Although modern structures of extraction attempt to mask old systems of colonial plunder, the living legacy of anti-colonial resistance across Africa remains a decisive force in the struggle for sovereignty and genuine freedom..
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
On 11–12 May, at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, French President Emmanuel Macron stood in front of more than thirty African heads of state and announced, ‘We are the true Pan-Africanists’. This was an extraordinarily obnoxious comment that was sandwiched between bureaucratic banalities about ‘growth’, ‘innovation’, and ‘partnerships’.
In an open letter, Togolese writer Farida Bemba Nabourema responded that ‘Pan-Africanism is, at its most fundamental, the political philosophy that said no to everything France spent three centuries saying yes to: slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism’. This philosophy, ‘born in the holds of the slave ships, in the plantation fields of Saint-Domingue’ by people who ‘believe that African and African-descended people deserved to govern themselves’, Nabourema wrote, cannot be laundered by Macron’s charm offensive.
This was the 29th France-Africa summit (rebranded for Nairobi as the Africa Forward Summit), yet the first to take place in a non-Francophone African country.
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