Independence Was Incomplete

Independence Was Incomplete

The photographs tell a beautiful lie.

Flags rising. Crowds cheering. Former colonial governors handing over documents to African leaders in ceremonial suits. Independence Day, 1960. The Year of Africa. Seventeen nations freed in a single year.

Except they weren't free. Not really.

The Deal They Were Offered

When France saw the writing on the wall in the late 1950s, they didn't simply pack up and leave. They made a deal. Actually, they made the same deal with almost every colony: "We'll grant you independence, but you'll sign cooperation agreements first."

These weren't optional. These agreements covered everything that actually matters for sovereignty — currency, foreign affairs, trade, defense, raw materials, education. The new African leaders would get the title of President. They'd get the flag and the anthem and the seat at the United Nations. But Paris would keep pulling the strings.

Countries that signed these agreements got to keep receiving French aid. They got French teachers and French military advisors. They got stability — or at least the appearance of it.

Countries that refused learned what France does to disobedient colonies.

What Happened to Guinea

In 1958, Charles de Gaulle toured French Africa to sell his new constitution. Every colony would vote in a referendum: join the French Community and accept limited autonomy, or vote no and get immediate independence — with all French support withdrawn.

De Gaulle was confident. What colony would choose poverty over French partnership?

Then he arrived in Guinea. Sékou Touré was waiting for him.

"We prefer poverty in freedom to riches in slavery."

Guinea voted no. Over 95% of the country rejected de Gaulle's offer. It was the only French colony to do so.

France's response was immediate and vicious. Within weeks, French officials, engineers, doctors, and teachers abandoned the country. They didn't just leave — they destroyed what they'd built. They unscrewed light bulbs from their sockets. They removed plans for sewage systems from government files. They burned medicines rather than leave them for Guineans. They sabotaged public buildings. They withdrew every franc of financial support.

The message to other African nations was clear: this is what happens when you choose real independence.

But France wasn't finished. When Guinea created its own currency in 1960, French intelligence launched Operation Persil — a covert operation to flood Guinea with counterfeit banknotes to cause hyperinflation and economic collapse. They armed opposition groups. They tried to trigger civil war.

Sékou Touré survived, though Guinea suffered for decades. He became the cautionary tale France wanted him to be. Other African leaders learned the lesson: play along, or we will destroy you.

The CFA Franc: Colonialism Repackaged

Fourteen African countries still use a currency controlled by France — the CFA franc.

Originally it stood for "Colonies Françaises d'Afrique." After independence, they just renamed it "Communauté Financière Africaine." Same currency. Same control. New name.

Here's how it works: CFA countries are required to deposit a significant portion of their foreign exchange reserves — estimates range from 50% to 65% — in a special account at the French Treasury. France "guarantees" the currency's convertibility in exchange. What this means in practice is that billions of dollars that could be invested in African development sit in Paris instead.

The currency is pegged to the euro. African countries using it cannot devalue their currency to make exports competitive. They cannot print money to respond to economic crises. They cannot set their own monetary policy. For every major financial decision, they must coordinate with France.

As Kako Nubukpo, a Togolese economist, described it: "voluntary servitude."

In December 2019, when pressure finally forced some reform, President Macron stood alongside Ivory Coast's President Ouattara in Abidjan and announced changes to the West African CFA franc. The currency would be renamed the "Eco." The eight member countries would no longer be required to deposit 50% of their foreign exchange reserves with the French Treasury — roughly €13.7 billion that could now be invested elsewhere. France would withdraw its representatives from the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) board and monetary policy committee.

Sounds like progress. Look closer.

The Eco remains pegged to the euro at a fixed exchange rate. France remains the guarantor — meaning if there's a currency crisis, Paris still controls the lifeline. African countries still cannot set their own monetary policy, still cannot devalue their currency to make exports competitive, still cannot respond independently to economic shocks. The Central African CFA franc — used by Cameroon, Chad, Gabon, Congo, Central African Republic, and Equatorial Guinea — wasn't reformed at all. Those six countries still deposit their reserves in Paris.

There's another layer to this. For nearly two decades, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) — which includes Anglophone powerhouse Nigeria — had been planning a regional currency also called the Eco. By announcing a Francophone-only "Eco" first, Macron and Ouattara effectively hijacked the name and complicated the broader regional integration that would have put Nigeria, not France, at the center of West African monetary policy.

Five years later, the reforms have stalled. The Eco hasn't been implemented. Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso — now under military governments — have announced their departure from ECOWAS and signaled they may leave the CFA system entirely. Senegal's new president has called for currency reform. The colonial architecture stands, freshly painted — but the cracks are showing.

The Pattern Across the Continent

France was the most systematic, but they weren't alone.

Britain handed over flags while keeping economic arrangements intact. The Commonwealth preserved trade relationships that kept African nations exporting raw materials to Britain and importing finished goods. Sterling reserves, trade preferences, technical assistance — all mechanisms of continued influence.

Nigeria: Independence by Regional Division

Nigeria's independence on October 1, 1960 looked like a success story. No war. No mass violence. A peaceful transition with Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa as Prime Minister and Nnamdi Azikiwe as Governor-General.

But Britain didn't hand over a unified nation. They handed over a time bomb.

The same colonial administration that had created Nigeria by amalgamating the North and South in 1914 had spent decades deepening regional divisions. The 1946 Richards Constitution formally divided the country into three regions: North, West, and East. Each region developed its own political party representing its dominant ethnic group. The three regions viewed each other with suspicion. Chief Obafemi Awolowo called Nigeria "a mere geographic expression."

Within six years of independence, the first coup struck. A counter-coup followed six months later. By 1967, Nigeria was at civil war. The Biafran War killed between one and three million people — most of them civilians who starved to death during a federal blockade.

The British created the divisions. Nigerians inherited them. The full story of Nigeria's collapse deserves its own telling.

South Africa: Freedom Delayed, Freedom Earned

South Africa's path was different — and in some ways, harder.

South Africa was technically independent from 1910, but only for white people. The African majority lived under increasingly brutal oppression, codified into law as apartheid after 1948. While other African nations were gaining independence in 1960, South Africa was massacring protesters at Sharpeville.

The price of fighting apartheid was prison. Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni, Elias Motsoaledi — the leaders of the African National Congress's armed resistance were convicted in the Rivonia Trial of 1964 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Mandela spent 27 years behind bars. Eighteen of those years were on Robben Island, a windswept rock off the coast of Cape Town where political prisoners broke limestone in the quarry, slept on cold cement floors, and were allowed one visitor and one letter every six months. The white lime dust damaged prisoners' eyesight permanently.

But Robben Island became something the apartheid government never intended — a university. The prisoners educated each other. They debated politics, studied law, organized themselves. Three future presidents of South Africa came out of that prison: Mandela, Kgalema Motlanthe, and Jacob Zuma.

Robert Sobukwe, leader of the Pan Africanist Congress, was considered so dangerous that the government passed a special law — the "Sobukwe Clause" — allowing them to keep him imprisoned indefinitely without charges. He spent nine years in solitary confinement in a small house on Robben Island, forbidden to speak to anyone.

When Mandela was finally released on February 11, 1990, he was 71 years old. Four years later, in 1994, South Africa held its first democratic elections. Mandela became president — the first Black head of state of the country where he had been labeled a terrorist and imprisoned for nearly three decades.

South Africa's freedom wasn't granted. It was won. And the cost was measured in decades of lives lost to prison, to exile, to murder.

Belgium fled the Congo in chaos, leaving a nation of 15 million with fewer than 30 university graduates and no Congolese military officers above sergeant. When Patrice Lumumba tried to chart an independent course, he was assassinated within months, with Belgian and American involvement.

Portugal held on until 1975, fighting brutal colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. When they finally left, they left destruction, not functioning states.

The mechanisms varied, but the result was the same: political independence without economic sovereignty. African nations could choose their own leaders — as long as those leaders maintained the arrangements that benefited the former colonial powers.

The Impossible Choices

This is where the story gets uncomfortable for everyone.

The African leaders who signed those cooperation agreements weren't fools. Many of them understood exactly what they were agreeing to. They made calculations. They looked at what happened to Guinea and decided survival was better than martyrdom. They looked at their countries — borders drawn by Europeans, economies built for extraction, populations divided by colonial policies — and decided working within the system was the only realistic option.

Were they sellouts? Some of them, absolutely. Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast proudly advocated for close ties with France. He benefited personally and enormously from the arrangement.

But others were boxed in. They inherited countries designed to fail as independent states. No industrial base. No processing capacity. Economies dependent on one or two export commodities whose prices were set in London or Paris. Borders that made no sense. Militaries trained and equipped by the former colonial power. Elites educated in French or English, disconnected from their own populations.

What do you do with that? Especially when you know that choosing real independence might mean your country becomes the next Guinea — or worse, the next Congo?

We're Still Living With This

The wave of military coups that has swept Africa since 2020 is not random. Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger, Gabon, Chad — former French colonies, all of them. Since 1990, 21 of the 27 coups in sub-Saharan Africa have taken place in former French colonies. The junta leaders in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have explicitly rejected French military presence and economic arrangements. Protestors in the streets wave Russian flags not because they love Russia, but because they hate what France represents.

Whether these coups lead to genuine sovereignty or just new forms of dependence remains to be seen. Russia and China are not liberators — they're new players making their own deals.

But the anger is real. The sense that independence was stolen before it even began — that's real too.

What Independence Actually Requires

Political independence was necessary but not sufficient. A flag is not sovereignty. An anthem is not sovereignty. A seat at the UN is not sovereignty.

Sovereignty is controlling your own currency. Sovereignty is processing your own resources. Sovereignty is feeding your own people with food grown on your own land. Sovereignty is defending your own borders with your own military answering to your own government. Sovereignty is educating your own children in your own languages about your own history.

By those measures, most of Africa is still waiting for independence.

The colonizers left. The colonial system stayed.

That's the inheritance. That's what we're still trying to dismantle. And that's why the project of making Africa truly sovereign is not about nostalgia for some imagined pre-colonial paradise — it's about finishing a revolution that was interrupted before it could begin.