France is facing a reckoning that may spread across Europe. No, not just economic challenges, but African pushback against the legacies of colonization. Specifically, African nations asserting greater control over their resources and images.
France’s military, political, and economic ties to West Africa outlasted colonial rule, but recently, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger expelled French forces. Recent deployments were to counter terrorism, but France’s military and governmental presence and influence goes back over a century. They have not ended French influence; they are contesting it.
Many African governments are challenging arrangements they view as colonial legacies and seeking greater control over their resources, like oil and uranium.
In March, Ghana led a successful UN resolution recognizing the transatlantic slave trade and racialized chattel enslavement as the “gravest crime against humanity.” In September, an African-led campaign also won UN support for the Equal Earth map, which represents continents’ relative sizes more accurately than the familiar Mercator map.
The Nigerian Dangote refinery is expanding domestic oil refining after decades of exporting crude and importing fuel at premium prices. The shift has challenges, but it creates new possibilities.
The history and current realities are complex, but these developments challenge an old assumption: that Africa is acted upon while Europe sets the terms. Slavery and colonialism helped build that story, fostering stereotypes of a continent incapable of shaping its future. That story was never the truth.
Across Africa, people and governments are contesting who controls resources, who defines history, and whose vision of the world counts. Their voices are just as relevant as any other nation and they deserve to chart their own destinies, like any other nation.
I am Joseph Flynn and that is my perspective.
