What France owes to Niger

About ten years ago I visited Dioundiou, a village in Niger two hundred kilometres south-east of the capital Niamey, and met a man known as Albert Camus. Hosseini Tahirou Amadou was the village history teacher. Nicknamed after his favourite writer, he was an expert on the events of 24 February 1899, the day a French colonial contingent turned up in the village demanding water, food and women. When the residents resisted, the French destroyed the village with cannon, massacred 373 people (according to Amadou’s research) and kidnapped hundreds of women. Even then, Amadou talked of bringing France to justice one day.

Dioundiou was my first stop on a research trip across the country for African Apocalypse, a BBC/BFI film which traced the route of the bloody Central African Mission that claimed tens of thousands of lives as France raced against Britain for control of the land and peoples between the Niger river and Lake Chad. For Amadou and his students this wasn’t ancient history: it was the origin of people’s contemporary poverty and sense of domination by a distant power. But, Amadou said, while younger generations might feel antipathy towards France’s continued neocolonial involvement in Niger, they were increasingly ignorant of the violent origins of that relationship.

In 2021, after the film was released, Amadou and I, with others from the affected communities, decided to turn our research into a collective claim for reparations: asking, primarily, for an acknowledgment from France of the immense harm caused, but also an apology and a commitment to sharing the colonial archives. These are currently held in Aix-en-Provence, beyond the reach of most Nigeriens because of financial constraints and immigration controls.

The Niger Communities Group on Reparatory Justice for Colonialism was formed with some support in Europe. A barrister was instructed – Jelia Sané at Doughty Street Chambers – and after more than two years’ work a fifty-page dossier was lodged with the UN Special Rapporteur for the Promotion of Truth and Justice. The group expanded the claim with oral testimony in an online hearing.

By April this year, the current special rapporteur, Bernard Duhaime, had secured the support of eight other rapporteurs with mandates on forced disappearances, extrajudicial killing, adequate housing, internally displaced persons, racism, slavery, trafficking and violence against women and girls.

In June, much to everyone’s surprise, France responded, saying it ‘remains open to bilateral dialogue’. Amadou and the group made their case in a ninety-minute special edition of Niger’s main current affairs TV show, Le Grand Débat. And at the UN General Assembly in September, the Nigerien prime minister, Ali Lamine Zeine, devoted several minutes of his speech to the subject, affirming his ‘solemn demand’ that ‘France shoulder its duty of remembrance and recognise its crimes’.

But while France was open to dialogue, it still treated the group’s litany of atrocities as mere allegation (it is generally accepted that the French authorities destroyed evidence of the Mission’s excesses). It also maintained that the laws and conventions it’s accused of breaching were not in force at the time. In other words, since it wasn’t unlawful in 1899 for Frenchmen to exterminate, mutilate, behead, rape, enslave and dispossess Africans, France is not now liable for those activities.

France did not answer the group’s demands for a truth commission, an apology, memorialisation or access to archives. It also said it will deal only with the government of Niger – and Niger and France have had no state relations since the coup of July 2023. By ‘government’, the Quai d’Orsay means the civilian regime headed by Mohamed Bazoum, who was toppled by his praetorian guard. The new caretakers went on to expel the French military, close down France’s diplomatic presence in Niger and rescind French uranium mining concessions.

Despite its overtures on ‘bilateral dialogue’, France is unlikely to make reparations for colonial violence, although it might issue an apology, but only if there is a sign from the new leadership in Niamey that it means to co-operate with the EU on closing down migration routes via Niger into Europe.

The contingency of historical apology on contemporary realpolitik is reminiscent of Silvio Berlusconi’s extraordinary 2008 admission of Italian colonial crimes in Libya. ‘I feel compelled to apologise and express our sorrow for what happened many years ago,’ Berlusconi said. But his apology was conditional on Colonel Gaddafi agreeing to stop the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean.

At the time of the 2023 coup, France relied on Niger for 15 per cent of the uranium in its civil nuclear energy programme and 100 per cent of its military nuclear inventory. Until 2014, France did not even pay tax on the uranium extracted. ‘Uranium brought our people nothing but misery, pollution, rebellion, corruption and despair,’ Ali Lamine Zeine said at the UN, ‘while the French prospered and bolstered their power.’ Uranium exploitation certainly didn’t bring power to Niger: even today only 10 per cent of rural Nigeriens have access to electricity.

Without the territory gained by the Central African Mission, the colony of Niger would have been untenable and France would not have enjoyed fifty years of cheap uranium.

In 1890, not long after the Berlin Conference, Britain and France divided their territorial claims with a straight line from the Niger river to Lake Chad. ‘We have given the Gallic cockerel an enormous amount of sand,’ Lord Salisbury remarked. ‘Let him scratch it as he pleases.’ The Central African Mission’s worst atrocities were committed south of the line, in the British-claimed zone of Nigeria.

In 1906, France’s massacre-fuelled gains were ratified in a new Anglo-French convention: Britain handed over fertile stretches of land along the border in exchange for fishing rights off the coast of Newfoundland which France had held since the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht.

One of the towns traded by the colonial powers was Birnin Konni, the site of the Mission’s biggest massacre. A 13-year-old boy named Tsalhatu climbed the city walls with a friend to watch the battle, until his older brother told them to get down. In 1979, aged 93, Tsalhatu gave an interview to the Nigerien historian Djibo Hamani. He remembered the French soldiers killing everyone who tried to flee and targeting anybody well-dressed on the grounds they were probably working for the sarkin (or sultan) who was commanding the defence. The French stayed in the town for thirteen days, Tsalhatu said, and ‘did nothing but massacre’. According to a memoir by one of the perpetrators, there were so many dead it took five days to bury the bodies.

Last month the current sarkin of Konni, the great-grandson of the resistance leader, attended an official ceremony in Niamey to rename the road next to the US embassy Avenue Sarkin Konni. The African Union has declared a decade of Action on Reparations and African Heritage. The Nigerien government has established a commission to rewrite the colonial history of the country. And the reparatory justice group’s lawyers are preparing their next steps at the UN.

There will be a screening of ‘African Apocalypse’ at the British Library on 7 November at 5 p.m. Book here.