The summer of 2020 on the streets of Paris:
There was an anti-racist uprising in France.
The death of George Floyd had sent shock waves around the world.
For Assa Traoré,
it was a reminder of the police brutality closer to home.
She’d been fighting for the truth surrounding the death of her brother, Adama Traoré.
He had died in police custody on July 19, 2016, aged 24.
Today’s French anti-racism movement
is part of the decades-long postcolonial struggles of Black and Arab people in France.
Many see the authorities' prevailing supremacist attitudes rooted in France's
view of the people it colonized.
It’s why there are growing calls for France to recognize and apologize
for its violent colonization of millions of people in Africa and Asia.
But for the French elite, these conversations on privilege, colonialism, Islamophobia and racism
are a threat to the very core of their identity.
Many blame it on the “out-of-control woke leftism” of American campuses.
And they’re pushing back.
Where as in France, it's really this denial of even
the need of having the conversation around race,
because the idea, the philosophy is that the Republic
with this, you know, this valor, liberté, égalité, fraternité already took care of this problem for us.
We don't have to open what is called this Pandora box.
France likes to see itself as "colorblind."
Official statistics on race and religion? Illegal.
At the same time, we see systemic racism when French police stop Black people and Arabs
20 times more often than white people.
This postcolonial melancholia that is gripping France, this feeling of loss that is accompanied by
an inability to come to terms with the country's history,
and as such to accept the present that
was born out of that history.
Let’s take a look at France’s historic colonial crimes to understand the conversations on race happening today,
and why the French elite say “non” when it comes to acknowledging its racist imperialist past.
Let’s start at the 17th century, when the French colonized the Americas.
North American colonies became known as New France.
The French colonized parts of the Caribbean. This included Saint-Domingue, present-day Haiti.
It grew to be the richest sugar colony because of the labor of enslaved Africans.
The French also established trading settlements across the coast of India.
In the middle of the 18th century, France and Britain got into colonial conflicts.
Much of France’s first empire was destroyed.
But it didn’t take long for French empire-building to continue:
France invaded Algeria in 1830 and then colonized much of North Africa,
West Africa, equatorial Africa, parts of Southeast Asia and islands in the Pacific.
France’s empire building led to huge financial gain.
Its global settlements provided a network of trading posts and colonies that were hugely
profitable for private investors.
In West Africa alone, the gains from colonialism exceeded 3.2 billion francs in 1914.
Where would France be without its colonies,
its possession in the Caribbean? Where would France be without its huge possessions in sub-Saharan Africa?
Where would France be without its possessions in Asia, without Algeria?
And that's a question that is extremely important when
we go back and I'm just talking about
the economy, right?
Intellectuals of the day justified these exploits with enlightenment ideals.
The French Revolution proclaimed universalist principles — freedom and rights for all men.
That was meant to lead to suffrage for adult males and the abolition of slavery in mainland France.
Slavery was actually reinstated before it was banned again.
But it was a different story elsewhere in the Francophone world.
Jules Ferry was a French statesman and leading promoter of colonial expansion.
In 1884, he said:
Colonialism was spun as Mission Civilisatrice – "the civilizing mission."
One of the corners of French imperialism was the idea
that France was the country of the enlightenment.
So it was really a huge part of the French mind of colonialism. Colonizing to, you know,
almost this divine mission to take people out of the darkness and bring them into civilization.
But the civilizing mission was just a self-aggrandizing and the prestige that France got from being,
having the second biggest empire in the world.
But even at the time, the propaganda of the “civilizing mission” was challenged.
We see this from the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804:
It was a successful insurrection by self-liberated enslaved people
against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue.
Its leaders demanded France apply the principles of its revolution to its colonized subjects.
It's absolutely paradoxical
to call yourself the cradle of enlightenments
and create and park specimens of your colonized behind
barriers and create human zoos.
By 1901, France ruled 79 million people over 4.6 million square miles on Earth.
The French colonizing mission continued into the 20th century:
France occupied Syria and Lebanon.
What was the impact of all this French colonization?
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic,
two senior French doctors proposed testing COVID-19 treatments in Africa.
There was international outrage.
Africa cannot and will not be a testing ground for any vaccine.
The hangover from a colonial mentality has to stop.
France has a long legacy of scientific experimentation on the continent.
Between the 1920s and 1950s, French colonial governments organized medical campaigns
against tropical diseases in central Africa.
Colonial medics forcibly injected millions with dubious medication.
People were left with serious side effects, including blindness, gangrene and death.
And it goes on.
Culturally, the French imposed a policy of “assimilation.”
This was the official policy of forcing French culture, language, religion, law and
even mode of dressing onto colonized people.
By the time of WWI, French was the most written and spoken western language in the Middle East.
There’s also the trauma of war.
It’s hugely significant in understanding contemporary French society.
The war began when the newly formed FLN movement declared its aim was to restore a
sovereign Algerian state. They used guerrilla warfare at home and also diplomacy abroad, particularly at the UN.
France drafted some 2 million conscripts over the course of the war.
The human cost of the war remains unknown, particularly on the Algerian side.
The Algerian government claims as many as over 1.5 million died.
The war ended 130 years of colonial French rule in Algeria.
Yet for the longest time, it was called “a war without a name.”
In my case, Algerian history was actually covered
over a day, more or less.
Walking around the street and seeing people that you learned about much later were actually
slave traders or, you know, colonialists or war crimes heroes is extremely distressing.
The barbarism of the “civilizing” French during this war isn’t a part of a French collective social memory.
But we can see how the issue of torture was depicted in French cinema.
The ‘90s marked a turning point in France.
Harrowing French crimes against Jewish people in Vichy France continued to emerge,
where local people collaborated with the occupying Nazis.
In 1995, Jacques Chirac became the first president to recognize France’s role in the Holocaust.
It was after this, Le Monde newspaper asked in an editorial whether it would be time for the next
French head of state to “clarify the responsibilities of all parties” in the Algerian War.
My father was born during the war, but he wasn't born
in Algeria. He was born in Tunisia in a refugee camp.
And that, yet, he grew up here in Strasbourg, France.
So already from a very young age, he was living all the consequences of colonialism.
For us who are born here and raised here, it can be even more different because we don't even realize
sometimes that the conflicts in our identities -
plural - can be because they are such clash within the
history that have not been resolved yet.
The crimes of colonialism didn't stay in Algeria.
They played out in the streets of the French capital too.
On Oct. 17, 1961, police killed peaceful Algerian protesters in Paris.
Algerians say up to 300 were killed,
but French officials say the number is much less – between 50 and 120.
Some Algerians were beaten and thrown into the river Seine.
The official amnesia surrounding this bloody event lasted for 50 years.
And there are other French war crimes that are not part of the national story.
Including the Thiaroye massacre.
On the night of Dec. 1, 1944, West African soldiers who had fought to liberate France in World War II
were killed by French forces on their return.
300 West Africans were killed, according to French and African historians.
The French government only buried 70 of the men and hasn't confirmed the large number.
There has never been a French apology for colonial crimes in Algeria.
In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy refused to apologize.
He said Algerian leaders should focus on the future and not “beat their breasts.”
In 2012, François Hollande acknowledged Algerian suffering under French rule.
But he stopped short of an apology.
In 2021, President Emmanuel Macron also ruled out an apology for colonial abuses in Algeria.
What would an apology actually mean?
I find it fascinating that we're not addressing what
happened in the past, yet doing so would actually help
us understand and acknowledge the issue that we have today and then therefore move forward and
to try and solve them. And this actually hurts France because we see that if we would address this,
this would just make France healthier and stronger because its children and its citizens would then become,
be more at peace and heal from all of that that they're not even aware of.
2022 will mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the Algerian War.
The Élysée announced that a “memories and truth” commission will be established.
But the notion of reparations has been ruled out.
By the way, France forced Haiti, one of the world's poorest countries,
to pay the equivalent of $21 billion in "reparations" for freeing itself from French colonialism and slavery.
These payments continued well into the 20th century.
To me, the first apology will have to be to recognize.
And it will be very easy because we have archives.
We're not talking about building a whole entire history.
Unveil the hidden past, highlight the hidden past, highlight the dead angle
and then at some point, I'm not an economist, but
some type of economic reparation will have to be weighed.
Where I see reparation happening, it's that the state is forced to have this conversation
around racial difference, religious difference,
and we know that it's a conversation that they've
been reluctant to have.
Today, this conversation on race, Islamophobia versus secularism, and postcolonial struggles
are treated as a direct challenge to the white nationalist myth-building of the Republic.
Currently, there is a war on words of who is or isn’t a legitimate anti-racist.
So that first camp is what I call the camp of the
historic Universalists or Republican anti-racist
organization. And the second group is kind of a motley
crew of young scholars, researchers, militants, activists, artists, oftentimes, which solid roots in working class
neighborhoods, such as the banlieue. And many of them, like myself, being themselves
children of France's colonial past, right? Postcolonial productions. And in France, this group is absolutely
vilified with adjectives, such as "racist," "racialist," "Indigenist," "separatist."
There’s heavy-handed political pushback.
For example, lawmakers voted on an “Islamist separatism” bill in February 2021.
The law expands local authorities' power to investigate mosques and oversee how they are funded.
It’s framed as defending French Republican values.
Islamo-leftism/Islamo-Gauchism seems to be the mot du jour
and is being weaponized against activism on campuses.
It's extremely, extremely dangerous because no one knows what it is so everyone can be it.
And once you are painted as one, and there's basically a free card against you.
History and collective memory are significant in the way a national story is told.
But in France, these social memories are fragmented.
The stories of the children of colonialism are actively left out.
France’s colonialism is not just a chapter that belongs in museums and textbooks.
It’s a fact that exists in living memory.
And through bodies like mine,
France is forced to confront this weirdness, right? This wedge between what it thought of itself, you know,
this idea about enlightenment and the "civilizing mission"
and the reality of what this history is, and the reality of
the implication of that history in real life.