the 1880s, for instance, some government officials elatedly estimated that Sudan had a consumer market strong of 88, 000. 000 people at the disposal of the French economy. In fact, they were only 10, 000. 000 people.6 From a humanitarian perspective, Ferry argued that, as a member of the “higher race,” France had a divine right and a duty to civilize the “inferior races,” perfect them, and improve their backward morals as was successfully the case in Algeria under the French, and in India under the British. From a political and patriotic perspective, Ferry insisted that France needed to ensure its place in the world by performing acts of grandeur. For Ferry, amidst the European rush for territorial expansion, any politics of abstention on the part of France would amount to abdication. To ascertain its position on the international exchequer, France would have to start exporting its language, its customs, its flag, and its genius.7

In a reply to Ferry, Clémenceau charged that Ferry’s dichotomy of superior race/inferior race was suspect and reminiscent of the German social engineers’ discourse in the days preceding the Franco-Prussian war. The Germans, like Ferry was doing then, had argued for racial superiority. German scientists had asserted that because the French were an inferior race, France was doomed to lose the war. So, Clémenceau urged his fellowmen not to repeat this German axiom against African nations by trying to disguise violence under the cunning designation of civilization. For him, the excuse of right or duty to civilize was nothing but a right to brutality that scientifically advanced societies tend to claim presumptuously in order to take possession of less advanced nations and torture their citizens and exploit them for the benefit of so-called superior races. Clémenceau concluded that to make civilization a justification for colonization was to adjoin hypocrisy to violence.8 In any case, the early 1890s witnessed the rise of a multitude of strong pro-colonialist pressure groups, such as, the Comité de l’Afrique française, the Comité de l’Égypte, the Comité de l’Asie française, or the Comité de Madagascar, all unified under the banner of the Parti colonial, which made the case for a revival of France’s place in the world. Their argument was less to sell an African business venture to French investors than to sell an African empire to the state. By the end of 1890, a colonial consensus was already in place in France. It advocated, as H. L. Wesseling notes, less emphasis on treaties with local chiefs, and a more forceful military approach that would lead to the subjugation of West African empires, such as Dahomey and the empires ruled over by Ahmadu and Samory.9 Against all apprehensions, the French colonization of Sub-Saharan Africa turned out to be more lucrative than even the pro-colonists had previously thought, especially in West Africa where, prior to the Berlin Conference, and in combination with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Europeans had been dealing in great resources of foodstuffs and profitable market products, such as, gold, ivory, timber, gum, and vegetable oils.10

When the dust of the European imperial dash to Africa settled, the continent was parceled into fifty territories, and most European countries had their African colonies. France, Germany, Great Britain, and Portugal were the countries that obtained the lion share. King Leopold of Belgium claimed the biggest territory known to belong to a single individual. He appropriated for himself the territory that constitutes today’s Democratic Republic of Congo. France snatched a large territory in West Africa from Mauritania to Chad (French West Africa), and Gabon and Congo (French Equatorial Africa), as well as the Island of Madagascar. Germany took Namibia and Tanzania. Great Britain seized Egypt, Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Nigeria, and Ghana. Spain grabbed Equatorial Guinea. The European powers saw the territories that they claimed in Africa and elsewhere as extensions of their countries. They became empire-building nations. France’s empire comprised the territories of present day Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, Togo, Gabon, Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, the Islands of Mauritius, Reunion, Seychelles, Madagascar, Comoros, and Mayotte.

The French territories did not all have the same status. They were slave colonies, exploitation colonies, settlers’ colonies, or protectorates; and France ruled them accordingly. Most French colonies in the Caribbean were slave colonies, whereas in Sub-Saharan Africa they were principally exploitation colonies. In exploitation colonies, France’s goal was to run away with most of the resources the colonies could yield (coffee, cocoa, lumber, palm oil, rubber, tropical fruits and nuts, and various minerals) for the benefit of the metropolitan state. Also, Africans from exploitation colonies were not on the same footing as those living in settlers’ colonies or protectorates. Settlers’ colonies and protectorates had local rulers collaborating with a French appointed consul. The protectorate of Tunisia had a local sovereign, the Bey. In the Settlers’ colony of Algeria, it was the Dey. Elsewhere, in the Americas, there had even been proposition of French citizenship for the people of the colonies at one time. For the people of the French colonies of Africa south of the Sahara, the question of equality or autonomy was hardly considered.

Indeed, the 1789 rebellion known as the French Revolution, and which was led by highly taxed peasants and bourgeois Republicans resentful of the rigid French monarchy, resulted in the fall of King Louis XVI, the replacement of the monarchy by a National Assembly (composed of the majority of French, rich merchants, and poor peasants), and the declaration of France as a Republic. The driving principle of the Revolution was the belief in the idea that all men are born free and equal in rights. This principle was drawn upon the French Enlightenment ideals as well as the English Bill of Rights of 1688 and the Virginia Bill of Rights of 1776. So, in the aftermath of the Revolution, the National Assembly adopted a document called The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was to be the blueprint of the new convention. Hardly had the Declaration been adopted that started a passionate debate about its implication for the people living in the old French colonies. Some proponents of equal rights argued that the philosophy of the Declaration should be extended to all the people living on French soil, including those living in the colonies. Consequently, in 1794, the elected National Convention, which in 1792 had replaced the dissolved National Assembly, voted to abolish slavery in all French colonies. The French planters of Saint Domingue (today’s Haiti), France’s richest American colony, protested this decision. These planters were white and people of color slave owners for whom slaves constituted a much-needed cheap labor in the large coffee and sugar cane plantations of Saint Domingue. Around the time of the French Revolution, Saint Domingue had about 500,000 slaves, 30,000 free people of color, half of whom were Mulattoes, and about 20,000 whites planters, shopkeepers or paid workers (referred to as “petits Blancs”).

These various populations with competing interests, who hardly got along, had anecdotal reactions to the Convention’s 1794 decision to abolish slavery and extend French citizenship to people in the colonies. Many of the free people of color, who had, at one time, bought themselves from their former masters, were small plantation owners. They usually owned small numbers of slaves that they treated very cruelly, as they intended to draw the distinction and show that, as free men, they were closer to the whites than to their slaves. The Mulattoes, children of slave owners and slave women set free by their remorseful fathers, were resentful of blacks, whether free or slaves. The Mulattoes were usually overseers on large plantations when they were not planters themselves, and they would not miss an opportunity to take their frustration on the slaves since they had no authority over the free blacks. Among the whites, the paid workers, such as, merchants, shopkeepers, and teachers (“petits Blancs”) hated the blacks—be they slaves or free—out of pure racism, and they resented both the black planters and the Mulattoes against whom they had to compete for social status. By all indications, the white planters, who relied heavily on slaves, would be opposed to setting them free. The Mulattoes, who were resentful of their black heritage, would welcome the possibility of being French citizens with much exultation. The poor whites’ social position would not change. On the contrary, they would henceforth have, not just the free blacks, but also, the former slaves to compete against for social standing. As for the black planters, even though they would gain French citizenship, the end of slavery would also bring the ending of free labor and the vanishing of the class of blacks that have helped sustain any little sense of superiority they had.

The reality was even thornier. While the law that abolished slavery in the French colonies was passed in 1794, four years earlier, in 1790, amidst discussions about the status of the people in the colonies, the French National Assembly passed a piece of legislation that was particularly aimed at reassuring the opponents of abolition of slavery. That legislation stipulated that only owners of property would have the same rights as French citizens. The problem with that legislation was that, by trying to prevent slaves from becoming French citizens, it also kept the petits Blancs, who were not landowners, from aspiring to French citizenship. Whites (planters and petits Blancs) created an alliance to fight this law that would give blacks French citizenship and refuse it to non-slave-owning whites. However, this alliance between white planters and poor whites to defeat a legislation that could enfranchise people of color was a fraught pact built on duplicity. The white planters were not really fighting so that the petits Blancs would become their equal. What the white planters really wanted was that which their people of color counterparts also wanted: a politically and economically autonomous Saint Domingue free from France’s control. Neither the planters nor the free people of color had any desire to lose their slaves (free labor force) by pledging total allegiance to France. Planters (whites and free people of color) wanted Saint Domingue to remain an independent slave state, especially in light of the Exclusif, this French law that forced planters from the French colonies to sell their goods only to France and to buy their necessary supplies from France only. So, white planters united with free people of color to fight France’s political and economic tyranny. The petits Blancs, who were not really affected by the Exclusif, wanted no part of this new alliance, especially as it included blacks, whom they hated viscerally.

Meanwhile, plantation slaves were also establishing alliances with run-away slaves (Maroons) who had retreated into the mountains. The Maroons, who had no intention of falling back into slavery, should the independent movement succeed, collaborated with black slaves to organize sporadic raids on plantations, ransacking and burning farms, and killing planters. As the raids on planters intensified, the planters’ alliance for political independence became also a defense coalition against Maroon and slave rebellions. Once again, the petits Blancs, who were not plantation owners, saw no reason to join the alliance. The coalitions between free people of color, white planters, and petits Blancs were very versatile and volatile. They changed according to decisions taken in Paris. The only stable alliance was the pact between the Maroons and the slaves whose determination for freedom was inflexible. So the 1789 spirit of equality and citizenship for all people living in France and in the French overseas colonies never fully materialized. Blacks in the slave colony of Saint Domingue seized their independence by force, after very violent encounters with antagonistic interests both within and without the Island. On January 1, 1804, two years after the capture of their leader, Toussaint Louverture, and one year after his death in a French jail, the slaves declared Saint Domingue a free state and reclaimed the Island’s former Creole name of Haiti, meaning land of mountains.

In the French exploitation colonies of Africa, France never attempted the Haitian experience. Instead, there, the policies of Assimilation and Association became the order of the day. Assimilation was a politics that sought to make the people of the French colonies in the likeness of French people in the motherland. The idea was that French civilization was the ideal civilization, and therefore French people had the divine duty of instilling French values in the Africans, thus considered uncivilized. This idea was proudly termed by the French as mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission), the true motivation of which, as has been discussed earlier, lies more in economics and self-image. However, Assimilation had its detractors. Many French did not like the idea that blacks should be placed on the same footing as whites. The celebrated French anthropologist, Gustave LeBon, for instance, was one of the passionate defenders of whites’ superiority and an untiring opponent of Assimilation.11 Also, in the colonies, many blacks resisted Assimilation because of its veiled notion of French superiority. Ultimately, Assimilation failed and was replaced by the less intrusive policy of Association. Faced with the Africans’ refusal to assimilate, French administrators had no other choice but to come to terms with the fact that Africans felt a strong attachment to ways of living that they were not prepared to replace by anything foreign; ways of living that some scientists, such as the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, have wished to theorize in not so pleasing terms as “the civilization of the person-plant.”12 So, Association was based on the recognition of an African civilization different from French civilization. From this perspective, the idea was to gently lead Africans toward an appreciation and a love of French culture and civilization without asking them to surrender their own cultures and civilizations. For that to happen, French administrators in the French colonies of Africa were asked to rule with much flexibility by relying on local chiefs as intermediaries between the people and them. These first French attempts at globalization were, like the ones that preceded them, devoid of any real reciprocity. The native populations of the colonies resisted them ferociously; and whatever justification the France gave for its retreat from the colonies, it did not leave on its own good will. The cost in human and financial capital was too high for France to sustain, the determination of the colonized too strong to break. Imperialist France left because it was simply and purely beaten and forced to recognize the autonomy of its colonies

However, the hexagonal compulsion for takings was so imperative that France devised a number of “cooperation” schemes to remain the privileged speculator in the newly independent countries of Africa. French-speaking Africa’s independences in the 1960s did not prevent France from seeking to exploit its former colonies. Responding to its protectionist itch, France tried numerous alternative schemes to keep the gaze of Africans turned toward France as the Promised Land, French language as the quintessential language, French culture as the exemplary culture, so that economic resources could continue to be transferred from Africa to France as natural and expected facts.

Previously, during the colonial system, protectionist France had mandated free entry of French goods in the French African colonies and imposed tariffs on colonial goods entering France.13 This decision had the obvious consequence of impoverishing the colonies while enriching the metropolis. However, the 1930s recession made it crucial, for France’s economic survival, to transform the African colonies into consumer markets. France thus eased tariffs on its colonies in order to allow them to sell more easily on French markets, earn money, buy French manufactured goods, and also pay interests on their debts. At the same time, in order to avoid competition from other powers, France imposed quotas on some foreign imports to France and to French colonies. France also forbade its colonies to export certain products to foreign markets, thus forcing those foreign countries to purchase only from France products that would otherwise be available in the colonies. In addition, France placed duties on some foreign imports competing with colonial goods entering France. These duties ranged from 11% on non-colonial bananas to 110% on cocoa, passing through 34% on peanuts and palm kernels and 91% on non-colonial coffee. Although many have argued that this pre-independence “preferential system” accorded to the colonies has greatly contributed to keeping French Africa afloat during the 1930s economic slump and is partly the source of what came to be known in the 1980s as the economic miracle of Côte d’Ivoire. 14 In fact, the market-driven economy that this colonial system fostered provided the colonies with some money, only to be returned tenfold to France. Furthermore, this market economy, which France managed to keep alive long after the African independences, was the source of many economic shocks, as it put French-speaking African nations at the mercy of international speculators.

In fact, the hexagonal protectionist measures of colonial times continued through various appellations in post-independence Francophone Africa. Under the sly excuse of insuring the economic safety of the ex-colonies, the various preferential economic system put in place by France on its own, and later with the cooperation of the E.C. and the E.E.C., actually sought to maximize France’s profits by curbing France’s dwindling returns in the colonies. In 1959, the French commercial system made it possible for France’s African colonies to consume 28.2% of French exports while contributing to 20% of French imports. These numbers dropped to 7.8% of French exports used by Francophone Africa against 5.9% of French imports coming from Africa. The various conventions (Lomé, Yaoundé, Lomé 2), which reinforced France’s economic “cooperation” with its former colonies and later with Anglophone Africa and the ACP states, did little to create real conditions of development for non-European countries. In fact, France maneuvered to exclude “Asian ex-colonies from the ACP states on the ground that they would prove dangerous competitors in a range of industrial products,” and the tiny country of Mauritius, a potential competitor in textiles was asked by the E.C. to voluntarily restrain from the ACP.15 The E.C. states, and particularly France, its most aggressive member did nothing to foster manufactures in Africa. As far as the E.C. was concerned, Africa was to remain an eternal supplier of raw materials; and the late 1980s Washington Consensus, with its menu of one-sided de-politicization of the state that opposes social public sector investment in welfare, job creation, environmental protection, healthcare, education, and poverty reduction,16 offered France the blessing of the Bretton Woods institutions to carry on a game that it had been perfecting for so long: that of draining off wealth from Africa under the semblance of reciprocal improvement.

From Colonization to Globalization

Globalization, this dogma implemented primarily under the impulsion of the financial institutions of Bretton Woods, presupposes an international violence. Globalization assumes, often on the ground of mere bureaucratic sixth sense and no scientifically dependable instance, that, in order to improve the welfare of human populations, the prescription is to oblige developing countries to fine-tune their economies according to the requirements of Euro-American multinational corporations by way of liberalizations of local markets. The result of this philosophical-economic exercise is that, as was the case in the days of the colonization of Africa, it effectively relocates crises of economic deterioration from North to South. The World Bank and the IMF’s persistence that developing countries open their economies to Foreign Direct Investments has enabled the scheme of neocolonization of the countries that have resolved, half a century ago, to determine the course of their particular developments away from the imperial ambitions of Europe. In most cases, globalization has succeeded in reinstating European—and American—imperialism by allowing First World capitalists quasi-ownership of Third World countries through purchases of strategic government-owned enterprises, such as, power, water, and communication companies. As Petras and Veltmeyer note, the scheme works when “the imperial state bails out banks, investors and speculators and provides political pressure to open markets, sends military expeditions to eliminate alternatives.”17 In this grand design of recolonization disguised as globalization, resistance is ruthlessly squashed by a variety of coercive methods. For the Third World leaders who, against the First World’s schema, try to pursue a populist agenda that advocates national control of their country’s resources and benefits, and who, true to their people, refuse to fall prey to the trap of corruption and the promise of First World lifestyle, “[T]he EHM [Economic Hit Men] game plan includes a full menu of oppositions to ensure compliance, whether willing or not.”18

Rich, indeed, is the list of options at the disposal of the EHM, which includes subversion of the political process, contact with and corruption of administration and business leaders, corruption of the military, of the media, of trade unions, and of academics, and the stirring of ethnic and religious divergences; a menu that seems to come directly from the handbook of the colonial era, and which begs to be verified against the inventory of treatments that countries like Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, and Haiti, to cite only these few, have endured for daring to stand against the tripartite collusion of the northern countries, the United Nations and the financial institutions, and their corrupt local political puppets. In Côte d’Ivoire, this threefold conspiracy functioned along the axis of an African IMF executive, Alassane Dramane Ouattara, who doubled as a shady native informant, during his years as prime minister of Côte d’Ivoire, his direct association with French multinationals, Bouygues and Bolloré, and his ties with the Chirac government in France. This web of international relationships is essential for understanding the current situation in Côte d’Ivoire, a situation that emerged as the result of Côte d’Ivoire’s resistance to globalization à la française.

Côte d’ivoire, 1970-1990: From Economic Prosperity to Scarcity

The 1970s were an age of prosperity in Côte d’Ivoire. The skyrocketing prices on international markets of cocoa and coffee, the country’s main export commodities, had created an astonishing economic boom and established Côte d’Ivoire as the preeminent economic power in West Africa. Signs of development were visible in all sectors; and economic observers were not shy to compare the Ivorian economic sensation to the Japanese miracle. They were right to a certain extent: The Ivorian growth rate was only second to Japan’s. However, this economic boom was heavily dependent on foreign capitals, as it was tied to international speculators’ willingness to pay high prices for coffee and cocoa, which, unlike oil, for instance, were not products of crucial necessity. Attempts to diversify the economy and launch development programs led the country to borrow external capitals, which were not always judiciously managed. Furthermore, the falling prices of coffee and cocoa in the late 1970s and early 1980s amplified the country’s external debt and led Houphouët to turn to the World Bank and the IMF for loans to stabilize his country’s economy. The period spanning from the mid-1980s to early 1990s was a time of mixed blessings for Côte d’Ivoire’s economy. The exploitation of newly discovered offshore oil reserves had helped alleviate some of the country’s hardships; however, the economic storm was not totally weathered. Amidst rumors of government layouts, people took massively to the streets to protest what they interpreted as the results of the grab for power of the PDCI (party in power). To save his presidency, Houphouët bent to the conditions of the Bretton Woods institutions and invited the economist Alassane Ouattara in April 1990 to chair the Comité Interministériel de Coordination du Programme de Stabilisation et de Relance Économique (Interministerial Committee for Coordination of the Stabilization and Economic Recovery Program), a committee in charge of reflecting on ways to tackle the economic crisis and find adequate solutions. Five months later, an ailing Houphouët appointed Alassane Ouattara prime minister. What happened from April 1990 onward is a series of events that read like a novel.

 

Dominique Nouvian Folleroux: Femme Fatale

Ouattara’s proximity to Houphouët had allowed him greater closeness to Ms. Nouvian Folleroux, the woman that would become his wife and most trusted associate in the most rocambolesque financial intrigues to define the political future of Côte d’Ivoire. The circumstances in which Dominique Nouvian was introduced to the epicenter of power in Abidjan are still not very clear today. According to some reports, the late governor of BCEAO, Abdoulaye Fadiga, Ouattara’s former boss, presented her to Houphouët. Other reports credit the late minister of construction, Bamba Vamoussa, of introducing her to the first president of Côte d’Ivoire. In any case, she had been intimately close to both men, and her affairs with key figures of Houphouët’s powerful circle had unquestionably been opportune in occasioning her meeting with the Old Man of Abidjan. She became Houphouët’s mistress and a few months later, to the shock of the Ivorians, this angelic blond became the exclusive administrator of Houphouët’s huge estate and part of the country’s estate. Her heartbroken and powerless husband, a French expatriate, committed suicide—though many Ivorians, known for their fertile imagination, would suggest that it was a case of euthanasia. Dominique Nouvian Folleroux’ new title of executor of Houphouët’s domain gave her tremendous name recognition and financial power, even as her benefactor’s popularity at home was declining.

In the early 1990s Houphouët was ailing and also assailed by a fierce political opposition. For the first time, the “Old Man,” as he was affectionately called in Africa, released his grip on power. Under the pressure of the Bretton Woods institutions and the French government, he legalized opposition parties and promised multiparty presidential and legislative elections in Côte d’Ivoire. The October 28 multi-candidate presidential election confirmed the strength of opposition forces, and especially the political weight of Houphouët’s old political rival, Laurent Gbgagbo, leader of the socialist Ivorian Popular Front (FPI). According to international observers Gbagbo garnered more than 30% of the votes—though the official ballot count conceded him only 18.3% against 81.7% for the sitting president. On November 26, 1990, eighteen opposition parties competed against Houphouët’s PDCI during the parliamentary elections. Houphouët’s PDCI retained 163 of the 175 parliamentary seats. If anything, the contestation of the Old Man’s hitherto absolute power ushered in a new era. Houphouët was a diminished man.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Dominique Nouvian Folleroux’s business seemed to suffer no setback at all from Houphouët’s trouble at home. On the contrary, her dealings were prospering. She made good use of Houphouët’s one-of-a-kind address book and entered financial transactions with his exceptionally influential friends. Among other things, she sold some of Houphouët’s real estates in France for the amount of 19 million Euros, a business deal that apprehensive Ivorian authorities had vouched to look into. She acquired Jacques Dessange’s hair saloons in the United States. AICI (Agence Internationale de la Commercialisation Immobilière), the real estate office that she opened in Abidjan was attracting big clients. Her regulars were Martin Bouygues, the French king of concrete, owner at 42.9% of TF1 (the first French TV station drawing 31.6% of French TV audiences in 2006), owner of LCI, another French TV channel, special guest to Nicolas and Cécilia Sarkozy’s wedding, and godfather of their son Louis Sarkozy; Vincent Bolloré (business partner of Bouygues) king of cigarette paper and media—it was Bolloré who paid the new French president a vacation trip to Malta on his luxurious boat as a congratulation present after the 2006 French presidential election; it was he again who lent his private Falcon 900 to Sarkozy and his then new girlfriend Carla Bruni for their December 25, 2007 vacation trip to Egypt; Dominique Strauss-Khan, former minister of finance of President Mitterrand and IMF president since 2007, Bongo, president of Gabon who, like Houphouët before him, has been so close to Dominique Nouvian Folleroux as to now entrust the administration of his real estate and part of his country’s property to the Gabon branch of Mrs. Folleroux’s AICI, run by her brother Philippe Nouvian. Other patrons of Mrs. Dominique Nouvian Folleroux are Blaise Compaoré, president of Burkina Faso, and Kaddafi of Libya. Hers was a network of powerful financial friends; the same network that Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate to the French presidential election accused on May 4, 2007, of trying to influence French elections by manipulating the news. Ségolène especially attacked the relations between Sarkozy, Bouygues, Vincent Lagardère (first world magazine publisher and owner of Paris Match, Elle, and Radio Europe 1). She charged them of working together to rig the electoral process.19 Such is the association of powerful financial interests that Mrs. Dominique Nouvian Folleroux has been able to weave since she first entered Houphouët’s bedroom in Abidjan. Dominique Nouvian Folleroux was the powerful woman that Alassane Ouattara declared to have fallen in love with, as he responded to President Houphouët’s IMF-coerced call for help.

“Ouattara, Ouattara! He’s Our Man. He Can’t Do It, Nobody Can!”

“Ouattara, Ouattara! He’s Our Man. He Can’t Do It, Nobody Can!” Such seemed to be the mindset of the Bretton Woods institutions and big international corporations with financial stakes in Côte d’Ivoire since about the death of Félix Houphouët Boigny, in December 1993. An excellent student of the IMF, where he first worked from 1968 to 1973 before assuming various positions at the BCEAO, Ouattara was very receptive to the International Monetary Fund’s prescription of Structural Adjustment Programs in Africa despite the burden that these programs put on local populations. As prime minister of Côte d’Ivoire, his solutions for redressing the country’s economy did more harm than good: He cut subsidies to farmers, as recommended by the WTO, while the European Union and the United States were, at the same time, heavily backing their own farmers financially; he dismissed more than 10,000 employees from the state payroll. Those who were lucky to keep their jobs saw their salaries reduced by 40% or were forced to accept an early retirement package. He reduced access to early education by freezing the recruitment of new teachers. He closed students’ subsidized restaurants. He eliminated transportation and basic healthcare services for students. He imposed fees on the masses for basic healthcare services. He initiated the devaluation of the CFA at the rate of 100 CFA francs for 1 French franc. He instituted the highly controversial resident cards for foreigners, which was the source of much harassment toward foreign nationals coming from neighboring African countries, and he aggressively pursued Mauritanian and Lebanese merchants for so-called back taxes in the upward of millions of CFA francs. These measures, as it was to be expected, frustrated the masses even further, and workers and students’ demonstrations intensified; which, under his orders, were repressed in blood. Many students were killed and student, union, and opposition leaders, among whom the current president, Laurent Gbagbo and the leader of higher education teachers’ union, Marcel Etté, were jailed and tortured amidst international outcries and unsuccessful calls for an independent investigation. Undeniably, Ouattara was a good student of the IMF. In Côte d’Ivoire, Ouattara was the praiseworthy son of a powerful institution that had reared him to serve the father unreservedly. The question was whether he was really a son of Côte d’Ivoire, concerned with the interests of his fellow citizens.

As far as the World Bank and the IMF were concerned, this question had no bearing so long as the Washington Consensus had a powerful spokesperson in the country that would guarantee the interests of its shareholders. So, under further pressure, the ailing president Houphouët had Ouattara cumulate the portfolios of prime minister, minister of finance, and interim president. During Houphouët’s long ailment and his medical treatment in Europe in 1993, Ouattara ordered that all public receipts (collection of taxes, debts, and returns from the customs, the ports, and even the treasury) be directly deposited in a special account at the office of the prime minister rather than at the treasury, as it was customarily the case. This atypical management style, to say the least, quickly mixed individual assets with state property, and millions of dollars from the public treasury remained unaccounted for, while Ouattara, taking as much as two flights a week to Europe, officially to visit his sick boss—but unofficially on capital flight missions—was tucking millions of dollars away in personal foreign bank accounts, making him one of the richest men on earth. Ouattara’s mysterious fortune raised some eyebrows, even among those who supported his bid for presidency. Ahmadou Kourouma, the late Ivorian writer, once suggested that the origin of Ouattara’s huge fortune ought to be investigated, because such wealth could not originate exclusively from his regular salary as Deputy Director of the International Monetary Fund. Kourouma hinted that the source of Ouattara’s wealth might not be honest at all. Il a été Premier ministre quand Houphouët était malade. Peut-être que cela donne un début d’explication. L’histoire, un jour, nous le dira.”20 (He was prime minister when Houphouët was ill. Perhaps, this is a beginning of explanation. History will tell us someday.) Likewise, Emile Constant Bombet, who was Ouattara’s minister of interior in the 1990s, speaking in 1999 as Bédie’s minister of interior, had promised to look into the source of Ouattara’s fortune just a few days before his boss was toppled by a coup d’état: “Je suis surpris de la partialité des journalistes . . . personne ne s’est posé de questions sur l’origine de la fortune de monsieur Ouattara. Croyez-moi, nous en parlerons le moment venu . . .”21 (I am dumfounded by the partiality of the journalists . . . nobody has questioned the origin of Mister Ouattara’s wealth. Believe me; we will look into that at the proper time.) There exists a consensus that during Ouattara’s tenure as prime minister and interim president of Côte d’Ivoire—a period during which he took an extraordinary number of flights to Europe during Houphouët’s illness—he has accumulated an astonishingly immense fortune. During his term as prime minister, Ouattara became one of the biggest actors of capital flight from Côte d’Ivoire toward European banks, thus depleting Africa of much needed resources, as he raided the country’s coffers.

Capital flight, the bulk of the private assets that are legally or illegally held in foreign countries outside Africa, is one of the continent’s biggest impoverishers. Capital flight, reported to amount to about US$ 22 billions, is as much as half of the aid that Africa needs for its development programs. Were this money brought back to Africa, it would constitute 64% of Africa’s private capital stock.22 As one of Africa’s biggest capital jetsetters, Ouattara is, without doubt, and in proportion to the short time he spent as prime minister of Côte d’Ivoire (three years and one month), among the leaders who have economically siphoned the continent the most. As the prime minister was busy outsourcing his public function to the businessman in him, thus mixing state capitals with private capitals, Dominique Folleroux—whom Alassane Ouattara had by then married during a 1991 ceremony officiated by the former mayor of Neuilly, currently president of the French Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy—was now, against all ethical propriety, lobbying for Bouygues and Bolloré to acquire state-owned EECI (Énergie Électrique de Côte d’Ivoire) and SODECI (Société de Distribution d’Eau de Côte d’Ivoire), respectively power and water companies. It did not take long for her clients to obtain satisfaction. These strategic Ivorian state companies and others were sold off to Mrs. Dominique Nouvian Folleroux Ouattara’s clients and friends, usually under their market values, sometimes for just one symbolic franc, all against the objection of opposition leaders and even leaders of his own party (the PDCI), such as Henri Konan Bédié, who was at the time president of the National Assembly. As a result, 27% of the assets of Ivorian enterprises are French-owned; 240 subsidiaries and more than 600 companies belong to French businessmen; which represented 68% of direct foreign investments in Côte d’Ivoire. Alassane and Dominique Ouattara’s shady deals with their cronies, which have mortgaged the economic and political future of Côte d’Ivoire, have been widely reported.

Mr. Michel Camdessus, a Frenchman who was the president of the IMF during the last term, when Alassane Ouattara was vice-president of the IMF, is currently serving as adviser to the French president Jacques Chirac. Of the members of the political parties and groups in Côte d’Ivoire, Alassane Ouattara, an unabashed advocate of IMF policies and an ideologue of the theology of neo-liberalism, and his current wife, a French businesswoman solidly connected with business lobbies, offer the best guarantee to satisfy the conditions for security and profit for the French government, corporations, settlers, and small-enterprise owners who can have a lifestyle of comfort they cannot afford or even imagine to have in France.23

 

This lack of probity on the part of Africa’s most influential economists and leaders ought to be examined in relation to the dire future that their selfish proclivities set up for the continent. Between 1985 and 1998, the net outflows from Africa to developed countries have risen from of US$ 3.6 billion to the alarming amount of US$ 12.5 billion.24 Capital flight by native pillagers has contributed enormously to these outflows. This, of course, has profound depressing incidences on progress. As a result, Africa continues to service huge debts and remains unable to invest in public and private sectors; which in turn erodes, not just poverty reduction projects, but also, serious foreign investors’ confidence in the continent; and the cycle of poverty linked to debt servicing and fiscal deficit goes on until the corrupt agents’ facility to plunder is short-circuited. It is Henri Konan Bédié, the institutional heir to the presidency, who put an end to Ouattara’s capital flight activities.

Henri Konan Bédié: Not Exactly the Man Paris had Dreamed of

On December 7, 1993, Houphouët, who for three years had been sidelined by his illness from participating actively in Ivorian politics, passed away in his native village of Yamoussoukro. The Ivorian constitution had a provision for replacing a deceased head of state. Article 11 of the constitution stipulated that in such a vacancy of power, the president of the National Assembly was to assume the duties of head of state until the outcome of new elections. Bédié was therefore the constitutional heir to Houphouët. However, bypassing the legal process, Ouattara proclaimed himself legitimate successor to the presidency. This obvious constitutional hold up provoked uproar at the National Assembly, and during an unscheduled appearance on RTI, the national TV, Bédié announced his intent to carry out his constitutional duty by finishing Houphouët’s remaining two years.

In the past, during his years as president of the National Assembly, Bédié had been openly critical of Ouattara’s complacent economic liberalism that widely opened the doors to foreign buyouts of strategic companies with very little regard for the country’s security. At the time when French politicians, led by then Minister of finance Nicolas Sarkozy, were hammering at employees gatherings and at the French national Assembly that EDF (French state-owned power company) and GDF (French state-owned gas company) were never going to be privatized because of their strategic importance to the French economy, Ouattara, the prime minister of Côte d’Ivoire, was selling his country’s power and water companies to the closest friends of the French government.25 What made Sarkozy’s position so tenable in France and so untenable in Côte d’Ivoire? Could it be for the simple reason that one was dealing in one case with a country located in Europe, and in another case of a country located in Africa? It is this lack of moral reciprocity that the movement of patriotes in Côte d’Ivoire has taken to task. In so doing, their demonstration was also aimed at denouncing the collaborators from within who have betrayed their people for the promise of economic lactification. For, the waves of coups d’état and political instabilities that have succeeded one another in Côte d’Ivoire since 1999 are also strangely laden with odors of organic betrayals. Each time Côte d’Ivoire was affected by shockwaves of military blows, Ouattara was the insider that, for the promise of a Firstworldist enjoyment, betrayed the loyalty of a country he claimed to love. The precedents to this proclivity are bloodcurdling. One shall recall how in the Leopoldian system of the Congo Free State, King Leopold’s auxiliaries were rewarded with free looting and raping in Congolese villages for increasing the king’s rubber output (see chapter 9 in this book). The Consequences, as in the days of Ouattara’s administration, proved disastrous for women and children.

Bédié, like Ouattara, believed in economic liberalism. Only insofar as one can speak in relative terms, Bédie’s liberalism, however, was one that was committed to ensuring that his country would not lose total sovereignty to wealthy investors from Europe or from anywhere else for that matter; and he was working at it by making a number of reforms. Some of the measures that Bédié took in that direction were to thoroughly identify the populations living on the Ivorian soil through a systematic census program, clean up the prevalent anarchical land exploitation, and regulate landownership. Indeed, in the mid to the late 1990s, Côte d’Ivoire was the second immigration destination in Sub-Saharan Africa, right behind South Africa, with an unusually high immigrant population rate of 27% for 13 million Ivorians. The largest foreign communities were from Mali (2 millions), Burkina Faso (2 millions), Ghana (1.5 millions), Nigeria (500,000), and in smaller numbers from Benin and Togo. Though an agreement among the countries of ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) allowed free circulation and settlement of populations from any member state, the migration to Côte d’Ivoire was almost unidirectional. The important immigrant populations from neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso, whose main purpose for coming to Côte d’Ivoire was to work the fertile land of the country or to cut and burn trees for the very lucrative charcoal business toward drier countries (Mali or Burkina Faso) had clashed several times with local populations over issues of landownership, forest fires, and severe national reserve deforestation. In 1999, a land dispute between settlers from Burkina Faso and locals from the region of Tabou (South-West of Côte d’Ivoire) had caused about 12,000 Burkinabé to flee their fields. This event, which took place a year after the National Assembly adopted a law that would prevent the sale of land to foreigners, invited even harsher criticisms towards Bédie’s reform. Bédie’s land reform did not sit well with his Malians and Burkinabé counterparts. The governments of Mali and Burkina Faso relied heavily for their national incomes on the money that their expatriates sent from Côte d’Ivoire. They perceived in Bédie’s reform a pretext to dispossess their compatriots of lands they had been exploiting for years, and they also found objectionable the reform’s obvious consequence of depleting their countries of much-needed revenues. In their grievance, the Malians and Burkinabé could find stronger allies in the French. “The old class of French landlords who acquired large portions of land in the southern part of the country often in obscure contexts, with no proper or convincing legal papers stipulating, for instance, the duration of the lease . . . oppose any form of land reform, as it could jeopardize transfer of these lands to their descendants.”26

These French landlords and businessmen had seen their privileges increased and consolidated with Ouattara. Under the administration of Houphouët’s prime minister, the nature of the state had shifted from that of a governmental institution to that of a non-governmental organization (NGO)—to use this term by James Ferguson27—whereby the prime minister had lost interest in state affairs and had, instead, become a businessman, increasingly drawn to establishing personal business deals and building private wealth to the detriment of public welfare. In the context of Bédie’s reform, the question then was whether, after having had a taste of the state of Côte d’Ivoire as a non-governmental institution, with all the advantages that it entailed, France and the neighboring countries of Côte d’Ivoire, notably, Burkina Faso and Mali, were still disposed to see the administration of Côte d’Ivoire return to being a governmental institution. This was the challenge that confronted the Bédié government in the mid- to late 1990s.

Against this sociological background, it becomes clear that Bédie’s demise—for he was to fall soon—was not the result of mismanagement or hostility to openness. In fact, Bédié was as open to FDIs as Ouattara had been; he was just a little more conscious of the governmental role of the state. The fact that, for the most part, Africa’s openness to international trade and finance has left it at the mercy of insatiable First World capitalists and corrupt Third World collaborators should be less imputable to globalization itself than to the probity of the protagonists in the globalizing enterprise. Globalization has succeeded in places where the actors involved have shown a minimum of moral decency. Available data for Africa in the 1990s shows that countries in North Africa, and South Africa and Côte d’Ivoire had managed a low level of poverty with high level of openness. Côte d’Ivoire’s numbers are 20% of poverty incidence for 40% of openness. Incidentally the data is not distributed on specific years of the 1990s, but it is easy to surmise that the incidence of lower poverty occurred during the Bédié years. Even Bédie’s detractors acknowledged that between 1995 and 1999, Côte d’Ivoire had known economic growth and increase in individual wealth—though some cynics are quick to attribute this expansion to capital inflow from war-torn Liberia and Sierra Leone. Furthermore, a Trade Policy Review of Côte d’Ivoire’s trade policies conducted by the World Trade Organization (WTO) on July 4 and 5, 1995, concluded with high praise for Bédie’s government open trade policies and expressed optimism for Côte d’Ivoire’s future.28

Bédie’s demise is just one more evidence that Foreign Direct Investments or private capital flows are not that private after all; Foreign Direct Investments often unleash state intervention, with all its military shock and awe. Whenever a powerful state intervenes to invade a weak state, one can be sure that some private investors from the powerful state, unhappy about their returns in the weak state, have directly or indirectly triggered the military intervention. History is littered with examples where private investors have sent their countries to war to protect or simply to increase their dividends. Bédie’s lukewarm support for French interests was not what France had hoped for. Bédié was a man of France’s, but not their number one man. His zeal for reforms could hurt French interests in Côte d’Ivoire. Ouattara had been more generous to French business with his unchecked liberalization and his gré à gré surrender of public corporations to French investors and to his French partners. With Ouattara in power, France was sure to regain its slippery grip on Côte d’Ivoire by continuing to buy under their market values state-owned enterprises and get government contracts by bypassing any calls for bids that would put them in competition with investors from the United States, Canada, Japan, South African, China, among others. For the sake of French interests, Bédié had to be deposed.

Meanwhile, Ouattara, who had returned to the IMF in 1993 upon the Ivorian Supreme Court’s confirmation of Bédié as legitimate head of state, had been appointed by Michel Camdessus to serve as his deputy chairman of the institution one year later. Though at the IMF, Ouattara had not given up his presidential ambitions; neither was he willing to wait for regular elections to have his chance. The massive foreign electorate constituted by undocumented immigrants from Mali and Burkina Faso, many who had voted before in the one-party system farcical elections that had confirmed and reconfirmed Houphouët by acclamation, and on which Ouattara, too, was relying to win the 1995 presidential race, had been compromised by Bédie’s identification program. Bédie’s identification program required that only established Ivorians should vote in presidential elections, though established foreign residents were still allowed to vote in legislative and municipal elections. Bédie’s land reform as well as his census and civic formation projects fell under the umbrella of what he had termed Ivoirité. This notion, whose origin had misleadingly been attributed to Bédié, and which had even more deceitfully been translated as Ivorianness, rather than simply Ivority—as one had spoken of Africanity, Americanity, and Francity elsewhere—was said to have first appeared in 1945 in Dakar at a black students’ conference. Later, and Ivorian writer and poet, Niangoran Porquet, used it in an article entitled “Ivoirité et authenticité,” in 1974, and an Ivorian scholar, Kanvaly Fadiga, used it in 1997 to mean the national consciousness, the common will of brotherly people who have chosen to live together on the Ivorian soil, and together share the same sufferings, the same joys, and the same hopes.

Why Francité But Not of Ivoirité?

Ivoirité, as Bédié had recuperated it, was first intended to represent, for the more than sixty ethnic communities of Côte d’Ivoire, a signifier of identification, the social glue that would bond them together by instilling in them a stronger patriotic fiber, and consequently a stronger attachment to the state and its institutions as embodying the sum total of all individual nationalistic expressions. This was an essential societal project given the lack of enthusiasm that the Ivorian populations had hitherto expressed for the state and state institutions. In most foreigners’ eyes Côte d’Ivoire stood as a state-ECOWAS, a sort of Deadwood, but a rich one nonetheless, where any opportunistic member of the 15 ECOWAS states, and even beyond, would come to seek fortune by all means necessary, with no sincere attachment to the land, but a lucrative one. The people of Côte d’Ivoire had lost faith in their successive governments which they hardly saw as really concerned with safeguarding the welfare of the nationals. Ivorians accused their successive governments of rather bending over backward to live up to an image of sanctuary country by satisfying the caprices of ECOWAS. This situation was exacerbated by Houphouët’s choice, throughout his presidency, of foreign nationals as cabinet members. For instance, Raphaël Saller (France) had been minister of finance and development; Mohamed Diawara (Mali) had been minister of development; Abdoulaye Sawadogo (Burkina Faso) had served as minister of agriculture; Hamadou Thiam (Senegal) had served as minister of information. To better understand this level of governmental openness and the resulting mass frustration that ensued, Americans would only have to imagine Canadian, Mexican, Columbian or Antiguan nationals (who have never been naturalized or who do not even intend to apply for American citizenship) occupy posts in the United Sates government, as treasury secretary, HUD secretary, or secretary of health. In the 1980s-1990s a phrase that illustrated the Ivorian distrust in their government and their detachment from public property was the infamous “Tant pis! Ça appartient à l’État” (who cares? It belongs to the state), a phrase that would justify any act of vandalism or spoliation of state property.

Bédie’s Ivoirité was determined to rectify this mass cynicism. It intended to create the conditions for an allegiance that would no longer be based on ethnic background—as had until then been the case in the context of the aloof and impersonal state—but rather an allegiance that would be grounded in identification with the nation-state created on Independence Day, August 7, 1960. This was nothing novel. In the sphere of cultural contestations, coinages in -ité suggesting allegiance to geographical, national, racial or linguistic origins have abounded. Senghor, the only black consecrated by France—this France so reactive to Ivoirité—in its so elitist French Academy for being so French, thus “so righteous,” said in his December 11, 1974 course at the Sorbonne that it was important to struggle, to suffer, and to die, “plus volontiers pour une –ité ou une –itude que pour un –isme” (more readily for an –ity or an –itude than for an-ism)? Curiously, however, it seems that African heads of state have been more willing to struggle, suffer, and die for France’s specificity than their own. An illustrative example is Francophone African presidents’ unashamed gathering around the theme of Francophonie, which, as we learn again from Senghor, is no more no less than a synonym of Francité. In May 1968, during a conference at the University of Beirut, while defending the so-called peaceful and non-imperialistic nature of Francophonie or Francité, Senghor insisted that Francophonie was not a war machine constructed by European imperialism, but a mode of thinking a certain way, a mode of approaching issues and seeking solutions, a spirit of French civilization or Francité.

Francophonie, Senghor declared, is Francité; and Francité, he swore had not the slightest imperialistic bent in it, but was merely the expression of French civilization and culture devoid of any political agenda; and while most African leaders accepted the word of Senghor, this griot of things French, that Francité would not harm a fly, yet, the same leaders were quick to condemn Ivoirité as a genocidal war machine. Today, as in 1968, the most passionate defender of Francité is an African, an ex-Senegalese president, Abdou Diouf. He is the current secretary general of Francophonie. He goes around world capitals selling French culture and civilization and promoting the expansion of French business and policy; and wherever he convenes his annual gathering, a plethora of African leaders follow him—among whom Bongo of Gabon, Wade of Senegal, Toumani of Mali, and Compaoré of Burkina Faso have the privileged front row seats. Lately, however, the Proselytizer-in-Chief of French language, wine, and fromage, the new griot of French culture and rectitude, Abdou Diouf, got a blunt reminder that, despite his professed worship of things French, he was specifically an African, and African he would remain. On May 13, 2006, as he was responding to the Canadian government’s invitation to speak in Winnipeg on matters relating to the pseudo-apolitical Francophonie, Abdou Diouf, this easily recognizable towering political figure who travels with a diplomatic passport and a strong following, was stopped and body searched at Toronto Airportlike a vulgar suspect. What? Had Diouf really believed that chanting the beauty of French culture around the world sunddenly shook his black soul into a dew of milk and conferred him special regards in the eyes of the white world? Perhaps so, for the diplomatic reactions that followed this humiliation of an African noted former head of state proved beyond all doubts that Francité, or Francophonie as it is often referred to, was more political than its supporters knew or would admit to know.

President Diouf’s humiliation at Toronto Airport was only symptomatic of the duplicitous nature of the North/South encounter, a reality to which Africans have never been able to respond in a coordinated way because of the North’s successful politics of Divide and Rule, and most importantly, because of most African leaders’ big complex of inferiority. While Senegalese, the most fervent believers of Francité in Africa, were protesting their ex-president’s treatment at Toronto Airport, many Ivorians were chuckling at what they perceived as a fair shock therapy to all the French-African puppets who, like the Senegalese sharpshooters of World War II, were busy fighting France’s war while the French populations were hiding in their basements,29 or the modern native Africans Economic Hit Men who were starving their peoples by selling off their countries’ resources to international multinational corporations in order to enjoy a little bit of white dreams. Ivorians had trouble understanding why, at the same time as Paris, with the support of some African leaders, was prosecuting Abidjan’s successive governments in the media for a so-called maintenance of Ivoirité; the same African leaders were touring the world to promote Francité. As if Francité were the natural expression of their own salvation, Francophone African leaders like Bongo of Gabon, Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, Compaoré of Burkina Faso, and Toumani of Mali, had been more vociferous about French nationalistic interests than they had been supportive of their own national interests. So, Toronto Airport reconfirmed, against the Senghorian denial, that neologisms of cultural renaissance have always had ideological/political dimensions; Toronto Airport only re-confirmed it, for many had known this fact long before Diouf’s discomfiture.

At least, President Bédié was aware of cultural-ideological nature of the concept. Having sensed France’s undeclared support for Ouattara just before the 1995 presidential election, Bédié activated against the latter the ideological political dimension of Ivoirité. A modification of the electoral code of Côte d’Ivoire, adopted on November 23, 1994, stipulated that only Ivorians whose parents were both Ivorian-born could run for the presidency. Bédié took this new measure not out of the blue, but precisely because he knew Ouattara. They were from the same generation. They knew where each other came from. They had followed each other’s formation and evolution. They had served for the same international financial institutions, and they knew how and why each one of them was appointed at the various posts they held. Bédié knew Ouattara as much as Ouattara knew him. Bédié knew—and Ouattara had admitted this in a signed correspondence to the Supreme Court of Côte d’Ivoire—that after his high school studies in Bobo Dioulasso (Burkina Faso) and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), Ouattara had benefited from an American scholarship to study in the United States of America as a student from Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso). Bédié knew that after his studies in the US, Ouattara first entered the IMF in 1968 under Upper Volta quotas. Bédié knew that Ouattara had obtained his first job at the BECEAO as an Upper Volta representative, and later served as vice-governor of the same institution between 1982 and 1984 as a functionary of Upper Volta (Burkina Faso). Apparently, Bédié was not the only one in the secret; for on August 8, 1984, on page 21 of an article entitled “Monsieur FMI,” Béchir Ben Yamhed, the editorial manager of Jeune Afrique, reported that, starting November 1, 1984, the Africa Department of the IMF was going to have a new director; and that Dr. Ouattara, from Upper Volta, would be serving in replacement of Zambian Justin B. Zulu. The Jeune Afrique article even specified that Ouattara was born in Côte d’Ivoire of immigrant parents from neighboring Upper Volta.31 Alassane Ouattara’s Voltaic nationality was no secret to anyone, especially as he exhibited it whenever it served his purpose.

Having evolved in the same professional space as Ouattara, the sphere of international financial institutions, Bédié was well positioned to know, as Jeune Afrique had reported, the nationality of Ouattara. He was an Upper Volta citizen, who took advantage of an American scholarship as an Upper Volta student. He was first recruited at the IMF under the quota reserved for Upper Volta citizens, and later, he served as vice-governor of the BCEAO as a representative of Upper Volta, with an Upper Volta diplomatic passport. In 1985, After his military coup in Upper Volta, Thomas Sankara, the new strongman of Burkina Faso—a country that, unlike Houphouët’s Côte d’Ivoire, was not in the business of appointing foreign citizens as cabinet ministers—offered Ouattara to enter his government as minister of economy and finances, a post that Ouattara, utterly resentful of Sankara’s revolution, disdainfully rejected, preferring to remain at his more prominent and lucrative international position at the BCEAO. Sankara then asked him to resign as the Upper Volta representative. It is at that time that Houphouët, who had a profound antipathy for military regimes, especially the ones operating too close to his borders, intervened, and in a taunting gesture toward Sankara’s junta, offered Ouattara an Ivorian diplomatic passport that would keep him at his post. As wrote Bédié, “Le président Houphouët lui avait accordé un passeport diplomatique quand il avait des difficultés avec les autorités du Burkina Faso. Il servait alors à la Banque centrale, commune aux sept États d’Afrique de l’Ouest. Un passeport diplomatique, vous savez, n’est pas une pièce d’état civil.”32 (President Houphouët gave him a diplomatic passport when he was in trouble with the authorities of Burkina Faso. He then served at the Central Bank, common to the seven states of West Africa. A diplomatic passport is hardly proof of civil status, you know.)

In 1988, upon the death of Abdoulaye Fadiga, then BCEAO director, Houphouët twisted the arms of the member heads of state and imposed Ouattara as the new governor of the institution. Bédié knew, as another journalist of Jeune Afrique had also reported, that from the time he finished his studies, thanks to an American scholarship awarded to him as a Voltaic student, and for the many years to come, Ouattara served in many capacities, in several places (Washington, Paris, Dakar), at several financial institutions (BCEAO, WAMU [West African Monetary Union], ADB [African Development Bank], UNCTAD [United Nations Conference on Trade and Development]) and took part in many general assemblies as a Voltaic citizen, equipped with a Voltaic diplomatic passport.33 So, Bédié knew that Ouattara had claimed Voltaic status each time he needed a scholarship or a job, simply because he was a Voltaic, like his father. [Alassane Dramane Ouattara] était burkinabé par son père et il possédait toujours la nationalité du Burkina Faso, il n’avait donc pas à se mêler de nos affaires de succession.”34 ([Alassane Dramane Ouattara] was a Burkinabé by his father. He had no right to involve himself into our debate of succession.) Bédié knew that by modifying the electoral code to request that both parents of any presidential candidate be Ivorian-born he was arresting Ouattara’s presidential ambition; which he did.

Bédié was a cunningly shrewd politician for changing the electoral rules in the middle of the political process. Ouattara was right to have protested Bédie’s unfair electoral practices. However, he challenged them on the wrong ground. It would have been more honorable of Ouattara to admit that, indeed, he had claimed Voltaic nationality to obtain a scholarship from the US and later to take advantage of an IMF quota system that favored Voltaic nationals; but that he had changed his nationality since then; and he could have provided documentation to that effect. He could also have maintained that, though his parents were Voltaic, he was born on Ivorian soil; and he could have challenged the Ivorian electoral rule on the ground of his birthplace. Instead, he told two momentous untruths that were totally undeserving of any prospective president. First, he denied, in the face of accumulating evidence that he had ever been a Voltaic national; he maintained that as far as he could remember, he had always had the Ivorian nationality. Secondly he denied that his parents were Voltaic, while his father had been a well-known village chief in Upper Volta. These two fabrications alone were good enough to disqualify any presidential candidate. As Bédie’s operatives started to produce proofs of Ouattara’s deceptions, Ouattara left Abidjan for Paris under the pretext that his life was in danger. Bédie’s Justice Department launched against him an international warrant for forgery. Just immediately, there started a vast media campaign that sought to legitimate any unconstitutional blow against the Bédié regime; a media campaign that resuscitated some of Bédie’s formerly ignored shortcomings or simply invented him new ones.

How Does One rationalize a Coup d’État? By conducting

it the name of globalization

In Côte d’Ivoire, the first coup d’état started with demonizing the Bédié regime on two levels. Socially and politically Bédié was to be presented as an insufficient leader who could not be the unifier that his predecessor, Houphouët, was. Economically, he was to be proven a reckless manager and an embezzler of public funds whose misconduct was hurting the masses. So, Bédie’s notion of Ivoirité served to demonize him as a divider and a xenophobic. Ivoirité, as Bédié had explained, was a formulae meant to synthesize the aspirations of the multiple ethnic groups living within the borders of Côte d’Ivoire. As such, the concept was to encompass not only the autochthonous people of Côte d’Ivoire, but also, the people from all over the world who lived and worked in the country, insofar as they, too, shared and respected the values of the nationals. For Bédié, Ivoirité. . . la synthèse culturelle entre les ethnies habitant la Côte d’Ivoire . . . concerne en premier les peuples enracinés en Côte d’Ivoire mais aussi ceux qui y vivent et y travaillent en partageant nos valeurs.35 (. . . the cultural synthesis of the ethnic groups living in Côte d’Ivoire . . . is primarily about the peoples rooted in Côte d’Ivoire but also those who live in the country and share our values.) Nothing in these words could hint to some official anti-immigrant or xenophobic stance, despite the fact that—and it has historically tended to be the case more in France than in Côte d’Ivoire—some frustrated fringes of the populations usually displace the inadequacies of their societies on the presence of foreigners.

Nevertheless, a powerful media campaign led by Ouattara’s operatives successfully disseminated the idea that Bédie’s Ivoirité was a recipe to repatriate immigrants from neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso; and an apparently “credible” French press went so far as to link minor occasional conflicts opposing locals to immigrants as direct consequences of Ivoirité, thus further exacerbating limited clashes by politicizing them. It did not take long for a country with a 27% immigrant population to be indexed as xenophobic. However, the French Press’ real motive for demonizing Bédie’s regime was elsewhere: Alassane Ouattara, France’s ideal candidate, could not run for the Ivorian presidency on account of his doubtful nationality.

Bédié is no saint, one must admit. He is only a politician, and every act he posited was politically calculated. Ivoirité in its political reach could serve, not only to eliminate Ouattara’s chances at the presidency, but also, to contain the massive electorate from Burkina Faso and Mali on which Ouattara was counting to this effect, and which, fitted with Ivorian national ID cards since the 1970s, had hitherto voted in every election. This electorate was geographically from countries north of Côte d’Ivoire, and religiously more than 90% Muslim. Ouattara wasted no time to coalesce topography and faith to his advantage, launching this designed sentence from his self-imposed Parisian exile, “On ne veut pas que je sois président parce que je suis musulman et nordiste” [They do not want me to be president because I am a Muslim and a Northerner], thus instigating an interethnic and interreligious pandemonium.

There was no reason to link Ouattara’s disqualification to the fate of the five million immigrants that lived in Côte d’Ivoire. Yet, this is exactly what a corrupt and irresponsible national and international media did. For the purpose of the denigration campaign that Bédié was to undergo under the hostile media, Ouattara suddenly condensed all that was foreign and Muslim; and any wrong done to him—either proven or unproven—became automatically a wrong done to any of the five million immigrants or the northern Muslims living in Côte d’Ivoire. Equally, any justice rendered him could be interpreted as justice rendered to the immigrants or northern Muslim populations of the country. Curiously, however, the self-professed certified media that supported Ouattara’s messianic campaign and was eager to impose him to Ivorians as legitimated president glossed over his own admission that he studied with an American scholarship reserved to Voltaic students and carried a Voltaic passport until the age of 42 with a disconcerting carelessness and an unforeseen lack of journalistic rigor. As one could read in L’Express,

A Paris, dans ce bureau de l’agence immobilière que dirige son épouse française, Alassane Ouattara, qui admet avoir été boursier du gouvernement de Haute-Volta et détenteur d’un passeport voltaïque, étale sur une tablette les copies des documents censés confondre ses détracteurs: cartes d’identité parentales, acte de naissance, certificat de nationalité.36

 

[In Paris, in the office of the real estate agency that his French wife manages, Alassane Ouattara, who admits to have held a scholarship from the government of Upper Volta and a Voltaic passport, displays on a little table copies of documents that are meant to prove his critics wrong: parents identity cards, birth certificate, certificate of nationality.]

Only journalists with premeditated purposes could be so blind as to pass over facts that begged so deafeningly for a minimum of objectivity.

Objectivity, however, was far from being the primary concern in the design to topple Bédié. Whoever has closely followed African politics, on the other hand, will know that African leaders are, in their great majority, corrupt officials, strongly encouraged by greedy Western political and business operatives to steal from their peoples or to embezzle foreign aids with impunity, insofar as these Western officials can be secured enormous benefits. One will recall how former French president Valérie Giscard d’Estaing and his cronies allowed former Central African Republic’s Emperor Jean Bedel Bokassa to remain in power for many years so long as he permitted them to plunder the uranium and diamond mines of his country. One will also recall how successive French presidents, from Giscard d’Estaing to Jacques Chirac closed their eyes on the financial follies of dictators like Mobutu from Zaire, Bongo from Gabon, Eyadema from Togo, Papa and Baby Doc from Haiti, as long as these corrupt leaders made their countries the economic playgrounds of French multinational corporations. The rulers of Côte d’Ivoire, from Houphouët to Bédié, passing through Ouattara and Gueï, have all treaded in the muddy waters of France’s organized crime, whereby they would cede their countries’ resources to France under their market values in return for huge commissions that often came in the form of freedom to embezzle with assurance of no audits; this is, until the crooked leaders start acting like renegades. Bédié offers an interesting case study to this paradigm. Of all the misappropriations of funds in which Bédié and his close associates were involved, there is one that he would always remember the most as the scandal that helped kill his presidency.

Between 1992 and 1997, the European Union approved several grants to Côte d’Ivoire; which were earmarked to improving the healthcare system and supporting the country’s decentralization program. Most of the aid vanished in government members’ personal bank accounts. Between 1992 and 1997, two different governments had been in control in Côte d’Ivoire, the all-powerful government of Prime Minister Ouattara (1990-93)—which, under an ailing Houphouët, saw the prime minister cumulate the portfolios of interim president and finance minister with that of prime minister—and the Kablan Duncan’s government under Bédie’s presidency (1993-99). Though the member states of the European Union acknowledged that the misappropriation of the European Union’s grants spanned over a five-year period, which should include at least one year of Ouattara’s administration, curiously, no mismanagement was imputed to the Ouattara government. The reason for this was quite simple. Ouattara had been good to French business in particular and to European interests in general, though at home much had been said and written on the illicit source of his huge personal fortune, on his elitist style, and on his arrogance toward the middle class that his blind support for the IMF and the World Bank’s forced structural adjustment was exponentially pauperizing. Bédié, on the other hand, was becoming an annoyance to France and to the European Union in general. His much-heralded reforms were not to the liking of France. Land reform threatened big French landowners, especially many who acquired their lands in shady deals reminiscent of the dishonest treaties George Goldie, founder of the African National Company, signed with African chiefs along the Congo River in the 1800s (see chapter 9 in this book). Bédie’s project of identification, by regulating the flow of immigration along the borders of Côte d’Ivoire, threatened France’s own politics of immigration, which sought to keep West Africans away from French borders in particular, and from European coasts in general. For a long time, Côte d’Ivoire had been the basin of African immigration. Many West Africans with dreams of better lives away from home—who could have tried their luck in Europe—had settled in Côte d’Ivoire, and had found in the Ivorian social and economic haven, not only more than the economic prospects they could envisage in France, but also, better social political and religious integration than could be imagined in Europe. So long as these African immigrants could remain in Côte d’Ivoire, they were millions less souls for the European Union’s immigration systems to worry about. Furthermore, Bédie’s identification policy—termed Ivoirité—was susceptible of disqualifying France’s greatest ally, Alassane Ouattara, and thus killing France’s hope of returning the state of Côte d’Ivoire to the status of non-governmental organization (NGO), a status which though disadvantageous to the Ivorian masses, has made so many French businesses wealthy and France’s balance of payments affirmative. So, five years after passively watching successive Ivorian governments indulge, among others, in the spoliation of the European Union’s grants, France was suddenly struck by some pang of conscience and decided to act on behalf of the oppressed masses that were being shortchanged by their leaders.

So, France, leading the European Union, ordered an audit of the management of the grants during 1995 and 1997, which was coincidentally the period concerning only the Bédié government, despite the fact that it was widely reported that the scandal went back to 1992, that is, as far back as the Ouattara administration.

Où ont disparu les 180 millions de francs que l’Union européenne a versés à la Côte d’Ivoire? Cette aide, destinée essentiellement au programme de santé, a été systématiquement détournée entre 1992 et 1997, comme l’attestent plusieurs audits récents de la Commission européenne et un rapport accablant de l’Inspection des finances ivoirienne, dont L’Express a pris connaissance.37

 

[[What happened to the 180 million francs that the European Union disbursed to Côte d'Ivoire? This money especially earmarked for healthcare has been systematically diverted between 1992 and 1997 as indicated by several recent audits by the European Commission and a report of the Ivorian finance inspection obtained by L'Express.]

 

The audit of very limited scope undertaken by the European Union, though it appeared somehow commendable, was in fact one more artifice in a series of carefully choreographed ruses meant to sully Bédie’s government and justify any military blow to come. The audit, conducted in November and December 1998 by the audit firm 2AC, uncovered that more than $30 millions, of an $88 million package, have gone missing. The assessment indexed Bédié, his family, and his close collaborators, especially his health minister, Maurice Guikahué, as economic criminals. This revelation coincided with the Cologne (Germany) announcement of debt reduction for heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) and caused the European Union to freeze its budgetary help to Côte d’Ivoire. The story of embezzlement of international aid by the Bédié government made a big splash in Europe and was disseminated by all the conceivable French major TV networks and newspapers. Nevertheless, some voices in Europe expressed suspicion about the timing of this revelation. According to a French member of parliament Thierry Jean-Pierre,

Il est scandaleux que les députés européens n’aient pas été informés de ces détournements, qui concernent des secteurs aussi sensibles que la santé. Je ne comprends pas que la délégation sur place et les quatre experts du Fonds européen de développement détachés auprès de l’administration ivoirienne n’aient rien vu. Cela pose un problème de compétence. A moins qu’il n’y ait d’autres explications.38

[It is outrageous that the members of the European Parliament had not been informed of these embezzlements that touch such sensitive sectors as health. I cannot understand how the delegation on the ground and the four experts of the European Development Fund assigned to the Ivorian administration did not detect anything. This raises a question of competence. Unless some other explanations exist.]

 

Clearly, the French MP was not blaming this delayed assessment on ineptitude from the European Union’s delegation in Côte d’Ivoire nor on incompetence from the four experts of the European Development Fund assigned to Côte d’Ivoire to monitor the use of the aid. If they had really wanted to, the European experts would have easily found out that, as early as the first years of the grants, monies were being diverted in private accounts; that programs targeted by the fund were never announced nor initiated; that medical materials, when they were effectively acquired, were being outrageously overpriced, and that some materials supposedly purchased were never delivered to their final destinations or simply ended up in the private homes of government officials. The experts of the European Union could not have been blind to the embezzlement going on for five years. They were well aware of the misuse of the funds. They just chose to ignore it because the time was not right yet to blow the whistle. That time came under the Bédié administration. Bédie’s misappropriation of international development aid from the European Union became public only when the moment to justify a coup against him became opportune. The revelation of the scandal coincided with the time when the question of Ouattara’s nationality became a burning issue in Ivorian politics, culminating with Ouattara’s self-imposed exile in France. Thenceforth, Bédié had on his hands, not only multiple not-so-peaceful demonstrations organized by Ouattara’s followers, the ire of the World Bank, the IMF, and the European Union, but also, the incensed populations of Côte d’Ivoire prompted daily by a hostile national media and a French gregarious media that has always mechanically aligned itself with the international policy of French politicians.

A few weeks after Ouattara turned up on the doorsteps of his Parisian friends and partners, on December 24, 1999, Bédié was deposed by the Ivorian military. On January 3, 2000, Bédié went in exile in Paris via Lomé and went to live in his private apartments on rue Beethoven, in the luxurious 16th arrondissement. Ouattara, as for him, returned to Abidjan triumphantly, persuaded that Robert Gueï, the new strongman of Abidjan, who had been his army Chief-of-Staff during his days as prime minister, was warming up the presidential seat for him. Ouattara was widely mistaken.

Robert Gueï: The house sweeper Who Would not leave

Judging by his body language as well as the statements that General Robert Gueï made as he appeared on Ivorian national TV on the evening of December 24, 1999, to announce the successful putsch that had led to Bédie’s fall, he was a terrified and unsure man; a man as surprised as the rest of the Ivorian population about the great burden that had suddenly befallen him. He was to lead a coup that he had not prepared and for which he was not prepared. He was peacefully getting ready to celebrate Christmas in his village, he told the viewers, when some young recruits came to him, weapons drawn, demanding that he be their leader and spokesman following a coup that they had just successfully undertaken against Bédie’s regime after President Bédié had refused to meet with them and discuss their claims for better wages. The recruits, he said, had taken his wife hostage, and unless he cooperated, they would execute her. So, he accepted their demand to avoid any bloodshed in the country. He seemed believable. He was disheveled and shaking, and his words were hesitant. He looked pitiful. He must have loved his wife to take on such a huge responsibility. Like everyone else, he was taken aback by this unforeseen event; or was he? For those who knew that Gueï had an ax to grind with Bédié, his revelation seemed very improbable.

General Gueï was born on March 16, 1941, in Kabakouma, a Western village of Côte d’Ivoire. As a teenager, he attended the military schools of Ouagadougou, in Burkina Faso, and Saint Louis, in Senegal. Later, in 1963, he went to the military school of St-Cyr, in France. Back to Côte d’Ivoire, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in 1967, captain in 1971. In 1990, as a colonel and Army Chief-of-Staff under Houphouët, he was ordered to squash a revolt of young soldiers claiming back salaries. In 1991, under the Ouattara government, Colonel Gueï served his master with a loyalty that almost landed him in hot waters. It was General Gueï who, under Ouattara’s administration, planned the bloody crush of student protest organized against the fallouts of structural adjustments in Côte d’Ivoire, and which resulted in the arrest, torture, rape and death of several students. In spite of an investigation that yielded damning allegations against Gueï, he was promoted general rather than being dismissed.

In 1995, Robert Gueï, henceforth a declared member of Ouattara’s opposition party, the RDR, ignored President Bédie’s order to repress a demonstration by the RDR that turned into a violent and disorderly pillaging revelry. Gueï refused Bédié’s orders less because he had come to good senses than because, that time, had he followed the orders, his party would be on the receiving hand of the brutal military machinery. For his insubordination and professed appurtenance to a party opposed to Bédie’s PDCI, General Gueï was removed from his post of Army Chief-of-Staff and appointed minister of civic service, and later minister of Sports. In 1996 Gueï, accused of coup d’état, was removed from his post. Granted amnesty in 1999 Gueï withdrew to Kabakouma, ruminating his revenge until the famous night of December 24, 1999, when he appeared, scruffy, on national TV, claiming that he was forced, under the threat of never seeing his wife alive another day, to assume the coup that toppled Bédié. A few days later, soon after he had regained a little bit of self-assurance and had come to terms with the blessed hand that fate had just dealt him, Gueï reappeared on national TV, this time, a little more radiant, a little more tidy and soldierly, a little less cowardly than he looked during his previous appearance, and cockier, too, mocking Bédié and unveiling his program or lack thereof. Bédié, he snickered, was no real man for fleeing, for real men stay on the front line to face adversity. Bédié was free to flee like a coward if that was his choice. As for him, he planned to maintain excellent relationship with France, honor Côte d’Ivoire’s financial obligations toward the Bretton Woods institutions, and return power to civilians as soon as he had swept the house and put things in order.

Gueï must have been very reassuring and unthreatening, for not a single time were there talks of French citizens being in danger in Côte d’Ivoire. None of the 20,000 French nationals living in the country was asked to leave by the French authorities. How could they be in danger? After all, was not Gueï close, very close, to Ouattara? Was not Ouattara himself the man of the IMF and the World Bank, thus the man of France and of the West in general? In fact, French newspapers, like Le Monde and French radio stations, like RFI, were literally dispatching Gueï’s version of the coup, presenting the despot as a hero who was forced by moral imperatives to take power in order to rectify injustices caused by Bédié; and these injustices, as the French media were relaying Gueï’s narratives, amounted first and foremost to Bédie’s November 1999 jailing of RDR leaders for organizing violent demonstrations to protest the dismissal of Ouattara’s candidacy. Powerful African leaders like Obasandjo of Nigeria and Mbeki of South Africa saw no reason to justify Gueï’s military coup, and while they were strongly condemning the military overthrow in Côte d’Ivoire as illegitimate and were calling for the restoration of Bédie’s power, France wasted no time, through its minister of cooperation, Mr. Charles Josselin, to recognize the new praetorian regime and to announce its willingness to work with Gueï. In the meantime Gueï dissolved the National Assembly and formed a so-called government of national unity constituted by ministers from all the political parties, except Bédie’s PDCI. However, Gueï’s government was filled in great part with Ouattara’s collaborators. All signs seemed to indicate that at the end of Gueï’s ostentatiously heralded “housecleaning” operation Alassane Ouattara would be the civilian leader to take over the presidency. Everything in Ouattara’s demeanor indicated that a deal in that effect had been reached with Gueï. In July 2000, Gueï organized a constitutional referendum that though overwhelmingly approved by the population and even by Ouattara’s party, failed to resolve Ouattara’s eligibility question. Indeed, in the process of “cleaning” house Côte d’Ivoire, Gueï grew fonder and fonder of presidential perks and discovered for himself a presidential destiny. In August 2000, Gueï announced his intention to run as the candidate of the PDCI, the very party whose president he overthrew a few months earlier. Gueï’s decision caused a rift in the PDCI between Bédié loyalists and those who had lost faith in any return to power of the deposed president. More importantly, it became henceforth clear that Gueï had no intention of passing the baton to Ouattara who, tired of waiting in the isle for the General to make his dream of becoming president of Côte d’Ivoire come true, had allegedly commissioned several coups against Gueï by the northern militaries. Mysteriously, the question of Alassane Ouattara’s nationality, which had been a sticking point during the Bédié administration, resulting in Ouattara being disqualified from the 1995 presidential race, and which according to Gueï was at the foundation of the December 1999 coup against Bédié, resurfaced on the occasion of Gueï’s presidential ambition. Like his predecessor, General Gueï pressed Ouattara to settle the issue of his doubtful Ivorian citizenship. On September 12, 2000, Gueï’s lawyers produced some papers intended to disprove Ouattara’s assertion that he had never availed himself of another nationality. Among the papers exhibited were Ouattara’s marriage certificate to an American woman named Barbara Davis, in which he declared himself a citizen of Upper Volta and stated at the time of marriage, in 1966, that his mother was no longer living; a fact that contradicted his earlier declaration that his mother was a living eighty-year-old Ivorian woman by the name of Hadja Nabintou Cissé. There were also a 1978 bank account document and a 1980 property sale certificate in which Ouattara declared himself to be a citizen of Upper Volta. For Gueï, all these discrepancies spoke more of Ouattara’s immorality and criminal mind than they could shed light on his honesty. Gueï threatened to charge Ouattara with falsification, and once again, the Supreme Court of Côte d’Ivoire rejected Ouattara’s candidacy to the presidential election on the ground of suspicious nationality. The foreign press did not remain silent to this nth injustice perpetrated against the misunderstood Savior of the Ivorian flock and took it upon itself to lecture the Ivorian people about what great opportunity they were missing by persecuting the great messiah come from the IMF. May the reader be patient with this long but instructive lament served them by Jeune Afrique, in its May 23-29, 2000 issue (issue 2054), which is only meant to shed some light on the way a corrupt media has tried to confuse the political issues in Côte d’Ivoire by manipulating information.

Le pays est de nouveau en situation de blocage et l’on craint qu’il ne soit entré le 18 mai dans une période d’agitation et de troubles. L’incertitude du lendemain avait déjà tari l’investissement intérieur et extérieur, contraint la Côte d’Ivoire à vivoter dans une économie anémiée. Le blocage actuel aggrave les choses, inquiète les Ivoiriens, leurs amis et leurs partenaires. Pourquoi ce blocage ? En un mot comme en cent, une partie de la classe politique ivoirienne en est revenue, en mai 2000, au Bédié de novembre-décembre 1999. Sans Bédié et avec plus d’habileté. Si ses vœux sont exaucés, Alassane Dramane Ouattara, président du RDR (Rassemblement des Républicains), leader incontesté du Nord musulman et candidat déclaré à l’élection présidentielle, n’aura pas la possibilité de s’y présenter! Non pas, cette fois, parce que son père et/ou sa mère ne sont pas ivoiriens ou parce que lui ne le serait pas, mais parce que – clause spécialement inventée pour lui barrer la route et en faire un inéligible – il a pu se prévaloir, il y a quinze ou vingt ans, de la nationalité burkinabè, ce qui n’est pas contestable et qu’il ne conteste pas, je crois. Il n’est pas nécessaire d’être l’ami d’Alassane Ouattara, il suffit d’être celui de la Côte d’Ivoire pour articuler que cette attitude politicienne dessert la Côte d’Ivoire, hypothèque son avenir.

[Once again the country finds itself in a thorny position, as many believe that May 18 has started a period of trouble and confrontation. The uncertain future had already withered home and foreign investments and forced Ivorians to endure an anemic economy. The present obstruction disrupts things even further, worries Ivorians, their friends, and their partners. Why this blockade? To put it plainly, a fringe of the Ivorian political elite has returned, in May 2000, to the Bédié philosophy of November-December 1999, this time without Bédié, but with more tact nevertheless. If their wish comes true, Alassane Dramane Ouattara, chairman of the RDR (Rally of the Republican Party), unchallenged leader of the Muslin North and declared candidate to the presidential race, will not be allowed to compete! This time not because his father and/or mother are not Ivorian nor because he allegedly is not Ivorian, but because—and this clause was especially invented to make him ineligible—he had adopted, fifteen or twenty years ago, Burkinabé nationality, which is neither debatable nor disputed by him, I believe. One needs not be a friend of Alassane Ouattara, one has only to be a friend of Côte d'Ivoire to recognize that this political attitude does the country no good; it mortgages its future.]

Was it not the same Jeune Afrique that reported on August 1, 1984, under the penmanship of Béchir Ben Yamhed, that Zambian Justin B. Zulu was being replaced at the head of the IMF Africa Department by Dr. Ouattara, from Upper Volta, Born in Côte d’Ivoire, of immigrant parents from Upper Volta? What had happened between 1981 and 2000 for Jeune Afrique to suddenly want to convince its audience that Ouattara adopted Burkinabé citizenship in his late thirties? What had happened for this magazine to want—by a lexical manipulation, the use of the conditional of allegation—to put the burden of proof of Ouattara’s nationality on the Ivorian authorities? Now, thanks to Jeune Afrique, one was learning some new facts; but still faithful to its style of versatility and sudden change of direction, even these facts were being deliberately distorted by the periodical. Ouattara, Jeune Afrique announced, adopted Burkinabé nationality in his late thirties, before regaining his original—understood, Ivorian—citizenship. What had suddenly caused this magazine with important circulation to become amnesic to the point of disregarding the widely reported and documented facts that Ouattara studied the in the US with an American scholarship earmarked for Upper Volta students? Is one then to understand that Ouattara got that scholarship to study in his late thirties? Furthermore, nowhere had Ouattara admitted to be a Burkinabé citizen at one time or another in his life, as the magazine stated. Jeune Afrique went further into its grioticization of Ouattara by anointing him the natural and unchallenged leader of the Muslim North. What a lack of basic journalistic rigor! Has the magazine really acquainted itself with the geopolitical landscape of Côte d’Ivoire before writing such irrationality? What then of this list of Northern sons, all precociously dead, who at one time or another had challenged Ouattara’s leadership? What of Abdoulaye Fadiga (former governor of BCEAO, and former director of the CAISTAB), Boubacar Diaby Ouattara (Deputy Director of BIAO (former Secretary General of ECOWAS, a brilliant graduate of HEC in Paris and Harvard University), Vamoussa Bamba (former minister of technical education, then of construction and urbanism), Lamine Fadiga (former president of the Chamber of Commerce of Bouaké and vice president of the Chamber of Commerce of Abidjan), Balla Keita (former Minister of Education)? What of this list compiled by Ben Soumahoro, one of Ouattara’s most vehement Northern and Muslim critics alive today, and a brilliant member of the Ivorian parliament? Is Ouattara the undisputed leader of the Muslim North that Jeune Afrique would like him to be? The cherry on top of the farce is Jeune Afrique’s bold assertion that to prevent Ouattara from running is to mortgage the country’s future. Could the startling loss of memory, the distortion of facts, and the gloomy predictions augured for Côte d’Ivoire in the absence of a “Ouattara presidency” by the editorial board of Jeune Afrique have at their source some financial spur? After all, Jeune Afrique and Radio France International (RFI), this public French radio, so loyal to the Ouattaras, are illustrious for their ability to harvest some very lucrative promotional contracts from Mrs. Ouattara’s numerous businesses. So, a legitimate question in trying to understand Jeune Afrique’s selective amnesia and fabrication of facts could be whether or not this magazine was in bed with the Ouattaras, whether or not this periodical, like many others, which pretends to be a friend of Côte d’Ivoire, has actually no friends but only its financial interests to care for. The hypothesis that the international media—for in Côte d’Ivoire such media as the newspaper Le Patriote or Radio Nostalgie had already lost all sense of journalistic deontology and had chosen to barefacedly eulogize Ouattara—could be financially coerced by Ouattara to write deceptive articles had been ventured in several places already. As noted L’Inter, an Ivorian paper, on March 9, 2003, “Tout en vilipendant le couple Gbagbo, ces journaux français faisaient pratiquement l’éloge de Dominique et d’Alassane Ouattara qu’ils présentent comme des victimes de la politique “ivoiritaire” du pouvoir FPI. ADO et sa femme ont-ils vraiment payé la presse étrangère et française en particulier pour quelle serve leur cause ?” (While bashing Mr. And Mrs. Gbagbo, these French papers were practically eulogizing Dominique and Alassane Ouattara, whom they presented as victims of the Ivoirité identity politics of the FPI. Did ADO and his wife really bribe the French media so they can serve them?)

Nevertheless, unencumbered by the criticisms of international media organizations that have lost all credibility even in the rare cases where they happen to get the news right, General Gueï barred Ouattara from the October 22, 2000 presidential election. As a result, five contenders vied for the presidential seat, General Robert Gueï for the military junta, Laurent Gbagbo for the socialist party FPI, Francis Wodié for the PIT, Mel Théodore for the UDCI, and the independent Nicolas Dioulo. Halfway through the ballot counting, Gueï attempted to load the dice to his advantage by stopping the count and declaring himself the winner while, the early returns had Gbagbo leading the race. Gbagbo’s supporters took to the street to protest Gueï’s coup de force, and with the support of the Defense and Security Forces of Côte d’Ivoire, they drove Gueï to hiding. A few days later, the Supreme Court declared Gbagbo the winner of the presidential race with 59.36% of the votes, against 32.7% for Gueï, 5.7% for Wodié, 1.5% for Mel, and .8% for Dioulo. Ouattara’s RDR contested the results, demanding that the election, which saw only 37% participation and did not include Ouattara, be redone, this time with Ouattara’s participation. This protest by the RDR remains the Damocles Sword hovering over Gbagbo’s presidency that would be used to rationalize all the conceivable coups bas. Laurent Gbagbo, the saying goes, was elected in calamitous conditions–59% of the votes with a participation rate of only 37%, and above all without Ouattara, the darling candidate of France and of the Bretton Woods institutions, he who, more than anyone else before, made French multinationals in Côte d’Ivoire so wealthy by selling them the country’s strategic companies under the excuse of satisfying a World Bank/IMF program called the Washington Consensus. Therefore, against Gbagbo, all blows were permitted, even the most contemptible ones. The notion that Gbagbo was ill elected became the subject of a derisory gesture among the patriotes. Mahan Gahé Basile, a young Ivorian protestor intimated at a rally that with 59% of the votes, Gbagbo was not worse off than Chirac who only had 19% of the votes in France. He thus suggested that, before forcing Gbagbo to include rebels in his government, Chirac should live up to his own principle of democracy and appoint Jean-Marie Lepen and Bin Laden, respectively, as prime minister and interior minister.39

Hardly had Gbagbo been sworn into office than the “crimes” once imputed to Bédié and Gueï became his daily lot. Gbagbo had announced a program that disturbed French interests: Refondation (Reconstruction). It is true that the greatest distinguishing feature between imperial rule and independent government is the externality of the former. In colonial societies, the power to rule was taken away from local populations and entrusted to another state with which these populations had absolutely nothing in common. All happened as if “the ability to decide a country’s destiny, its collective mind, had been cut out surgically and transplanted into another mind in London, Paris, Brussels, The Haye or Washington;”40 a fact which in the France-Africa relationship, and for what concerns us here, in the France-Côte d’Ivoire relationship, had persisted throughout all the governments that had preceded the Gbagbo administration. Gbagbo had decided that the transfer of power, thought, and responsibility from Côte d’Ivoire to the métropole that had hitherto defined the France-Africa relation and made French African governments non-governmental organizations at the sole service of France’s interests with no regard to the interests of the Ivorian people had to come to an end through political, economic, and social purgative Refondation. Refondation was meant to dig into the foundation of the Ivorian society in order to correct the structural flaws that were slowing or impeding progress and, thus, undermining the social growth of the Ivorian people.41 Economically, among other resolutions, Refondation wanted to review the terms of renewal of a number of conventions ceded to France multinationals under their market values by the Ouattara government, conventions the clauses of which French firms had hardly abided by, and which were to fortunately come to expiration around 2004. Among these were the exploitation of Côte d’Ivoire Telecom conceded to France Telecom, the exploitation of Côte d’Ivoire’s power (EECI) and water (SODECI) companies conceded to the Ouattaras’ friends Bouygues, the exploitation of the Abidjan-Niger railway system conceded to the Ouattaras’ friend Bolloré, and which, in violation of the terms of the contract, was in dire need of modernization. Refondation also meant reassessing some construction contracts by which French firms were fleecing the Ivorian economy by overpricing their services. For instance, the contract of a third bridge to be built in Abidjan was ceded to the French Bouygues, although a Chinese company (COVEC) would build the same bridge for 1/3 of what the French asked for, and would even accept part of payment as exchange in coffee and cocoa.

In short, Economically speaking, Refondation was to liberate the Ivorian economy by doing away with France’s exploitative and manipulative “friendship,” which had not changed since the days of the colonial Exclusif—this French policy whereby French colonies could only buy from France and sell to France at prices fixed by France—in order to stretch a hand to all those who were willing to be partners of good faith rather than abusing speculators, as has usually been the case with France. It was obvious that if such reassessing was to happen, the pressure exerted by France on Côte d’Ivoire to cede all its development deals to French multinationals without any bid for contracts would be fruitless; and French firms would henceforth have to openly compete with other multinationals (American, British, Canadian, Chinese, Japanese, South African, etc.) for a chance to obtain contracts in Côte d’Ivoire. This could be economically hazardous for France, especially as 2005 was announcing new privatizations, such as the privatization of the Ivorian oil refining company (SIR) and number two Ivorian cellular phone company TELECEL. In an open competition, French multinationals, which have proven in the past to be driven by no other concerns but exponential returns at all cost, would have very little chance of securing further contracts in Côte d’Ivoire, a country sitting on relatively immense oil and natural gas fields. Actually, in an open competition, French multinationals risked losing everything to Americans, British, Canadians, South African, Japanese or Chinese.

Perhaps, after all, Refondation’s pretensions were only a tale, the bluff of a nostalgic socialist out of touch with the realities of the moment. Perhaps, France had nothing to fear from Refondation, as Gbagbo had practically inherited a country on its knees, a country that, because of the disastrous politics of the PDCI in the previous forty years, was more dependent than ever on international aid, and especially on France. Without France, its colonial and post-colonial guarantor, where could Refondation get the money it needed for its program of development? After all, the devaluation of the CFA, the depreciation of coffee and cocoa, the country’s two major exports, the European Union’s and the World Bank/IMF’s refusal to lend any more money to Côte d’Ivoire after the Bédié administration’s much-publicized financial scandal had left Côte d’Ivoire no other alternative than to be on the good side of France, which could then intercede with international financial institutions to garner some much-needed loans and grants on behalf of Abidjan. Gbagbo could not be serious. He could not run the risk of losing France’s support at such a crucial moment by threatening French multinationals’ monopoly in Côte d’Ivoire.

Yet, Gbagbo was not bluffing. Gbagbo had anticipated the difficulty of receiving any external financial funding for his development and poverty reduction programs. To remedy it, he initiated a measure of austerity that consisted in working at eradicating poverty with a secured budget, a budget that could not rely on any external resources, and which he appropriately named le budget sécurisé. Also, he undertook to fight corruption and tax evasion at the customs. Gbagbo’s determination, his earnestness, and visible success were indisputable and to ignore them or to treat them as failures would have been highly disingenuous. Faced with the irrefutability of such a measured management, the World Bank had no other choice but to join the bandwagon of triumph by unconditionally returning to doing business with Côte d’Ivoire. In 2002, the IMF, the European Union, and the African Development Bank followed suit.

Paris’s apprehensions started to materialize, especially as to signal France’s loss of esteem in Côte d’Ivoire and Refondation’s resolve to rectify its cooperation with the Hexagon, and with all partners for that matter, a South African Company had just beaten French Bolloré at a bid for the construction of a new airport in San Pédro, in South-west Côte d’Ivoire. French multinationals had no intention of competing fairly with other countries. In the past, it had been easy for France to buy influences in French Africa by financing the campaigns of politicians sensitive to French interests or by bribing local officials. Refondation was undercutting this practice and leaving French multinationals, which hitherto garnered enormous dividends for France’s economy, at the mercy of other international competitors. France had no intention of loosening its grip on Côte d’Ivoire, the wealthiest former French colony in Sub-Saharan Africa. Furthermore, Côte d’Ivoire’s stance, if left unchallenged, could be infectious. Other French-speaking African nations could start questioning the validity of their “cooperation” with France; and should they, like Côte d’Ivoire, have the audacity to voice the anomalous makeup of that cooperation, France-Africa relations could be in great danger of vanishing for ever. This was not about to happen, for, as Koureyssi Bâ observed so fittingly, the French policy in Africa, characterized by deceit, lawlessness and violence, remains unchanged no matter which party is in power in Paris. Furthermore, France can always rely on the servile devotion of its puppets and its docile locals informants who do not care about their legacy in history, and who are ready to draw a dagger into the back of any brother who dares to say no to the master.42 Ouattara, who had dreamed of being president of Côte d’Ivoire at all cost, had no problem driving the dagger in the back of Laurent Gbagbo, Paris’s most annoying killjoy in French Africa. Convinced that France would back any subversive coup against Gbagbo, this is what Ouattara had to say in 2001 to a freshly elected group of mayors from his party.

Nous n’attendrons pas 5 ans pour aller aux élections. Après tout, dans certains pays, il y a des coups d’Etat et les gens s’accomodent bien de ces personnes pendant une certaine période. Nous avons des monarchies dans le monde et les gens acceptent bien qu’une personne non élue représente le peuple dans sa totalité. Pourquoi devrions-nous attendre 5 ans pour que vous ayez ce à quoi vous avez droit et surtout ce que les populations réclament ? Nous avons certaines relations extérieures. Nous avons commencé à les actionner. J’aimerais vous dire aussi que nous avions convenu avec le maire Adama que nous aurons des réunions périodiques pour qu’ensemble, nous puissions développer assez rapidement une stratégie pour la conquête du pouvoir.43

[We will not wait 5 years to go to the elections. After all, in some countries, there are coups d’état, and people get used to the situation after a while. We have monarchies in the world, and people accept that a person who has not been elected represent the country in its totality. Why should we wait 5 years before you get what you deserve, especially when the populations are asking for it? We have external contacts. We have started to activate them. I would also like to tell you that with Mayor Adama we have agreed to have periodic meetings so that, very quickly, we can all develop a strategy for the conquest of power.]

 

So, in the night of September 19, 2002, France triggered one of the bloodiest punitive campaigns against Côte d’Ivoire. A group of deserters from the Ivorian army, who had been training in neighboring Burkina Faso, simultaneously hit the cities of Bouaké and Abidjan with a brutality never experienced in the country. More than 100 unsuspecting members of the Ivorian defense forces in Bouaké were executed in their beds along with their families. Scores of wandering civilians were shot. Emile Boga Doudou, the Ivorian minister of interior who had just returned from a visit to his French homologue Sarkozy a day earlier, a visit during which he had raised the question of Ivorian deserters being trained in neighboring Burkina Faso, was executed in his bed, along with members of his family and his domestics. General Gueï, the former president and his wife were assassinated. In Bouaké, where the rebels had taken their quarters, an amateur video caught French paratroopers participating in the ceremonial slaughter of a captured Ivorian defense troop. Seated in the first row of the official guests to the ceremony, among whom the rebel leader Chérif Ousmane, French soldiers in their official uniforms, watched a traditional dozo hunter slit the throat of the frightened bare-chested soldier still wearing his camouflage pants. Then, the high priests of this gruesome ritual invited the French soldiers to dip their hands in a boiling pot of human blood and body parts to be later consumed. When given the floor, after their participation in the macabre feast, one of the French soldiers had these words of praise for the organizers of the rituals: “We are extremely proud to be welcomed here by out friend Chérif and to share this ritual with you. We thank you for making us feel as Ivorian as you.”44 After this well-inspired speech, the French soldiers joined their rebel brothers in a triumphant sacrificial dance. It was a night of carnage. Gary K. Busch has detailed the operational organization of that atrocious nightly attack on Côte d’Ivoire.

In September 2002, about 650 rebels loyal to General Robert Gueï attacked both Bouaké and Abidjan from neighboring Burkina Faso while Gbagbo was in Rome to meet the Pope. Gbagbo refused a curiously precipitous French offer for political asylum in Paris, shortened his Vatican visit, and returned to his country to organize a response to the attack. The rebels’ operation was supposed to last five days maximum. They had hoped to seize power in a matter of minutes with shock and awe, force Gbagbo to exile, and put in place a new government. Indeed, their approach was awful and bloody. However, they were ill armed and disorganized. Furthermore, they had misjudged the strength of mind of the Ivorian defense forces and their determination to safeguard the republican institutions embodied in the democratically elected head of state. The Ivorian National Defense Forces (FANCI) opposed a fierce and disciplined counter-offensive to the rebels. In a matter of hours, after the initial effects of surprise passed the FANCI cornered the rebels and reduced them to half. It was then that the commander of the French army in Côte d’Ivoire requested a cease-fire so that he could evacuate the French citizens and a few American nationals living in Bouaké. During the 48 hours allotted the French army, three Antonov-12 flew from Franceville (Gabon) to supply the rebels in armaments. Other planes and truck brought in weapons and mercenaries from Liberia and Sierra Leone, and the rebel force, which was previously estimated at a little over 600 troops, grew to 2500 mercenaries armed with Kalashnikovs and other weapons that had never been part of the Ivorian armory. The French army also supplied the mercenaries with sophisticated logistic and communication equipments that kept insurgents always aware of the movements of the Ivorian defense troops. The French then retreated gradually leaving the rebels in charge with Eastern Europeans mercenaries as technical advisers. Once the rebels were well positioned, Paris then activated the international pressure machinery through the United Nations to obtain a resolution entrusting France with a peacekeeping mission in Côte d’Ivoire.45 While tergiversations were taking more time than needed at the United Nations, the rebels were multiplying their fronts not just in the Northern part of the country (Bouaké, Korhogo, Katiola, Odienné), but also in the Western part (Man), recruiting more mercenaries from Samuel Doe’s civil war troops as well as mercenaries from the RUF in Sierra Leone. The rebels’ indiscriminate killing and raping of thousands of children, elderly, and women led to mass exodus toward Yamoussoukro (the political capital in central Côte d’Ivoire) and Abidjan (in the South). After much groping and stuttering to explain the real object of the failed coup that they transformed into a protracted rebellion, the rebels finally, through the voice of a former mediocre student, former student association leader, Soro Guillaume, settled on accusations of ethnocentrism and xenophobia against the Gbagbo regime, charges that have become so common since Ouattara’s bid for the presidency, and which have been the burden of all those who have stood in the way of his political ambition. Ouattara’s supporters, led by France, were principally accusing Gbagbo, as they did Gueï and Bédié before him, of hating foreigners in general, and Muslim Northerners in particular; as if, in Paris’s political imaginary, Ouattara condensed all that was Northern and Muslim in Côte d’Ivoire.

As the accusations of ethnocentrism have persisted from the Bédié regime to the Gbgagbo administration passing through Robert Gueï’s military junta, and seemed to have legitimated all the coups de force supported by Paris, would it not be fair to examine which ethnic, geographic, or religious groups have been persecuted and kept apart from the political process, and which ones have benefited from it? This is what a French mathematics teacher, a long time resident of Côte d’Ivoire, exceeded by the intoxication campaign organized in France about the Ivorian crisis, had to say to his misinformed compatriots beaten every day by a lazy French press and deceptive government officials.

Un peu d’histoire alors ? (Que les Ivoiriens m’excusent pour les considérations « ethnographiques » suivantes, qu’ils ne prennent même pas la peine d’opposer aux classifications françaises, mais qui peuvent aider les Français à enfin s’interroger sur le fameux découpage « ethnique » qui fonde leur compréhension de l’ « Ivoirité » !) Trois présidents successifs sont censés avoir été « ivoiristes » : Bédié, mais il est Baoulé (du Centre), Gueï, mais il était Guéré (de l’Ouest), Gbagbo, mais il est Bété (de l’Ouest aussi, mais un peu plus au Sud), sa femme (une « dure »), mais elle est Abouré (de l’Est), le « dur » du Régime, Mamadou Koulibaly (mais il est Sénoufo, « musulman du Nord »). Qu’ont de commun ces trois présidents (et pour Gbagbo les « durs » qui l’entourent) réputés « ivoiristes » ? Apparemment, rien sur le plan ethnique ! Mais qu’ont-ils donc de commun ? Une seule chose : ils ont à un moment ou à un autre été opposés à Alassane Ouattara. D’où la définition provisoire suivante que l’on pourrait proposer (en l’absence de toute autre) :  l’ “Ivoirité” est un concept français qui désigne le fait, pour un Ivoirien, de n’être pas Alassane Ouattara » !46

[Should we indulge in a little bit of history, then? (I hope that the people of Côte d'Ivoire will forgive me for the following "ethnographic considerations," which could help the French people to finally start questioning the so much rehearsed "ethnic" categorizations upon which their understanding of "Ivoirité" is based). Three successive presidents are said to be "ivorist": Bédié, but he is Baoule from the Center; Gueï, but he is Guéré from the West; Gbagbo, but he is Bété from the West, too (but a little more to the South); his wife (a "radical"), but she is Abouré from the East; the most "radical" of the regime, Mamadou Koulibaly, but he is Sénoufo, a "Muslim Northerner." What do these three presidents have in common (and for Gbagbo, what do the "radical" figures that surround him have in common with the other notorious "ivorists")? Apparently, nothing from an ethnic viewpoint! What then do they have in common? Only one thing: They have, at one point, been opposed to Alassane Ouattara. Hence the following provisional definition could be put forth (in the absence of any other definition): "'Ivoirité' is a French concept that describes the condition of any Ivorian who is not Alassane Ouattara."]

 

In other words, Ivoirité is that which has helped Paris rationalize all its military actions in Côte d’Ivoire since the death of President Houphouët and the continued decline of France’s influence in its richest ex-colony. Of all the regimes that had dared questioned France’s manipulative practices in Côte d’Ivoire, Gbagbo’s Socialist government was the most unbendable. It was only by breaking it that Paris could submit Gbagbo’s administration and could hope to recover its monopoly in the country. So, France launched against Gbagbo the biggest firepower ever delivered on Côte d’Ivoire. Now the United Nations, through the Security Council, could play its partition by blessing France’s direct intrusion in the country and by consecrating Paris’s overseeing of Côte d’Ivoire’s resources, and, perhaps, the coronation of Ouattara, and thus the putting in place of a puppet regime more amenable to France’s interests; for, indeed, ethnocentrism and xenophobia had nothing to do with it. The acclaimed Ivorian writer Ahmadou Kourouma, who had never been known to have great esteem for Gbagbo, and who, like many observers, has been led to read more than he should have in the concept of Ivoirité, nonetheless acknowledged that the question of the injustice of Ivoirité, which after much searching became the central pillar of the rebellion, was almost solved by Gbagbo, until “these people”—referring certainly to the rebels—arrived.47 Yet Some self-styled expert Africanists, speaking on the antennas of such hostile French radios like RFI, are still maintaining that Ivoirité, was not only practiced by Gbagbo, but also constituted the major cause of the rebellion, an assertion that either was the result of incompetence or bad faith;48 an incompetence or a bad faith that have enabled the French military’s constitutional holdup in Côte d’Ivoire to go unquestioned by the international community. The deafening silence of the international community in the midst of what is taking place in Côte d’Ivoire, the utter indifferent that greeted the French massacre of the Ivorian youth determined to stand up for their rights against French imperial compulsions, and who had no other weapons than heir voices to chant freedom and their bare fists raised in the air against the French war machine, is a failure of the international community’s duty of consciousness.

Yet, Gbagbo’s Refondation was not merely a rumination posture against France. Evidently it intended to rectify Côte d’Ivoire’s uncharacteristic relationship with France. The rosy economic definition of liberalization that treats Foreign Direct Investment as “. . . a decentralized process wherein each foreign company takes the investment decisions of the others as beyond its control . . .”49 is exploded in French Africa. There, nothing is meant to remain beyond the control of French multinationals whose barons have vouched to filter all non-French multinational investments’ access to the continent to the point of reducing them to nothing. “Exploding” is not just a figure of speech, as the daily conflagrations caused by heavy French artillery and the frequent turning out of black corpses scare Anglo-Saxon and Asian investments out of French Africa, while France remains curiously present before, during, and after the cannon roars. From the perspective of most French investors in Africa, Foreign Direct Investment should have nothing to do with each firm forming “. . . an expectation about the host country’s eventual trade policy and [evaluating] the profitability of its own potential foreign investment accordingly.”50 Instead, the host country should be bomb-pressured to accepting the level of protection and the terms of profitability dictated by France.

It is unfortunate that, in economic circles, the kinds of quid pro quo foreign investments that have made French multinationals and a few corrupt nationals wealthy while impoverishing most Africans by a relocation of their economic resources are still treated as epiphenomenal or isolated episodes involving a small number of disreputable industrialists. French multinationals’ brutal practices in Africa are systemic, and they ought to be examined as such. The much-publicized Elf-Aquitaine affair has now shown that French multinationals’ dirty economic practices run deep into the French government no matter which party is in power. As Bro Grébé, the leader of the women section of the PDCI explained, Gbagbo’s Refondation was principally a program of poverty reduction through education of the young, distribution of supplies, creation of universal healthcare for the masses, and creation of jobs;51 a program that fell well within the United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for Africa. The French-supported rebellion put Gbagbo’s poverty reduction program at a standstill, and the passion with which Koffi Anan’s United Nations defended the French actions and supported France’s subsequent direct intervention in Côte d’Ivoire was mind-boggling. The victim was presented as the victimizer, and the victimizer was made both judge and Jury of the victim. This collaboration of African leaders such as Ouattara and Koffi Anan with a brutal European force against their people, though revolting, nevertheless has an explanation. In all times, Africa has had local collaborators who enabled the exploitation and impoverishment of the continent by Western powers, so long as these local informants could be left to collect a few morsels alongside their plundering Western masters. At the time of the question of Côte d’Ivoire, Koffi Anan had his own scandals at the United Nations hovering over his head, and the oil-for-food humiliation in which his son, using Daddy’s influence, was deeply involved, and for which Anan needed France more than ever to testify on his behalf. This could only happen if he took care of France’s interests in Africa, no matter what the consequence could be for the African people. Anan and Ouattara were only repeating an ancient gesture called North/South collaboration. Unfortunately, this African managerial style, which tends to place personal gain over any ethical consideration, is a proclivity derived from the old partnership of Africans with Europeans in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and which has greatly contributed to Africa’s underdevelopment by preventing African so-called leaders from perceiving any alternative for growth other than their participation in dirty trades.

The old staple of foreign trade in West Africa, namely slave trading, had been very intimately bound up with the rise of new monarchical governments and societies . . . [that] could not readily or quickly change the nature of their activities . . . the replacement of slave as an export staple by other commodities did not really enter at all into the thinking of the men who governed or managed these African societies.52

 

Here is a proposition for which one only has to substitute a few contemporaneous signifiers to appreciate how true it rings today for many African elites. For the Ivorian youth, this paradigm of collaboration, which carried all the signs of neocolonialism, was to be conquered. The Galexie Patriotique developed as a response to this need. In fact, at the Linas Marcoussis roundtable—where after successfully sabotaging any African attempt to resolve the conflict, Paris self-proclaimed itself the mediator between the fighting parties—Gbagbo was firmly urged to share his power with the rebels and officials from other opposition parties. Subsequent to the Marcoussis meeting, Mr. Affi N’Guessan, Gbagbo’s prime minister was replaced by a “prime minister of consensus,” in the person of Mr. Seydou Diarra. Guillaume Soro, the rebels’ spokesman, became minister of communication. Yet, still holding on to the North, the rebel forces henceforth legitimized by Paris, which at Marcoussis insisted that the signifier “rebel” be scratched from the Ivorian political lexicon, continued to show no regard for the Republic. As if to mock all principles of democracy, the rebel leaders kept their quarters in Bouaké and never showed up at government meetings. They cut the North from national TV coverage and instituted their own television and radio stations, diffusing propagandist programs around the clock. They established their own police and treasury. Assisted by French soldiers, they regularly raided the local agencies of the BCEAO (Central Bank of the West African States) in Bouaké, Korhogo, Katiola, and Man; and they engaged in the most appalling acts of human rights abuses. On November 6, 2004, Gbagbo finally warned Paris that the loyalist forces had decided to free the North from the rebels and reunify the country. Ivorian defense planes taking off from Yamoussoukro executed two successful rounds in Bouaké, weakening the rebel positions. On the third round, the French military claimed that a bomb fell on their position and killed nine French soldiers and one American civilian. In retaliation, the same day, and before any investigation in the matter could even be set up, the French army destroyed all the Ivorian army air force planes. For the Ivorian populations committed to the republican institutions, this French open attack made it clear that Paris, which had until then supported the rebels indirectly, was now in a direct confrontation with the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire. That night, responding to a call for protest by their leader, thousands of Ivorian young men and women decided to march to the 43rd BIMA (the French military base in Port-Bouët) to mark their indignation and free Côte d’Ivoire from this French mindset that has not yet understood that Côte d’Ivoire “is not a district of Paris.” On their way, as members of the foreign press were able to witness, barehanded Ivorian young men and women became the targets of French helicopters armed with machine guns that shot at them for four hours, massacring scores and wounding hundreds. This event hardly created a quiver in the international community. From her Parisian office, Michelle Aliot Marie, the French minister of defense’s explanation for this savage act was that the French army responded to the provocations of Gbagbo’s armed militias. This is what a French reporter, who had managed to keep his head above the swirl of French propaganda, had to report about that night of butchery.

From our windows, we can see the protesters. It is 11:00 pm. We can hear helicopters above the roof of our hotel. From the sky, the helicopters of the French army are shooting at the protesters. They are civilians. We can hear tracing bullets, loud grenades, and persistent machine gun blasts, causing panic in the crowd and forcing the protesters to retreat from the bridge. A few minutes later, the protesters return, but the helicopters are now positioned ahead of them and are shooting directly at the protesters again to cut their advance. Even isolated protesters are targeted. The few cars going south of the town are also shot at. As you can see the first car manages to get away, but the one following is not that lucky. The French helicopters made about thirty passages. For the four hours that the attack lasted, we did not witness a single protester shoot back at the French helicopters. Silence returned at about 3:00 am.53

 

The politics of France in Côte d’Ivoire runs counter the very notion of globalization. The moral bankers of the IMF and the World Bank, those who have become adept at moralizing the world about openness, transparency, and good governance, have lost all credibility, not just in Côte d’Ivoire, but in most of the Third World, for they are the very ones who, through the backdoors of the institutions that employ them and pay them inexcusably aberrant salaries, have legalized corruption, nepotism, and coup d’états as the order of the day in the Third World. Often, the discourse on good governance promoted by the World Bank and the IMF is travestied as a discourse for direct intervention into Africa.

It would be utterly hypocritical for anyone who unreservedly condemns the resistance organized by the Galexie Patriotique to pretend to speak in favor of poverty reduction and growth in the Third World, and especially in Côte d’Ivoire. It is obvious that France’s gangster-like intervention in Côte d’Ivoire has undermined progress by any theory of economics. Let us only point to some of the consequences of France’s disquieting intrusion in Côte d’Ivoire as they relate to the armoring of the most pessimistic economics theories for the Third World and the undercutting of all development theories ever to cast any promising outlooks on poor countries.54

To proponents of dependency theory—the theory that winners and losers are two inevitable sides of the same coin of development55—the Chiraquian martial incursion in Côte d’Ivoire to protect lamenting French multinationals terrified of international competitions makes factual the hypothesis that as economic trade grows between rich and poor nations, global income inequality grows, too. In the kind of liberal commerce that, in the wake of the Washington Consensus, has characterized the “exchanges” between Côte d’Ivoire and France, and in which the French government and the French army, following an age-old tradition, have figured more like bullying middlemen than state institutions, profits have been unashamedly unidirectional. So, this explaining that, the convergence theory—the theory claiming that someday, in a happy future, the last shall meet the first, and that rich countries will experience dwindling returns and be caught up by poor countries—is belied. If the economic trends, as we observe them today, keep up, convergence theory becomes, for the proponents of global equality, wishful thinking, an unrealizable fancy. The impossible possibilization of convergence theory is pushed even further back into the dominion of bleakness by the doing of rich countries that have specialized in altering, in poor countries, all the control variables in which advocates of endogenous growth have invested so much optimism. How so?

Indeed, against convergence theorists’ pessimistic outlooks for rich countries and optimistic perspectives for poor countries, proponents of endogenous theory would argue that humanity is only at the beginning of useful discoveries, and therefore, rich countries will always be able to subvert the menace of diminishing resources and remain dominant just by the significance of the scientific, technological innovations that they make at home. This is possible because rich countries have traditionally been able to control certain variables, such as, fertility rate, level of human capital (education), and government spending. These controlled variables are referred to as conditional factors. Traditionally, the control for these variables has been absent in poor countries. So then, the factors that come to be known in rich countries as conditional convergence factors (insofar as the conditions for their control are present) become unconditional convergence factors in the Third World (insofar as the condition for their control are absent). No one, however, would dispute the fact that conditional and unconditional convergence factors are not natural occurrences. They do not respectively appear in rich and poor countries by Devine design. They are not the making of an omnipotent Big-Other who assigns them, in that order, to civilized capitalist societies on the one hand, and to primitive territorial populations on the other hand. Conditional and unconditional convergence factors are not inherently attributed to one group of people who are in control of all their intellectual faculties as opposed to another group subjected to lobotomy. Conditional and unconditional convergence factors are created and manipulated by greed, ruthlessness, and brutality, which are not necessarily signs of intelligence. Therefore, before proponents of endogenous theory rest assured that any responsibility for failure and economic decline is entirely organic, perhaps, it would be wise to situate responsibility. On the levels of human capital and government spending, the multiple muscled interventions of France in West Africa have always, intentionally, turned conditional and unconditional factors on their heads in a theatrical diagram that made perfect sense for France while disturbing any prospect of planned development for the African nations. This viciously masterful manipulation made conditional factors unconditional for national social engineers while at the same time keeping them conditional for French business. Bare Hands Victory becomes enlightening in disclosing France’s responsibility in that regard; but Bakaba’s documentary can only expose the symptoms of a bigger infection in Africa. In Bare Hands Victory, Côte d’Ivoire is but a case study of a more pervasive Hexagonal will to power determined to make profits by all means necessary. In the early morning of November 7, 2007, a young patriote, laying on a stretcher, his face and body drenched in blood, but who had still enough humor left in him despite the killing night he had just survived, had this to say in the midst of the dead and the wounded that surrounded him in this Abidjan emergency room.

We were at home in Abobo when we heard Blé Goudé’s call for resistance. I decided to join my comrades in the march to Port-Bouët. Once on the bridge, we saw a helicopter shooting at us. Some people would say that the bullets were not real. But I am here to tell you that they were very real. We saw people fall next to us. Three young women were hit in the heads and collapsed in front of us. I am among the lucky ones. Right now, the march is still on. And the French army continues to shoot without any consideration for human lives. And that is revolting.56

 

Revolting, indeed! Is it only by killing Africa’s human capital that the rest of the world could give the black continent a chance of turning the tides of global inequality? France seems resolved to spin the grim images of Ivorian youth falling under French multinationals’ hired guns into a neo-classical resolution of income inequality; one which would eerily assert, on account of the role of population growth in the race for development, “We are saving them from themselves.” If growth is a race between increases in population and capital stock, this pessimistic-optimist argument would thus go, then, wars—which have been more exogenous than endogenous in French Africa—by their ensuing effects of population decrease, will lead to better distribution of wealth in Africa. How depressing! And how disingenuous, too, to link the slaughter of the dynamic and educated force of a country to its chances for progress!

In fact, until an international outcry puts an end to the incendiary practices of the hired armies of imperial nations, the butchering of the young brains of Africa will continue to widen the technological gaps between North and South—one of the major causes of global inequality—and maintain an East-West-West-East-bound spread of technology and industrialization. It is not by accident that most Third World countries, claim appurtenance to the Orient when they cannot establish their belonging to the Occident.57 Have not theorists of economic geography told us that the Occident, with its temperate climate and smoother terrains, is blessed by the gods and has all the best prospects for development? Nevertheless, has African geography really been a problem at any time in history for opportunists resolute to plunder the riches of the African continent? Have not European explorers, as far back as the sixteenth century, defied the negative endowments of Africa and pushed deep into the heart of darkness to dig up Africa’s iron ores, its gold, and its diamond, to cut its timber, to bleed its rubber trees, to remove its elephants’ defenses, to practice their shooting ability on its game? Have not European speculators designed ingenious methods to transfer Africa’s human capital and riches to the Occident despite Africa’s much-heralded negative endowments? Why has Europe become so paradoxically impotent when it came to developing infrastructures in the continent that would benefit African populations? And what to say of this so-called poor continent that yet continues to stir up so much interest in greedy multinationals? Geography and poverty have nothing to do with the underdevelopment of Africa. In fact, to be fair, Africa is only victim of its wealth.

 

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Bernard Kouchner: Fossoyeur de l’Afrique!

February 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment

kLe ministre des Affaires étrangères Bernard Kouchner fait l’objet d’une charge virulente dans un livre à paraître mercredi, accusé d’avoir mélangé les genres entre activités publique et privée en Afrique, et aussi sévèrement critiqué pour ses positions politiques. “Le monde selon K.” (Editions Fayard), du journaliste-écrivain Pierre Péan, constitue probablement l’attaque la plus violente contre l’ancien “French doctor”, l’une des personnalités politiques les plus populaires de France. La principale accusation concerne de lucratives activités de consultant menées dans le secteur de la santé en Afrique, entre 2002 et 2007, après la défaite électorale de la gauche à laquelle il appartenait et avant sa nomination dans un gouvernement de droite, sous Nicolas Sarkozy. Selon le journaliste, Bernard Kouchner a mené ces activités pour deux sociétés privées, Africa Steps et Iméda, gérées par deux de ses proches, alors qu’il présidait en même temps un groupement d’intérêt public, Esther, consacré à la coopération internationale hospitalière. Les deux sociétés ont vendu pour près de 4,6 millions d’euros de contrats de conseil sur la réforme des systèmes de santé au Gabon et au Congo. Pierre Péan affirme qu’une partie de ces sommes n’ont pu être recouvrées par les sociétés qu’après l’entrée en fonctions de Bernard Kouchner au Quai d’Orsay, le 18 mai 2007. L’écrivain assure que l’un des proches du ministre, Eric Danon, gérant d’Iméda et alors ambassadeur auprès de Monaco, a démarché les autorités gabonaises pour obtenir des paiements de factures jusqu’en septembre 2007. Mais il ne fournit pas la preuve d’interventions du ministre après sa prise de fonctions.

Dès le 12 janvier, Bernard Kouchner avait dénoncé “certaines allégations inexactes” du livre à paraître et affirmé se “réserver le droit d’engager des poursuites judiciaires”. Bernard Kouchner “s’enorgueillit d’avoir toujours mené (…) un combat permanent en faveur de la santé publique en Afrique”, selon un un communiqué.

Pierre Péan affirme également que les activités de Bernard Kouchner au Congo et au Gabon se sont téléscopées avec le fonctionnement de la diplomatie française.

 Au moment où, selon lui, ces deux pays payaient leurs dettes aux deux sociétés, le secrétaire d’Etat à la Coopération Jean-Marie Bockel, placé sous l’autorité de Bernard Kouchner, disait le 15 janvier 2008 vouloir signer l’acte de décès de la “Françafrique”, la relation privilégiée mais souvent opaque entre la France et ses ex-colonies.

 ”A eux deux, le Gabon et le Congo ont commandé pour près de 4,6 millions d’euros de rapports à Iméda et Africa Steps! Ils en veulent beaucoup à Kouchner d’avoir laissé son secrétaire d’Etat tenir des propos qu’ils considèrent comme désobligeants”, écrit Pierre Péan.

 Jean-Marie Bockel a été remplacé au mois de mars 2008.

 Mais le livre consiste essentiellement en une critique des positions politiques de Bernard Kouchner, en particulier sur le rapprochement avec le Rwanda, et de sa proximité supposée avec les thèses américaines, sur l’Iran, le Darfour et l’ex-Yougoslavie.

 ”C’est à propos du Rwanda et de la nouvelle politique qu’il mène à l’égard de ce pays depuis son arrivée au Quai d’Orsay que je me suis vraiment intéressé à ce personnage”, reconnaît Pierre Péan, auteur d’un autre ouvrage controversé, “Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs”. Selon lui, cet ouvrage lui avait permis “de revenir sur une autre vérité officielle, selon laquelle, et pour l’éternité, tous les Hutus étaient des bourreaux et tous les Tutsis des victimes”.

 Le ministre des Affaires étrangères Bernard Kouchner fait l’objet d’une charge virulente dans un livre à paraître mercredi, accusé d’avoir mélangé les genres entre activités publique et privée en Afrique, et aussi sévèrement critiqué pour ses positions politiques.

 ”Le monde selon K.” (Editions Fayard), du journaliste-écrivain Pierre Péan, constitue probablement l’attaque la plus violente contre l’ancien “French doctor”, l’une des personnalités politiques les plus populaires de France.

 La principale accusation concerne de lucratives activités de consultant menées dans le secteur de la santé en Afrique, entre 2002 et 2007, après la défaite électorale de la gauche à laquelle il appartenait et avant sa nomination dans un gouvernement de droite, sous Nicolas Sarkozy.

 Selon le journaliste, Bernard Kouchner a mené ces activités pour deux sociétés privées, Africa Steps et Iméda, gérées par deux de ses proches, alors qu’il présidait en même temps un groupement d’intérêt public, Esther, consacré à la coopération internationale hospitalière.

 Les deux sociétés ont vendu pour près de 4,6 millions d’euros de contrats de conseil sur la réforme des systèmes de santé au Gabon et au Congo. Pierre Péan affirme qu’une partie de ces sommes n’ont pu être recouvrées par les sociétés qu’après l’entrée en fonctions de Bernard Kouchner au Quai d’Orsay, le 18 mai 2007.

 L’écrivain assure que l’un des proches du ministre, Eric Danon, gérant d’Iméda et alors ambassadeur auprès de Monaco, a démarché les autorités gabonaises pour obtenir des paiements de factures jusqu’en septembre 2007. Mais il ne fournit pas la preuve d’interventions du ministre après sa prise de fonctions.

 Dès le 12 janvier, Bernard Kouchner avait dénoncé “certaines allégations inexactes” du livre à paraître et affirmé se “réserver le droit d’engager des poursuites judiciaires”. Bernard Kouchner “s’enorgueillit d’avoir toujours mené (…) un combat permanent en faveur de la santé publique en Afrique”, selon un un communiqué.

 Pierre Péan affirme également que les activités de Bernard Kouchner au Congo et au Gabon se sont téléscopées avec le fonctionnement de la diplomatie française.

 Au moment où, selon lui, ces deux pays payaient leurs dettes aux deux sociétés, le secrétaire d’Etat à la Coopération Jean-Marie Bockel, placé sous l’autorité de Bernard Kouchner, disait le 15 janvier 2008 vouloir signer l’acte de décès de la “Françafrique”, la relation privilégiée mais souvent opaque entre la France et ses ex-colonies.

 ”A eux deux, le Gabon et le Congo ont commandé pour près de 4,6 millions d’euros de rapports à Iméda et Africa Steps! Ils en veulent beaucoup à Kouchner d’avoir laissé son secrétaire d’Etat tenir des propos qu’ils considèrent comme désobligeants”, écrit Pierre Péan.

 Jean-Marie Bockel a été remplacé au mois de mars 2008.

 Mais le livre consiste essentiellement en une critique des positions politiques de Bernard Kouchner, en particulier sur le rapprochement avec le Rwanda, et de sa proximité supposée avec les thèses américaines, sur l’Iran, le Darfour et l’ex-Yougoslavie.

 ”C’est à propos du Rwanda et de la nouvelle politique qu’il mène à l’égard de ce pays depuis son arrivée au Quai d’Orsay que je me suis vraiment intéressé à ce personnage”, reconnaît Pierre Péan, auteur d’un autre ouvrage controversé, “Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs”. Selon lui, cet ouvrage lui avait permis “de revenir sur une autre vérité officielle, selon laquelle, et pour l’éternité, tous les Hutus étaient des bourreaux et tous les Tutsis des victimes”.

 © 2009 AFP

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Faut-il compter les morts?

January 25, 2009 · 1 Comment

Alassane Dramane Ouattara, président du RDR

Alassane Dramane Ouattara, président du RDR

Nous faut-il compter les morts ? N’est-ce pas seulement trop triste de voir mourir un seul Ivoirien, un seul Africain, un seul humain par la faute de nos ambitions politiques démesurées ? Mais s’il faut vraiment compter les morts, s’il nous faut vraiment chiffrer en pertes humaines notre bêtise inhumaine, j’irai à la source interroger les importateurs du plus grand deuil en Côte d’Ivoire. Là j’entendrai certainement Koné Zacharia, Cherif Ousmane et bien d’autres me dire avec fierté et lucidité que celui qui les a équipés, nourris, logés et payés pour qu’ils violentent, violent et pillent la Côte d’Ivoire est bien Alassane Dramane Ouattara. Je sais combien courte peut être la mémoire humaine, mais heureusement que la bande sonore tournait et enregistrait les confessions de cette bande du Nord.

MF

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Obama rectifie le tir

January 22, 2009 · Leave a Comment

barack-obama-retakes-the-0011

Le lendemain de son investiture, Obama prête serment, une seconde fois, devant un parterre de journalistes et de quelques membres de son gouvernement; ceci pour corriger une erreur procédurale. Mardi dernier, au cours de la prestation de serment, le président de la cour suprême, John Roberts, qui officiait la cérémonie, a par inadvertance interverti l’ordre des mots. Un adverbe a été décalé de quelques mots. La constitution américaine étant invendable, il fallait que les choses se passent exactement comme elles ont été consignées dans la constitution. Cette deuxième cérémonie, beaucoup plus austère, confirme officiellement Barak Obama dans son rôle de président des États-Unis. L’Amérique vient encore de donner une leçon aux pays où la constitution s’écrit au crayon et se gomme à la mitraillette au gré des humeurs.

MF

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Obama Promet de relever les défis

January 20, 2009 · Leave a Comment

civil_rights_today_090116_mn

Chers compatriotes

Je suis ici devant vous aujourd’hui empli d’un sentiment d’humilité face à la tâche qui nous attend, reconnaissant pour la confiance que vous m’avez témoignée et conscient des sacrifices consentis par nos ancêtres.

Je remercie le président Bush pour ses services rendus à la nation ainsi que pour la générosité et la coopération dont il a fait preuve tout au long de cette passation de pouvoirs.

Quarante-quatre Américains ont maintenant prêté le serment présidentiel. Ils l’ont fait alors que gonflait la houle de la prospérité sur les eaux calmes de la paix. Mais il arrive de temps à autre que ce serment soit prononcé alors que s’accumulent les nuages et que gronde la tempête.

Dans ces moments, l’Amérique a gardé le cap, non seulement en raison de l’habileté ou de la vision de ses dirigeants, mais aussi parce que Nous le Peuple, sommes demeurés fidèles aux idéaux de nos ancêtres et à notre constitution.

Ainsi en a-t-il toujours été. Ainsi doit-il en être pour la présente génération d’Américains.

Nul n’ignore que nous sommes au beau milieu d’une crise. Notre nation est en guerre contre un vaste réseau de violence et de haine. Notre économie est gravement affaiblie, conséquence de la cupidité et de l’irresponsabilité de certains, mais aussi de notre échec collectif à faire des choix difficiles et à préparer la nation à une nouvelle ère.

Des gens ont perdu leur maison ou leur emploi, des entreprises ont dû fermer leurs portes. Notre système de santé coûte trop cher. Nos écoles laissent tomber trop d’enfants et chaque jour apporte de nouvelles preuves que la façon dont nous utilisons l’énergie renforce nos adversaires et menace notre planète.

Ce sont les signes de la crise en termes statistiques. Mais, si elle n’est pas aussi tangible, la perte de confiance dans tout le pays n’en est pas moins profonde, nourrie de la crainte tenace que le déclin de l’Amérique soit inévitable et que la prochaine génération doive diminuer ses ambitions.

Je vous dis aujourd’hui que les défis auxquels nous faisons face sont réels. Ils sont importants et nombreux. Nous ne pourrons les relever facilement ni rapidement. Mais, sache le, Amérique, nous le relèverons.

En ce jour, nous sommes réunis car nous avons préféré l’espoir à la peur, la volonté d’agir en commun au conflit et à la discorde.

En ce jour nous proclamons la fin des doléances mesquines et des fausses promesses, des récriminations et des dogmes éculés qui ont pendant trop longtemps étouffé notre vie politique.

Nous demeurons une jeune nation. Mais pour reprendre les mots de la Bible, le temps est venu de se défaire des enfantillages. Le temps est venu de réaffirmer la force de notre caractère, de choisir la meilleure part de notre histoire, de porter ce précieux don, cette noble idée transmise de génération en génération: la promesse de Dieu que nous sommes tous égaux, tous libres et que nous méritons tous la chance de prétendre à une pleine mesure de bonheur.

Nous réaffirmons la grandeur de notre nation en sachant que la grandeur n’est jamais donnée mais se mérite. Dans notre périple nous n’avons jamais emprunté de raccourcis et ne nous sommes jamais contentés de peu. Cela n’a jamais été un parcours pour les craintifs, ceux qui préfèrent les loisirs au travail ou ne recherchent que la richesse ou la célébrité.

Au contraire, ce sont plutôt ceux qui ont pris des risques, qui ont agi et réalisé des choses – certains connus, mais le plus souvent des hommes et des femmes anonymes – qui nous ont permis de gravir le long et rude chemin vers la prospérité et la liberté.

Pour nous, ils ont rassemblé leurs maigres possessions et traversé des océans en quête d’une vie nouvelle.

Pour nous, ils ont trimé dans des ateliers de misère et colonisé l’Ouest. Ils ont connu la morsure du fouet et la dureté du labeur de la terre. Pour nous, ils se sont battus et sont morts dans des lieux comme Concord et Gettysburg, en Normandie ou à Khe-Sanh.

A maintes reprises ces hommes et ces femmes se sont battus, se sont sacrifiés, ont travaillé à s’en user les mains afin que nous puissions mener une vie meilleure. Ils voyaient en l’Amérique quelque chose de plus grand que la somme de leurs ambitions personnelles, que toutes les différences dues à la naissance, la richesse ou l’appartenance à une faction.

C’est la voie que nous poursuivons aujourd’hui. Nous demeurons la nation la plus prospère, la plus puissante de la Terre. Nos travailleurs ne sont pas moins productifs qu’au début de la crise. Nos esprits ne sont pas moins inventifs, nos biens et services pas moins demandés que la semaine dernière, le mois dernier ou l’an dernier. Nos capacités demeurent intactes. Mais il est bien fini le temps de l’immobilisme, de la protection d’intérêts étroits et du report des décisions désagréables.

A partir d’aujourd’hui, nous devons nous relever, nous épousseter et reprendre la tâche de la refondation de l’Amérique.

Où que nous regardions, il y a du travail. L’état de l’économie réclame des gestes audacieux et rapides. Et nous agirons – non seulement pour créer de nouveaux emplois mais pour jeter les fondations d’une nouvelle croissance. Nous allons construire les routes et les ponts, les réseaux électriques et numériques qui alimentent notre commerce et nous unissent.

Nous redonnerons à la science la place qu’elle mérite et utiliserons les merveilles de la technologie pour accroître la qualité des soins de santé et diminuer leur coût.

Nous dompterons le soleil, le vent et le sol pour faire avancer nos automobiles et tourner nos usines. Nous transformerons nos écoles et nos universités pour répondre aux exigences d’une ère nouvelle. Nous pouvons faire tout cela et nous le ferons.

Cela dit, il y a des gens pour s’interroger sur l’ampleur de nos ambitions, et suggérer que notre système n’est pas capable de faire face à trop de grands projets à la fois. Ils ont la mémoire courte. Ils ont oublié ce que ce pays a déjà accompli, ce que des hommes et des femmes libres peuvent réaliser quand l’imagination sert un objectif commun et que le courage s’allie à la nécessité.

Ce que les cyniques ne peuvent pas comprendre, c’est que le sol s’est dérobé sous leurs pieds et que les arguments politiques rancis auxquels nous avons eu droit depuis si longtemps, ne valent plus rien. La question aujourd’hui n’est pas de savoir si notre gouvernement est trop gros ou trop petit, mais s’il fonctionne – s’il aide les familles à trouver des emplois avec un salaire décent, à accéder à des soins qu’ils peuvent se permettre et à une retraite digne. Là où la réponse à cette question est oui, nous continuerons. Là où la réponse est non, nous mettrons un terme à des programmes.

Et ceux d’entre nous qui gèrent les deniers publics seront tenus de dépenser avec sagesse, de changer les mauvaises habitudes, de gérer en pleine lumière – c’est seulement ainsi que nous pourrons restaurer l’indispensable confiance entre un peuple et son gouvernement.

La question n’est pas non plus de savoir si le marché est une force du bien ou du mal. Sa capacité à générer de la richesse et à étendre la liberté est sans égale. Mais cette crise nous a rappelé que sans surveillance, le marché peut devenir incontrôlable, et qu’une nation ne peut prospérer longtemps si elle ne favorise que les plus nantis. Le succès de notre économie n’est pas uniquement fonction de la taille de notre produit intérieur brut. Il dépend aussi de l’étendue de notre prospérité, de notre capacité à donner une chance à ceux qui le veulent – non par charité mais parce que c’est la meilleure voie vers le bien commun.

En ce qui concerne notre défense à tous, nous rejettons l’idée qu’il faille faire un choix entre notre sécurité et nos idéaux. Nos Pères fondateurs, face à des périls que nous ne pouvons que difficilement imaginer, ont mis au point une charte pour assurer la prééminence de la loi et les droits de l’Homme, une charte prolongée par le sang de générations. Ces idéaux éclairent toujours le monde, et nous ne les abandonnerons pas par commodité.

A tous les peuples et les gouvernants qui nous regardent aujourd’hui, depuis les plus grandes capitales jusqu’au petit village où mon père est né : sachez que l’Amérique est l’amie de chaque pays et de chaque homme, femme et enfant qui recherche un avenir de paix et de dignité, et que nous sommes prêts à nouveau à jouer notre rôle dirigeant.

Rappelez-vous que les précédentes générations ont fait face au fascisme et au communisme pas seulement avec des missiles et des chars, mais avec des alliances solides et des convictions durables. Elles ont compris que notre puissance ne suffit pas à elle seule à nous protéger et qu’elle ne nous permet pas d’agir à notre guise. Au lieu de cela, elles ont compris que notre puissance croît lorsqu’on en use prudemment; que notre sécurité découle de la justesse de notre cause, la force de notre exemple et des qualités modératrices de l’humilité et de la retenue.

Nous sommes les gardiens de cet héritage. Une fois de plus guidés par ces principes, nous pouvons répondre à ces nouvelles menaces qui demandent un effort encore plus grand, une coopération et une compréhension plus grande entre les pays.

Nous allons commencer à laisser l’Irak à son peuple de façon responsable et forger une paix durement gagnée en Afghanistan. Avec de vieux amis et d’anciens ennemis, nous allons travailler inlassablement pour réduire la menace nucléaire et faire reculer le spectre du réchauffement de la planète.

Nous n’allons pas nous excuser pour notre façon de vivre, ni hésiter à la défendre, et pour ceux qui veulent faire avancer leurs objectifs en créant la terreur et en massacrant des innocents, nous vous disons maintenant que notre résolution est plus forte et ne peut pas être brisée; vous ne pouvez pas nous survivre et nous vous vaincrons.

Nous savons que notre héritage multiple est une force, pas une faiblesse.

Nous sommes un pays de chrétiens et de musulmans, de juifs et d’hindous, et d’athées. Nous avons été formés par chaque langue et civilisation, venues de tous les coins de la Terre. Et parce que nous avons goûté à l’amertume d’une guerre de Sécession et de la ségrégation, et émergé de ce chapitre plus forts et plus unis, nous ne pouvons pas nous empêcher de croire que les vieilles haines vont un jour disparaître, que les frontières tribales vont se dissoudre, que pendant que le monde devient plus petit, notre humanité commune doit se révéler, et que les Etats-Unis doivent jouer leur rôle en donnant l’élan d’une nouvelle ère de paix.

Au monde musulman: nous voulons trouver une nouvelle approche, fondée sur l’intérêt et le respect mutuels. A ceux parmi les dirigeants du monde qui cherchent à semer la guerre, ou faire reposer la faute des maux de leur société sur l’Occident, sachez que vos peuples vous jugeront sur ce que vous pouvez construire, pas détruire.

A ceux qui s’accrochent au pouvoir par la corruption et la fraude, et en bâillonant les opinions dissidentes, sachez que vous êtes du mauvais côté de l’histoire, mais que nous vous tendrons la main si vous êtes prêts à desserrer votre étau.

Aux habitants des pays pauvres, nous promettons de travailler à vos côtés pour faire en sorte que vos fermes prospèrent et que l’eau potable coule, de nourrir les corps affamés et les esprits voraces.

Et à ces pays qui comme le nôtre bénéficient d’une relative abondance, nous disons que nous ne pouvons plus nous permettre d’être indifférents aux souffrances à l’extérieur de nos frontières, ni consommer les ressources planétaires sans nous soucier des conséquences. En effet, le monde a changé et nous devons évoluer avec lui.

Lorsque nous regardons le chemin à parcourir, nous nous rappelons avec une humble gratitude ces braves Américains qui, à cette heure précise, patrouillent dans des déserts reculés et des montagnes éloignées. Ils ont quelque chose à nous dire aujourd’hui, tout comme les héros qui reposent à Arlington nous murmurent à travers les âges.

Nous les honorons non seulement parce qu’ils sont les gardiens de notre liberté, mais parce qu’ils incarnent l’esprit de service, une disponibilité à trouver une signification dans quelque chose qui est plus grand qu’eux. Et à ce moment, ce moment qui définira une génération, c’est précisément leur esprit qui doit tous nous habiter.

Quoi qu’un gouvernement puisse et doive faire, c’est en définitive de la foi et la détermination des Américains que ce pays dépend. C’est la bonté d’accueillir un inconnu lorsque cèdent les digues, le désintéressement d’ouvriers qui préfèrent travailler moins que de voir un ami perdre son emploi, qui nous permet de traverser nos heures les plus sombres.

C’est le courage d’un pompier prêt à remonter une cage d’escalier enfumée, mais aussi la disponibilité d’un parent à nourrir un enfant, qui décide en définitive de notre destin.

Les défis face à nous sont peut-être nouveaux. Les outils avec lesquels nous les affrontons sont peut-être nouveaux. Mais les valeurs dont notre succès dépend, le travail, l’honnêteté, le courage et le respect des règles, la tolérance et la curiosité, la loyauté et le patriotisme, sont anciennes. Elles sont vraies. Elles ont été la force tranquille du progrès qui a sous-tendu notre histoire. Ce qui est requis, c’est un retour à ces vérités. Ce qui nous est demandé maintenant, c’est une nouvelle ère de responsabilité, une reconnaissance, de la part de chaque Américain, que nous avons des devoirs envers notre pays et le monde, des devoirs que nous n’acceptons pas à contrecoeur mais saisissons avec joie, avec la certitude qu’il n’y a rien de plus satisfaisant pour l’esprit et qui définisse notre caractère, que de nous donner tout entier à une tâche difficile.

C’est le prix, et la promesse, de la citoyenneté.

C’est la source de notre confiance, savoir que Dieu nous appelle pour forger un destin incertain.

C’est la signification de notre liberté et de notre credo, c’est la raison pour laquelle des hommes, des femmes et des enfants de toutes les races et de toutes les croyances peuvent se réjouir ensemble sur cette magnifique esplanade, et pour laquelle un homme dont le père, il y a moins de 60 ans, n’aurait peut-être pas pu être servi dans un restaurant de quartier, peut maintenant se tenir devant vous pour prêter le serment le plus sacré.

Donc marquons ce jour du souvenir, de ce que nous sommes et de la distance que nous avons parcourue. Aux temps de la naissance des Etats-Unis, dans les mois les plus froids, un petit groupe de patriotes s’est blotti autour de feux de camp mourants, au bord d’une rivière glacée. La capitale fut abandonnée. L’ennemi progressait. La neige était tachée de sang. Au moment où l’issue de notre révolution était la plus incertaine, le père de notre nation a donné l’ordre que ces mots soits lus :

“Qu’il soit dit au monde du futur, qu’au milieu de l’hiver, quand seul l’espoir et la vertu pouvaient survivre, que la ville et le pays, face à un danger commun, (y) ont répondu”.

Face à nos dangers communs, dans cet hiver de difficultés, rappelons-nous ces mots éternels. Avec espoir et courage, bravons une fois de plus les courants glacés, et supportons les tempêtes qui peuvent arriver. Qu’il soit dit aux enfants de nos enfants que lorsque nous avons été mis à l’épreuve, nous avons refusé de voir ce parcours s’arrêter, nous n’avons pas tourné le dos ni faibli. Et avec les yeux fixés sur l’horizon et la grâce de Dieu, nous avons continué à porter ce formidable cadeau de la liberté et l’avons donné aux générations futures.

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La démocratie commence par soi-même, par Martial Frindéthié

January 19, 2009 · Leave a Comment

magistrats-2
La démocratie – avec ses corollaires de libertés civiles, de liberté d’expression, d’égalité devant la loi, et de pluralisme politique – n’est pas un idéal abstrait suspendu au-dessus de nos têtes, inaccessible à la volonté individuelle, détaché de la pratique domestique quotidienne, que seul l’État a le pouvoir de faire descendre vers le citoyen. Le succès de la démocratie loge d’abord dans les actes individuels quotidiens des citoyens ; de même que son échec loge dans les actes particuliers quotidiens des citoyens. C’est lorsque la somme de nos actes individuels est positive qu’elle affecte la probabilité de la démocratie d’un coefficient élevé, et crée les conditions de sa mise en place permanente ; de même, lorsque la somme totale de nos actes individuels est négative, elle affecte d’un facteur négatif la chance de la démocratie, et favorise ainsi sa mort. Je pouffe souvent de voir des hommes qui dans leurs pratiques quotidiennes sont des bourreaux pour leurs femmes et leurs enfants, revendiquer, pancartes à la main, la liberté d’expression ; ou des éducateurs qui abusent des enfants à leur charge réclamer, à coups de grèves intempestives, l’égalité des droits ; ou des fonctionnaires partisans de la magouille s’autoproclamer les hérauts de la justice ; ou des étudiants, fraudeurs dans les amphithéâtres chanter en chœur pour la probité ; ou des maraudeurs de petits jetons demander l’arrêt de la corruption ; ou des avocats véreux réclamer la transparence ; comme si leurs actes isolés ne contribuaient pas à la dégradation de la société toute entière. Comme si eux, une fois en position de décideurs, seraient, par enchantement, guéris des difformités morales dont ils souillent chaque jour la société. Notre aspiration à une société juste ne devrait-elle pas commencer par une introspection individuelle ? Ne devrions-nous pas, avant de nous proclamer les chantres de toute cause juste, commencer par nous regarder dans le miroir ? La démocratie, comme la charité bien ordonnée, commence par soi-même.

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Jacqueville a trop attendu, par Martial Frindéthié

August 13, 2008 · 1 Comment

espoir
Key Data
Operator
Canadian Natural Resources
Location
Ivory Coast, 19km offshore south of Jacqueville
Block
CI-26
Block water depths
100m to 600m
Recoverable reserves
93 million barrels of oil, 180 billion ft³ of natural gas
Life expectancy
20 years
Peak oil production rate
35,000bopd

Espoir lies in Ivory Coast Block CI-26, approximately 19km offshore south of Jacqueville, and around 60km southwest of Abidjan. The water depths range from 100m to 600m. The Espoir field has estimated recoverable reserves of 93 million barrels of oil and 180 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

The field has a life expectancy of 20 years with a peak oil production rate of over 35,000bopd and a gas sales plateau of 35mmscfd.

The first phase came into peak production at the end of 2002. The development was centred on a wellhead tower covering the eastern part of the reservoir, and an FPSO. The second phase of development, which is currently being studied, comprises placing an additional wellhead tower and drilling in the Western lobe of the reservoir in 2004.

EQUITY

The field is operated by Canadian Natural Resources Limited. Although originally operated by Phillips Petroleum in the 1980s, Canadian Natural acquired a 36.33% equity in the Espoir field with its acquisition of Ranger Oil in July 2000. In May 2001, Canadian Natural acquired an additional and presently has a 58.67% equity in Espoir, with partners PETROCI Holding (20%) and Tullow Cote d’Ivoire Limited (21.33%) holding the remaining share. Originally uneconomic, it has become commercially viable due to modern drilling and production techniques, secondary oil recovery and an improved production sharing contract.

ESPOIR FIELD

The field came on-stream in 2002 with a rate of 8,500bopd. This was ramped up to 30,000bopd and the production of associated natural gas increased to 30 million cubic feet per day, as six more wells were completed from the East Espoir wellhead tower. The seven wells consist of a producer and an injector pair. The remaining wells are exploration wells on Emien and Acajou.

The Emien prospect was drilled from the East Espoir wellhead tower in mid 2002, allowing a successful discovery to be put into production immediately. The Acajou prospect could double the reserves of the licence area. The potential of the region was also enhanced by a discovery during 2001 in Block CI-40, immediately south of Espoir.

ESPOIR IVOIRIEN FPSO

The production is based on wellhead platform feeding into the Espoir Ivoirien FPSO. In 2001, Prosafe converted the Suezmax tanker MT White Sea to the 1,000,000bbls storage capacity FPSO.

The oil is exported by shuttle tanker and the gas is exported to shore via a 19km subsea pipeline where it is used to generate electricity in Abidjan. The lease is on a 10-year contract, excluding option periods.

The Espoir Ivoirien FPSO registers 140,000dwt. It is moored in about 120m of water offshore using an compact internal turret installed at forepeak. This has the capacity for up to ten risers. The fluid swivel contains eight paths. The mooring system is anchored by three sets of two all-chain mooring lines.

Topsides facilities include crude oil production capacity for 40,000bopd, water injection capacity of 60,000bwpd and gas compression capacity of 60mmscfd for gas lift and gas export.

The FPSO incudes two Mission D-type boilers, fired on deck with gas as the leading fuel, and with diesel as back-up. The capacity from each boiler is 80t/h saturated steam.

The vessel is certified by DNV.

Canadian Natural owns and operates a majority interest in other blocks located in deeper waters offshore Cote d’Ivoire where exploration prospects have been identified. In Block CI-40, 8 kilometres south of Espoir, Canadian Natural operates, with a 61% equity, the Baobab prospect. In 2001, Canadian Natural drilled an exploratory well on this Block that confirmed the seismic interpretation and tested oil at 6,700 barrels per day.

Le littoral ivoirien, et plus particulièrement la région de Jacqueville, de par son immense réserve de pétrole et de gaz naturel, constitue indéniablement le cœur de la nouvelle économie ivoirienne. Pendant que nous nous perdons en conjectures sur mille et un aspects de la relation entre l’exploitation des ressources énergétiques de la Côte d’Ivoire et le développement du pays, les questions relatives à l’essor de la région de Jacqueville demeurent de façon très alarmante évincées de nos priorités. Tout se passe comme si ce qui importe est de sortir le pétrole et le gaz du littoral sans aucun égard pour le bien-être économique et social des populations qui y vivent. Jacqueville est restée ce qu’elle est à cause de l’égoïsme d’une certaine génération de leaders de la région, bons élèves de l’école coloniale, qui fidèles à la politique du diviser pour régner, ont préféré développer leur petit hameau ou la voie qui mène à leur villa familiale, plutôt que de penser à la région toute entière, alors que leurs voix portaient jusqu’aux plus hautes instances, et auraient pu servir de lobby pour tout le littoral. Ainsi, Jacqueville est demeurée une région enclavée, sans un réseau de communication décent. Si dans le passé, Jacqueville devait se contenter de son statut de sous-développé et attendre que le bon-vouloir d’un gouvernement paternaliste lui jette de temps en temps quelques miettes, parce que n’ayant aucune carte pour négocier son développement, aujourd’hui, Jacqueville, l’une des régions les plus fortunées de la Côte d’Ivoire, espère recevoir des dividendes de ce qu’elle donne à la nation. Le développement économique, social et culturel de Jacqueville, cette zone économique stratégique, ce poumon de la Côte d’Ivoire compétitive de demain, doit être une priorité pour l’État de Côte d’Ivoire. La bonne foi de l’État ivoirien doit se manifester dans l’immédiat par la dotation d’un pont et d’un réseau routier à la mesure de l’apport de Jacqueville dans l’économie ivoirienne. Les promesses interminables et les manœuvres dilatoires ne doivent plus être de mise. Jacqueville a trop attendu. Et si les élus de Jacqueville ont encore du mal à défendre le besoin de développement de la région en dépit des arguments qui militent en leur faveur, alors, ce sont peut-être eux qui ne sont plus à la mesure de la tâche qui leur a été confiée ; ce sont certainement eux qui ne méritent plus la confiance des populations. 

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