Cote d’Ivoire: From the Castration of Colonization to the Self-castration of Neocolonization

Neocolonization as it is unfolding today on the African continent, especially in Francophone Africa, and more precisely in Cote d’Ivoire, has the chilling effect of conjuring up a depressing level of psychosexual investment on the part of the African leader into a pleasure principle that reverses the trajectory of the Oedipus complex. It is my sense that after 50 years of struggle that have landed him beyond the three organization stages of the Oedipus Complex in the form of the resolution of the colonial encounter, the “child” of the “mirror stage”, faced with the rupture of the symbolic order or the real(ity) of the post-independence moment, refuses to take the risk of a shattered experience, and chooses instead, at the cost of self-castration, to relapse, not

into the imaginary, but even worse, into a fantasy of unity mediated through circumfession to “Mummy France.”