The ‘Meaninglessness’ Bringing People and Armies Together in Africa

A reaction misunderstood from outside

African peoples’ endorsement of coups, particularly the recent takeover in Niger, astonishes some French experts on Africa. Newspapers repeat old clichés and even wishes for more violence in Niger, provided Western powers regain control. The enthusiastic declarations about Ukraine are forgotten. Who draws a parallel between the two conflicts? Such consistency has been absent since Jules Ferry declared before the French Parliament in 1884, to Clemenceau’s amazement, that ‘human rights were not made for Black people’. Ukraine and the Sahel, we are told, ‘are not the same thing’. We have understood. In truth, this matters little.

A failed democratic system

What matters is understanding that peoples mobilising across Africa are neither democracy’s gravediggers—because democracy is already systemically broken there—nor warmongers. They are not at war with particular people inside their states, citizens of neighbouring countries, or Westerners. History is clear: Africa’s fiercest battles have so far been fought between ‘brothers’, rarely between nationals and Western foreigners.

Rejecting a system of dispossession

These mobilised peoples do not target particular human beings. They oppose a real system of dispossession installed in French-speaking countries since independence, whose existence no intellectually honest person can deny. It is a tenacious, cynical and sprawling system, repeatedly declared dead yet repeatedly reborn from its ashes, which only a patriotic national army may be able to challenge—without certainty of defeating it permanently.

The army as an organised national body

African armies are not beyond reproach, notably regarding trafficking and corruption. Yet in Africa they are also the only genuinely organised state body and, through intelligence, are best placed to assess the strength of the system they may have to challenge, without any certainty of defeating it permanently.

The common experience of meaninglessness

This ‘meaninglessness’ in the management of the country brings African peoples and soldiers together because it is global and extends across the whole nation. In this particular situation, as Gramsci predicted, distinctions between ‘conservative’ and ‘revolutionary’, or between those ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, lose their relevance and must fade.

Sovereignty, not a cult of force

People applauding the fall of outward-looking regimes applaud neither armed violence nor the abolition of institutions. They are simply saying that, for now, they cannot proceed without the institutions capable of confronting this order.

All those working from within to strengthen peoples’ movement towards sovereignty are therefore welcome—not for their own sake, but for the sovereignty of African states and everything it entails.