“A fragmented, Manicheist, immobile world, a world of statues: the statue of the general who made the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge. A self-confident world, crushing with its stones the spines flayed by the whip. This is the colonial world.
Frantz Fanon, The Damned of the Earth, 1961.
Why attack Louis Faidherbe today? For a simple reason: because the monuments, buildings and streets that pay tribute to him celebrate – without always saying so openly – the colonial project to which he devoted his life. If Faidherbe undeniably belongs to the past, his ideals still pollute our present. The perpetual celebration imposed on us by these statues and streets proves that the colonial ideology is still very much alive.
Faidherbe was not just another agent of French colonialism. He was a precursor, a theoretician and a propagandist. He even ended up becoming a symbol of it.
Inspired by the conquest of Algeria, Faidherbe dug the furrow of colonialism in West Africa and made systematic the domination of previously sovereign people. Decisively, he forced a foreign land – Senegal – into the service of an occupying power – France – at the expense of its people. He then passed on his know-how to those who continued his ‘work’, perfected his methods and pushed the subjugation of the African continent ever further.
In a contemporary historiography that struggles to emancipate itself from the mythology fabricated by the Third Republic, all this has earned Faidherbe the flattering titles of ‘builder’ and ‘visionary’.
See “We are touching idols that are indispensable to national-republican mythology”. (interview with Olivier Lecour Grandmaison).
Faidherbe, a colonialist model
Of course, Faidherbe’s death in 1889 did not bury colonialism: on the contrary, it galvanised its promoters. For decades, politicians cited the ‘good Governor Faidherbe’ as an example and had his face printed in school textbooks. Generations of administrators read and admired him, and then imitated him in their day-to-day management of the colonies.
All these people wanted to believe in the myths that Faidherbe had helped to propagate. That we colonised for the good of the Africans. That we were protecting them against their enemies and their evil tendencies. That they would be eternally grateful to France for having built roads, hospitals and schools. That they would be grateful to the colonisers for having taught them Christian morals and the French language. In short, that after working hard and sweating a bit, Africans would also become good French men or women.
The myth was so strong that some Africans themselves began to believe it. In order not to die of despair, they in turn began to admire Faidherbe and to adopt the Gaulish heritage. The others, less credulous or less pampered by the occupiers, had to listen in silence to the colonialist myths and to accept the monuments that were erected in their homes. In 1961, the anti-colonialist psychiatrist Frantz Fanon finely dissected what was being played out at the time: “Each statue, that of Faidherbe or Lyautey, Bugeaud or Sergeant Blandan, all these conquistadors perched on the colonial soil, keep on signifying one and the same thing: ‘We are here by the force of bayonets’…”.
Let us debunk the myth of the ‘good colonist’!
Faidherbe had made this motto his own: “The interests of the natives must be taken as the rule of conduct”. An appalling hypocrisy when one knows what scars he left in Senegal…
Even more appalling is the hypocrisy that lasted after the independence of the former French colonies in Africa at the beginning of the 1960s. It even became a favourite slogan of Françafrique: the perverse system that allowed France to maintain its domination over its former colonies after their formal independence.
Surprisingly, Françafrique – which is nothing other than a system of indirect colonialism – has returned to the old Faidherbian ways. Recognising on paper the political sovereignty of its former dependencies, Paris relied on their new leaders, set up as ‘friends of France’, to control them from a distance. Thanks to this unofficial pact with Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Omar Bongo, French leaders kept control – economically, financially and militarily – of many ‘independent’ African countries.
Voir “Faidherbe vu du Sénégal” (Entretien avec Khadim Ndiaye)
Françafrique, whose history is now known and documented, has always put forward ‘African interests’ to justify and perpetuate itself. In the past and nowadays still, France invariably proposes to ‘protect’ and to ‘defend’ Africans against all sorts of dangers, starting with ‘terrorism’ or ‘foreign’ interference (British, Soviet, American, Chinese…). Emmanuel Macron, on an official visit to Senegal in February 2018, made an astonishing speech in the Place Faidherbe in Saint-Louis: “Here in Saint-Louis, around the 1850s, the French were worried about the rise of jihadism. Sometimes history stutters”.
Yes, history stutters. The arguments used today to justify France’s interference in its former colonies differ little from those that Faidherbe and his ilk waived back in the 19th century. And the objective is always the same: to give a humanitarian veneer to a (neo)colonialism whose real objectives have never changed: to defend the strategic and economic interests of the French ‘elites’ to the detriments of the populations.
It is this deadly hypocrisy, propagated without interruption since the time of Faidherbe, that must be unmasked today.
