2024/06/20 by Global Africa
paper · doi:10.57832/ct81-8r05
There is a wind of change blowing in the air in Africa. There has been, for the past two decades a growing call for decolonization, manifested in the second decade of the 20th century by civil society movements such as Y en A Marre in Senegal, le balai citoyen in Burkina Faso, la Lucha and Filimbi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa, etc. These movements have been particularly powerful in raising awareness and developing mass consciousness through their strong critique of the kleptocratic postcolonial state. They are also equally important given their radical critique of the Colonial Matrix of Power and its corollary, in Francophone Africa, la Françafrique, the neocolonial relationship between France and its former colonies. The renewed decolonial consciousness that was amplified by these movements on the continent has reached a new height in the past 5 years. In Guinea, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali, for example, the critique of the post-colonial state, has in the eyes of some people, legitimized the coup d’états that placed, at the head of these countries, military officers, who have anchored their political rhetoric on an anti-colonial, more precisely, an anti-France message leading, at times, to the severance of diplomatic ties with the former colonizer.