>>2296740<The popular sentiment that the Sahelian juntas tapped into is a complex mixture of different sentiments from different people with different backgrounds. The hotpot of ideologies can be summed up as "sovereigntism."This is includes 21st-century Pan-Africans, religious Muslims, Christians, and "traditionalists." And also what Idrissa calls "culturalists" which is a very small minority; i.e. Kemites, who are a strange Hotep-like cult movement which traces their descent to ancient Egypt. There are also people like Kemi Seba (he's also a Duginist) who he describes as a fascist. There are also anti-imperialist and left-nationalist intellectuals who dream of a war between Russia and the West, in which Russia destroys the West, and that will free Africa. It's like that multipolar stuff you see on this website all the time.
A related tendency is Afro-Pessimism. This really emerged in the 80s/90s and defines Africa through its historical abjection, slavery, colonialism, and the tragic consequences. "Africa is therefore a universe devastated by the hatred and greed of the world, and if the modern world is by definition hostile to Africanness, the only conceivable solution is secession from the modern world." This is like a secular equivalent of Salafism.
This doesn't mean that Francophone Africans don't have legitimate and objective grievances with France. "But sovereignists also and above all have subjective grievances, which date back at least to 1492, if not further." These subjective grievances can't be satisfied and don't lend themselves to solutions. It's basically a negative ideology, and the attraction to Russia (like in other parts of the world, including some populist rightists in the West) is more because they identify Russia as having the same enemy. People like Nigel Farage, Eric Zemmour, and Tucker Carlson also depict their countries as victims of colonization except it's through immigration. There's not a huge difference between the crowds that came out to cheer these juntas and the J6ers in Washington.
<This kind of thiking is distinct from Marxism-Leninism of the 1960sIdrissa contrasts this "bubble" (more on this later) with a progressive project in the Sahel in the 1960s. This is complicated, but to start with, there are two competing tendencies in the Sahel, which he refers to as "self-critics" and "victims." In a Sahelian context, the "self-critics" are on the left, and the "victims" are on the right. But this is not apparent in the West, because the left is fighting their own right, which has racist and chauvinist views towards Africa, and the Western left is highly sympathetic to people who were colonized. The Western left therefore is not keen to criticize Africans because (a) they don't know much about Africa and (b) they don't want to lend ammunition to the right in their own societies and what they say about Africans. But it's not at all the case that the people who espouse this "victim" ideology which blames the West for Africa's problems are progressive in their own context.
However, in the 1960s, these tendencies were combined. There was both a real attempt in the Sahel by a coalition of trade unionists, feminists, peasants, etc. to decolonize
and self-critique their own regressive legacies (feudalism, obscurantism, etc.) of the "archaic and backward" past from the point of view of societal progress through single-party states operating under the principle of democratic centralism. But this began to recede in the 1970s. Thomas Sankara was the last attempt to revive it, but he was not successful. So this basically reactionary and conservative-identitarian "victim" ideology (stemming from Afro-Pessimism) emerged out of complicated mixture of that collapse, the limited empathy of the West towards Africa, feelings of humiliation, and a real decline in development, punctuated by racist stuff said about Africans from French politicians like Nicolas Sarkozy.
But under these juntas, practically everyone who Idrissa identifies as part of the self-critical tendency (which I'm assuming includes himself as well) has been exiled, imprisoned, or forced into strict and complete self-censorship. While those on the "victim" team have fgound a regime they needed, one that basically sees itself in a constant war.
<A lot of this is a self-contradictory ideological delusionIdrissa notes that the anti-French sentiment as it's expressed by these people doesn't actually make a lot of sense if you think about it. It borders on the toxic and stupid at worst. It's quite common for example for Sahelians to claim that France is behind the jihadists who are destroying these countries, but the same people accuse France of betraying them for also saying "fuck it" and pulling out of the Sahel when they kicked them out (although the French were very offended at first). For one, all of these military officers were trained by the French army anyways, and they were also fighting the same jihadists as the French before they kicked out the French. But when French troops there were fighting the jihadists, it was a widespread belief among people that the French were only there to distribute weapons to the jihadists. This is not based on fact, but feelings, and that cannot be contradicted by facts.
But think about it from the perspective of an ordinary guy. Shit sucks. There's really murderous jihadi violence, and now there are French troops everywhere and they're rolling around in armored vehicles, shooting at people, and getting directly involved in conflicts between the locals. So what that guy understands is that the situation is unbearable, and the French – objectively speaking too – are not actually defeating the jihadists. But in the mind of that guy, he wonders, why haven't they? And that guy has a smartphone which is connected to the internet. And that's an opportunity for populists and political "speculators" to tell him ~stories~ about how the French are actually in cahoots with the jihadists as part of a conspiracy so the French can take over the country, so the solution is to get rid of the French. This comes from a social atmosphere of negative emotions: fear, resentment, distrust, and in some cases hatred. Built on the trauma and shock of what NATO – including France – did to Gaddafi.
This is not totally crazy BTW. Anti-French sentiment is quite longstanding in the Sahel, stemming quite naturally from colonial domination, French support for various coups in the decades following that, the role of French mercenaries, and the ongoing (before the coups) French military presence in the Sahel which people took to be an imposition. You can sum that up as a neocolonial framework known as "Françafrique" which aims to protect the strategic interests of France, and which in turns has constructed an image in the minds of people of a diabolical French hyperpower and the resulting hatred.
The catch is that the French are no longer a running concern here. The French have stopped giving a fuck about the Sahel. It's only Africans who haven't realized this yet. They still treat France as a devil that's responsible for all their problems. It sounds like Russiagate stuff but in the Sahel. France (and the West in particular, but especially France) is apparently behind everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) bad, but the Sahelians can just say "fuck you" to France, and France apparently can't do anything about it. France is both all-powerful and weak and the West is in decline, right? That's a contradictory ideology. But it did unite (for different reasons) people with different ideologies.
>"These beliefs are ideological. Among other things, this amounts to saying that there is nothing Westerners can do to change people's opinions. Even if they completely withdrew from the field, they would still be perceived as pulling the strings by any African who dared not follow the ideological directive. This directive is simple. It is a story that Africans tell themselves, in which the roles are distributed once and for all: Westerners (especially the French in the Sahel) are the bad guys, Africans are the good guys and the victims, and the struggle between the two has no end, unless perhaps the Russians manage to completely destroy the West." The Western left doesn't get this because they feel solidarity and compassion for Africans, but for humanist reasons, while the feelings of these Africans are nationalist, and some are actually on the left, but others are actually on the right.
That leads to one more thing.