Briggs Murray
Beneath the arid, subtropical, scattered townships of the Sahel, above the overbearingly humid jungles of the Congo River Basin, to the east of thriving Gold Coast cities like Lagos, Abidjan, and Kano, and to the west of the White Nile lies the landlocked aptly named Central African Republic (CAR). Its geographic centrality is a contributing factor to its obscurity—without being part of an easily defined region, and without a prevailing biome in which to build an identity, most people hear little of the happenings that occur within this middling African state. What the CAR lacks in a defining geographical feature, it gains in an eye-catchingly poor economy, much to the chagrin of CAR citizens: according to the World Bank’s GDP per capita metrics, the Central African Republic is the fifth poorest country in the world, behind only Sierra Leone, Syria, Afghanistan, and Burundi. Yet, somewhat tragically, the World Bank seems to view the CAR’s impoverishment as entirely avoidable. In the World Bank’s country overview of the CAR, they write that “it is one of the poorest and most fragile countries in the world despite its abundant natural resources,” referencing the 470 known oil, gold, diamond, and other precious metal mineral deposits. The goal of this article is to explain, in clear terms, how we may trace a direct line from African colonization by European dominators to a de jure independence that was not at all what it appears to have been: instead of exiting the African continent with goodwill, French colonial masters of the CAR succeeded in constructing a nefarious system in their former colony that forced a newly independent republic into dependence on their colonial master. Such a de facto colonization we may call neo-colonialism, and I argue that this neo-colonization is the root cause of the depravity we see in the Central African Republic today.
Let me first clarify terminology before proceeding into the history of French meddling in the postcolonial Central African Republic. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana (1957-1966) and a founder of the Pan-African movement that many credit as the intellectual movement behind African independence, defines neo-colonialism thus: “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality, its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside." Therefore, each neo-colonial state is independent in legal terms, yet they do not have sovereignty—their policy agendas, actions, foreign policy, economic directives, and all other powers otherwise reserved for the government are covertly re-routed through a meddling influence.
When applying this lens to the Central African Republic, their old colonial master, France, found a way to neo-colonially dominate their former possession. By 1960, Pan-African thought had permeated far enough into the intellectual circles of French colonies in West and Central Africa—commonly called Françafrique—so that it was now clear a fight for independence was imminent. France, seeing the writing on the wall, keenly decides to grant sovereignty to states within the Françafrique, including the CAR, under one condition: they sign an agreement with France. Harmless enough, right? Eager to get their independence, these states ratified a Faustian exchange that the Taiwan Center for Security Studies labels an “obnoxious pact for the continuation of colonization.” Under the pact, France is enabled to stage military interventions any time they so choose, thus rendering ratifying states “a de facto colonial protectorate due to France’s militarization of their territories.” Even though this forfeiture of armed power is a major impediment to state sovereignty, it did scant damage to prosperity when compared to the monetary side of France’s colonial pact.
In agreeing to end direct colonization of Françafrique, France ensured that each of the newly independent states were economically dependent on France for decades. The government of France created a Françafriqan currency modeled after their own franc: the African Financial Community (CFA) franc. The CFA franc was pegged to the French franc before then being pegged to the euro after France changed its currency. Here is what the Harvard International Review says about this French neo-colonial economy in Françafrique:
One of the founding principles of the system was that colonies had to keep 50 percent of their foreign currency reserves in the French Treasury, plus an additional 20 percent for financial liabilities. Thus, member states only retained 30 percent of reserves within their borders. The long-term direct economic trade-offs of the CFA monetary zone have included both diminished per capita growth and mitigated progress in fighting poverty. [. . .] The CFA franc stimulates huge capital outflows and, due to the fixed exchange rate regime, pushes that money towards Europe, often France. 11 out of the 14 CFA states are deemed “least developed” by the United Nation, and Sub-Saharan member countries fall at the bottom of the UN Human Development Index.
Another tenet of the colonial pact is that, when a state needed to use the other 70 percent of their finances, they had to borrow their own money at artificially-high interest rates from the French Treasury—a clear exemplification of debt-trap diplomacy. As such, through the colonial pact, not only had France infiltrated states in Françafrique through military control, but they also found pernicious ways to pull states’ economic levers, directing them like marionettes.
A perfect case study of the long-term effects of such wholesale meddling may be seen by tracking events in the Central African Republic since its formal independence in 1960. The CAR’s first president, David Dacko, agreed to allow France a role in shaping the CAR’s implementation of defense, foreign affairs, and trade, per the terms and conditions of France’s colonial pact. Most importantly, France retained much control over the state’s natural resources, including its numerous diamond deposits. In an anti-democratic move, just two years after the CAR’s independence, Dacko banned all political parties except the one he led—MESAN, the Mouvement pour l’Évolution Sociale de l’Afrique Noire (translated into English as Social Evolution Movement of Black Africa). This, in essence, reverted the structure of the Central African government to one of autocracy. However, Dacko’s reign did not last long: as a result of the colonial pact forcibly offshoring 70 percent of the CAR’s coffers to the French Treasury, the newly-turned autocrat soon found his country in a state of incredible financial mismanagement. The Dacko government was on the verge of a debt default. In desperation, the domestic military staged a coup d’état in 1965, removing Dacko and replacing him with a military junta led by strongman Jean-Bédel Bokassa.
Much to the despair of Central Africans, Bokassa’s control of the state yet again put France’s personal enrichment over the prosperity of the CAR. As an aspiring dictator, Bokassa dissolved the legislature and terminated the constitution, consulting with a select group of self-appointed secretaries to manage the state’s affairs. Bokassa looked to France for legitimacy and authority: would the Fifth Republic of France, all too familiar with suffocating dictatorial rule from Nazi Germany’s then-recent occupation, permit such an authoritarian regime in their former colonial possession? It turns out that CFA bills blind the moral senses: France not only did nothing to impede Bokassa from consolidating power, but they even went so far as to actively support and defend him. In 1967, France invoked their colonial pact rights to put troops on the ground, defending Bokassa’s regime from a revolt and successfully stymieing efforts to overthrow the dictator. When Bokassa worked up the gall to crown himself Emperor of the Central African Republic in 1976, France was not only complacent, but also complicit: the state of France financed most of the lavish imperial celebrations. Many speculate that France’s staunch desire to prop up a cooperative authoritarian stems from the fact that the Central African Republic possesses vast uranium deposits, yet due to the nature of military secrecy this connection cannot be proven as fact.
When it became clear that supporting Bokassa had become too problematic as a result of international condemnations and sanctions, France once again used their colonial pact right to militarily intervene by implementing Operation Barracuda, swapping out their partner-in-crime and installing once more their old ally David Dacko. Bokassa was granted political asylum by the French government, and he spent a seven-year exile in a glamorous château on the outskirts of Paris. He attempted to return to the CAR, but was apprehended and put on trial for, among other things, treason, murder, and cannibalism (yes, cannibalism. . . and he was found guilty of it, too) and was imprisoned until 1993.
If I were to digress into all of France’s subsequent involvements in the security, government, and other affairs of the Central African Republic, I’m afraid you would be reading a novella. So, I will highlight only the most salient events. France kept a stranglehold on military authority in the CAR until 1997, when they agreed to hand over their last military base to United Nations peacekeepers. French combat personnel did not formally leave the Central African Republic until 2022, upon the conclusion of Operation Sangaris. This modern military intervention sought to defend the Central African government from myriad rebel armed groups, yet a one-two combination of a newfound lack of French interest in state meddling and friction between the two states’ governments led France to officially remove boots-on-the-ground. Operation Sangaris was the seventh formal military intervention in the Central African Republic in the postcolonial age, according to the news media France24. What transpired after 2022, you might ask? Tragically, President Faustin-Archange Touadéra replaced an old neo-colonial master for a new one: he sought the support of Russian Wagner Group militant mercenaries, who provide security support at a steep price. While no definitive explanation for this can be proven, it may be supposed that a rise in French isolationism has led to an increasing reluctance to get involved in affairs on another continent. Touadéra, seeing both the visible frustration from Central Africans who feel enraged by France’s history of meddling and France’s unpredictability for future military help, chose to lean heavily towards the reliable fighting forces of Wagner.
Even though they may be reliable, Wagner is far from humanitarian: Wagner’s combat tactics have previously been connected to resource-looting and egregious human rights violations, leading the United States Treasury to classify them as a transnational criminal organization in 2023. The US Treasury justified this classification by decrying “an ongoing pattern of serious criminal activity, including mass executions, rape, child abductions, and physical abuse in the Central African Republic” at the hands of Wagner militants. Just in the diamond sector alone, Africa Defense Forum Magazine claims the profits from mined or looted diamond profits “could amount to tens of millions of dollars,” one of the many reasons the magazine consequently writes that “experts say the country is now a laboratory of Russian influence.” While economic data is sparse in this war-ravaged country, Wagner’s suspected profits from the diamond trade alone should point towards a conclusion that millions of dollars worth of goods, which could have been used to develop the CAR economy and improve people’s lives, are being seized by neo-colonial extraction and looting, all but ensuring the Central African Republic will stay poor and unstable.
Kwame Nkrumah did not believe an African nation could gain true independence, much less flourish, unless hazardous neo-colonial influences were isolated, contained, and, eventually, removed from the state. It was only then that sovereignty, and the stability and prosperity that generally follows, could be attained. At the very least, Nkrumah’s theoretical underpinnings cannot be disproven: there is no rational reason as to why states like the Central African Republic, possessing abundant and profitable natural resources, would remain as destitute and as weak as they currently are if there were no perfidious outside powers at play. Despite the short-term instability that removing such external powers would cause, it is the only way to ensure the long-term affluence of the state. To ask a government to forfeit imminent and necessitated gains like immediate security for an abstract, hazy future promise of prosperity goes against human nature; yet, in this instance, such an irrationality is the only rational thing to do.