Campbell congratulates the Senegalese people on the eviction of the French military presence from their soil in a discussion of France’s nefarious neo-colonial practices in Africa
Introduction
One of the most ignominious records of any military apparatus in history ended in Senegal last week, July 17th, 2025, when the French military forces were booted out of Senegal. The French military had been in Senegal since 1857, even before the imperial partitioning of Africa. From their naval and military bases, millions of African men were humiliated and coerced as Africans fought to expand the imperial reach of France. This African corps that played such a central role in the survival of France was called the Tirailleurs Senegalais and hundreds of thousands of Africans died in Europe. France repaid these sacrifices by continuous genocidal and criminal activities against Africans with one of the more infamous being the massacre of African soldiers at Camp Thiaroye on 1 December 1944. The hubris of France that the French military could continue crimes with impunity was highlighted in Libya in 2011 when President Nicolas Sarkozy explicitly stated that one of the five reasons for the NATO destruction of Libya was to ‘provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world.’ France had sought to reassert its position in Africa by fabricating terrorism in the Sahel and embarking on Operations such as Serval and Barkhane in its anti-jihadist fiction.
Since 2014, Africans have opposed the French military and financial presence with the militant youths protesting the presence of the French imperialists and racists in Africa. These protests informed a new phase of Pan African mobilization and education culminating in the massive rebellions against France that forced the expulsion of France from Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. The formation of the Alliance of Sahelian States (AES) started a new chapter in the road towards African military and security cooperation. Chad and Côte d’Ivoire later called for the French military forces to leave, but the leadership of these two societies had been duplicitous in the past, and the youths in Africa did not take their expulsion of the French military as being serious. The victory of the African Patriots of Senegal for Labor, Ethics and Fraternity (Patriotes Africains du Sénégal pour le Travail, l’Éthique et la Fraternité) (PASTEF) in 2024 significantly changed the political calculus in Africa. When the President of Senegal, President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, took office, he pledged to carry forward the mandate of the people to end the French military presence in Senegal. President Faye demanded that President Macron and the French army apologize for colonial atrocities, including the massacre on 1 December 1944. In July 2025, the French formally left their military base, Camp Geille in Senegal. France had negotiated for months to find some pretext to remain in Senegal, but with the determination of the Senegalese becoming clear, France returned the military base in Senegal and its airfield at Dakar’s airport.
In this commentary we salute the people of Senegal in carrying forward the mandate to strengthen control over the economy by expelling the French army. It is known throughout Africa that the French military remained the backstop for French commercial and monetary domination of Africa. A new road has been opened with disastrous consequences for France and Europe. Vigilance is now needed in Senegal to ensure that militarism and subversion do not continue under commercial and counter terror guises.
After one hundred years of crimes, the diminution of the French military domination of Africa.
When President Nicholas Sarkozy of France mobilized NATO to place the stamp of approval of the UN Security Council Resolution for the NATO destruction of Libya in 2011, Sarkozy laid out five reasons for the NATO intervention in an email to the Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton.
These reasons were:
- A desire to gain a greater share of Libya’s oil production
- Increase French influence in North Africa
- Improve Sarkozy’s internal political situation in France
- Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world
- Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long-term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa.[1]
One can see from the fourth reason for the destruction of Libya that it was the push by the French to reassert its position in the world. France had panicked in 2007 when, at the meeting in Accra (celebrating 50 years of Ghana’s independence), the leaders of the African Union (AU) set a timetable for the establishment of the African Central Bank and the common currency. President Gaddafi took this mandate seriously. France was terrified that after decades of holding Africans hostage to the French CFA subsidies for France,[2] the Libyan leader would invest in the financial institutions necessary to kick start a high degree of economic independence with a new pan-African currency. Not only did France manipulate NATO and its subservient allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to foment destruction, but France also embarked on several counter terror operations in the Sahel to provide justification for the UN to support the deployment of French military personnel in the Sahel region.
The colonial activities of France had been overshadowed in the past two decades by France’s claim that it is fighting against terrorism in Africa. This duplicitous War on Terror had been undertaken by the neo-conservative forces as basically a war against Islam. Mahmood Mamdani had exposed this war against Islam in the book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. Other studies such as Terrorizing Ourselves: Why U.S. Counterterrorism Policy is Failing and How to Fix it,and Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War Terror exposed what the authors determined to be the error ofUS counter-terrorism strategy. But this war was not an error, it was a deliberate strategy to maintain US imperial dominance.
France latched on to this counter terror strategy to save the French brand of imperialism. Jeremy Keenan had outlined the stages of the War on Terror in his book, The Dying Sahara: US Imperialism and Terror in Africa. This book covered in detail the complicity of leaders in Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Qatar in this war fabrication of terror. The sequences of the fabrication of terror in Africa had followed closely the international construction of that military strategy that was rolled out after the United States had launched wars against the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan. The destruction of Libya and the deployment of the French military operations Serval and Barkhane had ensured the militarization, destabilization and impoverishment of the peoples of Africa, especially West Africa. Senegal had escaped the worst forms of the violence of this War on Terror because its social cohesion and religious traditions ensured that the political/religious leaders were not compromised by Qatar and the Emirates.
Crimes of France against the peoples of Senegal
The French Revolution that started in 1789 was supposed to be one of the epic revolutionary struggles of the modern era. However, the French revolutionary army never recovered from the shock of the defeat at the hands of the revolutionary Africans in Haiti. Napoleon Bonaparte had sent his brother-in-law General Leclerc to crush the revolution of the enslaved, but Leclerc and the French army were routed. From that moment of defeat, the insecurity of France went through another 200 years of crisis as the French army was defeated by the Germans in 1870, 1914, and 1940. These defeats at the hands of the Germans were followed by the rout of the French army in Indochina in 1954 and in Algeria in 1962.
As early as 1831, the French army had created a structure for international warriors of fortune in a special unit called the French Foreign legion. This force was different from the Senegalese Tirailleurs who were colonial troops drawn from French Africa who fought under French command but often faced racial discrimination. The Senegalese Tirailleurs (French: Tirailleurs Sénégalais) were a corps of colonial infantry in the French Army. They were initially recruited from Saint-Louis, Senegal, the initial colonial capital city of French West Africa and subsequently throughout Western, Central and Eastern Africa: the main hub of the French colonial empire. Myron Eschenberg in the book, The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857– 1960, documented the severity of the military exploitation of Africans who had been recruited to serve the French empire in Port Louis Senegal from 1857.[3]Jules Ferry (1832-1893), one of the theoretical champions of the French civilizing mission, had justified the recruitment of Africans to fight for France on the basis of what was to become the ‘blood debt.’ This was the racist view that Africans owed France a debt for bringing civilization to their people.[4] In the process of the imperial partitioning of Africa, France recruited soldiers to physically occupy most of what would come to be their colonial territory in West Africa (including present day Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Guinea, Ivory Coast and Niger). A governor-general of French West Africa was appointed to administer the federation and was based in Senegal.
Africans as cannon fodder in war
France recruited Africans to fight against other Africans in the pacification process after the Berlin conference and used Africans as cannon fodder in the first imperialist war (1914-1918). Close to half a million Africans served in varying capacities to fight against Germany in Europe.
A senior officer responsible for West Africans’ training in the camp of Fréjus wrote in a letter in January 1918 that African soldiers were “cannon fodder, who should, in order to save whites’ lives, be made use of much more intensively.” And even Clemenceau, in a speech delivered to the French Senate on 20 February 1918, stated: “We are going to offer civilisation to the Blacks. They will have to pay for that […] I would prefer that ten Blacks are killed rather than one Frenchman […]!”[5]
Military conscription by Europeans proved to be one of the most onerous forms of oppression under colonialism. The French competed with the Belgians, Italians, the Portuguese and the Dutch to see which of the colonial forces could be the most barbaric in the pursuit of genocidal politics and actions. During the capitalist depression, the French worked hard to transfer the social and economic hardships of capitalism onto the shoulders and bodies of Africans. The same dependence on African troops emerged again in the second imperialist war after Germany occupied France in 1940 and established the puppet Vichy regime in France. General De Gaulle established the headquarters (HQ) of the Free French movement in Africa, moving from West Africa to eventually establish the HQ for the French army in World War II in Brazzaville.
Massacres at Camp Thiaroye in Senegal
After the liberation of Paris and the German army was pushed out of France, the Free French army under General De Gaulle deemed the presence of hundreds of thousands of nonwhite troops in France as a danger to the rekindling of white supremacy. The surviving African troops were rotated out of Europe. Some were redeployed to Indochina with the majority shipped back to Senegal. The African soldiers who were being repatriated were housed in a camp, named Thiaroye in Senegal. Poor living conditions, racist officers, and demand for equal pay stimulated massive protests in the camp. Instead of addressing the legitimate demands of the African soldiers, the French army massacred scores of African soldiers at Camp Thiaroye on December 1st, 1944. For eighty years, France covered up the massacre and for eighty years Senegalese and other African writers, poets, playwrights, griots, and film makers passed down the history of this massacre so that the young would not forget this crime. The movie Camp de Thiaroye (1987), by Senegalese director Sembene Ousmane vividly recounted the context and experience of the massacre.
These criminal activities of the French army occurred in every part of Africa with the most extreme violence being unleashed on the Algerian people. On 8 May 1945, the same day as Victory in Europe (V-E) that France and Europe was liberated, France initiated the massacre of over 45,000 Algerians who were agitating for political independence. The massacres at Sétif and Guelma (1945) now stand as part of the ignominy of the French army in Africa. France developed new theories of counterinsurgency warfare even after their reversals in IndoChina and Algeria. With every defeat the French army doubled down to remain in Africa. The French hold on Africa had guaranteed the place of France as one of the Five Permanent members of the Security Council of the UN. The French remained terrified of the economic might of Germany, and even as the French worked inside the European Union with Germany, France held grudgingly on to its control of African resources so that it could stand as an equal to Germany in the European community. President Jacques Chirac said: “Without Africa, France will slide down into the rank of a third [world] power” and Chirac’s predecessor, François Mitterand, had warned in 1957 that: “Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century”. The French maintained colonial territories in Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific Ocean.
French military and the Jacques Foccart system
The documentation on the role of the French army in Africa after World War II is impressive.[6] What is striking about the French academy is the extent to which the left in France is still tied to a conception that Europeans are superior to Africans and that France was carrying out a civilizing role in Africa. Younger Africans have alternative sources of history and have been told the stories of the sabotage of the French after Guinea voted “no” in 1958. When this author visited Diffa and N’guigmi in Niger in 2018, one saw all the equipment that the French had dumped into Lake Chad in 1958 to sabotage the decolonization of Niger. The drying-up of Lake Chad had exposed the actions of the French. Under the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD),) the French continue to gather together young African scholars to direct the research agenda away from the well documented role of France in African countries. In a country such as Senegal, the village griots and writers such as Sembene Ousmane and countless others have ensured that the resistance against France remained the dominant narrative of collective memories.
This narrative, such as that of the strike recounted in Sembene Ousmane’s novel, Gods Bits of Wood, clarifies the role of the military in opposing the self-determination demands of Africans. Though humiliated in Europe, France had developed theories of counter terror which unleashed division, destruction and death in all parts of the world. The intellectual and institutional culture of the French continues to be the reference point for military trainers where names such as that of Marshal Thomas Robert Bugeaud and David Galula are drilled into the skulls of young officers.[7] As I noted in relation to the defeat of France in Vietnam:
“French generals were humiliated and despite the military defeat, the sense of white supremacy never allowed them to accept the idea of the independence of the people of Africa and Asia. One such French imperial military commander was General Marcel Bigeard. His career is important in the history of imperial domination in so far as he went on to fight to preserve French imperial domination in Algeria and also lost there. General Marcel Bigeard became an inspiration for US military officers and right up to his death in 2010 he kept up a healthy communication with General David Patraeus of the US military.”[8]
Defeat in Vietnam, and Algeria provided the impetus for the French military and intelligence to work harder to hold on to Africa, providing the muscle for the financial and monetary domination of France. Progressive scholars have documented the extent of the corruption and fraud that was carried out under the protection of the French military. Eva Joly’s wide-ranging investigation into corruption at French oil giant Elf-Aquitaine, exposed a complex web of corruption across France’s business and political spheres. Elf-Aquitaine morphed into Total, but the system of corruption and bribes that had been the hallmark of the Foccart system remained in place. The Jacques Foccart system cemented the military, intelligence, and commercial domination of Africa by French banks and corporations.
The term “Foccart system” referred to the network of intelligence, military, commercial relationships, and clandestine operations established by Jacques Foccart, a key advisor on African affairs to French Presidents Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou. This system, particularly active during the 1960s and 1970s, organized and executed its aim to maintain French influence over its former colonies in Africa, a policy often referred to as ‘Françafrique.’ François Xavier Verschave, who coined the term ‘francafrique’ described the secret control system of its leaders as “the secret criminality in the upper echelons of French politics and economy, where a kind of underground Republic is hidden from view.”[9]
There was a logic to this criminality in that the objective of the French military was to oppress Africans and plunder African resources. As Gary Busch outlined in his commentary, ‘Long Overdue Exit of France from Africa’ after the Niger coup in 2023, the colonial pact of France in Africa maintained the French control over the economies of the African states:
- it took possession of their foreign currency reserves;
- it controlled the strategic raw materials of the country;
- it stationed troops in the country with the right of free passage;
- it demanded that all military equipment be acquired from France;
- it took over the training of the police and army;
- it required that French businesses be allowed to maintain monopoly enterprises in key areas (water, electricity, ports, transport, energy, etc.).[10]
What is important about the effects of Françafrique on African states is that the French resisted any locally engendered change in the rules and had troops and gendarmes available in Africa to put down any leader with different ambitions. During the last 50 years, a total of 67 coups happened in 26 countries in Africa; 61% of the coups happened in Francophone Africa.[11]
The French manipulation of terrorism escalated when they instigated the Touaregs and their multiple political and military formations to destabilise the Sahel region. France then launched Operation Serval as a counterterror operation against the same forces they had unleashed. The diplomatic and political energies of France were later extended with the formation of the G5 in Operation Barkhane to ensnare Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad in the so-called Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF). Initially, after Senegal correctly calculated that they would stay aloof from the MNJTF, France then went with its begging bowl around the world to raise money for the MNJTF. After raising $100 million from Saudi Arabia for these counterterror operations, the UNSC hesitated to give its stamp of approval. The European Union then established EUCAP to back up the French in the Sahel with the so-called security sector reform. The first Trump administration hesitated in supporting the French in the Sahel until 5 American service personnel were killed in Tongo Tongo, Niger, in October 2017. Thereafter, the French Army took the US support as the green light for their nefarious activities in the Sahel and North Africa. In response to the French military machinations, hundreds of thousands of youths sought to migrate out of Africa. However, faced with hundreds dying in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, the African youths decided to stand and fight. These youths shifted the balance and created the conditions for PASTEF to come to power.[12]
The boldness of the New African leaders
The political changes in Africa since the French-inspired destruction of Libya have brought new energies to the Pan African struggles. Ndongo Sylla summed up these new energies in this way:
Frustrated by the actions of French diplomats and its military, Paris’s double standards and the often humiliating declarations of French officials vis-à-vis African peoples, their women and their leaders, the West African youth have become the spearhead of an open and organised revolt against French imperialism and its local allies. Through social networks, they can coordinate their struggles and resistances, and gain access to alternative narratives conveyed by ‘influencers’ claiming to be pan-Africanists or even anti-imperialists.[13]
The importance of this analysis is that the new generation of progressive African scholars are not only critiquing the French military and western intellectuals who are pontificating on the ‘return of coups in Africa,’ they are also doing the technical work to provide the substance to the demands for the delinking from the French military and financial domination of West Africa. The Alliance of Sahel States (ASS) (l’Alliance des États du Sahel, AES) as a mutual defense pact created between Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso on 16 September 2023 has gone a long way to break the domination of the French military in Africa. The head of the transitional government in Mali announced that this pact will be “an architecture of collective defense and mutual assistance for the benefit of our populations.” The AES is not merely a military or security pact. At the signing ceremony, Mali’s Defense Minister Abdoulaye Diop, told journalists, “This alliance will be a combination of military and economic efforts [among]… the three countries.” [14]
Senegal is not a member of the Alliance, but the political leaders of PASTEF have demonstrated concretely that their objectives of achieving economic transformation is in line with the aspirations of peoples all over Global Africa. It is important that progressives do not romanticize the challenges being faced by the new leadership in the AES. Temporarily, these leaders have been forced to seek alternative sources of military capital. These challenges of seeking military and economic self-sufficiency are compounded by the multiple attempts on the life of the current leader of Burkina Faso, Captain Ibrahim Traore.
Vigilance is needed in Senegal and West Africa
When the French were booted out of Senegal, the western media presented the break as that of ‘French withdrawal’ from Senegal. Western news agencies continue to present the role of France in Africa as humanitarian echoing the call of Macron for his desire to “build a new model of military partnership” with Africa. France is now more eager to disguise its military and economic push under the umbrella of cooperation between France, Germany and the UK. On the same day that the Senegalese booted out the French, Macron met with the Chancellor of Germany and the Prime Minister of Britain seeking new cover for French imperialism. Hitherto, since 1945, the French had collaborated with US imperialism, but with the uncertainties generated by the 47th President of the United States, France is seeking new disguises to maintain its commercial and financial stranglehold over Africa.
Agile and adept leadership is now needed to deal with the new fronts of French imperial penetration in Senegal. French logistics, transport, construction, telecommunications, banking, insurance and water companies can do even greater harm to the independence of Senegal than 350 military personnel at Camp Geille. The strength of the Senegalese society will have to be harnessed to neutralize the French and European cooperants who continue to believe that France and the Europeans are bringing ‘development’ to Africa. Senegal has been strengthened by the new political culture that has unleashed the local languages as the languages of politics. Reorganizing the educational system at every level to democratize access to education and language offers great possibilities for the social and economic transformation of Senegal and West Africa.
The French through their intellectuals and their worldwide media linkages will foment diversion such as the current hype that there is a political split between the Prime Minister Sonko and President Faye. The French are exposing their own weaknesses and the failure of their efforts to rehabilitate Macky Sall. The crimes of the French army and the massacres at Camp Thiaroye are now part of the popular culture in Senegal and Africa. It is time for the progressive intellectuals of the left in France and Europe to break from the fiction that the French military brought civilization to Africans. Senegal has emerged as a force in the global anti-fascist alliance. The youths of Senegal at home and abroad live the reality that Africa is for Africans.
Sarkozy’s wish that the destruction of Libya would ’provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world’ had the opposite effect.
Mwalimu Horace Campbell is a peace and social justice activist. He is also Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University and Chairperson of the Global Pan African Movement, North American Chapter. He is the author of Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, Monthly Review Press, 2013.
Endnotes
[1] WikiLeaks – Hillary Clinton Email Archive, Hillary Emails Reveal True Motive for Libya Intervention. https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/23898
[2] Pigeaud, F. and N.S. Sylla. 2021. Africa’s Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story. London: Pluto Press.
[3] Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857– 1960. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1991. See also Anthony Clayton, France Soldiers and Africa and Ruth Gino, The French Army and Its African Soldiers: The Years of Decolonization, University of Nebraska Press 2017
[4] From Jules François Camille Ferry, “Speech Before the French Chamber of Deputies, March 28, 1884,” Discours et Opinions de Jules Ferry, ed. Paul Robiquet (Paris: Armand Colin & Cie., 1897), -1. 5, pp. 199-201, 210-11, 215-18. Translated by Ruth Kleinman in Brooklyn College Core Four Sourcebook
[5] Christine Koller, Colonial military participation in Europe (Africa), International Encyclopedia, 2014, https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/colonial-military-par…
[6] See inter alia, Robin Luckham, “French Militarism in Africa.” Review of African Political Economy 9 (24):55–84
[7] Michael Surkin, “FRANCE’S WAR IN THE SAHEL AND THE EVOLUTION OF COUNTERINSURGENCY DOCTRINE, “Texas national Security Review, Vol 4, Iss 1 Winter 2020/2021 | 35–60
[8] https://www.pambazuka.org/nguyen-giap-revolutionary-vietnamese-general-…
[9] Quoted in Gary Busch, “The long overdue Exit of France from Africa, https://independent.academia.edu/GaryBusch
[10] Busch, ibid
[11] Busch, ibid
[12] Horace Campbell (2020), The quagmire of US militarism in Africa. Africa Development / Afrique et Développement, 45(1), 73-116.
[13] Ndongo Sylla, The crisis of French imperialism: debating military coups in Africa
[14] Reported in Al Jazeera, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/16/mali-niger-and-burkina-faso-establish-sahel-security-allianceLanguage
English