With a joyous rumba-filled opening ceremony, the 10 days of Le Jeux de la Francophonie begin on Friday in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Staged every four years since 1989, and aimed at people aged 18 to 35 from French-speaking countries, the games include photography, dance and painting alongside weightlifting, running and cycling. It is presented as a utopian vision of a world where the French language is shared and not imposed – a fiction too many go along with.
At a time when many are trying to tear down Francafrique, as Haiti is pressing the case for reparations for the slave trade, and in the aftermath of the CFA Franc scandal, why are we celebrating so-called common values with the nation that once exploited us so badly?
Le Jeux de la Francophonie is meant to help shape our national sense of ourselves. The DRC – the world’s largest French-speaking country – is at war with the neighbouring French-speaking regime in Rwanda. The French, as well as Britain and the US, have continued to support Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, in spite of overwhelming evidence of Kigali’s involvement in crimes against humanity in DRC over the past 20 years, and Rwanda’s support for the Mouvement du 23 Mars (M23) militia, which has committed mass killings and rape and displaced more than 900,000 people from their homes.
Rwanda has not been thrown out of Francophonie – a loose group of French-speaking countries that seems to be just a thinly veiled attempt by France to keep a political hold on its former colonies – and Paris continues to refuse to push for the international criminal court to issue arrest warrants for Kagame.
The games were switched to Kinshasa after New Brunswick in Canada pulled out, citing costs that grew 664% to C$130m (£76m). They will be the fifth games to be organised on the African continent. Only two have been held in France and none in Belgium or Luxembourg – which have sizeable French-speaking populations. Because of Covid, the 2021 games were rescheduled to 2022 and then deferred until this year because DRC didn’t have the infrastructure to host the event.
“It is tough to get the resources to organise such events when you are a nation at war,” the DRC foreign minister, Christophe Lutundula, conceded last week. The Congolese government is said to have ploughed about US$30m (£23m) into staging the games, which will feature at least eight sports and 12 cultural events, involving 4,000 participants including top athletes from about 40 countries. Organisers hope the event will reach a global television audience of many millions.
Once the usual legacy promises about urban regeneration and sports participation are stripped away, though, are the games not an outdated waste of resources for a struggling country? What value does Francophonie have unless part of a genuine attempt to reckon with France’s subjugation and exploitation of black people and their land, and continued support of Africa’s strongmen such as Kagame?
Coined by the 19th-century French geographer and colonialist Onésime Reclus, the word Francophonie was the grand vision of the French colonial expansion. In his 1883 work, France, Algérie et Colonies, Reclus argued that France should concentrate on colonising Africa – a continent rich in natural resources, and where the overwhelming majority of the French-speaking population live today.
Reclus did such a good job of talking up French colonisation that at the end of the Berlin Conference in 1885, France took the largest slice of “the magnificent African cake”. In fact, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, France was the only former colonial power that maintained and expanded its reach in Africa. Nearly half of African countries were at one time French colonies or protectorates.
As athletes from 40 Francophonie nations compete on track and field in the coming days, Congolese people are dying as a result of the fighting in DRC that couldn’t have continued to the extent it has done since 1998 without, in part, France’s actions.
DRC should have left Francophonie years ago, and cancelled the games in protest.
• Vava Tampa is a freelance writer
