Like one on a holy trip to mecca, French President Emmanuel Macron waltzed into the ecstasy of Fela Shrine. Smitten by the whirligig of rhythm, voice and beats, he acted like one of us. Nigerians praised him for embracing the abami eda. He descended from his Eifel tower to croon like us, dance like us, and blend into the smoke and tone of Afrobeat. Here was one Caucasian icon shorn of racial contempt on his white face.
Don’t be fooled. Sooner or later, as American writer Toni Morrison once posited, such white persons would betray you. Like autumnal leaves in Paris, Macron has unveiled his true colour. He declared that without France, there would be no Gabon, Niger, Mali or Burkina Faso. In simple terms, he asserted that there was no country until France made them. Macron ought to withdraw that statement. It is racist. For one, no one begged France give us nations after their own imperial heart. We have never lauded the British for lumping peoples to form Nigeria. They did it for themselves and not for us. He implied French West Africa had no past before their imperial adventurism into our lands.
President Macron is in league with white historians who have been banished from African historiography. He is like the Oxford Professor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who, in 1962, wrote, “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at the present there is none; there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness…and darkness is not the subject of history.”
We can understand the fury in Niger and other French West African countries asking the French to leave their lands. Coup plotters have exploited this fever. It feeds their cynical egoism. The French treat Africans like children. Historians call it paternalism. Their colonial policy, assimilation, was a condescending strategy to hoodwink the black subjects and tell them they had promoted them from slaves to children. The French were superior, so everything they did must conform to French civilisation. If you wanted to mail a letter to the next street in Cotonou, it must pass through Paris.
Macron meant we should applaud colonialism. We should be grateful for slavery. They set us free. It is not restricted to the French. The British thought so, too, as witness the words of the Oxford professor. Lord Lugard’s companion Margery Perham wrote same points about Nigeria. Their great philosopher, John Stuart Mill, loved liberty so much that he recommended colonialism for societies like India and Africa. We were too primitive to be free. It’s like the Austrian nationalist Metternich, who the poet Lord Byron satirized. “He had no objection to true liberty,” wrote Byron of Metternich, “Except that it would set them free.”
Macron needs a little lesson in African history. Before the whites started taking over our territories, we were building our nations in the sweep of the 18th and 19th centuries, even into the early hours of the 20th. It reflected in the quality of resistance.
Did he hear of the Dahomey kingdom, the Amazons of their army and the glorious soldiery of women who defied breasts for martial glory. They cut out of Oyo thralldom and even walloped some Yorubas into their fold until they chafed and fell, especially to the Egba. Did he know of the Agbajigbeto, the spies who might have given the CIA a model? Also, we had Samori Toure, the African Napoleon, who played the French against the British, and the Malinke hero of the Dyula Revolution introduced war strategies to stalemate the white colonialists for 15 years.
Macron should plough into the biography of Mahmadou Lamine of the Senegambia, and it was he, the great warrior of the Sarrakole tribe, who built a great coalition and a people with Islam to rattle the French and the conniving Tukolor. The French had to build the French Marine Corp as well as what was known as the Senegalese Sharp Shooters to mow down a great race. My later professor, Olatunji Oloruntimehin devoted a book, The Segu-Tukolor Empire, to the exploits of Lamine and his Sarrakole people.
Macron ossifies views of inferiority in our people. Again, it should challenge our people to read history. We had our exploits here, too. Did we not have the Habe dynasty for centuries as well as the Kanuri Empire or Kanem Borno, with the longevity of the Saifawa dynasty? Was that darkness? Did warrior Uthman Dan Fodio not capsize tradition with his 1804 jihad for over two centuries now? The Yoruba Wars gave a pageant of warriors: Sodeke, Kurunmi, Ogunmola, Latosa, Fabunmi, Ogedengbe, et al. Or the impregnable Itsekiri blockade under the doughty Nana Olomu, who puzzled the British Navy. Shall we forget the great Benin Kingdom and how its prosperity enticed the rapacity of the British to trade in the Benin River. Their historians called it massacre. I insist it was Benin Resistance. As we had heroes, we had traitors like the Obaseki ancestor of the present governor of Edo State. A similar story played out in Dahomey, now Benin Republic, when the king, like Ovonramwen, hid after the European onslaught. A palace quisling exposed his whereabouts.
If what the Africans were doing was to build wars of integration and nation building, the western historians called them barbarism. Yet, in the same period, Europe was embroiled in their own hostilities. They had what was called the Westphalian Treaty that forbade any nation to disrespect another’s sovereignty. Yet, we had Napoleon fight wars of meaningless conquests across Europe, leaving a trail of butchery all the way to Russia. There was no Gaul until France, only Prussia until Germany. The French roared against the Germans in brutal wars until Bismark humbled her with Alsace and Lorraine. The Roman Empire viewed some of the so-called civilized Europe today as barbarians, including the Germans and people of northern Europe. Cavour and Garibaldi revived Italy. Professor Femi Omosini, in my European History class, interrogated the view that there was no concept of Europe until about the fifth century. It was seen as a period of total darkness. Its Middle Ages was also seen as a period of darkness. But their historians, who were waking up from the sway of Roman swagger, saved their continent from the somnolent narrative. When they woke up, they set Africa to sleep in the night of their historiography. Macron is a product of that prejudice.
Today, the French West African countries still store their treasures in French Central Bank, and African leaders beg in order to withdraw. In 1958, France browbeat colonies to sign an accord called Loi Cadre where France determines how they run their country. Guinea’s Sekou Toure, who had Samouri’s DNA, said no, until he imposed a sit-tight tyranny.
You understand why Macron is nervous. During the Second World War, Charles De Gaulle set up the Free French when Germany overran his country. It rallied blacks to help liberate France. They were colonial subjects being asked to save France that had now become a colonial subject. Africans became slave of slaves fighting for their master slave. The 19th century African warriors were the precursors of 20th century Negritude movement that highlighted African dignity with poets like Diop, Senghor and a subtler Soyinka, who said “a tiger should not shout its tigritude.”
For all his charisma, De Gaulle expressed discomfort over photo-ops with visiting African leaders when he was president. At the Fela Shrine, Macron was friendly but not a friend.
The Bard’s barb
Professor Wole Soyinka threw a broadside at the Obidients last week, and they turned crybabies on their familiar turf: the social media. The bard said Peter Obi came third and his followers know it but are just indulged in what the Yoruba call Gbajue. He translated it as force of lies. I would rather translate it as “lies by force.” In his Nostromo, Joseph Conrad described it as “the bravado of guilt.” No matter. But what is striking is that when Soyinka described Obi during the hustings as a “new kid on the block,” the obidients had love for the bard. He was not a Yoruba man then. A new kid who was governor with old guard, in bed with Atiku in 2019, pitched Catholic against Anglicans, cannot explain why he stashed money offshore while a governor and erected Abuja marque supermarket, etc. Soyinka’s intervention shows that there were a few fair-minded Obi supporters who have sat back and seen through his fraud. Obi is the Gbajue in chief. Soyinka is sincere enough to admit that the man did not win. The obidients have no such grace or integrity. They cannot abide the barb. They are innocent of facts and processes. They cavil at the Tribunal verdict without asking Obi’s lawyers why they had no facts for their claims. Of such persons, the Bible says, “I will send them strong delusion that they should believe a lie.” Like Pharoah’s hardened heart. Their pastors as well as the Catholic elite should read their Bible. A teardrop for them.
NB: Sam Omatseye is a respected columnist with The Nation.
