A Reply to Macron, the “Pan-Africanist.”

My Yoruba people say: “Ọmọ Atiro to ra bata wálé fún bàbá ẹ̀, ọ̀rọ̀ ló fẹ́ gbọ́.” The child of the cripple who returns home with a pair of shoes for his father is not looking for gratitude. He is asking to be insulted.

Let us give some reply to that physical dwarf and intellectual midget who sits in Elyse Palace and continue to imagine himself a Napoleon reincarnate.

It doesn’t surprise that Nairobi, that ancient city of broken colonial promises, was chosen as the place where the young tenant of the Élysée Palace, Emmanuel Macron, who gets slapped around by his wife, stood before Africans and declared himself a “Pan-Africanist.”

What a revolting declaration from a repulsive idiot!

One almost expected the spirits of Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, and Ruben Um Nyobè to rise from their desecrated graves and ask the Frenchman whether he had swallowed industrial quantities of champagne before boarding his presidential aircraft.

Pan-Africanist? France? The same France whose fingerprints are on every mutilated dream between Dakar and Djibouti?

One must admire the audacity of Europeans. It is the only natural resource they possess in inexhaustible abundance. They invade your land, enslave your ancestors, loot your minerals, corrupt your leaders, assassinate your patriots, devalue your currency, install military bases on your soil, and then arrive decades later to lecture you about democracy, human rights, climate change, and “shared humanity.”

Colonialism may have formally ended, but the European appetite for hypocrisy remains gloriously evergreen.

France’s history in Africa is not merely criminal; it is operatic barbarism. The French slave ports of Nantes and Bordeaux fattened themselves on Black flesh.

Millions of Africans were shipped across the Atlantic like livestock while European philosophers composed elegant essays about liberty, equality, fraternity, and civilization.

French colonialism in Algeria alone killed hundreds of thousands, most of them in ghastly cold blood. In Madagascar, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, and elsewhere, Paris ruled through massacres, torture, forced labor, puppet chiefs, and economic blackmail.

Even after the lowering of colonial flags, France merely exchanged the whip for the necktie. The infamous CFA franc became a monetary chain around the ankles of Francophone Africa. Paris continued dictating fiscal policy to supposedly sovereign states while French corporations extracted uranium, oil, gold, cocoa, and strategic minerals with the efficiency of vampire bats feeding in darkness.

The late François Mitterrand once admitted, with unusual honesty, that without Africa, France would slide into the ranks of a third-rate power. There, in one sentence, lies the obituary of French grandeur. France’s greatness has always depended on African misery.

And when Africans dared challenge this arrangement, Paris responded with coups, assassinations, sabotage, and mercenary warfare, as happened recently in Mali.

The blood trail is long and foul-smelling. France undermined or participated in the destruction of progressive African leaders from Sylvanus Olympio to Modibo Keïta, from Lumumba to Sankara.

Jacques Foccart, that sinister undertaker of Françafrique, operated a parallel empire of coups and political manipulation so extensive that even the CIA occasionally looked on with professional admiration.

By conservative estimates, France has been linked directly or indirectly to dozens of coups and attempted coups in postcolonial Africa. Gabon, Togo, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger — the list reads like the itinerary of a professional arsonist.

Whenever an African leader threatened French commercial interests or spoke too loudly about sovereignty, the smell of gunpowder would mysteriously waft through the air.

And now comes Macron, that staggering imbecile, heir to this imperial machinery, posing as a Pan-Africanist in Nairobi.

The idiot needs some serious education.

Pan-Africanism was born from the suffering of Africans under European barbarism. It was forged in the intellectual furnaces of Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, Julius Nyerere, etc. It was a doctrine of African dignity in opposition to European domination.

For a French president to call himself a Pan-Africanist is like a termite declaring itself a protector of wood.

What next? Shall NATO proclaim itself an anti-war organization? Shall Wall Street announce itself a monastery of poverty? Shall colonial ghosts begin offering seminars on decolonization?

Macron’s statement was not merely absurd; it was profoundly insulting, especially in this age. It revealed the incurable paternalism embedded within the European political class — the assumption that Africans possess no historical memory. And that we still crave Europeans indulgences and validation.

Who or what made Macron a Pan-Africanist? What an arrogant and arrant nonsense from an uncultured and uneducated buffoon.

Europeans like Macron still imagine Africa as a theater where they can perform moral comedy before an audience of amnesiacs.

Like the naked emperor, Europeans continue to dance to their self-generated lullabies, unaware that the ground has shifted beneath them.

Across the Sahel, young Africans are increasingly rejecting French and Western tutelage. French troops have been expelled from several countries. The old mythology of France as Africa’s benevolent guardian is collapsing like a termite-infested colonial mansion in the rainy season.

Africans must therefore learn an important lesson whenever European leaders arrive on African soil mounted on moral horses. Unlike well-curated puppets like Ruto and Tinubu, who continue to grin like village idiots in the presence of white people, Africans must never be hypnotized by polished accents, expensive suits, or theatrical declarations of friendship.

Truth be told: Europe does not come to Africa out of love. Europe comes because Africa remains central to its survival.

Unfortunately, present Europeans continue to behave like their ancestors did – treat Africans with impunity while treating African resources as their entitlement, to which they have developed the mentality of: Why pay for it, when you can kill for it?

We Africans should never forget that when the fox suddenly declares itself chairman of the poultry protection society, wise chickens do not applaud. They count their feathers.

 

*Femi Akomolafe is a passionate Pan-Africanist. A correspondent for the London-based New African magazine, and columnist for the Accra-based Daily Dispatch newspaper. He lives in both Europe and Africa, and writes regularly on Africa-related issues for various newspapers and magazines.

 

Source: https://femiakogun.substack.com/p/a-reply-to-macron-the-pan-africanist