“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner; they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”
This brief guide is intended as an introductory resource. The questions posed are not central to the debates in this course, but rather serve as basic points of departure. I seek to present the material with objectivity, while acknowledging that the approach is not, and cannot be, neutral. Prof. Jorge Majfud.
France and the Architecture of Neocolonialism
Françafrique, military bases, currency control (CFA franc), Frank currency
- How did France maintain influence over its former African colonies after granting them formal independence between 1958 and 1962?
- Why do many historians describe Françafrique as a form of neocolonialism rather than a continuation of traditional colonial rule?
- How did France’s military agreements and interventions affect the political independence and sovereignty of African nations?
- In what ways did the CFA franc system create both benefits and limitations for African economies after independence?
- How did France’s economic relationships with African countries reproduce patterns of dependency established during the colonial era?
- What are the main differences between the critical interpretation of Françafrique and the argument that these relationships were mutually beneficial?
- Was independence for France’s former African colonies primarily political, or did military, economic, and monetary ties prevent full sovereignty? Explain your answer.
- Why did many African independence leaders lean toward socialism?
Table of Contents
Yes, but no
When France’s African colonies officially gained independence between 1958 and 1962, Paris didn’t actually pack up and leave. Instead, they quietly switched outright rule for a web of behind-the-scenes control known as Françafrique. This system kept the newly independent nations on a tight leash through (1) a mix of military pacts, (2) economic leverage, and (3) currency control.
By keeping French troops on the ground and locking these countries into the CFA franc currency system (Colonies françaises d’Afrique), France ensured its strategic and financial interests stayed secure. On paper, these nations were sovereign; in reality, they remained heavily dependent on Paris to keep their economies afloat and their governments in power. It’s why historians and political scientists point to Françafrique as a textbook case of neo-colonialism —independent in name, but still managed from afar.
La Françafrique
At its core, Françafrique is the term for the informal, highly influential network of political, financial, and military ties France kept with its former African colonies after they officially went independent around 1960. Far from stepping back, Paris designed a system to lock in its grip on West and Central Africa. The architects of this strategy were President Charles de Gaulle and his key adviser, Jacques Foccart, who ran French-African policy right out of the Élysée Palace like a shadow diplomatic service.
This system rested on a few powerful levers. France backed pro-Paris leaders to keep them in power, locked in trade and investment advantages, and signed military deals that allowed French troops to intervene when friendly regimes were threatened. They secured privileged access to raw materials and tied many economies together through the CFA franc. When leaders tried to break away, the consequences could be severe. Guinea’s Sékou Touré abandoned the French Community in 1958 and was penalized with the abrupt withdrawal of French personnel, equipment, and financial assets. Mali’s Modibo Keïta abandoned the CFA franc in 1962 and created a national currency, but mounting economic difficulties and political pressure forced Mali back into the franc area in 1967. In Togo, President Sylvanus Olympio was assassinated in 1963 as he pursued monetary independence; French involvement remains debated, although the coup was carried out by former French colonial soldiers.
While countries like Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Gabon, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Togo, the Central African Republic, and Congo-Brazzaville saw some surface-level stability and funding from this arrangement, it came at a massive cost. To critics, the setup made a mockery of real sovereignty —a textbook case of neocolonialism where the national flag changed, but Paris still called the shots.
Empire Without Colonies: France’s Military Reach After Independence
Post-colonialist France replaced direct colonial rule with a system of indirect influence: formal independence, but continued French influence through political allies, military agreements, economic ties, and the CFA franc.
Right after independence, France locked in defense pacts with its former territories. This permitted Paris to keep boots on the ground and operate permanent military bases in strategic hubs like Dakar, Libreville, N’Djamena, and Djibouti. While officially framed as security cooperation to keep the peace, these bases essentially gave the French military a permanent green light to project power across the continent at a moment’s notice.
And Paris didn’t hesitate to use that power. Throughout the Cold War, French troops intervened dozens of times to prop up friendly regimes, squash coups, protect French business interests, and keep Soviet influence at bay. When allied presidents in places like Gabon (in 1964), Chad, or the Central African Republic found themselves in trouble, French paratroopers were sent in to bail them out. A similar story of American interventionism in Latin America since the 19th century.
Naturally, this defense umbrella came with strings attached. It severely undercut the sovereignty of these new nations; when a government owes its very survival to foreign troops, it isn’t actually independent. It created a cycle of dependency that kept Paris pulling the strings long after the colonial administrators had supposedly packed up and gone home.
The Currency of Control
On the economic front, the old colonial pipeline barely ignored a beat. After independence, France remained the dominant financial player across the region, with French corporations holding onto sweet deals and exclusive access to the continent’s most valuable resources. Whether it was Gabonese oil, Nigerien uranium, timber, or vast agricultural estates, French businesses kept their hands firmly on the wheel.
This set up a classic, highly unequal trade loop. African nations continued to export cheap, unprocessed raw materials to France, only to turn around and buy back expensive, finished manufactured goods from French factories.
In political science, this is known as the «center-periphery» dynamic —a core tenet of dependency theory. But in plain English, it just meant the game was rigged. The resources flowed out, the wealth flowed to Paris, and the newly sovereign nations remained economically trapped, serving as raw-material providers and captive markets for their former colonizer.
The CFA franc was cooked up back in 1945 for France’s colonies, but instead of retiring the currency when those nations went independent, Paris kept it running. It has since become arguably the most enduring symbol of French staying power in Africa. Today, it still splits the region into two monetary unions: the West African (XOF) and Central African (XAF) branches.
The mechanics of the currency are where things get sticky. Originally pegged to the French franc and now to the euro, its value is guaranteed by the French Treasury. But that guarantee came with a massive catch: member states were forced to deposit a huge chunk of their national foreign reserves directly into French-controlled accounts.
The CFA franc was created by France in 1945 for its African colonies, originally covering much of French West and Central Africa, including territories that became Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo, Cameroon, Chad, Gabon, Congo and the Central African Republic. After independence, the system survived in modified form: today 14 African countries use the CFA franc, divided between the West African XOF and Central African XAF, both fixed to the euro and still guaranteed by France.
When Guinea left the CFA franc in 1960 and introduced its own currency, French intelligence responded with Operation Persil, a covert campaign that included counterfeiting Guinean banknotes to destabilize the new currency. Mali created its own currency in 1962 but, after economic difficulties and political pressure, returned to the CFA system in 1967. In Togo, President Sylvanus Olympio was assassinated in 1963 while pursuing monetary independence, although direct French responsibility for his assassination remains disputed.
There is a common thread linking the assassination of Sylvanus Olympio in Togo, the fall and execution of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the overthrow and slaying of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and the pressure placed on Iran: all involved challenges, in different ways, to financial or monetary systems dominated by major powers. Olympio was assassinated in 1963 while pursuing monetary independence from the CFA system, although direct French responsibility remains disputed. Saddam moved Iraq’s oil sales into euros in 2000, but there is no definite evidence that this caused the 2003 invasion. Gaddafi promoted greater African monetary independence and a gold-backed currency, but claims that this was the reason for the 2011 NATO intervention remain in dispute. Iran, meanwhile, has faced extensive sanctions while attempting to bypass dollar-centered financial and oil-trading channels. The pattern is worth examining, although the evidence connecting monetary policies directly to subsequent military or political actions is much stronger in some cases than in others.
Historically, CFA countries earned foreign currency through exports such as oil, cocoa, coffee, cotton, and minerals, and their central banks were required to deposit 50 percent of their foreign-exchange reserves with the French Treasury in return for France guaranteeing the currency’s convertibility. This did not mean France simply confiscated African export earnings or gold, but it gave France an important function in the monetary system and constrained how reserves could be controlled. Since 2020, West Africa has ended the 50 percent reserve-deposit requirement, while it remains in the Central African CFA system.
The Two Sides of the Coin
1) The Defense: Supporters argue this setup is a safety net. It keeps inflation remarkably low, keeps the currency stable, and protects these nations from the devastating monetary crises that often hit neighboring countries.
2) The Reality: Critics see it as a gilded cage. By outsourcing their currency, these countries essentially renounce their financial sovereignty. They can’t print their own money, set their own interest rates, or make independent economic moves to pull themselves out of a slump.
For many economists and historians, the CFA franc isn’t just a currency —it is the ultimate financial anchor keeping former colonies firmly moored to Paris. Before the euro, the CFA franc was pegged at a fixed exchange rate to the French franc. This meant that, for all practical purposes, the monetary policy of over a dozen African nations was being dictated by the central bank in Paris. If France changed its interest rates or adjusted its currency, these African economies had to ingest the consequences, leaving local governments with almost no control over their own money supply —a similar case of Puerto Rico today.
The most brutal proof of this dependency came in 1994. With Paris’s blessing, the CFA franc was suddenly devalued by a massive 50 percent overnight. It was a devastating blow that instantly cut the purchasing power of millions of people in half, drove up the cost of imports, and threw regional economies into chaos.
Even though this happened decades after these countries supposedly gained independence, it was a stark reminder of how the monetary handcuffs forged in the 1960s were still very much active —proving that who controls your currency controls your country.
Political Legacy of Françafrique
Beyond the obvious muscle of military bases and economic deals, Paris held onto power through a far more intimate web of influence. This was a world of backchannel diplomacy, intelligence sharing, financial aid, and tight-knit personal relationships between French officials and African elites. If an African government played ball and protected French interests, it was rewarded with development funds, diplomatic cover, and military backing. Pretty much similar to Latin American history, if a leader —democratically elected or not— tried to steer too independent a course, however, they quickly found themselves facing (1) diplomatic isolation, (2) financial strangulation, or (3) a sudden, French-backed military coup.
When historians look back at this complicated relationship, they generally split into two camps:
1) The Critics: They argue that France simply swapped out a clumsy, direct colonial administration for a sleeker, indirect one. By relying on hand-picked political elites, defense pacts, and the CFA franc, Paris ensured that «independence» was little more than a flag-raising ceremony.
2) The Pragmatists: Other scholars point out that many African leaders weren’t just helpless victims; they were active partners. They willingly signed these deals because the trade-offs —like guaranteed security, heavy French investment, and a stable currency— helped keep their fragile new states (and their own regimes) afloat.
When you step back and look at the whole picture, the French neocolonial system of the 1960s was a beautifully engineered tripod. It stood on three legs: (1) military bases to project power, (2) resource extraction to fuel French industry, and (3) the CFA franc to lock in financial control. By weaving these three threads together, Paris managed to keep its hand on the steering wheel of its former empire, making Françafrique the absolute blueprint for modern neocolonialism.
Postcolonial interventionism
France invaded and colonized Algeria in 1830 and ruled it for 132 years. Behind the word colonization were confiscated lands, displaced populations, destroyed villages, and hundreds of thousands of deaths; in Sétif, Guelma, and Kherrata in 1945, French repression turned a demand for freedom into a massacre. During the war of independence, from 1954 to 1962, there were torture, executions, disappearances, and collective punishment that left arround 500.000 people massacred. We do not need to call the entire period genocide to recognize its human cost: families who lost their homes, people who never returned, and generations subjected to a system of inequality. Decades later, France would intervene militarily in Africa again, supporting Juvénal Habyarimana’s government in Rwanda until shortly before the 1994 genocide, in which more than 800,000 people, overwhelmingly Tutsi, were systematically killed in about 100 days.
When the French colonial empire formally disappeared from Africa in the 1960s, French power did not disappear with it. The flags changed, presidents changed, and the colonies became republics, but France retained a dense network of military agreements, economic relationships, political connections, and cultural institutions across much of West and Central Africa. Independence therefore did not end French involvement; it transformed it. What became known as Françafrique described this ambiguous world in which former colonies were sovereign states, yet Paris continued to regard much of Francophone Africa as a zone of particular strategic interest.
The military dimension was especially visible. France repeatedly intervened when governments friendly to Paris faced rebellions, coups or armed movements. French troops were deployed in Chad for decades and intervened in Gabon, the Central African Republic, Comoros and elsewhere. In some cases France worked at the request of African governments; in others, it claimed to be protecting French citizens or strategic interests. To many Africans, however, the recurring image was simpler: independence had arrived, yet the former colonial power could still send soldiers when the political order it liked was threatened.
Some episodes became especially controversial. In 1979, France’s Operation Barracuda helped remove Jean-Bédel Bokassa in the Central African Republic. In Rwanda, France supported the government of Juvénal Habyarimana and trained his army before the 1994 genocide and later launched Operation Turquoise under a UN mandate. French responsibility for the political and military environment surrounding the genocide remains the subject of intense historical debate. In Côte d’Ivoire, French forces intervened during the civil war beginning in 2002 and again during the 2010–11 post-election crisis.
After the Cold War, France increasingly described its interventions in terms of peacekeeping, civilian protection and the fight against terrorism… The most important later example was Mali. In 2013, France launched Operation Serval after Islamist armed groups advanced southward. It was replaced in 2014 by Operation Barkhane, a regional campaign involving thousands of French troops across Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad and Mauritania. French soldiers were fighting armed groups at the request of African governments, but the longer the intervention continued, the more it became a symbol for some populations of continuing foreign dependence.
The contradiction became increasingly visible. France was intervening to strengthen governments that often could not control their own territories, while its continued presence itself caused political resentment. Coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger brought governments that demanded French withdrawal. France left Mali in 2022 and subsequently withdrew from Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad and Senegal. By 2025, the large French military presence that had characterized much of the postcolonial period in West Africa had largely disappeared.
Yet France has not simply left Africa. Diplomatic relations, French companies, schools, cultural institutions, development programs and security cooperation remain significant, while France is replacing large permanent deployments with smaller partnerships and training arrangements.
The story is therefore not simply one of France abandoning colonialism and later returning to Africa. A French soldier in Mali could sincerely believe he was fighting terrorism and protecting civilians; a Malian could look at the same soldier and see the continuation of an old colonial relationship. Both perceptions coexist. That tension helps explain both the longevity of French influence and the speed of its recent decline. Political independence ended direct colonial rule, but it did not immediately eliminate the unequal relationships built during colonialism. The French withdrawal from the Sahel marks the decline of one model of power, not necessarily the end of French influence in Africa.
Gold without mines
France keeps 2,430 tonnes of gold twenty-seven meters (88 feet) beneath Paris. That is the fourth-largest national stock in the world, behind the United States, Germany and Italy, according to the World Gold Council and the Banque de France. No French mine produced it. It is monetary gold, gathered by a central bank. Since early 2026, all of it rests in Paris. The last 129 tonnes in New York were sold between July 2025 and January 2026 and replaced with newer bars that meet modern standards, as if even gold needed to be presentable. France did not dig this treasure out of the ground. It accumulated it through the arithmetic of power. After Poincaré stabilized the franc in 1926, a law required the Banque de France to hold gold worth at least 35% of the banknotes in circulation. From 1928 on, the bank exchanged its dollars and pounds for bullion. By 1939 its vaults held 2,500 tonnes, a fifth of all the world’s central-bank reserves.
History has its ironies, and gold has a memory. In 1940, fleeing the German advance, France scattered its treasure across the ocean: about 1,145 tonnes to New York, 250 to Martinique, and 1,100 to Dakar, including gold that Belgium and Poland had entrusted to France. From Dakar, the gold was carried inland to Kayes, in what is now Mali, and stayed there until 1945-46. For a few years, the Sahel guarded the wealth of the metropole. Two decades later, under Bretton Woods, de Gaulle’s France converted part of its dollar reserves into gold, exercising its right to redeem dollars for gold at the official rate of $35 an ounce. Between 1963 and 1966, France brought its bullion home from New York and London, and its stock peaked at about 4,650 tonnes. Then came May 1968, and some 1,500 tonnes went to defend the franc. Between 2004 and 2009, France sold another 589 tonnes. Since then, the figure has stayed close to 2,437 tonnes.
Mali tells the opposite story: it has the mines, and the gold leaves. Its industrial mines produced about 51 tonnes in 2024. Artisanal panning may add as much as 60 tonnes more, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. The World Gold Council puts total output at about 100 tonnes, far above the official figure of roughly 57 tonnes. The gap is filled by smuggling and by labor that never reaches the statistics. Mali’s proven reserves are estimated at 800 tonnes, the third-largest in Africa. The mining ministry counted 731 tonnes held by mining companies in 2024. Either way, the number is not zero. Gold makes up nearly 80% of the country’s exports and brought in about $4.3 billion in 2024. It goes mostly to South Africa, Switzerland, and Australia, not to France. France accumulated a huge monetary stock of gold; Mali has enormous gold deposits but does not accumulate that gold as a national monetary reserve.
One country stores gold as a symbol of monetary power; the other pulls gold from its soil and watches it go. The numbers alone do not say who profits from Mali’s gold, and they do not explain how France treats its immigrants. Those questions belong to history and politics. Statistics can describe the gold; they cannot settle those debates.
Why socialism?
For many African independence leaders, socialism was not something they discovered in European books before discovering Africa. It was, in part, a response to the Africa they knew. Colonialism had left the land, mines, plantations, banks, and trade largely in foreign hands, while Africans remained at the bottom of the economic and political order. The colonial flag could be removed, but what would independence mean if the same companies continued to own the mines and the same foreign interests controlled the economy?
This is why socialism became attractive to figures such as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Patrice Lumumba, Amílcar Cabral, and later Thomas Sankara. It offered a vocabulary for connecting political independence with economic independence: collective ownership, redistribution, control of natural resources, and resistance to imperialism. For a generation that had grown up under European rule, capitalism was not an abstract economic theory. It was often experienced through the colonial mine, the plantation, the company store, the tax collector, and the foreign administrator.
The Cold War reinforced this choice. The Soviet Union presented itself as an enemy of colonialism and offered African movements scholarships, military assistance, diplomatic support, and training. Meanwhile, Western governments frequently regarded radical African nationalism as a threat to their strategic and economic interests. The assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961, amid Western involvement, became for many Africans a brutal lesson: political independence could be tolerated, but economic and geopolitical independence was another matter. The same happened with Mozambique’s independence and the suspicious plane crash that killed Samora Machel.
Yet African socialism was never simply Soviet communism transplanted onto African soil. Nyerere spoke of ujamaa, Nkrumah of African socialism and Consciencism, and Cabral emphasized the particular history and social structures of African societies. Their common question was simpler and more fundamental: what was the meaning of independence if Africans could raise their own flag but could not control their own land, labor, or resources?
African philosophies such as Ubuntu, with its emphasis on the idea that a person exists through other people, and older traditions of communal land, mutual obligation, collective decision-making, and shared responsibility often had more in common with socialism than with the individualistic capitalism imposed through colonial rule. This does not mean that precolonial African societies were socialist in the modern political sense: they had hierarchies, private possessions, inequality, and systems of power of their own. But the moral principle was often different from the European ideal of the individual as an autonomous economic actor. Wealth was frequently embedded in relationships—with the family, the village, the ancestors, and the community. For many African intellectuals and independence leaders, socialism therefore did not necessarily feel like the importation of a European doctrine. It could be understood as a modern political language for recovering or defending older ideas of reciprocity, communal responsibility, and the belief that what sustains the community cannot belong entirely to a few individuals.
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