France, football, colonialism: Take the best, leave the rest

The colonial era may have ended, but French extractive policies in its former colonies have not. As the Qatar 2022 World Cup saw formerly colonised peoples take on former colonial powers on the football field, conversations about “scars of the present’s past” inevitably erupted both online and offline. As Trevor Noah pointed out back in 2018 during a similar debate on inclusiveness and overlapping identities, “When I’m saying African, I’m not trying to exclude them from their Frenchness but include them in my Africanness.” But to go further than that – France has embraced a markedly selective assimilationist approach towards people of African origins; it is very particular about who can be French. It is not coincidental that Niger’s main highway, on which many extracted resources are transported to Niamey and other strategic areas, follows today the exact route of the mass atrocities carried out by the troops of Paul Voulet, the French army captain who in 1899 sought to take control of Lake Chad for France before the United Kingdom got there. Much has changed since colonial times, but Africa’s exploitation is continuing with corrupted governments in many African countries guaranteeing the “stability” needed to carry out these processes – among much else, they receive for this end weapons worth billions of euros which they also use to crush internal dissent.