J’Accuse – Open Letter to French President Francois Hollande

TOPIC: J’ACCUSE – OPEN LETTER TO FRENCH PRESIDENT FRANCOIS HOLLANDE.

Dear President Francois Hollande.

INTRODUCTION.

I refer to your presidential visit to South Africa this week.

Firstly, for the sake of transparency, let me declare upfront my interest in what I am about to write about you: I do not welcome your visit to South Africa this week. In fact, I am totally opposed to it. I really think your visit is ill-advised. I truly think your French policy towards Africa stinks to high heavens. If I had the power, you would not set your feet in my country, and if you did, as you are going to, I would throw you into the sea to be swallowed by a whale, like biblical Daniel, to take you back to Normandy beach, in the hope that such a marine experience would so frighten you, that you would never want to visit Africa again, at least as long as you remain French president.

In a word, you are really not welcome to visit SA, Mr. President, at least in my book.

In fact, if I really had Superman’s powers, I would declare you persona non grata (PNG) across the whole of Africa. If, like a believer in Hinduism, I could choose what to be reincarnated into in my afterlife today, in time for your visit this week to my country, I would reincarnate myself as former American president Monroe, and declare the Monroe Doctrine over all of Africa, to prevent your types from ever abusing and taking for granted our beloved, ancient African continent again.

You are lucky that there are no Monroes amongst the crop of African leaders today, who could show you the bold African sign reading: THE RIGHT OF ENTRY IS RESERVED.

This is because I consider you and John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, two of the ugly white men of the 21st century. By ugly white men, I am not referring to your physical attributes, although both of you have enough of these to recommend you for the expression. About this I shall make only a cursory mention of below, quoting from a renowned journalist. But I shall resist the temptation to go that undignified route full throttle, tempting though it is to do so, for it will trivialize the negative sentiment I hold about you, which I am about to express and share with you in this open letter, and to go that route will also demean my African ancestors and me in the process. The utterance of such an expression by me about your looks would also detract and deduct from the bedrock of my ethical beliefs, which is the African Ubuntu. Lastly, I am not using the term “ugly white men” in the way people would sarcastically use the term “ugly Jew” in the past to refer to the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

I am using the term rather in the sense Ben Mezrich would write about “ugly Americans” in an eponymous book. I am using the term for its intended insurgent political meaning and significance. These political meaning and significance stem from your recent impermissible warmongering, in which you and John Kerry indulged and excelled, at the pleasure of US president Barack Obama’s threatened, but for now aborted, war against the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

And you really want me to believe you are a “French socialist”? Perish the thought. The impression I have gained of you is that you are just a wily political careerist and a ruthless, unabashed ideological opportunist who adorns himself with the term “French socialist” to advance your personal power ambitions and your craving for personal glory. What is “French socialist” about your FrancaAfrique policy? You tell me.

You have defiled socialism by your warmongering on Mali and Syria, Mr. President Hollande.

And, just to remind you, you are no former French president Jacque Chirac, although you seek, unsuccessfully and in your many TV interviews, to cloth yourself in his formidable and much-celebrated anti-Iraqi war legacy. Mr. President, I was part of the team under former SA president Thabo Mbeki that interacted very closely with former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin’s French foreign policy establishment in its opposition to George W Bush and Tony Blair’s war of folly on Iraq, in line with SA’s own opposition to that war. I visited Paris several times in this capacity. I recall with warm fondness that when our team, led by former SA foreign affairs deputy minister, Aziz Pahad, visited the French presidency and foreign ministry, for discussions on Iraq with senior French officials, we were so impressed that the then-just-designated new prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, (a very handsome, good-looking white French man), broke his summer holiday in southern France to fly to Paris to come and meet with deputy minister Pahad and his team. We were even more impressed by his profound knowledge of Africa and the developing world, as France’s former ambassador to Madagascar. But what absolutely bowled us over was de Villepin and Jacque Chirac’s unflinching opposition to George W Bush and Tony Blair’s illegal, unilateral and needless war of choice on Iraq. And on this score, these French leaders were merely representing and giving expression to a very strong anti-war French public opinion prevalent at the time. We knew in those official discussions that the conservative French government of Chirac and de Villepin was absolutely opposed to warmongering on Iraq, the sort of warmongering that has now become your second nature, especially when you, a socialist president of France, deal with Africa, and especially when you threaten to deal with Bashar al-Asaad’s Syria. That is why I tell you, President Hollande, you are no Jacque Chirac on matters of war and peace. You are just trying to ride on his anti-Iraq war coat-tails in order to perpetrate a deceptive war on Syria that the French public, to their eternal glory, and to your great chagrin, oppose by huge public opinion majorities.

No wonder you find it easy to rush to introduce a draft resolution on Syria at the UN Security Council, whilst you were absolutely petrified to allow the great French democratic parliament to pass a vote on your warmongering policy towards Syria. You knew you would suffer the same embarrassing defeat which befell UK prime minister David Cameron, when he strove to steamroll both his own co-ruling Conservative Party and the UK parliament to approve his warmongering on Syria. At least David Cameron, to his credit, had the courage of his convictions and took the gamble to allow for a UK parliamentary vote on his unpopular Syria policy. Not so with you, I am afraid. You, on the other hand, would not take the risk to entrust to the democratically-elected French parliament, the representative of the French people, with a conscience vote on your warmongering Syria policy. At the end of the day, all you have done is to uncritically hitch France to the warmongering bandwagon of what former French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, once famously termed “a hyper-frenetic power”, or what the wonderful, much admired and highly respected French philosopher, and a true friend of Africa, Jean-Paul Satre, once described, quite correctly, in his Foreword to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of The Earth, as “a super-European monstrosity”, namely, the United States of America (USA).

I deliberately use the expression “ugly white men” as a means to denounce, in no uncertain terms, your and France’s ongoing brutal destabilization and neo-colonization of a whole swath of the African continent, anew and in the 21st century, just to gain for France a diplomatic and economic advantage domestically and on the world stage, at the expense of Africa herself. Because I am aware that you intend to project yourself as a friend of Africa during your upcoming SA visit, I have decided to level with you, through this open letter. I am aware that you intend to portray yourself as a lover of Africa, an Afrophile, as soon as you touch down on the South African soil.

Although in my previous life as a South African diplomat in Geneva I fell in love with your country and its wonderful people, although I regard myself as an incurable Francophile, although I spent a lot of time in France, sometimes driving all by myself from Geneva right through to Paris and back, and sometimes traveling on the Euro-train from Paris to Dover in England, although I used to do my family weekend shopping in southern France to escape the more weighty Swiss francs, and although I was never discriminated against personally, not once, by the French people during my many visits to and sojourns in France, when many times my family and myself would be the only black faces around a sea of French white faces, and although one of my sons was born in French Switzerland assisted by Swiss French midwives, and although I often felt safer then in France than I normally do now in such conservative, barely reformed South African small towns like Brits, Ventersdorp, and Middleburg, I have retained my critiquing faculties versa viz France’s policy towards Africa. Yet as a sign of my abiding appreciation for such French hospitality and humane treatment during my stay and visits to your great country, I am continually self-teaching French and about French culture, as well as her great literature. I suppose by now you have correctly guessed that I regard Emile Zola, the great French author of the original J’Accuse Open Letter to French President Felix Faure on Alfred Dreyfus Affair in the late 19th century, as France’s greatest and most courageous author ever.

Monsieur President, je aim bien francais!

CHAPTER ONE.

And so, President Hollande, I think I have absolutely a firmer basis to call myself a true friend and lover of France, the French and things French, – a Francophile -, than I believe you frankly have to call yourself a friend and lover of Africa, the Africans and things African, – an Afrophile -.

Mr. President, for me Africa is uber alles, not a far-away neocolonial adjuct it may be to you and other French citizens.

Let me explain, just in case you misunderstand or misinterpret what I mean by this.

I remain acutely awake to the reality that France’s Africa policy is rotten to the core, beyond redemption, and that as France’s current president, you symbolize such a profound rot.

Mr. President, you are neither a friend of Africa, nor a lover of Africa. The fact is, you and the entire French policy to Africa remain very much abusive and condescending towards my African continent and its peoples. In addition, your country is a long-standing, great exploiter of Africa’s riches and resources, which have gone to build some of the world’s greatest palaces and architectural wonders in Paris and the rest of France. You are, therefore, quite clearly, the enemy and hater of Africa, by dint of the French state ideology and policy towards Africa, which you pursue and are implementing with a determination as focused as your half-squinting eyes. This is all nothing personal, Mr. President. I don’t care how you self-describe in this sense your soi-disant as French president. It is not your melodious words and declarations that matter to me, but rather your malodorous actions and deeds on and towards Africa that count. No doubt about that. Your ugly record on Africa speaks for itself. You and many of the French you represent do not really respect Africa, beyond the obligatory diplomatic platitudes and bonhomie. You, if anything, profoundly despise and dread any possibility of Africa one day becoming truly independent from the French economic and diplomatic patronage, or from the suffocating French sphere of influence. Even today, globally, you and France ego-trip on the French colonial-era Dahomy-type carry-high carts hoisted by Africans, at the expense of Africa.

If this were not the case, the first thing you would have done upon becoming France’s new, “socialist” president, would have been to put Africa-French relationship on a footing of equals. This French neo-colonial establishment towards Africa, including you and the French state you head, will never contemplate, let alone permit, such a paradigm shift and outcome. In your mind, Africa is crucial for the French DNA that allows France’s survival as “a globalized power, with a global reach.” In this crucial task of changing the essence of FrancaAfrique policy,, you have failed dismally. You continue the sordid French extractive policy towards Africa that was best described by the former Ivory Coast Speaker of Parliament and academic, Mr. Koulibally, writing about the unfair and unjust Francophone monitery union, as ruinous to Francophone Africa. You continue the unjust and exploitative French policy towards Africa that Al Jazeera TV recently described in a three-parts documentary on the history and current status of FrancaAfrique policy as “unjust”.

You do not represent a healthy break from the old FrancaAfrique, but a morbid continuity. And you know it, Mr. President, deep in your heart.

So indeed you are no revolutionary socialist.

Yet, because you fancy yourself a white French man superior to any black man and any African, you come hear, a wolf wearing a sheepskin, and you think South Africans will be fooled by your outward deceptive diplomatic finesse, and by the commercial contracts you are going to sign during your visit, as if our South African soul has “up for sale to the highest French bidder” hanging around it. You fool only yourself and your sycophantic presidential advisory team.

In my view, because of your support for and embodiment of the violent French policy towards Africa, especially your adventerous war in Mali, you deserve to share the bench with Charles Taylor at the International Criminal Court (ICC), alongside Henry Kissinger, George W Bush, Tony Blair, and, of course, the father of modern Drone Wars, Barack Obama. Your soldiers have killed too many innocent Tuaregs in northern Mali for you to saunter around South Africa as a free French man and a man of peace. Because you are quick to display a pretty violent streak when French interests are mortally threatened by Africa’s march towards self-determination in all its aspects, you are the bearer of French gifts your South African hosts should be very wary about. Preferably, you should be in the same league as the president of Sudan, Al-Bashir, or of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, both who are wanted by the ICC for genocide and mass killings, respectively. But again, who said this West-dominated world of international criminal justice is just and fair, or color-blind?

I therefore salute the decision by the AU Summit of Heads of State and Government to resolve to request the UN Security Council to stop the prosecution of the leaders of Kenya at the ICC, and to instruct African ICC member states to first canvass the AU before referring cases to the ICC or UN Security Council. That this AU decision comes on the eve of your visit to South Africa, is just a cherry on top, to my mind.

I shall resist the temptation to make your visit to SA the basis of my quarrel with the president of Mali, who recently described you, so offensively, so incongruously and so incorrectly, as “a great friend of Africa.” You may be many things. You may be his great friend for giving him a job-for-pal presidential promotion, on a silver platter, on the back of French tanks and war planes, in a proud African country that should not be an extension of France. But a friend of Africa? My pitch black foot.

A neo-colonialist like yourself will not make me fall for your divide-and-rule policy and make me fight with other African leaders in your neo-colonial pockets. After all, without your invading armed forces in Mali, the Mali president would not be in power today. Same with the president of Ivory Coast and his French wife. Same with the new president of the Central African Republic and his anarchic, highly ill-disciplined, murderous and looting Seleka bandits, which seek to pass themselves for a reputable CAR national army. You, as Commander-in-Chief of French armed forces, should be dismantling France’s archipelago of death and destabilization, in the form of French military bases in several former Francophone African countries. You should not be using these French military bases in Africa to keep in power, or to catapult into power, some of your co-opted sahibs in Africa. So, of course these African sahibs of yours will whisper sweet nothings into your French ears, or utter mindless bon mot, just to humor you, and because they are obliged by circumstances created, in the main, by centuries of French colonialism and neo-colonialism in Africa to, faute de mieux, accept French patronage and neo-colonial diktat over them. Of course they will be outraged when we point out their despicable dependence on France’s neo-colonial patronage. Of course they will be offended, your African sahibs, to hear us criticize their French masters like you. Malcolm X once described these types as “kitchen niggers.” And he was right.

Of course you, in turn, will point to your African sahibs as “examples” of how pleased Africans are with FrancaAfrique policy, French aid, French currency, French language, French culture, French literature, French influence, French cuisine, French wine, French perfumes, French high fashion, French football, and even, in some discreet instances, in some dark corners, with some of the young French ladettes for Berlusconi-type bunga-bunga merry-making. And here, understand me well Mr. President, I am not at all accusing you of poncing around whenever you visit African countries. Not at all.

But stuff all that up your right-wing armpit, Mr. President of France!

Those of us who read how former Panamese president (general) Omar Torrijos described to John Perkins, in his highly memorable Confessions of an Economic Hitman – Conversations with the General, his experience with US imperialism, know how your neo-colonial ilk operate across the developing world, are aware of your modus operadi across Africa, and we know you are up to no good for Africa. Regarding Africa, you are a predatory white European hyena, nothing more. You and France gain when Africa bleeds, when Africa is weak, when Africa is dependent on western alms and aid, and when Africa is on its knees, extending a begging bowl, perpetually being our Information Age’s avatar for human suffering, backwardness and human indignity. We know well that a strong Africa, a dynamic Africa, a truly independent Africa, an economically powerful Africa, and a proud and content Africa, is anathema to broad and fundamental French interests globally and in Africa. We are not deceived by your sweet tongue and savoury diplomatic smell emanating from the eau de toilette around your FrancaAfrique policy.

For starters, you and France view yourselves as equals to the whole African Union (AU), our continental body, on all matters pertaining to Africa. A single country, France, located outside Africa, sees itself as an equal to a whole continent of 54 countries and its continental body. What chicanery. The reason your country has for so long opposed UN Security Council reform is that you carry on with this false, self-serving and self-perpetuating canard that you are the voice, ears and eyes of Africa in the Council, that you look after the interests of Africa there. Would you trust an African country or the AU to do the same for France at the meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)? Would you agree that an African be the Managing Director of the IMF, instead of a French or European citizen? Would you? Of course not. This harmful pretense that you represent Africa at the UN Security Council has engendered a highly distorted, pernicious diplomatic relationship between your country and Africa, as some African countries depend on selective and tendentious briefings and leaks by French UN diplomats at the UN Security Council in New York. I witnessed this diplomatic perfidy as a junior diplomat in 1994-1997.

Mr. President, Africa does not need France to represent her at the UN Security Council, or for France to be Africa’s pointman in her dealings with other global powers, including at the table of UN Security Council permanent members. Africa can represent herself, including at this UN Security Council table, whilst France, like the UK, has to vacate its permanent seat to more deserving, rising and emerging powers like Indonesia or Turkey or Mexico, or Egypt or Poland or, – yes-yes -, even Zimbabwe. You frown at the mentioning of Zimbabwe? And why not Zimbabwe, given that it does not carry the slavery, racism and colonialism baggage, unlike France and the UK?

Nothing illustrates better the ease with which the FrancaAfrique policy is capable of destabilizing our entire African continent than this: The AU has passed a controversial resolution to expel any member-state whose government comes to power through a coup or through any unconstitutional change of power. Good enough as far as the resolution goes. But what is the reality? Outside powers like your country can sponsor their paid agents in African countries to overthrow legitimate, constitutional governments. What is the consequence? The poor African country is expelled from the AU. And what happens to external powers like France or the UK or the US, who, as everyone knows, and as the Al Jazeera TV documentary on the FrancaAfrique policy made abundantly clear, can indirectly instigate coups and other forms of unconstitutional change of power in Africa? They go scot-free and are not punished by the AU whatsoever. The result is further deepening divisions and mistrust amongst African leaders, whilst the real outside instigators of coups and or other unconstitutional change of government in Africa smugly sit on the AU’s sidelines, happy at the mayhem they cause in Africa.

Currently Egypt’s expulsion from the AU, and its resultant war of words with the SA government, is a prime example of this point I am seeking to make. As a result, Western and other non-African powers are more involved in the Egyptian crisis than the AU. Very strange. Yet the new Egyptian army coup leadership will never turn on the US or European countries like France. They instead blast the SA government. Either the AU must revisit this resolution about unconstitutional change of power, or it must also impose stern sanctions on Western and other external governments that sponsor such coups and unconstitutional change of power in Africa.

Look now at what your country, the US, the UK and NATO, in defiance of the AU leadership, have created in Libya following their anti-Gaddafi “regime change” and their installation into “power vacuum” (and not into power) of armed, lawless Libyan militias, including some aligned to Al Qaeda, which account to no central Libyan government. Can the AU find a means to punish and sanction your country, France, as well as other Western countries like the US, the UK and Denmark, for the absolute mess they have created in Libya through their unconstitutional ouster of the Gaddafi regime? Or is it easier to expel the Central African Republic, or Madagascar, or Guinea, or Mauritania, or Niger, or Egypt, from the AU, than it is to confront powerful countries like yours, the US, the UK and other NATO members, who engage in or abet the same coups and or other unconstitutional change of power in Africa? Otherwise the AU is busy shooting itself in the foot, to the great satisfaction of the West, by this decision on unconstitutional change of power within AU members. To pick on the weak, just because they are weak, but allow the powerful to go scot-free, is not right and must end. At this rate, the western interferers in African affairs will soon instigate an alternative AU made up of expelled coup plotters, African unconstitutional regime changers and bloodthirsty power-mongers like the current CAR president, who came to power through the barrel of a gun.

Mr. President, you represent a French agenda fundamentally in contradiction with Africa’s agenda for renewal. Your sunshine smile during your visit to South Africa this week will not hide this fact. In her Guardian article of 15 September 2011, Angelique Chrisafis, reporting on your unpresidential “love-triangle”, described you as “portly joker.” Yet you and your FrancaAfrique policy are no “portly joker” to us Africans. You are a deadly, core anti-African and pro-French force, in the final analysis. And having read your former lover, Segolene Royal’s writings about you, you are neither a good, trustworthy man and lover, at a personal level, if her 30 year intimate knowledge of you is anything to go by.

We are not fooled by UNESCO either, which is based in your country, for conferring on you some dubious honor for your destructive military adventures in Mali, which the UN Security Council has controversial conferred some modicum of internationality legitimacy on. This dubious, undeserved honor and legitimacy, in my opinion, do not lessen the gravity of your direct responsibility for what will transpire in Mali in the next few decades ahead. To use the thin excuse of protecting the ancient Timbaktu manuscripts as a means to recolonize Mali, is totally unacceptable and intolerable. It is even less comprehensible why the same Paris-based UNESCO never conferred the same honor on former SA president, Thabo Mbeki, for the excellent efforts and financial support he and his former government expended on safeguarding the same ancient Timbaktu manuscripts pre-Mali civil war, for quite a long period at that. Why you, and not him, are more deserving of this UNESCO honor, when Mbeki never ordered the killing of a single Malian, whilst the French armed forces you command have killed at least hundreds of Mali’s Tuaregs in north Mali? This funny UNESCO gesture is as ill-advised as the Nobel Peace Committee conferring on US president Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, or the UN’s secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, promoting the UN Security Council resolution authorizing your armed forces to slaughter the forces belonging to former Ivory Coast president Gbagbo during the recent Ivory Coast civil war, in order to advantage a side that was a favorite to France in the civil war. This too is a war crime that should be prosecuted by the ICC, which has unfairly decided to prosecute only one side of Ivory Coast civil war that was led by former president Gbagbo.

At this rate, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netenyahu would not be amiss to entertain the possibility of a Nobel Peace Prize for Israel’s continuing long-standing, brutal and inhuman occupation of, and sustained, ongoing repression in, Palestine. Why not? And who would blame him for entertaining such a zany idea, in the circumstanes?

If you really deserve the UNESCO prize for your naughty activities and military adventure in Mali and Niger, why didn’t you volunteer to do the same, alone, in Syria, as you did in Mali? Both are former French colonies after all. What is the differentiator between them then? Is Syria not a far worse civil war and humanitarian situation, much more deserving of French military intervention than Mali? Did you need the US military cover to intervene in Mali? Why didn’t you go into Syria as a Terminator of the Allewites and other Syrian minorities? Why did you declare yourself ready for militarily intervene in Syria, but only if the US initiated the unlawful military aggression against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus? Instead, you went into Mali like the Terminator of Mali’s oppressed and marginalized Tuaregs – no hesitancy, no qualms. In Mali, you claim to be fighting Al Qaeda-aligned terrorists. In Syria, you are the chief western patron and comforter of Al Qaeda-aligned anti-Assad terrorists, supplying them with finance, intelligence, military know-how, French special operation forces to train them, and even providing them with French diplomatic cover around the world? Mali and Syria, viewed in one, uninterrupted continuum, show the true, unethical basis and texture of France’s foreign policy under your presidential stewardship

The point is that you have only pure contempt for African armies’ fighting capabilities and prowess, especially in former French colonies. But the thought of Hebullah in Lebanon/Syria and of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards sent fear-factor jingles up your head, regarding a possible quagmire intervention in Syria.

After Napoleon, weak African countries are where modern-day French generals seek to outdo Clausewitz in their military fantasies and war theories, and where they accumulate undeserved military honors. It is why your defence force is running amok in several of these former French colonies in Africa. Your French armed forces would never dream to do the same in Vietnam, or Louisianna in the US, or in Waterloo in Belgium, or on the approaches to Moscow in winter, or in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, or even in Syria. Africa, for lazy French military planners and strategists, remains the template on which to play out their wildest military fantasies, without fearing to be clobbered Dien Bien Phu-style for doing so, whilst registering easy military victories over “Don Quixotic windmills-type” African armed forces. Because many African states remain so weak and fragile, partly due to your country’s FrancaAfrique policy.

It is no wonder that a recent opinion poll in France on your performance as French president, revealed an interesting facet of France. According to this opinion poll, a clear majority of the French people completely disapproved of your presidential performance on domestic French issues, eg on the economy. But, very oddly, a healthy French majority approved of your military adventure and naughty military games in Mali. So, were it not for Mali, the French public would have dismissed you completely as an unmitigated presidential disaster, according to this opinion poll. Put differently, I understood this French opinion poll to have said that the majority of the French people think you are a bad president for them domestically, but that you make an outstanding, terrific French president on Mali, an African country; a rather particularly confounding and peculiar French way of assessing their state leaders’ presidential all-round performance. What is a reject in France should be houte couture in Africa, seems to be the French reasoning according to this opinion poll.

What utter hogwash.

In such a situation, what would ever incentivize a serving French president to bring to an end French military adventures and naughty activities in Africa? It makes perfect domestic and electoral sense for a French president to therefore continue with France’s destabilizing neo-colonial FrancaAfrique project ad infinitum, which was started by former French president and War-time hero, de Gaulle. Thus French president’s gain is Africa’s loss.

CONCLUSION.

Mr. President, I was greatly amused to listen this past Saturday to the interview CNN’s Richard Quest conducted with your Finance Minister, Pierre Moscouvici, on the margins of the World Bank’s meeting in Washington, in which Moscouvici bizarrely complained about “French-bashing.” Well, to paraphrase a famous, hilarious and cartoonist SA Vodacom advert, “the French have been doing it in Africa”, meaning the French have been Africa-bashing, literally and physically, since the first French colonialists set foot on the African soil, leaving utter destruction, bloodbath and underdevelopment in their wake. And now that the world is refusing to plant a French kiss on Minister Moscouvici’s cheek, he is crying foul and declaring it all a horrible “French-bashing”, and the end of the world as the French know it. Just imagine what your Finance Minister would do were he to be told that Francophone Africa has served irrevocable divorce papers on France, and that it has renounced the unequal monetary union with France.

Or maybe we do not really have to imagine it. Maybe this is the real cause of the calamity that befell Ivory Coast under its former president Gbagbo, now languishing at the ICC.

So, I should not have been amused by your Finance Minister’s interview with CNN’s Richard Quest. This is serious and deadly.

One African caricature which is popular in the West is that there is nothing African leaders like than the chance to go on official duty to capitals of major western countries, which, without fail, double up as shop-until-you-drop-dead-in-the-middle-of-New York’s-Fifth Avenue therapeutic sessions for their incurable shopaholic First Ladies. But a more accurate caricature may be of a French president’s love-affair with visits to former French colonies in Africa. Again the recent Al Jazeera TV documentary gave a glimpse of this French foreign policy facet, focusing particularly on the nepotistic former French president Francois Mitterand and his son’s excursions into some of the Francophone countries in Africa.

The only difference is that the French leaders, when they visit Africa, “shop”, for lack of a better term, for whole African elites, whole chunks of African economies, and whole national industries in African countries; whilst African leaders’ wives shop for clothes, underwears, hats, bangles, goggles, purses, perfumes, jewels, game consols and expensive cars, when they “shopaholic” in western capitals.

Lastly, President Hollande, you and your FrancaAfrique team go around Africa using the possibility of an Afrcan permanent seat in a reformed UN Security Council to play South Africa against Nigeria, or Algeria against South Africa and Nigeria, or all these three countries against Egypt, and all these four big African countries against the smaller Francophone countries. However, the truth is that a real, honest UN Security Council reform in the future should result in France and the UK losing their permanent seats on the UN Security Council. Period. Both of you are have-been powers, who are desperately clinging to an outdated UN Security Council veto and your useless nuclear arsenal to remain relevant in global affairs. That and your warmongering readiness to join in any and all US military campaigns against any perceived US enemy in the developing world, unless the UK Parliament thinks otherwise, make you and David Cameron poodles of US policy of military aggression around the world, and thus most unsuited to wield the veto concomitant to being a permanent members of the UN Security Council. Without the current veto and your warmongering, your country France, and the UK, would be second-tier world powers. In fact, in the next twenty years, none of your two economies will be in the top ten economies of the world by the measure of purchasing power parity. In the next thirty years, Nigeria, a glorious African power on the rise – an awakening black giant -, will have a much better prospect of being in the top ten of world economies by purchasing power parity, than your two countries’ declining and moribund economies. Yet your country France, like the UK, craves nothing more than to fancy themselves as “the international community”, or some world powers. Wake up and smell coffee.

So, Mr. President Francois Hollande, keep your France and let us keep our Africa.

And just to remind you, all of west and central Africa is an intrinsic part of Africa, and has never, is not and will never be an extension of France, however much the French men like yourself and their dependent African sahibs delude themselves.

Even better still, keep your neo-colonial feet from the sacred soil of Saartjie Baartman, whom your country and French eugenists so viciously dehumanized. Call off your state visit to our country, if you still can. That would be a good gesture to Saartjie Baartman, I presume, who will violently rotate in her new burial home in South Africa, upon hearing the sounds of your footsteps on our sacred South African soil. You and your countrymen have already caused her too much pain as it were. Let her be and rest peacefully. Feet off our country, I say to you. Your visit this week will not achieve anything for Saartjie Baartman, but will serve to arouse her angry, ancestral spirit again. This will most certainly cause you to lose the next French presidential election, believe you me, and quite possibly to Dominique de Villepin. But if you fail to cancel your visit, at least go and be cleansed by African traditional healers near Saartjie Baartman’s grave, and offer her a public French presidential apology, on behalf of the whole French Republic, for defiling her in French eugenics laboratories for so long. That would be a small gesture from you, but a good start to connecting with Africa on an equal footing, at least spiritually.

But because I know you will not heed my advice, I call upon you to at least take note of the wise words of one of the greatest Frenchmen ever to live, one of France’s beautiful white men, besides Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Satre, I mean Jean-Jacque Roussouw, written in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and on Social Contract:

“Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.”

Sadly, Mr. President Francois Hollande, were Jean Jacque Roussow to rise from the dead this week, to witness your first presidential visit to post-apartheid South Africa of Saartjie Baartman, he would most probably declare, dolefully:

“Africans are born free, but everywhere France and other western countries want to put neo-colonial chains back on them”.

I hope you will use your presidential visit to SA this week to, at least, publicly commit France to putting a real end to her perfidious neo-colonial FrancaAfrique policy.

That would be something. That would be true, presidential noblesse oblige.

Monsieur President Francois Hollande, s’ il vouz plait, vouz ne bienvenue pas ici a Afrique du Sud!

Merci!

2nd Cediablog

By:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
http://www.cedia.co.za
https://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.wordpress.com
isaac@cedia.co.za
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14 October 2013