An open letter to Emmanuel Macron: You are not a Panafricanist and can never be!

On the Particular Audacity of Claiming What You Have Spent Generations Destroying

Monsieur Macron,

You stood in Nairobi in 2026, in a summit you convened hastily to salvage what remained of France’s African credibility after the continent’s most dignified populations had organised themselves with remarkable clarity and expelled your soldiers, your bases, and your flags from their soil, and you declared, before a room full of African heads of state who had the historical misfortune of sitting there in silence, that “ you are the true Pan-Africanist”. I have been trying, with genuine intellectual effort, to locate the precise category of moral and cognitive failure that produces a statement of that magnitude, delivered with that degree of composure, and I have concluded that it does not fit neatly into any existing taxonomy. It is its own species and it requires a name that has not yet been invented, something that sits at the precise intersection of historical illiteracy, institutional shamelessness, and the specific brand of civilisational arrogance that your republic has refined across five centuries into something almost indistinguishable from a natural disposition. Allow me to offer you what your education, expensive and celebrated as it undoubtedly was, clearly failed to provide: a history lesson.

Pan-Africanism was not born in Paris. It was not theorised in the corridors of Sciences or the salons of the Fifth Republic. It was born in the holds of slave ships, in the plantation fields of Saint-Domingue in the exile of men and women whom your republic and its predecessors hunted, poisoned, shot, disappeared and buried in unmarked graves precisely because they had the temerity to believe that African and African-descended people deserved to govern themselves. Pan-Africanism is, at its most fundamental, the political philosophy that said no to everything France spent three centuries saying yes to: slavery, colonialism and noecolonialism. It is the intellectual and organisational tradition built in direct and irreconcilable opposition to the project your nation prosecuted across this continent with a consistency and a brutality that your current rhetorical repositioning cannot retroactively launder.

Pan-Africanism is, at its most fundamental, the political philosophy that said no to everything France spent three centuries saying yes to: slavery, colonialism and noecolonialism.

You know the names, Monsieur Macron, because they are in the archives your government has spent decades managing with exquisite care, releasing selectively and never once confronting with the full, unmediated honesty that justice would require. Toussaint Louverture, who led the only successful slave revolution in human history and whom your predecessor Napoleon Bonaparte had poisoned in a French prison in 1803 because the existence of a free Black republic was an intolerable philosophical contradiction to the French imperial project and to the slavery your republic had briefly abolished and then reinstated. Ruben Um Nyobe, the Cameroonian independence leader whom French forces hunted through the forests of his own country and killed in 1958, before independence was even formally granted, because he represented the possibility of a Cameroon that would not serve French interests. Felix Moumie, also Cameroonian, poisoned in Geneva in 1960 by your intelligence services because he continued Um Nyobe’s work with insufficient deference to French preferences. Sylvanus Olympio, the first democratically elected president of Togo, an economist of genuine rigour who spoke six languages and was building a national currency that would have reduced his country’s dependence on the franc zone, shot dead in front of the American embassy in Lomé in 1963 by soldiers who had served in your colonial army, with your government recognising the junta that replaced that continues to rule Togo to this day. Mehdi Ben Barka, the Moroccan opposition leader who disappeared in Paris in 1965 with the direct complicity of French intelligence and French police, whose body was never found and whose case remains one of the most thoroughly documented illustrations of how your republic treats African political leadership that refuses to be subjugated.

Modibo Keita of Mali, destabilised and removed. Sekou Toure of Guinea, whom your government attempted to assassinate eight separate times after he had the singular dignity in 1958 of saying non to de Gaulle’s offer of continued French tutelage, and when the assassinations failed, your government printed counterfeit Guinean currency in industrial quantities and flooded his economy with it, because a free Guinea with a functioning independent currency was more threatening to French interests than a Guinea in chaos. Thomas Sankara, the most luminous political intelligence West Africa produced in the twentieth century, murdered in 1987 by a man your government armed, supported, and then sheltered ias a dictator twenty-seven (27) years while he systematically looted Burkina Faso.

And beyond the individuals, let’s talk about the massacres. At least 250,000 Cameroonians killed between the late 1950s and the early 1960s in a counterinsurgency campaign your government conducted with napalm and collective punishment and the systematic destruction of villages, a campaign so thoroughly suppressed in French historical memory that most French citizens today are entirely unaware it occurred, while Cameroonian survivors and their descendants carry it in their bodies. One point two million Algerians killed between 1954 and 1962 because they demanded what your “ Universal Declaration of Human Rights” had theoretically guaranteed to all human beings, and which your republic had decided, applied fully only to some Europeans.

This is what Pan-Africanism was built against, Monsieur Macron. Not against an abstraction. Not against colonialism as a historical phenomenon safely located in the past. Against France and colonial allies. Against the specific, named, documented decisions made by the institution you currently lead, whose archives contain the evidence, whose budget financed the operations, and whose diplomatic apparatus protected the perpetrators. When Du Bois organised the first Pan-African Congress in 1919, he was responding in part to what France had done and was doing. When Fanon wrote Les Damnés de la Terre in 1961, feverishly, dying, he was writing about the French colonial system from inside the Algerian revolution against it. When Amilcar Cabral theorised national liberation in Guinea-Bissau, when Nkrumah built the case for continental unity, when Sankara stood before the Organisation of African Unity in 1987 and delivered the most devastating indictment of odious colonial debt ever spoken aloud, they were all, in different registers and with different instruments, saying the same thing: that what France and its allies had constructed on this continent was incompatible with human dignity, and that it had to end.

That you stood up in Nairobi in 2026 to wrap France in the vocabulary of the very people your republic assassinated is not diplomacy, Macron. It is not even audacity in the ordinary sense of the term, because audacity implies some awareness of the risk being taken. What you demonstrated in Nairobi was something far more disturbing: the complete absence of the historical consciousness that would make such a statement dangerous to utter.

You said it with the ease of a man who has never truly confronted what his country, what his institutions, have done, because the systems protecting French historical memory from genuine accountability have functioned so effectively, for so long, that the truth was never forced upon you. The archives are managed, the schoolbooks are sanitized, and politicians are never seriously questioned about their crimes. And so you arrive in Nairobi with the confidence of someone who believes the past is truly past: the exclusive luxury of those who have never been forced to live inside its consequences.

The peoples of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger who organized themselves and expelled your military presence did not do so because they were manipulated by Russia, as your government’s communication apparatus suggested with insulting predictability. They did so because they possess what you so clearly lack: a functioning memory.

They remembered what French military presence had produced across decades of formal partnership, which was not security but the management of their insecurity in ways that served French strategic interests, not African human development. They looked at the evidence of what had been built under French tutelage and made a rational political assessment.

Pan Africanism is not a brand, Mr. Macron. Neither is it a diplomatic posture.

I want to be precise with you about what exactly you have stolen, because precision matters here in a way your speech in Nairobi suggests you do not understand. Pan Africanism is not a brand, Mr. Macron. Neither is it a diplomatic posture. Pan Africanism is a political tradition purchased with specific lives, at specific moments, in specific confrontations against specific powers, one of which was and remains France.

To claim it does not reposition France as a partner in African liberation. It desecrates the memory of every person France killed for practicing it. It is standing on the grave of Sylvanus Olympio and declaring that the institution that financed his assassination is now the guardian of his legacy. It is looking into the eyes of Thomas Sankara’s children and telling them that the government which armed their father’s assassin has now decided to speak in his name. Your remarks carry a level of indecency and cruelty rarely witnessed.

France is no longer what it once was, Mr. Macron, and that contraction is inseparable from everything I have described above. The credibility your republic once projected across this continent was never moral. It was never earned through the quality of the relationships it built or the genuine development it supported. It was maintained through dependency, through debt management, through currency control, through the selective protection of cooperative elites, and through the implicit, and sometimes explicit, threat of what happened to those who strayed too far beyond the permitted perimeter of African sovereignty.

When those mechanisms began to be exposed by Pan Africanists, when populations developed the historical consciousness and organizational capacity to name what had been done to them and demand its end, that credibility collapsed with remarkable speed.

It was Pan Africanism that defeated France in Africa.

And Pan Africanism will outlive your government, your republic, and the particular civilizational moment that made it possible for a French president to stand in Nairobi and utter the kind of statements you delivered last night without visible embarrassment. It has already survived empires, colonial administrations, structural adjustment programs, client regimes, and the assassinations deployed against it. It will continue to survive whatever comes next because it is not a political posture. It is the political expression of a refusal: the organized, theorized, historically rooted refusal of African peoples to accept the terms of their own diminishment.

That refusal began before your birth and it will continue long after you are forgotten.

And you, Emmanuel Macron, will become the most rapidly forgotten French president in the history of your republic, so profound have your political laziness, your historical illiteracy, and your moral emptiness made the work of decolonization infinitely easier for us. There is no greater accelerator for a cause than an enemy who advances it unknowingly.

Macron, you are not a Pan Africanist and you can never become one. You are the president of the nation that has done more than almost any other on this planet to ensure that Pan Africanism remained an unattainable dream. The least you could do, the absolute minimum demanded by honesty and history, is to remain silent.

A mouse does not become a cat simply because it failed to kill it. And France does not become the parent of Pan Africanism simply because it failed to destroy it. The failure of your project of destruction grants you no ownership over what you tried to erase. It grants you only the silence history reserves for the defeated who have not yet realized they have lost.

Farida Bemba Nabourema
A Disillusioned African Citizen!

This article was first published by Farida Nabourema on Medium and it is published here with permission of the writer.

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