Niger's military junta has just suspended ten French media organizations, including Agence France-Presse and France 24, and that decision opens an enormous conversation about French colonialism in West Africa, the so-called Françafrique, and the wave of coups reshaping the continent. Fletcher and Octavio dig into why the Sahel is expelling France, who is filling the vacuum, and what it all means for journalism and history.
La junta militar de Níger acaba de suspender diez medios de comunicación franceses, entre ellos la Agencia France-Presse y France 24, y esa decisión abre una conversación enorme sobre el colonialismo francés en África Occidental, la llamada Françafrique y la ola de golpes de Estado que está redibujando el continente. Fletcher y Octavio van al fondo de por qué el Sahel está expulsando a Francia, quién está ocupando su lugar y qué significa todo esto para el periodismo y la historia.
5 essential C1-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| golpista | person or movement involved in a coup; coup (as adjective) | El régimen golpista expulsó a los periodistas extranjeros en las primeras horas tras tomar el poder. |
| caldo de cultivo | breeding ground; fertile environment for something to develop | La pobreza extrema y la corrupción son el caldo de cultivo perfecto para la inestabilidad política. |
| poder blando | soft power | Francia usó sus medios de comunicación como instrumento de poder blando en sus antiguas colonias africanas. |
| abonado | fertilized; primed; prepared (figuratively, of conditions or terrain) | El terreno estaba abonado para el descontento después de décadas de desigualdad económica. |
| coartada | alibi; cover story; pretext | El discurso anticolonialista sirvió de coartada para justificar medidas autoritarias contra la prensa libre. |
Niger's junta just banned AFP from the country.
AFP.
Agence France-Presse, one of the oldest news wire services on earth, and they shut it down along with nine other French outlets including France 24, citing, quote, public order.
Claro, pero si conoces la historia de la relación entre Francia y sus antiguas colonias africanas, esto no es una sorpresa, Fletcher.
Of course, but if you know the history of the relationship between France and its former African colonies, this is not a surprise, Fletcher.
Es la consecuencia lógica de algo que lleva décadas construyéndose.
It's the logical consequence of something that has been building for decades.
Lo que ocurre en Níger ahora mismo no es un accidente;
What's happening in Niger right now is not an accident;
es el final de un modelo que nunca funcionó para los africanos.
it's the end of a model that never worked for Africans.
Walk me through it.
Because I covered West Africa briefly in the late nineties, and I remember this palpable French presence, the language, the currency, the military bases.
But I want to hear you lay out the whole structure.
Empecemos por el principio.
Let's start from the beginning.
Francia colonizó una parte enorme de África Occidental y Central desde finales del siglo XIX.
France colonized an enormous part of West and Central Africa from the late nineteenth century.
En 1960, cuando la mayoría de esas colonias se independizaron, Charles de Gaulle negoció una serie de acuerdos secretos con los nuevos gobiernos africanos que básicamente perpetuaron la dependencia francesa bajo otra forma.
In 1960, when most of those colonies became independent, Charles de Gaulle negotiated a series of secret agreements with the new African governments that basically perpetuated French dependence under a different name.
That's the system that eventually got called Françafrique.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
El término lo acuñó el propio presidente marfileño Félix Houphouët-Boigny en los años sesenta, en sentido positivo, para describir la amistad entre Francia y África.
The term was coined by Ivorian president Félix Houphouët-Boigny himself in the sixties, with a positive meaning, to describe the friendship between France and Africa.
Con el tiempo, la palabra se convirtió en un insulto porque describía algo muy distinto: redes de corrupción, líderes africanos mantenidos en el poder a cambio de lealtad a París, intervenciones militares francesas para proteger a sus aliados, y empresas francesas con acceso privilegiado a los recursos naturales del continente.
Over time, the word became an insult because it described something very different: corruption networks, African leaders kept in power in exchange for loyalty to Paris, French military interventions to protect allies, and French companies with privileged access to the continent's natural resources.
The franc CFA is the clearest piece of that machinery.
I remember explaining it to an editor once and watching their face go through about five stages of disbelief.
Y con razón.
And rightly so.
Imagina que te independizas de tu metrópoli colonial, pero sigues utilizando una moneda controlada por el banco central de ese país, con el cincuenta por ciento de tus reservas de divisas depositadas obligatoriamente en el Tesoro francés.
Imagine that you become independent from your colonial power, but you continue using a currency controlled by that country's central bank, with fifty percent of your foreign exchange reserves compulsorily deposited in the French Treasury.
Durante décadas, eso fue exactamente lo que ocurrió con catorce países africanos.
For decades, that is exactly what happened with fourteen African countries.
Técnicamente eran soberanos;
Technically they were sovereign;
en la práctica, su política monetaria la diseñaban en París.
in practice, their monetary policy was designed in Paris.
And Níger sits at the center of something else that made France especially reluctant to let go: uranium.
Ahí está la clave.
There's the key.
Níger es uno de los mayores productores de uranio del mundo, y durante décadas la empresa francesa Areva, hoy llamada Orano, extrajo ese uranio en condiciones que muchos nigerinos consideraban escandalosamente desiguales.
Niger is one of the world's largest uranium producers, and for decades the French company Areva, now called Orano, extracted that uranium under conditions that many Nigeriens considered scandalously unequal.
Francia obtiene aproximadamente el setenta y cinco por ciento de su electricidad de la energía nuclear.
France gets approximately seventy-five percent of its electricity from nuclear energy.
Sin el uranio del Sahel, esa ecuación se complica enormemente.
Without Sahel uranium, that equation becomes enormously complicated.
So you have a country sitting on one of the most strategically valuable minerals on earth, and for most of its independent history it's been one of the poorest countries on earth.
That gap is the story, isn't it.
Es exactamente la historia.
That is exactly the story.
Y esa contradicción, vivir encima de una riqueza enorme y no ver casi nada de ella, es el caldo de cultivo perfecto para el resentimiento político.
And that contradiction, living on top of enormous wealth and seeing almost none of it, is the perfect breeding ground for political resentment.
No estoy justificando los golpes de Estado, quiero que quede claro.
I'm not justifying coups, I want to be clear about that.
Pero sería ingenuo no ver la conexión entre décadas de frustración acumulada y lo que está pasando ahora.
But it would be naive not to see the connection between decades of accumulated frustration and what is happening now.
Let's talk about the coup itself, July 2023, because the sequence of events across the Sahel in recent years is remarkable.
Mali 2021, Burkina Faso 2022, then Niger.
Three countries, three coups, all of them turning against France almost immediately afterward.
La velocidad con la que los tres nuevos gobiernos golpistas expulsaron a las tropas francesas y pidieron la salida de los embajadores fue llamativa.
The speed with which all three new coup governments expelled French troops and demanded the departure of ambassadors was striking.
En Mali, el gobierno de transición exigió la retirada de la operación Barkhane, la misión antiterrorista francesa de cinco mil soldados que llevaba casi una década en el Sahel.
In Mali, the transitional government demanded the withdrawal of Operation Barkhane, the French five-thousand-soldier counterterrorism mission that had been in the Sahel for almost a decade.
En Burkina Faso, lo mismo.
In Burkina Faso, the same.
En Níger, en cuestión de semanas después del golpe, las calles de Niamey se llenaron de manifestantes con banderas rusas.
In Niger, within weeks of the coup, the streets of Niamey were filled with protesters carrying Russian flags.
And Wagner, now rebranded as the Africa Corps, moved in almost immediately.
I find myself wondering, every time I read about this, how much of the anti-French sentiment is organic and how much of it is being actively cultivated by Russian information operations.
Esa pregunta es legítima pero creo que contiene un error de fondo.
That question is legitimate but I think it contains a fundamental error.
Sí, Rusia lleva años realizando campañas de desinformación en el Sahel, con granjas de trolls, con medios de comunicación afines como RT en francés y Africa News.
Yes, Russia has been running disinformation campaigns in the Sahel for years, with troll farms, with affiliated media like RT in French and Africa News.
Pero si el terreno no hubiera estado ya abonado por décadas de descontento real, esas campañas no habrían funcionado tan bien.
But if the ground had not already been fertilized by decades of real discontent, those campaigns would not have worked so well.
La desinformación necesita una semilla de verdad para crecer.
Disinformation needs a seed of truth to grow.
That's a fair distinction.
The raw material was always there, Russia just learned how to light it.
Hay un dato histórico que creo que mucha gente no conoce: Francia intervino militarmente en sus antiguas colonias africanas más de cincuenta veces entre 1960 y el año 2000.
There is a historical fact that I think many people don't know: France intervened militarily in its former African colonies more than fifty times between 1960 and the year 2000.
Cincuenta veces.
Fifty times.
Lo que se conoce como las guerras de bolsillo de Francia en África.
What are known as France's pocket wars in Africa.
Y en la mayoría de los casos, el objetivo no era la democracia ni la seguridad regional;
And in most cases, the objective was not democracy or regional security;
era proteger al líder que más convenía a los intereses franceses.
it was to protect the leader who best served French interests.
Fifty.
I knew the number was significant but I'd never had it land quite like that.
That's essentially an average of nearly two a year for four decades.
Y cuando ves esa cifra, empiezas a entender por qué la palabra soberanía tiene un peso emocional tan distinto en Bamako o en Niamey que en París.
And when you see that number, you begin to understand why the word sovereignty carries such different emotional weight in Bamako or Niamey than it does in Paris.
Para un nigerino de cuarenta años, la soberanía no es un concepto abstracto del derecho internacional;
For a forty-year-old Nigerien, sovereignty is not an abstract concept of international law;
es algo que su país nunca ha ejercido del todo.
it's something their country has never fully exercised.
Now, the banning of AFP and France 24 specifically, that's a press freedom issue but it's also a very deliberate symbolic act.
What do you read in that choice?
Because you could ban a dozen things if you wanted to consolidate power, but you go after the media.
Los golpistas son muy conscientes del papel que jugaron los medios de comunicación franceses en la narrativa sobre el Sahel durante décadas.
The coup leaders are very aware of the role French media played in the narrative about the Sahel for decades.
France 24 y la AFP no son percibidas en esa región como medios neutrales, sino como extensiones del poder blando francés, lo que los franceses llaman la politique de la langue, la política de la lengua.
France 24 and AFP are not perceived in that region as neutral outlets, but as extensions of French soft power, what the French call la politique de la langue, the politics of language.
Controlar el relato es parte de la estrategia de legitimación del nuevo gobierno.
Controlling the narrative is part of the new government's legitimization strategy.
Which I understand as a political calculation, even if it's also deeply troubling.
I've spent enough time in places where the press was being pushed out to know that the first casualty is always the local journalist trying to report on local conditions.
Completamente de acuerdo, y ese es el aspecto más oscuro de todo esto.
Completely agreed, and that is the darkest aspect of all this.
La junta no solo expulsa a los medios franceses;
The junta is not only expelling French media;
también reprime a los periodistas nigerinos independientes.
it is also suppressing independent Nigerien journalists.
Hay reporteros que han sido detenidos, emisoras locales que han sido cerradas.
There are reporters who have been detained, local radio stations that have been closed.
El anticolonialismo se convierte muy rápidamente en una coartada para el autoritarismo.
Anti-colonialism very quickly becomes a cover story for authoritarianism.
Let's zoom out to what this means for France's position in Africa more broadly.
Because this isn't just Níger.
Emmanuel Macron has given several speeches in recent years acknowledging that the old model is finished, but I'm not sure the French foreign policy establishment has actually internalized that.
Macron ha pronunciado los discursos correctos, sí.
Macron has given the right speeches, yes.
Ha hablado de una relación nueva, de igual a igual, sin paternalismo.
He has spoken of a new relationship, of equals, without paternalism.
Pero las instituciones no cambian con los discursos.
But institutions don't change with speeches.
Francia todavía tiene bases militares en Chad, en Yibuti, en Costa de Marfil.
France still has military bases in Chad, in Djibouti, in Ivory Coast.
El franco CFA fue reformado ligeramente en 2019 pero sigue existiendo.
The CFA franc was slightly reformed in 2019 but it still exists.
Hay una enorme brecha entre la retórica y la realidad estructural.
There is an enormous gap between the rhetoric and the structural reality.
Chad is the one I keep watching.
Because if N'Djamena goes the way of Bamako and Niamey, France loses its last significant military foothold in the region.
Y lo que complica todo aún más es que la alternativa no es el vacío.
And what complicates everything even further is that the alternative is not a vacuum.
Rusia está ahí, China también con sus inversiones en infraestructura, y en algunos países la presencia turca está creciendo.
Russia is there, China too with its infrastructure investments, and in some countries Turkish presence is growing.
El Sahel no va a quedarse sin patrocinadores externos;
The Sahel is not going to be left without external sponsors;
simplemente está eligiendo nuevos.
it is simply choosing new ones.
Y esa elección tiene consecuencias geopolíticas que van mucho más allá de quién puede emitir las noticias en Niamey.
And that choice has geopolitical consequences that go far beyond who can broadcast the news in Niamey.
I spent time in the late nineties watching the United States make that same miscalculation in Central Asia, the assumption that if you push out one power a friendly vacuum will somehow appear.
It never does.
Power abhors a vacuum as reliably as physics.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y hay un elemento que creo que se subestima mucho en el análisis occidental: la demografía.
And there is an element that I think is greatly underestimated in Western analysis: demographics.
Níger tiene la tasa de natalidad más alta del mundo.
Niger has the highest birth rate in the world.
Para 2050, tendrá más habitantes que Francia.
By 2050, it will have more inhabitants than France.
Los jóvenes nigerinos que hoy ven banderas rusas en las calles de Niamey no tienen ningún recuerdo emocional de la Guerra Fría, no sienten ninguna gratitud por las tropas francesas que combatieron a los yihadistas, solo ven décadas de pobreza y lo que consideran humillación.
The young Nigeriens who today wave Russian flags in the streets of Niamey have no emotional memory of the Cold War, feel no gratitude toward French troops who fought jihadists, they only see decades of poverty and what they consider humiliation.
That demographic point is one that European policymakers genuinely don't seem to have grappled with yet.
You're describing a continent that is getting younger and more populous while Europe ages, and the political energy that comes from that is going to be enormous.
Y no solo la energía política.
And not just political energy.
La presión migratoria, la competencia por los recursos naturales que necesita la transición energética europea, el litio, el cobalto, el uranio, todo eso va a requerir una relación muy diferente entre Europa y África.
The migratory pressure, the competition for the natural resources that Europe's energy transition needs, lithium, cobalt, uranium, all of that is going to require a very different relationship between Europe and Africa.
O Europa aprende a negociar como igual, o los africanos buscarán socios que lo hagan.
Either Europe learns to negotiate as an equal, or Africans will look for partners who will.
There's something almost poetic and not in a good way about the fact that it's the press that becomes the front line of this rupture.
Because that's where the contest over how events get described, who decides what is true, who holds the narrative, that's where it becomes most visible.
Bien dicho.
Well said.
Y hay un antecedente histórico directo que merece recordarse: cuando los países latinoamericanos se independizaron en el siglo XIX, una de las primeras batallas fue también la del relato.
And there is a direct historical precedent worth remembering: when Latin American countries became independent in the nineteenth century, one of the first battles was also that of the narrative.
Quién contaba la historia de la independencia, quién definía al héroe y al villano, quién controlaba los periódicos.
Who told the story of independence, who defined the hero and the villain, who controlled the newspapers.
Los nigerinos de hoy están peleando exactamente esa misma batalla, solo que con smartphones y con TikTok.
Nigeriens today are fighting exactly that same battle, only with smartphones and TikTok.
You know what that framing makes me think of?
Something I wrote about twenty years ago, a piece on the post-colonial press in Southeast Asia and how a lot of newly independent governments treated the foreign press as a kind of latent occupation.
The fear wasn't just what journalists would report;
it was that the frame itself was an act of power.
Sí, y eso es verdad aunque el gobierno que lo invoca sea autoritario y esté instrumentalizando ese argumento.
Yes, and that is true even when the government invoking it is authoritarian and instrumentalizing that argument.
El hecho de que la junta de Níger use esa lógica de forma oportunista no significa que la lógica sea falsa.
The fact that Niger's junta uses that logic opportunistically does not mean the logic is false.
Las mejores mentiras siempre contienen una verdad.
The best lies always contain a truth.
Right.
Holding two things at once: France's relationship with its former colonies was extractive and sometimes deeply cynical.
And the junta now using that history as cover for shutting down independent media is also wrong.
Both are true.
Esa capacidad de sostener dos verdades a la vez es exactamente lo que le falta al debate público sobre África, tanto en Europa como en muchos países africanos.
That ability to hold two truths at once is exactly what is missing from the public debate about Africa, both in Europe and in many African countries.
O eres colonialista o eres anticolonialista.
Either you are a colonialist or you are anti-colonialist.
O defiendes a Francia o defiendes a la junta.
Either you defend France or you defend the junta.
Y la realidad, como siempre, es más complicada y más interesante.
And the reality, as always, is more complicated and more interesting.
Oye, before we let this go, I want to ask you about something you said earlier.
You used the word golpistas.
And I know what it means from context, coup leaders, but it struck me because English doesn't really have that word.
We say coup leaders, or junta, or military government, and none of them feel quite right.
Es que golpista tiene algo que ninguna de esas traducciones captura del todo.
Golpista has something that none of those translations fully captures.
Viene de golpe de Estado, claro, pero como adjetivo o sustantivo describe a la persona o al movimiento mismo: el general golpista, las fuerzas golpistas, el gobierno golpista.
It comes from golpe de Estado, of course, but as an adjective or noun it describes the person or the movement itself: the coup general, the coup forces, the coup government.
No solo dice lo que hicieron, sino lo que son.
It doesn't just say what they did, it says what they are.
Tiene una carga política implícita que en español nadie tiene que explicar.
It has an implicit political weight that nobody in Spanish has to explain.
That's the thing about political vocabulary.
Spanish apparently decided early that you need a word that sticks.
In English you have to construct it every time, and something gets lost in that construction.
Y cuando un idioma tiene la palabra, la gente la usa con más facilidad, lo cual significa que el concepto circula con más libertad en el debate público.
And when a language has the word, people use it more easily, which means the concept circulates more freely in public debate.
En Latinoamérica, donde los golpes de Estado han sido una realidad durante dos siglos, el idioma simplemente se adaptó.
In Latin America, where coups have been a reality for two centuries, the language simply adapted.
La lengua refleja lo que una sociedad ha tenido que nombrar con frecuencia.
A language reflects what a society has had to name frequently.
Which is a slightly uncomfortable thought.
English not having that word might just mean we haven't needed it in the same way.
Though some mornings lately I wonder.
Te voy a regalar la palabra, Fletcher.
I'll give you the word as a gift, Fletcher.
Y espero que no tengas que usarla demasiado pronto.
And I hope you don't have to use it too soon.