Letter from a self-hating African to his beloved French brother
Pius Adesanmi puts Nicholas Sarkozy to task on France's foreign policy towards Africa
Dear President Sarkozy,
Happy new year. This is my second letter to you since you became the principal resident of the Elysée. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since I wrote my first letter to congratulate you on your election to the presidency of France and to offer a few mots de sagesse on how to successfully negotiate the intricacies of your new station. Your actions since I wrote that letter are clear indications that you agreed with some of my propositions and disagreed with others. That’s fine. That’s the essence of democracy. You must be able to disagree with me on occasion. There are certain aspects of that first letter I now wish to renounce. I wrote that letter as an African patriot who knows the history, language, and culture of France very well and who hates the uses to which those things were put in places like Indochina, Algeria, Madagascar, and so many places where your people displayed unsurpassable brutality. I wrote as someone who hated the France that participated in slavery, the France that colonized, the France that civilized, the France that tortured, the hypocritical France that still despises “le Black” and “le Beur” while parading Thierry Henry and Zinedine Zidane as its finest gifts to humanity in recent times.
I hated this France until very recently. Now I’ve seen the light! Like Doc Gynéco, I’ve fallen in love with the France of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the France of Charles Pasqua, the France of you, my brother, Nicolas Sarkozy. I take back every negative thing I’ve said, written or thought about my beloved France. Those were my days of ignorance. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! I have now washed myself clean of the blight of my uncivilized African origins. I no longer have any trace of the jungle left in me. I sleep and dream every day of my brand new Gallic ancestors. And as you know, I do not just speak French, I speak le Français de France, le Français du Français, le Français français just like brother Léon Damas of Guyana. You and I can now speak of our common heritage, our common history, our culture, and our civilization.
On the basis of our new, unimpeachable bond, I want to commend you for the valiant efforts you made to ensure that our compatriots, who were recently found guilty of child kidnapping and trafficking in Chad, were returned to us to serve their prison terms in Paris. It beats me that those uncivilized Africans would actually imagine that we would allow French criminals to serve jail time in Africa! Unimaginable. In N’Djamena of all places! Isn’t it insulting enough that dignified French criminals had to suffer the indignity of passing through an African judicial system and being treated like ordinary African criminals to boot? Imagine the emotional and psychological toll this treatment must have had on our criminals. I hope you will put pressure on the Chadian president to consider paying compensation to our criminals.
Really, these are times when I regret that we still haven’t found a proper replacement for my brother, the great Charles Foccart. There just will never be another Monsieur Afrique like him. He was a great man. He knew his Africa; he knew his Africans. They were like his children. When Charles Foccart handled Africa on behalf of La République, Africans were very well behaved children. Things would never have degenerated to a point where a whole Président de la République personally had to travel to Chad to secure the release of our criminals. One phone call from Foccart and Idriss Déby would have pissed in his pants. For more than three decades, Foccart raised and nurtured the boys who served us so well: Etienne Gnassingbé Eyadéma, Abdou Diouf, Paul Biya, Omar Bongo, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Mathieu Kérékou, Dennis Sassou Nguesso, Modibbo Kéita and so many others. Even Mobutu Sese Seko, who belonged to the Belgians, knew that his bread was buttered only when he recognized Foccart’s authority. Every family has a black sheep. Our black sheep in those days was Thomas Sankara who consistently misbehaved and reared his vegetable head on our path. Foccart arranged for him to be disciplined by Blaise Compaoré…
This brings me to my next point. In less than one year of your Presidency, you’ve visited Gabon, Senegal, Chad, and a few other places in Africa. In Senegal, you gave that great speech but Africans have reacted to it with characteristic ingratitude. No surprise here. They were never grateful for the civilization we took to them anyway. My point, however, is that you’re fraternizing too much and too frequently with Africans. It is one thing for us to make them happy by calling them partners in the Francophonie, it is another matter entirely if your behaviour begins to create the erroneous impression that the said partnership is, for us, anything more than the productive partnership between the horse and its rider. We must never forget that they are still subjects of our vast neocolony. Familiarity breeds contempt. We already have unpalatable consequences of your trips to Africa on our laps…
You have spent almost two precious decades of your public career waging a jihad against the immoral and amoral effects of the black and beur presence in our clean, pure, and intrinsically moral Aryan cities in France. You and I agree that every single problem of moral decadence and degeneracy one encounters in Paris, for instance, is attributable to the presence of those undesirable, hungry racaille from West Africa and the Maghreb. Just look at what they have turned neighbourhoods like Barbès and Belleville to! They are dirty, do not speak French, grow Islamic beards, wear Islamic foulard, marry too many wives, have too many concubines or “deuxieme bureau”, have too many children who drain our sécurité sociale. I’m not going to talk about your predecessor, Jacques Chirac, who complained, justifiably, about the “noise and odor” of these unwanted folks who invade our territoire national.
Of these undesirable attributes, polygamy, concubinage, and marital infidelity are the most alien to our pure, Christian, civilized Western culture. They are the most formidable indices of the primordial immorality of these people. This explains why your jihad against immigrants and sans-papiers has consisted in trying to demonstrate that they are just too steeped in their immoral and amoral cultures to be able to integrate fully into our civilized society. How does one expect a Malian or an Algerian not to have a harem of wives that makes a single family look like a football team? It’s their culture, not ours. How does one expect a Gabonese or a Togolese, who pretends to have only one wife, not to have a string of concubines scattered all over Paris? It’s their culture, not ours. How does one expect them not to cheat and lie? It’s their nature, not ours. The sacrosanct essence of marital vows, so fundamental in our culture, is completely alien to Africans and Arabs.
Given these incontrovertible facts, I’ve been trying to understand recent developments in your own life that are completely at odds with our culture. I am not talking about the much-publicized divorce between you and Cecilia. Divorce is the Siamese twin of marriage in our Western societies. The problem I have is with the time line of events. The mathematics is not working. No matter how one cuts it, slices it, spins it, the inevitable scenario is that you were seeing Carla Bruni – that stunning Italian model, your current girlfriend, and future Madame Sarkozy – long before you divorced Cecilia. Now, that looks awfully lot like you were cheating on Cecilia, lying to her. That looks awfully lot like you had a girlfriend or a concubine or a “deuxieme bureau”. At some point in this time line, you had a loose form of polygamy going on. Now, you have spent an entire career explaining to the world that such behaviour – the idea of polygamy, concubinage, deuxieme bureau, marital infidelity, etc – is alien to our pure Aryan culture and can be found only in the immoral and amoral cultures of folks from West Africa and the Maghreb. Do you see my problem now? Already, some mischievous African immigrants, who have resisted full cultural integration ferociously for a very long time, are now saying that if Sarkozy’s lifestyle is emblematic of Western culture, they won’t mind integrating at all! It seems to me that you are degrading our culture by making it look like the culture of Africans.
In my search for explanations, I have come up with a brilliant thesis. Since your degenerate behavior of rotating droits de cuissage (conjugal duties) between Cecilia and Carla is completely alien to our culture, you must have caught the virus during your frequent trips to Africa. I think you caught what Americans call jungle fever. Definitely, Africans are to blame for your behavior. Since you know their history so well – as your Dakar lecture reveals – you must know that the pages of our colonial library are littered with the ghosts of Europeans who ventured into the Dark Continent - the white man’s grave - and were physically and metaphorically eaten up. Those who did not die lost their minds and their souls to the degeneracy of Africa. Something about the environment, the mosquitoes, the heat, the humidity, and the incomprehensible roar of jungle drums destroys the moral compass of Europeans who venture into Africa. In your own case, you went to Africa, lost the purity of our culture, and came back a lying, quasi-polygamist, two-timing … (let’s leave the four words that would have followed to Americans).
I am trying to start an NGO in Paris. Our aim will be to sensitize our compatriots to these things and to ensure that no future President of France will ever set foot in Africa. The risks aren’t just worth the gains. This, I hope, will be my contribution to my new home, my new culture, my new society, and my new country: France!
Yours in Francophilia,
Pius Adesanmi
* Pius Adesanmi is Associate Professor of English and Director, Project on New African Literatures ( at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Apart from his academic work, Dr. Adesanmi publishes opinion articles regularly in various internet fora. He runs a regular blog for The Zeleza Post ( www.projectponal.com
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