French Empire in Mali and Around the World--Slavery, Suffering and Death
November 23, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Editors’ note: This is an excerpt from “French ‘Saviors’ in Mali: World-Class Enforcers of Slavery, Genocide, and Oppression,” published in Revolution February 24, 2013, when France invaded Mali.
Modern France—the proclaimed land of “liberty, equality, fraternity”—was built to a great degree on top of the blood, bones, land, and cultures of the enslaved peoples of a huge region of North Africa and Southeast Asia.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, a tenth of the earth’s surface was colonized by France—an empire that at times ranged into the Americas, the Caribbean, and Asia. The French empire suffered setbacks in North America at the hands of their British rivals and their attempt to colonize Mexico was defeated by Mexican forces in 1867. They were driven out of Haiti when the African slaves rose up against their colonial masters.
But French colonialism was entrenched in North Africa and Southeast Asia. In the later half of the 1800s, the French colonized Indochina—the countries of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. French capitalists turned vast tracts of forest into rubber plantations. Tens of thousands of Indochinese labored in the plantations under conditions that were described by one worker as “hell on earth.” According to official (and likely underreported) French statistics, 17 percent of the workforce at one plantation died in the year 1927 alone.
By the early 1900s, through wars, alliances with local rulers, and systematically provoking conflicts between different peoples in the region, the French established control over much of North, West, and Central Africa including what are now the countries of Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Ivory Coast, Benin, Niger, Chad, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
France didn’t abolish slavery in its African colonies until 1905. U.S. academic David P. Forsythe wrote, “From Senegal and Mauritania in the west to Niger in the east (what became French Africa), there was a parallel series of ruinous wars, resulting in tremendous numbers of people being violently enslaved. At the beginning of the twentieth century there may have been between 3 and 3.5 million slaves, representing over 30 percent of the total population, within this sparsely populated region.”
Today, the French are hailed by the so-called “international community” for saving important cultural artifacts from the jihadists in the fabled Malian city of Timbuktu. But if you are looking for plundered cultural and historic art and culture from Timbuktu, a good place to start would be the many French museums of artifacts stolen from Africa by the French colonial rulers.
The French ruling class and their ideologues—those celebrated icons of enlightenment and bourgeois democracy—justified all this with the crudest racism. In 1886 the French bourgeois republican Jules Ferry declared: “The higher races have a right over the lower races, they have a duty to civilize the inferior races.”
After World War 2, the French waged a counter-revolutionary war of occupation in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, killing hundreds of thousands of liberation fighters and civilians. After the defeat of the French in 1954, the U.S. took over the imperialist domination of Vietnam and waged its own war against the peoples of Indochina until being defeated in the mid-1970s.
And between 1954 and 1962, France sent 400,000 troops into Algeria to attempt to crush the independence movement. The French forces killed over 100,000 Algerians before being driven out.
The success of liberation struggles, along with the dismemberment of traditional-style empires and the rise of U.S. imperialism, provoked a series of crises for the French ruling class and brought the end—in the main—to formal French colonialism. But what emerged instead was neocolonialism, which maintained the same basic oppressive relationships between France and its (former) colonies, but in the form of nominally independent states.
New and Not Improved Neocolonialism
Of every thousand children born in Mali, 109 die in infancy. By contrast, in capitalist-imperialist countries, the infant mortality rate is in the range of three, four or five children per thousand. Those additional 100 children in every thousand who die in infancy in Mali are direct victims of the workings of imperialism—with the French ruling class the main “beneficiaries” of the brutal exploitation of the people of Mali.
Financial instruments of international capitalism-imperialism like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) impose policies that contort the economy of Mali in service of foreign capitalist-imperialist investment. IMF policies force peasants in Mali to use scarce arable land to grow cotton for export to France instead of food to feed themselves and their children. That, in part, is why 27 percent of the children in Mali are dangerously underweight. And when world market prices for cotton crashed starting in the late 1990s, Malian farmers suffered even more extreme privation, and Mali’s national debts to imperialist financial institutions mounted.
The legacy and present-day operation of imperialism produced the most profound and horrific scars on the economic, political, and social landscape in Africa, including setting the stage for endless fratricidal conflict among peoples in Africa that has been an essential element in colonial and neocolonial domination. France, for example, was deeply involved in provoking and perpetuating the horrific genocide in Rwanda in 1984 that resulted in the killing of between half a million and a million people. A Rwandan commission determined that France helped train the ethnic Hutu militia that carried out much of the killing, helped plan the genocide, and participated in the killings. The report accused 33 senior French military and political officials of involvement in the Rwandan genocide including François Mitterrand, the president of France at the time. The Rwandan report said, “French soldiers themselves directly were involved in assassinations of Tutsis and Hutus accused of hiding Tutsis.” (“Rwanda: French Accused in Genocide,” AP, August 6, 2008)
Such are the genocidal “liberators” of Mali.
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