AFRICAN STORIES: MALI BANS ALL FRENCH NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS FROM TERRITORY

Following Macron government's decision to withdraw "donor aid" from Mali for employing Russian Wagner mercernaries in the fight against islamic terrorists, the military regime running the francophone west african nation has decided to ban all French-funded non-governmental organisations from its territory. This is a second blow to French influence and control over one of its former colonies on the continent.

First blow was the forced removal of all French military bases from Mali. I wonder what the third blow would be against the edifice of "La Francafrique" carefully constructed by General Charles de Gaulle to supervise the comprador elites he had installed in power in most of Francophone Africa, which had to be granted quasi-independence after the United Kingdom broke ranks with other colonial powers-- Spain, Portugal and France-- by voluntarily agreeing to participate in the UN approved decolonization of all African territories.

SIDE NOTE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ONE COUNTRY THAT GOT AWAY

Mali's neighbour to the south, the Republic of Guinea, was the first francophone nation to escape the quasi-colonial "La Francafrique" policy in the late 1950s. The French colossus, General Charles de Gaulle, famously forgot his trademark kepi cap on a conference table in Guinea's capital city of Conkary as he angrily stormed out of a meeting with the Guinean leader, Ahmed Sékou Touré, who had told the French President that Guineans would rather starve to death than agree to convert their homeland from a colony into an autonomous vassal state of France.

Indeed, Guinea was the only francophone African colony to vote in a referendum against membership of Communauté Française, a supranational entity that transformed the colonies into quasi-independent client states of metropolitan France.

For insisting on real independence, the French colonial regime destroyed most of the infrastructure it had built on Guinean territory before pulling its colonial administrators, technocrats and military troops out. Thereafter, the abandoned colony declared itself a sovereign nation on 2nd October 1958, making it the first francophone African nation to do so. It was also the first to drop the CFA Franc as currency after independence, and one of a few francophone countries that did not have French military bases on its territory after gaining admission to the United Nations as a sovereign state .

By the way, the acronym, "CFA" originally meant Colonies Françaises d'Afrique, which translates to "French Colonies of Africa" until it was replaced by the nicer sounding Communauté Française d'Afrique ("French Community of Africa" ) and later on, the even better sounding Communauté Financière Africaine ("African Financial Community" ).