FRANCOPHONE WEST AFRICA

The Westerners with their governors and generals have survived in a fashion in African tradition after 1960, objects of sullen scorn: ‘at last, it seemed, the land was rid of them, never to return’. There was one exception to this rule: ‘N'Gol’ was different, N'Gol being the name under which the ‘Man of Brazzaville’, Charles de Gaulle, was known in Gabon and elsewhere in French-speaking Africa. In Brazzaville in 1944 he had declared ‘the right of Africans to run their own affairs’, proving thereby that he was a sufficiently great personality to appreciate the potential of modern Africa and of Africans. His name and life were ‘a sacred seed which grew remarkably well in African soil’. In French-speaking Africa there developed a de Gaulle legend and myth. In December 1959 at St Louis, Senegal, de Gaulle interpreted his view of the Franco-African community and he did so with overtones which his African listeners, more so perhaps than was the case with politicians from other countries, recognized from the Bible in their chapels: ‘Abide with me, for it is towards evening and the day is far spent’ (Luke 24). He was thereby laying foundations for a policy ‘at the Summit’ which, much later in the day, in 1990, could be pursued by François Mitterrand in co-operation with the heads of Francophone African states.