Amatoritsero Ede

A Coup détat or Couplet?

A coup d’état is supposed to be an illegal, violent ransacking and toppling of a noble government that has been legitimized through a popular ballot, whose usurping force equally ought to issue from an irrational, lead-spewing, fatal gun barrel. Nevertheless, the series of recent coups in French West Africa – from Burkina Faso to Niger or Gabon and so on – has been anything but irrational or violent in any physical sense. The insurrections were very level-headed; no one died; no bullets were fired – ostensibly. The countries in question simply carried out locally what, in common political register, are mere ‘palace coups.’ It is at an immediate and historical international geo-political level that the real coup d’état takes place. This is because the literal political and economic real-life consequences of those local putsches are existentially devastating for erstwhile colonial and imperial Western regimes but liberating for these revolutionising countries. That, then, is the real coup d’état; and it is why the concerned colonial mother countries – or more appropriately, ‘murder countries’ – are in a frenzy.

Murder for capital it is indeed when we think of the deadly inhumanity and ferocious bestiality of chattel slavery with which Africa’s encounter with Europe began in the 1440s till official abolition in the late 19^th century. So daemonic was that centuries-long event that slaves were roasted alive on the pits like ordinary meat and their babies sometimes fed alive to crocodiles. This is not fantasy but documented fact. Rosa Amerlia Plumelle-Uribe comments on the deadly master / slave relationship as exemplified in indigenous Americas. “[T]he Spaniards could quite unconcernedly roast a few indigenous people selected from amongst the community’s nobility so as to make a deep impression and effectively instil terror” (2020: 78). She invokes the eye-witness accounts of the all-important activist Spanish Dominican priest-missionary, Bartolomé de las Casas, who horrifyingly reported on this barbarity.

Generally, they kill the chiefs in this manner: using wooden poles, a grill is improvised to which the people are tied. A low burning fire is lit beneath the grill to slowly roast the victims. Once, I saw four or five Indians screaming from pain being roasted on the grill. Their screams disturbed the captain’s sleep and so he ordered them to be drowned instead. But the executioner who was in charge of roasting them […] preferred to stifle their cries by stuffing pieces of wood into their mouths” ( ibid. 78-79).

Of course, the same brutality applied to all chattel-enslaved, Black or indigenous, everywhere in the premodern era. These murder countries’ unethical and inhuman behaviour vis-a-vis the global south, was not and is not concerned with any form of morality. That uncivilized misdemeanour has been telegraphed into modern times not in terms of a premodern physical force but a modern psychic violence that is/was underscored by imposed colonial and neo-colonial socio-political, economic and cultural conditions, whether in Africa, India, Australia or the Americas.  It must be said that murder countries cajoled, extorted and coerced support from a handful of local comprador, money-and-power-greedy African politicians like those that these revolutionising countries are ‘putsching’ out of power.

France more than many a murder country has spilled much blood over the centuries as an imperium in pursuit of capital. This is a Christian country that has historically removed Christ from its inhuman politics. One only need to recall Napoleon’s blood-soaked hands or even just watch that harrowing documentary about the Algerian war of independence, “The Battle of Algiers.” France’s atrocities across the world, and especially in colonial and postcolonial Francophone Africa, is such that were democracy truly authentic under a modern international law that country ought to sit at the international court of justice for crimes against humanity. One good bad example of a murder country in evil action is that upon flag-independence in 1960s, France surreptitiously continued colonial economic policies by forcing its 14 African dominions to sign slavish military and economic contracts under a dubious “Françafrique” umbrella.  Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Togo, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon are all still paying a ‘colonial tax’ to France. This is the same policy this murder country introduced in Haiti, which is largely responsible for the latter’s modern economic ruin and political catastrophe. So essentially what France protested as military coups in Francophone Africa is nothing but the necessity of history catching up in a ‘couplet.’

Without diminishing the life-changing local political import for the Sahel region, and indeed for the whole continent of Africa, the grammar of these 21^st century African military operations have to be diminutively conceived, at least at the local level, as just ‘couplets’ (with a silent letter ‘p’). There is another linguistic sense though, this time at the level of a symbolic poetics, in which those rebellions become ‘couplets’ (with a loud ‘p’). That is in terms of a historical ethical rhyming or counter-point to the incessant millennial exploitation inherent in the socio-political cultural and economic lie that ‘Françafrique represents. Yes, France is the particular ‘murder country’ in the immediate eye of the putschist storm. It is an open secret that this hegemon, France, has been a thoroughgoing daemon in how it dealt with those unfortunate enough to have historically encountered its wickedness. Its history with Haiti is existentially impossible and that country is still reeling from the French hijacking of its resources and levying of colonial taxation – ironically for Haiti having defeated and managed to eject France in 1804. The same sit-tight, ‘my-knee-on-your-neck’ principle was at play in French West and Central Africa. France needed to be booted out.  

In the Sahel region’s couplets – pun intended –  the present goes back to the past and rhymes with it by righting historical injustices perpetrated by France in Africa. Under the ruse of a ‘Françafrique, that murder country continued colonialism into the 21st century even after its official end in the 1960s.