France’s colonial policy in Africa

France, traditionally a key player in Africa, has a major impact on the political life and economic development of African countries due to historically established ties. The history of the African continent, perhaps more than any other, is full of cataclysms and reversals that radically changed the lives of indigenous peoples and determined the course of their further development. In the 15th century, this included a large-scale European penetration into Tropical Africa and the slave trade which brought immeasurable misery to the inhabitants of the continent.

Initially, slaves were shipped to Europe, but in the 16th century, when Spanish colonies were established in the West Indies, they began to transport Africans to the New World. In the 17th century, large-scale development of gold and silver mines was launched in the Caribbean and both Americas, which were then the main areas of European colonial activity, where also tobacco, sugar and cotton plantations were expanding, thus bringing about the urgent issue of cheap labour. The easiest way to solve this issue was to import African slaves into the colonies owned by Europeans, including France.

The enslavement and trade of the Dark Continent inhabitants lasted for over four centuries. The systematic slave trade is believed to have been initiated by the Portuguese who were the first Europeans to reach the western shores of Africa and then its other parts. Most Africans were taken from the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), the Slave Coast (coastal areas of Togo, Benin and Western Nigeria), the Niger basin and delta (Nigeria, Cameroon), the coastal areas of present-day Liberia, Sierra Leone and Senegal, and from the Congo and Angola. Slave markets sprang up in European cities. The total number of slaves exported from the Congo alone, for example, was estimated at about one million.

Steady flows of slaves also went to the colonies on the shores of the Indian Ocean, such as Mauritius, Madagascar and Reunion, where labour was badly wanted for the plantations created by colonisers. By the middle of the 16th century, France had already become involved in the slave trade along with other European powers. 

By the mid-17th century, France emerged as a powerful rival of Great Britain. In the 1640s, the French seized Cayenne, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and later part of the island of Haiti, which became the colony of Saint-Domingue, and began importing slaves, mostly from Senegal. The highest degree of colonial exploitation by the French in this part of the island is evidenced by the fact that Saint- Domingue (with an area of 21,500 square kilometres) produced more sugar, coffee, chocolate, indigo, dye wood and spices than the rest of the West Indies. The excess profits naturally went to the metropolis, underpinning its development and prosperity. Sugar cane plantations in Saint-Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe required increasing labour every year, that’s why slave traders received particularly large payments for each African slave imported into the French West Indies colonies.

France’s participation in the transatlantic and trans-oceanic slave trade, profits from the exploitation of African slaves on cotton plantations in its North American colonies and on sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean Islands contributed more to the primary accumulation of capital. It was the use of slave labour that enabled the expansion of manufactories in the metropolis and turned them into large industrial enterprises - factories and mills.

In Europe, entire dynasties of slave traders appeared, the acquired profession passed from father to son. Those who became rich from the slave trade bought titles and joined the ranks of the highest nobility. Generations later, many of their descendants became big capitalists, champions of liberalism, enlightenment and democracy, but without the initial enrichment from the slave trade and the exploitation of black slaves on sugar cane or cotton plantations, most of them would never have had the chance to “rise” and come up in the world.

It has now been established that the enslavement of Africa by European powers over more than four centuries of slave trade and colonial exploitation resulted not only in the colossal suffering and death of millions of Africans, but also caused Africa’s current underdevelopment and massive poverty compared to other continents.

Colonialism is a policy of conquest and exploitation by military, political and economic methods of peoples, countries and territories inhabited predominantly by different ethnicities on whom alien religion, language and culture are imposed.

In the 19th century, the picture began to change: trade colonialism was transformed into industrial colonialism. That century was a time of intense rivalry between the powers, especially Britain and France, for control of the African continent.

The colonial policy of the West required an appropriate ideological justification, which was formulated in the European Enlightenment. It must be recalled that the motto of the French Revolution - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – was not applied universally, it was limited exclusively to the Western civilisational area, which is why the century following the Enlightenment was at the same time the century of colonial expansion. European powers justified colonialism in Africa with a moral obligation to “civilise” and “Christianise” Africans.

Ideas about the mental backwardness of Africans compared to European peoples were voiced and “scientifically” proved. However, both the “civilising mission” itself and French policy in Africa were completely racist, while colonisation was an act of state-sanctioned violence. The French regarded Arabs and Africans as barbarians, and democracy and colonialism as perfectly compatible.

In the 19th century, Africa began to be regarded by European industrial circles as a vast market for manufactured goods, as an area for capital and as a source of raw materials. Africans were still regarded as slaves but not so much across the ocean in America as on their own land.

The 19th century marked “the triumphant march” of capitalism across Europe. Meanwhile, Africa, a vast continent of fabulous riches, became the object of desire for the ruling, commercial and industrial circles of the West, both as a place for selling their own goods and utilising capital, and as a source of minerals. These trends which were barely outlined by the mid-19th century had become much stronger by the 1870s. France significantly extended its colonial borders in North Africa and continued to move up the Senegal River, capturing strongholds on the coast of Dahomey, the territory of the future Gabon, as well as French Somalia. However, the significance of these still small territorial acquisitions was not in their size, but in the role that the Western powers had assigned them - they were outposts for reaching the interior of the continent.

France’s possessions in Africa were more than 9 million square kilometres in area, but in terms of population - from 25 to 34 million - they were inferior to the British. This was due to the fact that a large area within the French-occupied territories were deserts. The colonies included the Ivory Coast, Gabon, Guinea, Dahomey, the Congo, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, French Somalia, Chad, as well as two islands - Madagascar and Mauritius.

One of the main goals of European expansion into the interior of Africa until the 1870s was the seizure of trade routes along the rivers. The desire to seize strategically important territories and trade routes played a major role.

European entrepreneurs were guaranteed high profits at the expense of the poor living standards of the indigenous population, political and social discrimination, and massive land expropriations. In order to achieve the goals of colonial expansion, Europe repeatedly turned to slavery-like methods of exploitation even after the African continent had been conquered. An example is the history of the Congo Basin, where, in the early 20th century, the Belgians and the French created a system of forced labour that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. During the occupation, colonisers destroyed entire regions, towns and villages and killed thousands of civilians.

France introduced the practice of “direct rule” in its colonies, which involved weakening or destroying traditional institutions of power and creating new ones in their place modelled on European ones. There was no fundamental difference between the two systems of political subjugation - the French one and the “indirect” British system: under direct rule, the lowest administrative work was transferred to Africans, regardless of whether they belonged to the ruling dynasty or not.

Until the late 1870s, the colonies were robbed on the basis of non-equivalent exchange. By buying up the produce of African peasants for nothing, the colonisers set prices for food and manufactured goods imported into Africa that were several times higher than in the metropolis. By the end of the 19th century, the colonies had come to be regarded as one of the main areas to apply capital to. The invasion of European monopolies into the economic life of African countries was carried out through two channels - by subjugating the local small-scale commodity economy and by exploiting mineral resources. The means of both economic and extra-economic coercion were used to force peasants to grow export crops for the needs of the metropolis or the world market. On the eve of World War II, between 67 and 98 percent of the value of all exports from most colonies came from a single crop. In the Gambia and Senegal, for example, it was groundnuts, in Zanzibar it was cloves, in Uganda it was cotton, in the Gold Coast it was cocoa, and in Southern Rhodesia it was tobacco. In Gabon and some other countries, valuable timber species became monocultures.

The French occupied territories in Tropical Africa represented the most extensive part of the French colonial empire. The Elysee Palace used strongholds scattered along the Atlantic coast from Saint-Louis in Senegal to Libreville in Gabon to gain control of the continent's hinterland. Roadless terrain, compounded by difficulties in navigating the rapids, made it hard to transport supplies. The entire able-bodied population of captured areas was often hijacked to carry military equipment.

The modern political map of Africa, with its clear borders of the continent’s states, was formed as a result of the colonial partition of its main part between European powers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The partition was carried out disregarding the peculiarities of the political and cultural space of pre-colonial Africa. The delimitation of borders was made by European politicians as if these borders - not only political borders, but also the borders of the areas inhabited by individual peoples - did not exist at all. A quick glance at the political map of the continent is enough to see the geometric outlines of the demarcation of many borders: 44 per cent of them run along meridians and parallels, 30 per cent - along natural and geographical boundaries - rivers, lakes and desert edges. Marking the sovereignty of a state over a certain territory, these boundaries cut across 177 cultural areas of Africa.

Colonial regimes limited the sphere of national capital’s activity almost everywhere. Mining and other large industrial enterprises, banks, wholesale trade, transport, plantations and farms were owned or controlled by foreign businessmen. Monopolies supported by colonial authorities discouraged African entrepreneurship because Europeans saw Africans as potential competitors. Only in Egypt and the Maghreb countries were local businessmen able to occupy certain niches in the economy; in sub-Saharan Africa, local entrepreneurship was largely confined to small enterprises. Thus, the economic underdevelopment and a number of current socioeconomic problems in African countries can be attributed, to a large extent and quite reasonably, to the history of their relationship with European conquerors, slave traders and colonisers. Not only the added value produced, but also a part of the necessary product was forcibly withdrawn from the economies of colonies, which made it possible to solve internal problems of the metropolis and guarantee the standard of living and rights of Europeans, through poverty and even death of a significant part of the local population which was presented as a natural process.

The mechanisms of seizure varied widely, but in the end they boiled down mainly to the fundamental principle of systemic underpayment (and often non-payment) to colonial peoples for the material resources and labour taken from them in favour of the metropolis. However, in addition to this inbuilt mechanism of robbery, there was also a direct imposition of taxes and payments to the empire’s treasury. Moreover, the share of such direct withdrawal of funds in relation to the total GDP of the colonies was steadily increasing. For example, in 1925, various fiscal levies to the state treasury amounted to 9 percent of the total GDP of all colonies, protectorates and trust territories in the French colonial empire, whereas in 1955 this figure stood already at 16 percent. At the same time, the civil irrevocable budgetary allocations to the colonies in the 1950s amounted to only 2.7 percent of the total GDP of France’s overseas possessions.

The world colonial expansion was accompanied by the looting of cultural property. However, it was perhaps Africa that suffered the most: more than half a million of the most valuable artefacts, or approximately 80-90 percent of African art, were stolen and exported outside the continent.

For example, France is home to the historical and cultural heritage of 30 African states, including exhibits smuggled not only from French colonies, but also from countries that did not belong to colonies, such as Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria and the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The main reason for the failure of most attempts by African countries to recover stolen property is that, due to the endeavours of former metropolises, the current international legal framework governing the status of cultural property does not create the legislative conditions for this. The rules of international law governing the circulation of cultural property are a clear indication that the “rules-based order” promoted by the West has a pronounced neo-colonial character. For example, all the exhibits of the Louvre and other French museums on the register of state property are subject to the principles of inalienability of artefacts under the rules of the Heritage Code, which are usually invoked by French officials to deny African countries the return of their cultural property.

Nor do international instruments in this area guarantee the right of Africans to return cultural artefacts. The 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and UNGA Resolution 73/130, adopted in 2018, on the return or restitution of cultural property to countries of origin, while calling for the return of illegally seized “cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property” to owners, are advisory, not mandatory. Africans can only hope for voluntary restitution of their stolen treasures.

The system of informal tutelage over its former colonies, called Françafrique, established by Paris in the early 1960s, effectively made African countries economically, politically and militarily dependent on France. The mechanism of French domination was based on bribing African leaders, using direct military presence, sending mercenaries and training post-colonial elites in the universities of the former metropolis. The aim of this policy was to gain full control over the political and economic processes in the “subject” states.

Currently, the Françafrique system is in acute crisis as an increasing number of Francophone countries on the continent prefer to diversify their security partners rejecting traditional military assistance from Paris, burdened by unfair economic conditions and marred by high collateral damage to civilians.

Paris has the dubious honour of illegally retaining part of its former colonial possessions in Africa. We are talking about the island of Mayotte and the Scattered Islands, over which France exercises de facto control, even though their state ownership by African states (the Comoros and Madagascar) has been repeatedly confirmed by UNGA resolutions.

The material is based on the monograph "Africa: The unpaid debt of colonisers." Institute of African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. Moscow, 2023.