My Beauty Best Teacher

Khadija Sharife in FPIF writes:

The portrayal of Africa's strong-arm leaders as lone rangers obscures the system underpinning the dictatorships and delinks dictators from their primary source of sustenance. The rhetoric of French-controlled development endorsed by Bongo is a subset of France's postcolonial Africa policy — Françafrique — designed to create structural dependence and domination by reasserting geostrategic control over natural resources through the use of black "governors." The pulse of the Françafrique ideology — fric is slang for cash — is rooted in shadow economies sustaining respectable corporations, various intersecting shadow networks, secret services, private lobbies, and political and diplomatic relationships between the official and unofficial political elite. These forces are individually and collectively able to mobilize substantial economic, political, and military support.

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via Pambazuka

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• The Enrichment of Africa's French Allies (time.com)
• The Resource Curse and Democracy (my-beauty-best-teacher.blogspot.com)

In LRB Stephen Smith writes about France's slow withdrawal from its erstwhile colonies:

It’s hard to date the death of Françafrique precisely: the exquisite corpse still haunts many minds, and ghost stories are a lucrative business. Even so, three events in 1994 adumbrated the end: the (unprecedented) devaluation of the CFA franc and with it the crumbling of the monetary wall around the Franco-African enclave economy; the genocide in Rwanda, which left blood on the hands of Africa’s gendarme (having failed to understand a country outside its historical zone of influence, France had thrown its weight behind ‘Hutu power’); and finally, the state funeral of the Ivorian president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the sub-Saharan godfather of Françafrique and an enthusiast of the ‘Franco-African state’ – indeed, it was Houphouët who coined the term at a party congress in 1973.

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Eloi Goutchili writes(Fr) at Babilown:

“..the Western press, so harsh when it comes to a Mugabe and so concerned with democratic progress in Africa remains silent about the exploits of this hero of françafrique's [sham democracies, Biya]. For this self-righteous press, as for Whites, it's dictatorship only when their interests are endangered.”

via Global Voices

The press(within and outside Africa) did raise a fuss regarding Kenya's recent crisis and the Nigerian 2007 'elections'. Mightn't this lopsided coverage have more to do with the Anglophone/Francophone divide and their differing histories?