The burning French question

IT IS tempting to assert at the outset that we should not be at all surprised that France has been experiencing race riots in the recent past. That would be unfair because is ignores the historical context within which the setting for the riots evolved. Further, we should also examine the issue by reference to the British experience in dealing with immigration and race. In the wash up neither of them has been quite as good as they once thought they were.

I lived in Ghana in the early 1960s when the circumstances for future tension involving the former colonies and the former colonial powers were evolving. In Ghana and the other former British West African territories — Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Gambia — there seemed to never have been any doubt, on either side, that Britain would leave. The only question was when. African political theorists and leaders had been thinking and writing about it for many years. Perhaps the father of those thinkers was Dr. E.W. Du Bois at whose feet Kwame Nkrumah and others sat before and after the Second World War.

However, what ultimately gave the British West African independence movement its critical momentum was the post-second world war independence activity in Asia. India in 1947, Pakistan, Malaya, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and others showed the way to the Africans and Ghana led the way in Africa in 1958. The rest soon followed.

The fact that the Asian dependencies were much more “ready” for independence than the West African colonies — in terms of political and institutional maturity — made not a jot of difference. The movement was inexorable.

That Britain would always leave and do so sooner rather than later, at least when compared with the French and other European colonists, was inevitable and tangibly so in the colonies concerned. In pre-independence Ghana there were many British administrators, teachers, troops, business people and others but overwhelmingly they saw Britain as home. They took their holidays at home, the kept in touch with home, they educated their children at home and so on. Moreover, while in the British territories there may well have been considerable informal sexual interplay between the races there was minimal miscegenation in the sense of marriages and long term partnerships. All of this provided the platform for a clean break. It was quite different in British East Africa because, unlike tropical West Africa, the British settlers in East Africa took up land and made the countries their homes through a number of generations.

Preening themselves at the warm embrace

Back in West Africa the French territories were quite different again. France regarded their colonial territories everywhere as extensions of the metropolitan power, Indeed this was a formal as well as informal relationship. As an example, Leopold Senghor in Senegal and Felix Houphouet-Boigny in the Ivory Coast — both subsequently presidents of their respective fully independent countries — were members of the French Senate. To visit Abidjan or any other French colonial capital in West Africa in the 1960’s — and earlier — was to visit highly integrated societies and everywhere this was tangible. The woman running the bar might be white French while the man running the hair salon next door might be her black husband. Miscegenation was pervasive throughout the French territories. And all the while these seemingly eternal bonds were flourishing President de Gaulle and his colleagues in Paris were preening themselves at the warm embrace with which the French colonial peoples in Africa and elsewhere had embraced French culture and all other things French. This was also evidenced by the accelerating interest of Africans from French territories right across the continent — and indeed from territories elsewhere in the world — to take up the standing offer to move to France. Indeed, many of the successful plots to overthrow French colonial rule were hatched in Paris!

And then the lid came off. From the late 1950s, following Ghana’s independence, the French territories looked across their borders and saw the former British black African colonies now independent states in their own right. For France, the litmus test was Algeria and when that peg fell, at the cost of more than a little blood, the whole French colonial edifice came tumbling down. The principal thing that remained the same was the continuing movement of Africans to France, from all of its former colonies.

This is some of the background to the disturbances across France. It is not the first time it has happened and nor will it be the last, there or elsewhere. However, as time passed the character and external perception of the problem has tended to change. Initially, there was a tinge of racism in the response at street level in France but over time that seems to have been replaced by attention to socio-economic considerations — jobs, education, dignity, equality of opportunity — from an increasingly assertive immigrant population. I would not have thought that the French are innately disposed to racist attitudes — on the contrary, the concept would be grossly offensive to one of the great liberal cultures the world has seen — but the massive influx of peoples from Africa and elsewhere may well have caused some distemper at lower socio-economic levels where competition for jobs has intensified.

Open door for many decades

The French have a problem and it will not be readily solved, especially if French governments remain as weak, pompous and indecisive as most of those over the past few decades. At least in the short-to-medium term the problem will never be solved but it should be possible to manage it much better. And the management must surely focus principally on those economic policy instruments that are most conducive to growth and job creation.

The British situation is not as volatile as that in France but they too have had their moments as those who will recall the Brixton riots of the 1960s will know. There has been further concern from time to time over the past few decades and some inflammatory talk and behaviour in the very recent past. The British may have been more pragmatic than other colonial powers but they too have had an open door for many decades and they can surely expect recurrent problems of the kind presently afflicting France and for the same economic rather than racial reasons.

It is easy to blame colonialism for all sorts of things but in the situation facing France and Britain it is a relevant factor. Specifically, while the British may have been more pragmatic than the French in their colonial policies and practises, they — like all colonial powers — were fundamentally exploitive. It is one thing to leave a solid administrative structure but quite another to leave a thriving economy. Some of the colonial territories had little to offer in this regard but they all had something and some had a lot. It was an area in which the colonial powers mostly failed and the combination of underdone internal development and corrupt, venal black leadership has compounded and often created the human tragedy we see across Africa today.

Nick Evers, born in November, 1937, has been a diplomat (in Africa), trade policy advisor, economic/management consultant, university lecturer, Premier’s Department head, Liberal Government minister (1986-89) company director, Chairman, TT-Line Company Pty Ltd (1995-05), chairman of Forest Industries Association of Tasmania (2004-05), occasional consultant, columnist and writer.