Racism, France and Afrika: Dr. Kwame Osei

The current Ivorian crisis which saw the removal from power of Laurent Gbagbo by White French mercenaries is yet another episode in the unsavory and barbaric nature of French imperialism in Afrika.
I wrote an article recently called “no smoke without fire” – parts of this article highlighted innate and callous French corruption in Afrika and cited the French multi-national ELF/TOTAL of playing a very sinister role of corrupter.
The French have a very dark past (and present) in Afrika and even want to as their other white brothers re-colonize Afrika. In a conference held by the French in Brazzaville in 1948 (and chaired by General De Gaulle), it was explicitly stated that “the establishment even in the distant future, of self-government in the colonies is to be avoided” (p.278, How Europe Under developed Africa: Walter Rodney) – meaning that the idea of even granting their former colonies political independence was unthinkable in French eyes let alone allowing these francophone states the opportunity to embark on a path of economic development and emancipation.
This is why the French inserted a wicked clause that in order for Francophone states in Afrika to be granted political independence, these states would have to surrender up to 90% of ALL their income to France and that the CFA franc HAD to be tied to the French Franc (now Euro) and that only French companies should be given government contracts in these francophone states and have a monopoly in terms of selling French goods and services – what a diabolical arrangement and this shows the evils of French imperialism in Afrika by forevermore making these Francophone states deeply impoverished and it is no surprise that Francophone countries are amongst the poorest 50 countries in the world.
Just like the Americans, British, Germans, Portuguese, Spanish, Belgians, Swedish, Dutch, Danish, Irish and so forth the French were big benefactors in the enslavement of Afrikan people.
There is no industry today in France including their banking industry that was not directly or indirectly conceived as a result of the massive profits France made from enslaving Afrikan people and their descendants.
Every aspect of French society from royalty to ordinary French folk was involved directly or indirectly in the trade in enslaving Afrikan people. French cities like Nantes, Bordeaux, Rouen, Paris and Le Havre were ALL slave ports where enslaved Afrikans were docked.

This means that the splendor of French cities and of its great buildings like Notre Dame Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower, the Elysee Palace, Sacre Coeur and even the Champs Elysee itself were built with the proceeds made from enslaving Afrikan people.
The French New World settlers outstripped the Americans in their greed for slave labor. When the U.S. acquired Louisiana from France, the first governor sent out from Washington reported back that, “No subject seems to be so interesting to the minds of the inhabitants of all parts of the country which I have visited as that of the importation of brute Negroes from Africa. This permission would go further with them, and better reconcile them to the government of the United States, than any other privilege that could be extended to this country. … White labourers, they say, cannot be had in this unhealthy climate.”
French interlopers had jumped into the trade in enslaving Afrikans in the early 16th century, a century before the first White American set sail for Africa. Nearly 200 ships bound for Sierra Leone sailed from three Norman ports between 1540 and 1578. A Portuguese renegade, sailing under the French flag as Jean Alphonse, was one of the pioneers of the “triangle trade” between Afrika, the “New World” and Europe.
The French government sought to promote plantation economies in its West Indies colonies. With capital, credit, technology — and enslaved Afrikans — borrowed from the Dutch, these islands began to thrive as sugar export centers. The Dutch established the first successful French sugar mill in 1655. By 1670, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and St. Christopher had 300 sugar estates.
Realizing Afrikans were the key to this, a monopoly Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, largely financed by the French state, was organized in 1664. A French fleet took many factories from the Dutch in Gorée and the Senegambia in the 1670s. In 1672, the French government offered a bounty of 10 livres per enslaved Afrikan transported to the French West Indies. This spurred the formation of a second monopoly company, Compagnie du Sénégal, founded in 1673. By 1679 it had 21 ships in operation.
French slavery totals in the 17th century were lower than they might have been due to incompetence, bankruptcies, and mismanagement and strict royal rules about buying from, or selling to, other empires. By the 1720s, however, French private traders had broken the monopolies and the trade in enslaving Afrikan people boomed under the French flag.
During the 1730s alone, the French shipped probably more than 100,000 enslaved Afrikans from Afrika. The French government raised the bounty per enslaved Afrikan delivered to 100 livres, and in 1787 upped it again to 160.
By the 1760s the average number of slave ships leaving French ports was 56 a year, which does not sound like a large number, but they were big ships, averaging 364 enslaved Afrikans per boat. The attendant horrors of the Middle Passage, of course, were multiplied in the bigger ships.
In 1767 the French overtook the British in sugar production for the first time.
Conditions on sugar plantations were brutal (though French sugar colonies were no better or worse than Spanish, Dutch, or British ones). During the eight-month sugar harvest, enslaved Afrikans sometimes worked continuously almost around the clock from sunrise till sunset and beyond.
Accidents caused by long hours and primitive machinery were horrible. In the big plantations, the captives lived in barracks; women were few and families nonexistent.
Compared to this, North American cotton plantation slavery featured much less ferocious labor and allowed family units to exist. This is one reason France required a steady flow of thousands of enslaved Afrikans a year — to replace the ones the French had viciously worked to death –.
Nantes by far was France’s leading slave port. Between 1738 and 1745, Nantes alone carried 55,000 enslaved Afrikans to the “New World” in 180 ships. All told, from 1713 to 1775 nearly 800 different vessels sailed from Nantes in the trade of enslaving Afrikans.
But Bordeaux, Le Havre, and La Rochelle were leaders in the trade, too. Saint-Malo, Harfleur, and Rouen also played a part. French slave ships bore such ironic names as Amitié (La Rochelle) and Liberté (belonging to Isaac Couturier in Bordeaux).
The novelist Chateaubriand’s father, of Saint-Malo, was active in the enslavement of Afrikans in the 1760s. In 1768, King Louis XV expressed his pleasure at the way “les négociants du Port de Bordeaux se livrent avec beaucoup de zèle au commerce de la traite des nègres.”
In the late 1660s, the French settled the abandoned western half of the island of Santo Domingo, and by the early 1680s this new colony, which the French called Saint-Dominguez, had 2,000 enslaved Afrikans.
By the 1740s, Saint-Dominguez had replaced Martinique as the French empire’s largest sugar producer. Its 117,000 enslaved Afrikans that year represented about half the 250,000 enslaved Afrikans in the French West Indies. Coffee, introduced in 1723, only made the plantations more profitable — and increased the demand for slaves.
By the late 1780s Saint Dominguez planters were recognized as the most efficient and productive sugar producers in the world. The population of enslaved Afrikans stood at 460,000 people, which was not only the largest of any island but represented close to half of the 1 million enslaved Afrikans then being held in all the Caribbean colonies.
The exports of the island represented two-thirds of the total value of all French West Indian exports, and alone were greater than the combined exports from the British and Spanish Antilles. In only one year well over 600 vessels visited the ports of the island to carry its sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo, and cacao to European consumers.” [Herbert S. Klein, "The Atlantic Slave Trade," Cambridge, 1999, p.33]
To keep the supply of enslaved Afrikans flowing, the French government had permanent establishments at the Senegal River and Whydah on the Gold Coast. French free traders worked seasonal camps from the Senegal to the Congo and even East Afrika, where they became serious competitors to the Portuguese in Mozambique.

The enslaved Afrikans they bought there went to the French Indian Ocean island colonies, which also were thriving on sugar exports.
Enslavement of Afrikans went deeper than this in French society. In the 17th century, the French navy galleons were manned by enslaved Afrikans. In 1679, the Senegal Company provided 227 enslaved Afrikans for this purpose.
Nor was their slaving activity limited to Afrika. As late as 1820s the French were engaged in a slave trade in Sumatra, on the island of Nias (in the news recently as an earthquake site), taking 1,000 enslaved Afrikans a year from there to Ile de Bourbon (modern Réunion).
The rise of the French trade in enslaving Afrikans meant the number of Afrikans living in France grew.
A law of 1716 clarified their position by allowing masters from the islands to keep their enslaved Afrikans captive while in France. But a law of 1738 decreed enslaved Afrikans could not stay in France more than three years, otherwise they would be confiscated by the Crown (and likely put to work on the royal navy’s galleys).
The motive for this was the French authorities’ eagerness to preserve their nation’s racial purity, as illustrated by a royal declaration of 1777 which forbade entry of any Afrikan into France because “they marry Europeans, they infect brothels, and colors are mixed.” The restrictions rarely were enforced, however, and six years after the 1777 decree a ministerial circulaire complained that blacks continued to be imported.
Until 1793, the French trade in enslaving Afrikans continued to receive a huge subsidy from the French government in the form of a bonus for every enslaved Afrikan landed. Nantes in fact enjoyed its best year ever as a slave city in 1790, sending forty-nine ships to Afrika. For the slave merchants in that politically radical city, the word “liberty” seems to have signified the idea that the enslavement of Afrikan people should be open to all.
Finally, in August 1791, the Assembly declared anyone who landed in France to be free, but it was too late to save Saint-Dominguez. The British had occupied the colony and re-instated the enslavement of Afrikan people, and by the time they handed it back to France at the Peace of Amiens (1802) the French had gotten over their flirtation with emancipation and were back in the business of enslaving Afrikans.

Saint-Dominguez fell in the only successful slave revolt in history when great Afrikan hero and strategist Toussaint L’Ouverture and his men defeated Napoleons’ army and was reborn as the free nation of Haiti and the French have never forgiven Haiti for this act and have virtually bankrupt the country by forcing it to pay inordinate taxes of around $40 billion.