Fraternité, égalité mais rien de Liberté
on Anthony Lovat in Bolgatanga (Ghana), 13/Feb/2011 13:25, 34 days ago
Most guide books to West Africa will state that a visa to enter Burkina Faso is available on the border with Ghana and can be obtained for the equivalent of about£12. This was true up until late last year when, without any warning or explanation, the cost was increased by over 1000%. Having obtained a visa valid for a year in the Burkina capital last February, we were still able to travel up to Ouagadougou to catch a plane home before Christmas. It is likely to be our last visit to Burkina Faso. Against all odds, the journey was fairly uneventful – a shared taxi to the border, a car to the nearest big town called Po and a short wait for the bus to Ouagadougou.The bus was crowded and I was crammed into the hard plastic seat next to a friendly young Burkinabe man called Albert on his way back to see his family in Ouagadougou. He was short, skinny and with a head that seemed too big for his tiny neck. He spoke good French and even a little English.“Ghana is peace country,” Albert kept repeating. “It is developed country – a democracy. Not like Burkina Faso.”He then launched into a vitriolic tirade against French imperialism. The French, he maintained, plundered all of the resources within Burkina Faso. They pick the country’s president. They post their troops to keep control. They do nothing for development.The bus had to take a sharp diversion off the main road to avoid the high street in a small market town. Policemen could be seen marching and carrying flags. I asked Albert what was happening. That day, he told me, happened to be the 50th anniversary of Burkina Faso’s independence from France (then known as Upper Volta).Ghana celebrated fifty years of independence in 2007. It was a heartfelt national celebration. Visit many Ghanaian homes today and there will usually be a souvenir of that day, often displayed prominently in a living room– perhaps a painting or a flag or a t-shirt or a key ring. Pictures from 2007 show a national day of revelling. Every town and village had flags flying. It was a day of music and dancing and drinking.“Wow,” I exclaimed, delighted to be in Burkina Faso on such a special day. “Congratulations!”Albert sniffed and looked scornfully at the marching policemen. Burkina Faso, he told me, is not independent. It is not a free country. There is, he emphasised, nothing to celebrate.Driving up the main road, nothing whatsoever appeared different. It was only once we’d entered the capital that we saw flags on lampposts and within roundabouts. Whilst having dinner that evening, the TV played music videos. There was no mention of the anniversary. On our way to the airport that evening, the taxi driver had to drop us off at a police road block just before the airport. Groups of young men stood around looking intimidating. We walked through the crowd wearing fixed smiles. I think that was the centre of national celebration. Nobody looked particularly happy.“The English colonies are better than the French,” Albert passionately continued during our bus journey. “Look at this place. Our capital city is like a village.”It is an attitude I have come across time and again in Burkina Faso and Mali, despite me citing such places as Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Young migrants from Burkina Faso, Mali, Togo, the Ivory Coast and Niger can be seen selling sunglasses, ice cream, rip-off DVDs and fake Calvin Klein jeans on the streets of Accra, Kumasi and even Bolga. I have asked many of them the question: why are they here in Ghana? In Ghana there is peace. In Ghana there is opportunity. In Ghana there is money.“The people here say that the English taught their colonies to work hard,” Madou, our guide in the Dogon Country of Mali, told us. “The French taught their colonies to have fun. I remember watching the World Cup, I think it was in 1990, and the English were playing Cameroon. There was an English striker called Gary Lineker. He broke his thumb but kept on playing the match. He even scored a goal with a broken thumb. The Cameroon players feared him. When I watched this man play football, I wished that the English had colonised Mali and not the French.”The French did not want to give up their empire and neither did the leaders of French West Africa. Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the leader of the Central African Republic, addressed Charles de Gaulle as“Papa” and believed Napoleon to be his “guide and inspiration”. Felix Houphouet-Boigny was Kwame Nkrumah’s contemporary in the Ivory Coast and, in stark contrast to the Ghanaian pan-Africanist, was particularly keen to remain part of a French Union. He was typical of French West African leaders of the time – educated first by an elite Catholic institution and later in a Parisian university. He was taught to reject his African heritage and to become, quite literally, French. He dreamed of turning the Ivory Coast into France-in-the-tropics. He even built a ridiculous Notre Dame Basilica in his new capital, Yamoussoukro. Completed in 1989, it is the tallest church in the world. Houphouet-Boigny is believed to have worked with the French secret service in having the Burkina Faso revolutionary leader, Thomas Sankara, assassinated in 1987. Sankara wanted to break ties with France and create a communist state similar to Cuba. The powers-that-be in French West Africa would not allow it to be so.Post-independence leaders of former British colonies, led by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and encouraged both in cash and kind by him, were politically far more nationalist than their counterparts in the French colonies. Their different politics reflected their different political beginnings. While Houphouet-Boigny was accepting a scholarship to study in Paris, Nkrumah was paying his own way through his university studies in the United States working as a labourer in a soap factory and a street fish seller. While Houphouet-Boigny was being courted by the French government and encouraged into leadership, the British colonial government locked Nkrumah away for stirring up trouble.The British lost their Gold Coast. Nkrumah won his Ghana. There is certain nobility in accepting defeat. The winds of change blew so Britain handed over power and left.The French won their French Union of small (and therefore weak) francophone states. They won mining rights and trade concessions. They control government policy and law. They train the military and police force. The African nationalists, such as Thomas Sankara, lost. As Albert told me on the bus to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso is not truly independent. To celebrate 50 years of Burkina Faso’s ‘independence’ is not the same as Ghana celebrating in 2007.“Just two weeks ago,” Madou seethed, “French paratroopers landed in Mali and captured some people they claim are Al Qaeda people in the desert. They did not tell the government of Mali, our government. They just went ahead and came into Malian territory with their guns and their helicopters. The Mali government is in the pocket of Sarkozy and the French. They issued a weak statement saying how they support action against terrorism. Can you imagine such a thing?! Can you imagine British troops parachuting into Ghana without telling anyone? The French do what they like in my country.”The English remember the World Cup in 1990 because Paul Gascoigne cried and we lost to the Germans in the semi-finals on penalties. We dwell on our sporting defeats but not so much on the losing of an empire. The last significant part of the empire I remember being‘handed back’ was Hong Kong in 1997. I remember seeing British people on the TV wearing Union Jack shirts, drinking and celebrating in the streets of Hong Kong. It looked like a big party rather than a withdrawal. There were fireworks. Imperial Britain belongs in the history books – the biggest and most unlikely empire the world has ever seen. Imperial France, however, is alive and kicking in francophone West Africa. The people who live under French colonial rule, such as Albert, are not fooled by phoney “independence” celebrations. They know who is in charge. With many of these countries remaining some of the poorest in the world, there are rumblings of discontent. It is no longer safe for westerners in general and French citizens in particular to travel north of Ouagadougou. Three French citizens were kidnapped last month in the Niger capital, Niamey. Timbuktu is now completely off limits. The Ivory Coast is in the midst of a power struggle and it is not safe to enter the country. The presidential loser has tried to discredit the incumbent by saying he is a stooge of France. He knows that the resentment is there. Having visited Burkina Faso and Mali and spoken to peoplethere, I also know that the resentment is there. Does France know?