"Africa-France: Divorce?", on France.tv: X-ray of a relationship under influence

FRANCE.TV - ON DEMAND - DOCUMENTARY

Tricolor flags burning, President Macron's effigy jeered, embassies attacked. Ksenia Bolchakova and Alexandra Jousset, who directed the excellent documentary Wagner, Putin's Shadow Army (2022), wanted to understand how and why violent anti-French sentiment has spread across the African continent in just a few years.

It's not easy to investigate an emotion. To examine this still-influenced relationship, the authors therefore focus on revisiting the symbols that cause pain: the CFA franc, signs that reflect economic domination, signs of arrogance or paternalism, "universal" values ​​with varying degrees of bias, interference, and military presence. A profound disenchantment is at work, one that Paris, still proud of its 2013 intervention in Mali to help Bamako, at its request, fight against Tuareg and Islamist rebel movements active in the north of the country, failed to see coming. Nine years later, the French army was forced to lower its flag and repatriate its last soldiers from Operation Barkhane. Russia, for its part, quickly stepped into the breach.

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