DID you know that the French history in its former colonies is full of gross injustices?
What they called ‘assimilation’ was nothing but a cover of cruelty and exploitation because blacks could never really become French.
In Southern Africa, some former British colonies, like Zimbabwe, fought and defeated the Britons and their inhuman system and after that extended the hand of reconciliation to the former colonial masters.
Today, in a Zimbabwe formerly devastated by an evil British occupation force, people of British and European descent live as equal citizens, no-one has asked them to pay for their sins and/or that of their forefathers.
These are real credentials, this is the foundation on which the State of Zimbabwe is built.
But in many former French colonies, independence was ‘given’ to the formerly colonised.
And it was given under many unfavourable conditions to the disadvantage of the owners of land.
The French are guilty of the most heinous crimes against Africans from the days of slavery to date.
For instance, when Sekou Toure of Guinea decided to break away from France, the French’s response was unequivocal.
Three thousand French left the country, taking their property and destroying anything which could not be moved: schools, nurseries, public administration buildings were crumbled; cars, books, medicines, research institute instruments, tractors were crushed and sabotaged; horses, cows were killed and food in warehouses was burned or poisoned.
That’s the price anyone who wanted to stop being enslaved by the French paid.
Sylvanus Épiphanio Olympio, the first President of Togo, in 1963, tried to get out of the French money economy by printing his own currency.
The French killed him three days after he started printing his own currency.
On June 30 1962, the French removed the first Malian President, Modibo Keïta, by engineering a coup.
He had rejected being part of the French colonial currency, the FCFA, and they disposed of him.
The French have, over the years, revelled in their successes at permanently suppressing and exploiting their former colonies.
In the words of their own Presidents Chirac and Mitterrand, they attest this:
“Without Africa, France will slide down into the rank of a third (world) power.” – (Former President Jacques Chirac-2008).
And:
“Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st Century.” (Francois Mitterrand 1957).
To date, 14 of France’s former colonies, under duress from France, have kept 85 percent of their reserves in the French Central Bank under the control of the French Minister of Finance.
To date, French former colonies still have to pay colonial debt for the infrastructure developed during the colonial period.
The French are a classic case of the psyche of the oppressor.
Africans lost labour, capital and natural resources to France during the colonial era.
France owes its former colonies reparations, but instead of paying up, it has manipulated the situation so that it seems the Africans are indebted to France.
The French should be paying reparations to the African countries for what they cost them in pain, labour, capital and natural resources during slavery and colonialism; but instead, the Africans are perpetually the cow that is milked to feed France.
Apart from the 500 billion Francs foreign reserves of the former colonies which it keeps in its central bank, France also has the right of ‘first refusal’ for any natural resources sold by its former colonies; they have first priority in terms of award of government contracts even if the Africans could get better deals elsewhere.
In addition, it has the legal right to intervene militarily in the former colonies.
In 2011, the French played a leading role in the NATO coalition demolition of Libya during which they murdered a lawfully elected Head of State, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, an illustrious son of Africa.
The destruction of Libya, which they orchestrated and perpetrated, is business as usual and this is the way they have always related with Africa.
Libya is in shambles, lest we forget.
