When Islamist forces carried out a series of military coups in Central Africa - Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso - with the open support of the Wagnerian Russians, two narratives emerged in the media. Pro-Russian sees a popular uprising against French neo-colonialism linked to local corrupt elites. Meanwhile, the Western media sees aspects of a grand conspiracy by Islamists and Russia to establish an anti-Western and anti-liberal empire in Central Africa. Both narratives are right - to an extent.
It is true that France exercised subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) neo-colonial rule over its former colonies in West and Central Africa. After France granted them independence in the 1960s, peacefully, it continued to exert economic, political and military influence in la Françafrique. Of all the former colonial powers, France maintains the largest military presence in Africa; forces African countries to favor French interests and companies in public procurement and tenders. It imposed the African Financial Community (CFA) monetary zone on its former colonies, which is inherently unequal and rooted in exploitative practices.
However, it is clear that the "anti-colonial" uprisings in Central Africa are even worse than French neo-colonialism. The future they bring is the future of failed states like Zimbabwe and Myanmar: authoritarian military rule; economic regression into deeper poverty from which only the new and corrupt elite profit; ideological fundamentalism combined with rejection of "colonial" influences such as gay rights. Authentic emancipatory leaders like Tomas Sankara in Burkina Faso are a distant memory. How is it possible that most of Africa finds itself in such a desperate situation, where the only choice is between bad (Western neo-colonialism) and worse (false authoritarian anti-colonialism)? The recent military coup in Gabon was a revolt against both evils, where President Ali Bongo was removed with the knowledge that this time the French military would not interfere.
One must have the courage to reject the simple explanation that a better scenario lacks the mobilization of the people. If there's a lesson from the latest right-wing protests, it's that the time has come to reverse Abraham Lincoln's famous line: "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time." But you can't fool all the people all the time." A modern version reads: "All people can get away with being cheated occasionally, and some people can get away with being cheated all the time. But not all people can avoid being deceived all the time."
Any truly emancipatory engagement of the people is a rare event that quickly dissolves, and not only when it comes to Western democracy. Let's remember how during the period of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong sent thousands of intellectuals to agricultural communes to learn from ordinary villagers, whom he elevated to "subjects who should know". It can be said that it was good for the intellectuals to get acquainted with the real life in the countryside - but they did not gain a deeper wisdom about the society.
How to explain that there is no privileged group that has an authentic understanding of society? We will try in two steps. The first myth to dispel is the myth of meritocracy: regardless of your social position at birth, society should offer enough opportunity and mobility to combine talent with effort to achieve success. In her book Against Meritocracy (2017), Jo Littler showed that meritocracy is a key means of legitimating contemporary neoliberal culture and that while it promises opportunities, it actually creates new forms of social division, as class, race and gender continue to play a much more important role. To these factors should be added one heterogeneous one, chance. In Success and Luck: Luck and the Myth of Meritocracy (2016), Robert Frank does not dismiss the importance of hard work, but shows that, among groups of high-performing people, chance (luck) plays a huge role in individual success.
If, then, an individual's wealth and social power do not reflect his merits, what is the alternative? For most critics of meritocracy, the alternative is to trust the majority of ordinary people of no particular merit: however manipulated and brainwashed they may be by religious or ethnic fundamentalism, in the long run their spontaneous sense of justice will prevail. In short, critics of meritocracy tend to advocate some version of Lincoln's dictum.
Unfortunately, the complexity of today's world leads us to reject that trust in people. How can an ordinary, poor person decide when they are bombarded daily with conflicting reports about global warming? Should she advocate for measures that will push her deeper into poverty in the short term? When immigrants arrive, how can we blame that person for seeing them as a threat to their established way of life? Can we blame her if, in her limited worldview, she does not understand that she is somehow complicit in the neo-colonial exploitation of Third World countries? These questions go on and on: can we blame our person for being confused by media debates about gender pronouns? And aren't most of us, including intellectual elites, caught in similar loops, unable to arrive at what the philosopher Fredric Jamieson called a true "cognitive mapping" of our situation? That's why the solution is not to strive for a "real" meritocracy: those who deserve success on their merits will prevail only when our entire social order changes.
More precisely, it's not so much that the majority are deceived, but that they don't care: their main concern is that their relatively stable daily lives continue undisturbed. The majority do not want real democracy, in which they can really decide: they want a semblance of democracy, where they vote freely - but where some trusted higher authority puts them before a choice and indicates how they should vote. Most people are confused when they do not receive any clear indications and the situation in which they should decide is paradoxically perceived as a crisis of democracy, a threat to the stability of the system. (This is true not only of the former French colonies, but of democracy in general.) However, when the so-called silent majority gets worried, when they feel victimized and genuine anger erupts, things usually get much worse. People want to decide, to make their voices heard, and in doing so - as the ongoing wave of right-wing populism around the world shows - they expose themselves to further manipulation, falling prey to conspiracy theories.
Is this a universal rule? Fortunately, it didn't. Rarely, from time to time and in an unpredictable manner, exceptions occur; the fog dissipates, clarity prevails and the majority mobilizes for the right reasons. Such moments are history in its purest form - moments when whole years fit into one week.
Let's go back to our starting point: is there a chance for such a moment to happen in Central Africa? It will certainly not happen as a result of our (European) efforts to enlighten Africans. What we can do now is to turn against our own neo-colonialism, which feeds false fundamentalist anti-colonialism. A lot still needs to happen; we can let fall one of the great taboos: to rehabilitate planning - mandatory large-scale planning, not just vague "coordination" or "cooperation". Groups of states will have to form confederations with legislative and executive powers to impose measures related to the environment, mass movement of people, military interventions and the use of artificial intelligence. Utopia? Yes, but there is simply no other way to face the crises that threaten our survival.
(The New Statesman; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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