France's Colonial Tax:
14 Nations Still Pay for Their Own Colonization

In November 1884, the major European powers convene in Berlin to divide Africa among themselves. No African is present. Over three months, Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, and others draw lines across the continent — cutting through existing kingdoms, ethnic boundaries, and trade networks with no reference to the people who lived there. The result: 14 nations claim sovereignty over a continent none of them had fully explored, let alone controlled.

France claims the largest single territory: a vast swath of West and Central Africa that would become French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa — covering modern-day Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Benin, Chad, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Republic of the Congo, Gabon, and others. France extracts labor, resources, and soldiers from these territories for the next 75 years. Between 600,000 and 800,000 Africans serve in the French military in World War I and II combined. Their nations remain colonies throughout.

In 1945, France creates the CFA franc — the franc des colonies françaises d'Afrique (franc of the French colonies of Africa), later rebranded as the franc de la Communauté financière africaine (franc of the African Financial Community). As France's African colonies gain nominal independence between 1958 and 1960, they are not given a choice about the currency. Continued use of the CFA franc is a condition of independence.

The terms of the CFA franc arrangement, as written, require member nations to:

1. Deposit 50% of their foreign currency reserves in the French Treasury in Paris (raised at some points to 65%). The nations can draw on these reserves, but France holds and manages them. African governments do not control their own money.

2. Maintain a fixed exchange rate with the French franc (later the euro). This sounds like stability — and France presents it as a benefit. The reality: the fixed rate makes African exports permanently expensive and imports from France permanently cheap, structurally inhibiting industrialization.

3. Grant France first right of refusal on any natural resource extraction in the former colonial territories. Before African nations can seek other buyers or partners, France must be offered the deal first.

4. Give French companies priority in government contracts for infrastructure and development projects — meaning France continues to profit from building infrastructure in countries it colonized.

In exchange, France guarantees the currency's convertibility and provides a stable monetary framework. For poor nations with limited institutional capacity, this looks like a benefit. It functions as a leash.

The CFA franc arrangement is not voluntary in any meaningful sense. The leaders who tried to exit it did not survive long. The pattern is documented:

Sékou Touré, Guinea (1958): Guinea is the only French colony to vote "no" in de Gaulle's 1958 referendum on joining the French Community. When Touré says no and demands full independence, France responds immediately: French administrators remove all equipment from government offices — pulling out telephones, files, and furniture. France destroys infrastructure it cannot take. It prints counterfeit Guinean currency to destabilize the new government's economy. No other French colony attempts to follow Guinea's path.

Sylvanus Olympio, Togo (1963): Olympio is the first president of independent Togo. He refuses to join the CFA franc zone and creates Togo's own currency to capture the nation's economic sovereignty. On January 13, 1963 — three days before Togo was to begin printing its own money — Olympio is assassinated in a military coup. The lead assassin, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, had trained in the French military. His son rules Togo to this day. Togo rejoins the CFA franc zone.

Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso (1987): Sankara becomes president in 1983 and proceeds to name French neocolonialism directly from the podium of the United Nations. He refuses to pay Burkina Faso's IMF debt, arguing it was incurred by colonial governments and the people should not pay it. He bans luxury car imports. He renames the country (from Upper Volta, its French colonial name). He begins redistributing land from French-backed feudal structures to peasants. He refuses IMF structural adjustment programs. On October 15, 1987, Sankara is assassinated in a coup led by his former ally Blaise Compaoré — a man with documented ties to French intelligence. Compaoré rules Burkina Faso for 27 years. Sankara's economic policies are immediately reversed.

France maintains a permanent military presence across its former African colonies — a network of bases, troops, and intervention capacity that has been used in at least 50 military interventions in Africa since 1960. This is not a peacekeeping force. It is a stability guarantee for governments that maintain the CFA franc arrangement and French business interests.

The system has a name: Françafrique — a term coined sarcastically by Félix Houphouët-Boigny, longtime president of Ivory Coast (and France's most reliable ally on the continent), and later turned into an indictment by critics. It describes the network of personal relationships between French presidents and African heads of state, French intelligence services and African security forces, French companies and African resource contracts, that operates alongside and often instead of official diplomacy.

The economic numbers are stark. France's 14 CFA franc zone nations together hold approximately 500 billion CFA francs in the French Treasury at any given time — money that France uses to finance its own operations and that earns a below-market interest rate before being returned, on demand, to African governments. Multiple African economists and the African Union have called this arrangement a form of ongoing colonization. France calls it monetary cooperation.

In 2019, Ivory Coast president Alassane Ouattara and French president Emmanuel Macron announce a reform: the CFA franc in West Africa will be renamed the "eco" and African nations will no longer be required to deposit reserves in the French Treasury. The announcement is widely celebrated in Western media as the end of the colonial currency arrangement. Critics note that the fixed exchange rate with the euro remains, France retains representation on the monetary governing board, and the structural constraints on industrialization are unchanged. The name changes. The architecture does not.

Meanwhile, a wave of military coups sweeps the Sahel — and each coup government expels French troops and announces withdrawal from the CFA franc system. Mali (2020, 2021), Burkina Faso (2022), Niger (2023), and Guinea (2021) all undergo coups whose new governments explicitly frame their actions as anti-French and anti-CFA. French military operations are ordered out. Russian Wagner Group forces (and later Russian state military) fill the vacuum. The populations in each country, by polling data, broadly support the expulsions of French forces — whatever their views on the coups themselves.

By 2024, France has lost its military presence in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Senegal, and the Central African Republic — nations it had garrisoned for 60 years. The withdrawal is not voluntary. France is being pushed out by the governments it used to install. Whether the exit from Françafrique improves life for West Africans or simply trades one external power for another remains to be seen. What is no longer deniable is the premise: that Africa's relationship with France was never between equals, and that Africans are now, in growing numbers, choosing to end it.

The France-Africa story connects directly to threads this site has already told. When people ask why Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, the answer runs through France: Haiti paid $21 billion in reparations to France for the "loss" of enslaved people over 122 years, which crippled its development before the 20th century had even begun. France's treatment of Haiti is the same logic as France's treatment of its African colonies — extraction rationalized as civilization, continued through financial instruments rationalized as cooperation.

It also connects to the story of African Americans. The same European powers that enslaved Africans and shipped them to the Americas are the powers that then carved up Africa at Berlin and continued extracting from it for another 140 years. The poverty of the African continent — which Western media presents as a natural condition or the result of African failure — is the predictable output of a system designed to prevent African accumulation. Understanding why sub-Saharan Africa is poor requires understanding the CFA franc, the Berlin Conference, the assassinations of Sankara and Olympio, and the 50 French military interventions since 1960.

The chain does not stop at the water's edge. It runs from the slave ship through the colonial office through the currency board in Paris to the coup-proofed president in Ouagadougou — and it is still running today.