If elected, she promised to ensure that the currency is abolished and Francophone African countries are given “greater sovereignty” to relate with France on their own terms. Le Pen famously used the CFA Franc as a campaign issue during a visit to Chad while running for President in 2017. These politicians generally do not sell an expansionist, imperial vision of France to their growing audiences, but instead sell a nativist, inward-looking vision of France that portrays African immigration as an existential threat and depicts Francophone Africa as an economic and cultural deadweight that France should cut loose. From being fringe figures barely a decade ago, French far-right politicians like Marine Le Pen now sit in the country’s National Assembly. Exact figures are very difficult to come by because the French Constitution expressly forbids collection of ethnic demographic data, but it is not hard to see how the very meaning of what it is to be ‘French’ is a rather different thing to what it was in 1958.įrance is also witnessing a wave of rightwing populist politicians who make immigration and racial identity the core of their message. Today’s France also has millions of people with North African origins, chiefly from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. A 2008 estimate in the New York Times put the number of black people in France at somewhere between 3 and 5 million people. In fact, France is a remarkably different country now to what it was in the mid-20th century.įor one thing, the country’s ethnic and racial demographics have shifted significantly. Today’s France is not Charles de Gaulle’s FranceĪ rather unhelpful effect of the framing around the CFA conversation is that France is often typecast as the quintessential colonial power hanging on to its empire by all means, which fits in neatly with the narrative of the CFA Franc being a tool for French neocolonial subjugation in the 21st century. Predictably, the announcement sparked fist-pumping around the continent, presumably because it heralds the beginning of the end of a perceived exploitative, neocolonial relationship. According to this narrative, France – a European behemoth with a $2.5 trillion economy – is actively bullying 14 poor African countries and holding their economies hostage.īenin’s President Patrice Talon has become the most prominent West African leader to openly express these sentiments, with a statement announcing that all 8 member countries of the West African CFA union are planning to pull out of it. Many others, however, see it as a neocolonial tax, a brake on economic growth and an insult to the sovereignty of these 14 countries. To some, this is a beneficial arrangement that ensures that such countries are shielded from the devastating impact of price inflation that sometimes happens in weak African economies that issue their own currency. Countries using CFA Francs are required to store 50% of their currency reserves with the Banque de France, and the currencies are pegged to the euro. 
Out of these inauspicious origins came the CFA Franc, a twin set of French-backed currencies used by eight West African countries and six Central African countries. It was an example, illustrating the consequences of thumbing your nose at Paris is to risk losing everything. To 14 other newly independent French colonies however, the message was not that of a mere divorce. The ensuing maelstrom of burning books, demolished buildings, destroyed agricultural implements, and assorted vindictive behaviour by the departing French was summed up by French commentators as “un divorce sans pension alimentaire” – a divorce without alimony.
Following the 95% “no” vote, Charles de Gaulle’s government immediately pulled out more than 4,000 civil servants, judges, teachers, doctors, and technicians, instructing them to sabotage everything they left behind.
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