The Colonial past haunts French Military operations in Africa
Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu emphasizes that the “presence of France is changing, but is not disappearing.”[3] Yet French legislators worry about the “very heavy geopolitical implications” of base closures, and commentators speculate about “the beginning of the end” of the country’s military influence on the continent.[4]
Mainstream debate about the future of France’s footprint in Africa obscures its long and troubled history. Since the colonial era, French officials have relied on a continent-spanning base network, elite African partners, and clandestine operations to defend their political and economic interests. Rather than securing peace, military cooperation has strengthened autocratic regimes and exacerbated social conflicts. The precipitous withdrawal of French forces showcases the failures of France’s strategy, explosive discontent, and the long shadow of the imperial past.
The Colonial Meat Grinder
Current military assistance programs have their roots in the security and conscription policies of the colonial era. Over the nineteenth century, French leaders recruited African soldiers through raw coercion and strategic collaboration with local elites while building colonies. World War I revealed France’s dependence on Africa’s manpower, as over 500,000 colonial subjects reinforced troops in Europe and elsewhere.[5] Many Africans regarded white officers as “Black meat grinders,” and entire villages migrated to avoid sending their youth overseas.[6]
During World War II, over one million African soldiers served in colonial forces, supplying the sweat and blood that secured an Allied victory.[7] Wartime service and international travel stretched the color line, often sharpening the political consciousness of combatants, and the return of newly assertive Black soldiers to Africa unnerved French administrators.
In December 1944, tensions peaked at the Thiaroye military camp near Dakar, when officials refused to pay returning servicemen. Soldiers protested the illegal decision. In response, a French commander ordered subordinates to attack them with armored vehicles and machine guns.[8] The historian Armelle Mabon concludes that they committed a “premeditated massacre,” likely killing over 300 African soldiers.[9] Afterward, authorities manipulated records to discredit protesters’ grievances, while sentencing 34 survivors to prison and forced labor.
Mistreatment of African soldiers climaxed during the Algerian War (1954-1962), as France attempted to stifle demands for independence. French commanders fielded Arab and Berber combatants, hoping to divide the population and demoralize revolutionaries.[10] Most famously, thousands of Algerians served as “Harkis”: auxiliary forces that reinforced the regular army.
Their contribution left a bitter legacy. Following France’s defeat, French officials largely abandoned native personnel. Minister of the Armed Forces Pierre Messmer encouraged officials to dissuade them from immigrating by emphasizing “the difficulty of an abrupt adjustment” to life in France.[11]
Nevertheless, about 84,000 Harkis and their families reached France, where they faced grinding poverty and discrimination.[12] Authorities forced thousands to live in spartan camps ringed with guards and barbed wire.[13] “The houses were not heated; there were pests, rats, bedbugs,” resident Mireille Bouglouf remembered.[14] The camps lasted until youth launched an uprising in 1975, forcing the government to finally close them.
Their struggle highlights the contradictions of military recruiting in colonial Africa. By conscripting native soldiers, France splintered African societies, compelling youth to participate in the subjugation of their own communities. Repeatedly, colonial propaganda exhorted Africans to fight for the French nation: an imagined community that refused to admit them. Their labor built empires and won world wars. But afterward, French leaders treated them as disposable.
Colonialism by Contract
Following decolonization, France continued to mobilize African soldiers to defend its interests across the continent. In their authoritative book, Kamerun!, the historians Thomas Deltombe, Manuel Domergue, and Jacob Tatsitsa reveal that French leaders constructed a clandestine system of political control through military agreements. The test case for this strategy was Cameroon. After ceding independence in 1960, French advisers directed a ruthless counterinsurgency war to protect President Ahmadou Ahidjo and crush the revolutionary Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC).
Their influence was omnipresent. French advisers even helped pen Cameroon’s constitution, concentrating power in Ahidjo’s hands. Jacques Rousseau and Paul Audat boasted that they drafted it in a single night. “In any case,” Rousseau shrugged, the constitution “isn’t observed much in those countries.”
Cameroon became one of the first African states to conclude military agreements with France. The arrangement allowed French officers to prosecute the war with brutal discretion, while teaching Cameroonian soldiers tactics perfected in Algeria and other colonial theaters. Perversely, France could act with impunity precisely because Cameroon was independent. Unlike in Algeria, its power was invisible to international opinion, hidden behind the phantom sovereignty of the Ahidjo regime.
Deltombe and his colleagues demonstrate that military and technical advisers permeated the architecture of the postcolonial state. For years, French officials commanded the Cameroonian army. They also ran the national military academy from 1961 to 1985. The officer André Marsot described their power, explaining, “you gave the impression that you followed the Cameroonians’ orders, while in reality you obeyed your French superiors.”
A decade-long war devastated the countryside, while exterminating proponents of national liberation like the UPC and fueling atrocities. The Cameroonian intellectual, Mongo Beti, published an unflinching exposé of war crimes. One of his sources described how soldiers forced political prisoners to bury their “naked and bleeding” victims outside a torture facility. “If one of the unfortunate ones is still breathing, they are buried alive.” Soldiers lined decapitated heads along roadsides and leveled villages. Infuriated by Beti’s revelations, France banned his book and destroyed available copies.
Deltombe, Domergue, and Tatsitsa conclude that Cameroon became a model for defense assistance in Africa. French leaders linked independence to military agreements that subverted it from the outset: making countries dependent on foreign advisers, training, and equipment. In essence, France exchanged territorial sovereignty for informal political control, as Cameroonians literally took orders from their former colonial masters. The UPC guerrilla leader, Ernest Ouandié, believed that independence was an obscene ruse. “[A] new label was simply put on the same old bottle of booze,” Ouandié observed.
Defending Françafrique
Throughout the Cold War, France continued to teach counterinsurgency techniques pioneered in Algeria and Cameroon to foreign armies, bolstering allies that defended its political influence and business investments. Military aid was especially notorious in Rwanda, where President Juvénal Habyarimana’s racist regime espoused “Hutu Power” and oppressed the Tutsi minority. In 1975, France concluded a landmark defense agreement with Habyarimana. Later revisions allowed his army to swell with foreign advisers, Gazelle helicopters, and heavy artillery.
In October 1990, a group led by Tutsi exiles, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), initiated an offensive against the Habyarimana regime. Immediately, President François Mitterrand intervened to prop up the government, wrongly regarding the RPF as a U.S. proxy and threat to French influence. From 1990 to 1993, Mitterrand oversaw Operation Noroît, a sweeping defense initiative that included arms shipments, military training, and combat support.
Entrenched racism determined policy, while encouraging French officials to overlook the regime’s anti-Tutsi pogroms. Later, Commander Didier Tauzin asserted that “violence is a constant in relations between the two Rwandan ethnicities,” suggesting that “the term genocide would be inappropriate.” Human Rights Watch even reported that French soldiers “demanded [ethnic] identification” from civilians at checkpoints.
In April 1994, a missile destroyed Habyarimana’s plane, and the remainder of his regime responded with a genocidal campaign that killed 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates. Nonetheless, France continued to back his colleagues. Dr. Jean-Hervé Bradol of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) underscored that the people “carrying out the slaughter… have been funded, trained and armed by France.”
That spring, MSF leaders petitioned senior policymakers to cut aid.Instead, Mitterrand lambasted their “propaganda,” and Foreign Minister Alain Juppé feigned ignorance of military assistance. “It was pathetic!” President Philippe Biberson of MSF France recalled.
In June, Mitterrand launched Operation Turquoise to supposedly protect civilians and staunch the bloodshed. Yet later, Commander Guillaume Ancel admitted that his “first operational order” was to plan a raid to “reinstate the government we were supporting.” Superiors also asked Ancel to “launch air strikes against the enemies of the génocidaires, the RPF.” They covertly backed the Rwandan army, which was “just then in the process of committing genocide before our eyes.”
But France’s role went beyond silent complicity. Numerous observers claim that French soldiers raped Tutsi civilians. Marie-Jeanne Muraketete remembered personnel raping her in a ditch by the Nyarushishi refugee camp. “I had my baby on my back,” she noted. “I stayed in that ditch for three days.”
Ultimately, the Mitterrand administration’s military operations followed an intransigent pattern of neocolonialism. Officials refused to forfeit an abstract commitment to French hegemony even in the face of atrocities. Instead of human rights, they protected the geopolitical balance, keeping Rwanda locked into the francophone world and backing a genocidal ally. Their policy carried the neocolonial logic of military aid to its furthest extreme. But they expressed little regret. “In those countries,” Mitterrand reportedly mused, “a genocide doesn’t matter that much.”
In Through the Out Door
Over the past decade, Military cooperation has remained the centerpiece of French policy in Africa, as officials combat jihadism, protect strategic allies, and safeguard economic interests. In 2013, President François Hollande initiated the latest wave of operations to prevent jihadists from seizing power in the Sahel. Hollande emphasized the theme of partnership with local governments. Yet as the journalist Rémi Carayol observes, French policymakers doggedly pursued goals and tactics from the colonial era.
Commander Bernard Barrera exemplified this tendency, while leading Operation Serval in Mali. Barrera openly regretted “being born too late” to know “the great Sahara campaigns” of the nineteenth century. He interpreted the “reconquering” of Mali through the mystique of imperial expansion. Scanning a map, he recalled his grandfather, “once a colonial officer,” recounting “long-ago expeditions” to him.[32] Waxing nostalgic, Barrera cast Africa as a blank slate for French military feats, while neglecting the roots of political crises.
He was not alone. One influential commander, Lieutenant Frédéric Gout, asserted that Africa exists “in another time,” suggesting that France keep “a ‘paternal’ watch” on Mali because it was supposedly backward.[33] In military circles, intellectuals such as Bernard Lugan brazenly defended colonialism, arguing, “Mali wasn’t killed by colonization, but by independence.”[34]
Meanwhile, Amnesty International concluded that French cooperation with Malian forces fostered extrajudicial executions and torture.[35]
Ultimately, military assistance discouraged African elites from pursuing reform or sharing power, while failing to halt rebel attacks. Support for France plummeted. Beginning in 2020, a string of military coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger led to the expulsion of French forces from the Sahel.[36] Ironically, the very armies that absorbed the most foreign advisers and assistance demanded France close its bases and leave the region.
Recently, the French Senate published a landmark study that concludes its country has triggered continent-wide backlash by supporting “predatory” governments and “aging ruling classes” that cling to power.[37] And the legacy of military cooperation remains devastating: In 2020 and 2021 alone, French partners perpetrated 47 percent of the 4,200 documented civilian casualties in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso.[38]
Yet legislators and senior officials insist on preserving France’s postcolonial empire in Africa, focusing on immediate setbacks to avoid more fundamental questions. Hubris continues to define policy, as officials undercut efforts to restore influence with their own racism. Portraying Africans as spoiled children, President Macron claims that they “forgot to say thank you” for French military cooperation.[39]
For two centuries, France has mobilized security forces to extract wealth and influence politics in Africa. The current crisis makes the invisible sinews of military power embarrassingly apparent as they dissolve. In response, officials are racing to revamp bases in Djibouti, Gabon, and elsewhere.[40] Over a half century after decolonization, France professes to defend the sovereignty of a continent that it steadfastly refuses to leave.