Martinican author Aimé Césaire—long revered as one of the early founders of France’s Négritude movement, cultivating Black consciousness alongside Léopold Senghor and the Nardal sisters—has long been canonized in historical memory as one of the leading luminaries in the decolonial movement against the French empire. “Colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism,” he writes in his famed 1955 book Discourse on Colonialism. “While colonialism in its formal sense might have been dismantled, the colonial state has not. Many of the problems of democracy are products of the old colonial state whose primary difference is the presence of black faces.”

At the time, his unrepentant and unyielding language was viewed as a direct statement of aggression against the French metropole, a revocation of the fictive liberalism that had long been affixed to French society and the valorization of its own revolution under the precepts of liberté, égalité, fraternité. With his charged rhetoric, Césaire not only delineated open hostility with the afterlives of French colonialism but also placed his existence as a Martinican Antillais in direct conversation with Françafrique along racial lines, then at the nascence of its own independence fight. Affectionately referred to as Papa Césaire by his fellow countrymen, he consistently argued that French assimilation required alienation from Black identity, subsuming their colonial dominion under a “universalist” umbrella—an argument that Frantz Fanon crystallized in his seminal text Black Skin, White Masks.

Fifty years after his transformative essay, however, Césaire’s framing would shift—for one, he no longer identified as a communist. He famously resigned from the French communist party in a searing letter that accused the party of having a limited capacity to understand the racial components of the workers’ revolution. “It is clear that our struggle—the struggle of colonial peoples against colonialism, the struggle of peoples of color against racism,” he wrote, “is more complex, or better yet, of a completely different nature than the fight of the French worker against French capitalism.” While he never shied away from his arguments on colonialism, his legacy would come to be marked by his role as a leading architect of the transformation of Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Réunion into overseas departments in 1946—a political act that had long been criticized as an assimilationist capitulation to the French republic.

“The Martinican people didn’t care about an ideological stance. They wanted social change, an end to their misery,” he argued in a 2005 interview, elaborating that many Martinicans feared being cut off from France due to the lack of domestic infrastructure to support its production and civil services. The upside of being recognized as French, along with all the civil rights and benefits granted therein that Martinicans could now argue for, he insisted, outweighed the glaring issue that the principles of liberté, égalité, fraternité seemed to have selective application along racial lines. He insisted that “position is neither pro-independence nor pro-assimilation, but pro-autonomy,” referring to his participation in the Convention du Morne-Rouge in 1971, where the four departments asserted their sovereign authority. While he argued for a united Africa and feared the lingering impacts of colonialism defanging the collective fights for independence, Césaire looked at the fate of the neighboring country of Haiti as a cautionary tale of a pyrrhic victory—achieving liberation at a devastating cost that the country has yet to recover from.

Césaire’s minimization of the Haitian struggle is part and parcel of his political evolution—it is precisely in labeling the trials and tribulations as hopelessly doomed that the longtime politician can make his incrementalist case in favor of departmentalization. As long as there is an “other” that can be positioned as the permanent underclass within a racial capitalist schema, the case can be made for fighting to preserve the liminal space between absolute neglect and full citizenship. In this structure, Césaire’s negotiations can be regarded as a compromise born out of self-interest, regardless of its unintentional impact of entrenching the hierarchical stratifications left behind in the wake of France’s brutal slave trade. It is a model of subjugation and negotiation that France has replicated the world over—juxtaposing the suffering of neighboring sovereign states with the nascent and uncertain future of emerging republics, where the threat of disrepair becomes both the carrot and the stick. Inevitably, states become trapped in a cycle that is hard to emerge from—born from decades of capitulation to French political engineering—veering between thinly veiled constraint and outright distrust as their humanity continues to be litigated in legislative chambers an ocean away.

As someone of Comorian descent, I am no stranger to this ontological framework. This summer, the Comoros islands are on the precipice of celebrating 50 years of independence, a hard-fought battle that has withstood over 20 coups, many facilitated by the French government under the leadership of mercenary Bob Denard. In the Global North, what little recognition that does exist for such a small country in the Mozambique Channel is one of paternalistic pity—condemning the islands to a fate of being irredeemably ungovernable, run by backwards Africans with a penchant for Islamic authoritarianism. Lost in such assessments is any acknowledgment of the damage of French colonialism and its lingering aftereffects: the turning of the islands into plantations for ylang-ylang, vanilla, cloves, and cocoa, as well as the entrechment of an informal hierarchy between local Comorians, the Shirazi elite, and neighboring Madagascans. At the time of independence, France forcefully retained the island of Mayotte, leveraging its permanent position in the United Nations Security Council to subvert any efforts at accountability for this occupation. As a result, the relationship between the Comoros and the island of Mayotte is akin to the dynamic between Haiti and the remaining Antilles islands. Comorians are subject to endless scorn, disregard, and dehumanization, while the Mahorais pride their legacy as part of the French empire over the indisputable cultural, linguistic, and ethnic kinship with the remaining three islands of the Comorian archipelago. It is a capitulation to the assimilationist narrative that the island was French before Nice and Savoy.

In 2024, a tragedy struck the region that brought these postcolonial contradictions into focus. That December, I lost contact with my mother for an entire weekend while she was visiting family in Ikoni, on the island Grande Comore (locally known as Ngazidja), as one of the deadliest cyclones in modern history barreled towards the Mozambican coast. Cyclone Chido was an unprecedented tempest for a region that is not prone to natural disasters of such magnitude. In a twist of fate, the brunt of the cyclone did not land at the condemned islands of the Comoros, which endured heavy (but manageable) flooding, a two-day shutdown of all government services, and fractured communication infrastructure. Rather, the apex of the storm landed on Mayotte’s shores, killing hundreds, displacing dozens of communities, and flattening shanty towns and bidonvilles beyond repair. A catastrophe by every definition of the word, the aftermath of the cyclone left Mayotte in need of rebuilding, and the region looked to France, with its long-standing construct of benevolent patriarchy, to address the crisis.

In the wake of the ruinous storm, French President Emmanuel Macron made an ill-fated visit to the island, which had begun making pleas to its colonial benefactor for basic necessities. Residents were in need of food and water after the cyclone decimated infrastructure, and swaths of the island had been relegated to “open-air mass graves,” as Mahorais representative Estelle Youssouffa informed French parliament. Despite being a critical part of France’s global apparatus—in part due to its strategic location which allows the French military direct access to the Swahili coast, Indian ocean trade routes, and Mozambican shores—the neglect in the days after such massive tragedy revealed the relationship to be largely vestigial in nature. While France may boast a strong republic with the seventh strongest economy in the world, it seemed content in leaving one of its departments in a semi-permanent state of disrepair. Even before the ruinous natural disaster, Mayotte had long been struggling with the impacts of France’s neglect, as residents faced water shortages and unsanitary living conditions.

Instead of acknowledging culpability for this neglect both before and after the devastation, the French government reacted with indignance and deflection, choosing to emphasize the crisis of Comorian “migrants” as a point of subversion against any accountability. This weaponization of Comorian disrepair has been deployed across the political spectrum. Marine Le Pen—enjoying a resurgence of fascist enthusiasm in the wake of the rebranding of her father’s Nazi’s sympathizing political party into the Rassemblement National—has been aiming to repurpose anti-Comorian xenophobia to use Mayotte as the testing ground for revoking birthright citizenship throughout France. Macron, who did not visit Mayotte until nearly a week after Cyclone Chido, responded brusquely to provocations and frustration by Mahorais locals, crudely insisting that “if this weren’t France, you’d be 10,000 times deeper in shit!” The unavoidable subtext is the simmering threat of being doomed to the fate of the rest of the Comorians. It’s a framing Macron has weaponized since 2017, when he pejoratively joked that kwassa kwassa boats brought only Comorians to Mayotte’s shores. These thinly veiled rejoinders are middling attempts at obscuring the reality that French citizenship has failed to grant the people of Mayotte better living conditions. Beyond the social capital that being a vestigial member of the EU affords, fidelity to France has not been able to alleviate the social ills that consume the island. As Malcom Ferdinand argued in his essay “For a Cosmopolitics of Relation:” “confronting the ecological tempest also means confronting modernity’s colonial and slave-making constitution.”

Martinique has been wrestling with a similar contradiction in its postcolonial condition. In 2024, protest over depressed living conditions, the latest in multiple rounds that strech back to 2021, broke out on the island. Not only does 30 percent of the island population fall below the poverty line, food, 80 percent of which is imported from Europe, costs 40 percent more than it does in mainland France. With Martinicans frustrated over continued inequality despite being French citizens, and with a crisis that was due to be exacerbated by planned inflation, protests and riots inevitably ensued. Instead of addressing the resentment, France sought to quash the rebellion by deploying riot police and enforcing curfews. Similar protests emerged in neighboring Guadeloupe. On both islands, residents contend with the reality that their position as departments offer limited postcolonial advantages. This relationship is ultimately a continuation of an extractive dependency that obstructs the autonomy that Césaire advocated for. While France has entered into an agreement aiming to lower the cost of public goods, it does not undo the islands’ dependence on European imports, or allow for investment in more affordable regional trade. Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau aptly labeled this structure “mercantile capitalism” that exists within a colonial matrix, which, he argues, continues to feed on itself like an ouroboros of exploitation without an end in sight.

This grim reality brings the long-standing neglect of the Haitian plight into stark focus. In the 220 years since Haiti declared its independence as the first free Black republic, it has endured endless punishment: from postcolonial subjugation and occupation to authoritarian regimes backed by the United States. Yet, despite the long-standing interference by global powers, even those with a documented decolonial mindset, like Césaire, have referred to the pro-ject of Haitian statehood and self-determination as a tragedy, implying if not outright suggesting that it was a failed state. In more recent years, decolonial communities have acknowledged the role that France’s double indemnity played in irrevocably burdening the country, effectively crippling the burgeoning state by forcing them to pay the current equivalent of nearly $34 billion until 1947. Despite this insight, there is a sustained reluctance to acknowledge the deleterious role that the U.S. and France have played in hampering Haiti’s sustainability: from the 1915 invasion and subsequent 20-year occupation by the American government and its crony corporations, to the multiple U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes, such as that of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, of his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc,” and of Jovenel Moïse who was assassinated in 2022. Considering Haiti’s checkered history, any critiques of the country’s social ills should be placed in its proper context. Yet, political leaders such as Jean-Marie Bockel, Macron’s envoy to the African continent, continue to reject culpability in this fiasco, asserting that “France cannot always be in repentance or mea culpa.” To this day, the fate of Haiti is invoked as a threat against French departments that grow increasingly agitated about their meager conditions, with the implication that their lives could be worse. As the years progress, however, more voices continue to emerge, demanding the right for former colonies to fail for themselves and not under France’s guiding thumb.

While Haiti continues to be held up as a cautionary tale against pursuing political autonomy and independence from neocolonial structures, the Sahel region has chosen to pursue the risk regardless, developing into a space of rupture and refusal in staunch opposition to the French metropole. For decades, France had openly embraced its paternalist role in the postcolonial sphere of influence that the country has retained over the continent, with the clever portmanteau “Françafrique” informally rendering Africanness and Frenchness as inextricable entities. French governments would deploy the term as a point of amicable diplomacy or a weapon of derision at their convenience—alternating between carrot and stick with a diplomatic temperance akin to disciplining a child. A prime example of the employment of this tactic, Nicolas Sarkozy once advocated for the end of Françafrique while campaigning for president. However, post-election he repeated the common institutional refrains that Africa resides in a permanent state of inherent savagery, equivocating the impacts of slavery and colonialism. In an infamous 2007 speech at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar he declared: “Africa has its share of responsibility in its own misfortune: colonization is not responsible for the bloody wars that the Africans carry out among themselves, genocides, dictators, fanaticism, corruption, and prevarication… The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history… They have never really launched themselves into the future… There is no place for human adventure, nor for the idea of progress.”

Well after Sarkozy’s exit, institutional reproach in response to the idea of France’s culpability in defanging African autonomy remains in place. In January, Macron insisted that the countries in the Sahel region would not be sovereign today without the help of French armed forces. “I think someone forgot to say thank you. It does not matter, it will come with time,” he stated. “Ingratitude, I am well placed to know, is a disease not transmissible to man.” Not only were these statements remarkably curt, they amounted to a brazen revision of history, minimizing France’s direct role in the long-standing instability in the region. The remarks came in the wake of the formation of the Alliance des États du Sahel (AES) by Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, which have all cut off military relationships with Western powers, including France and United Nations peacekeeping troops, and formed a mutual defense pact with the ultimate aim of economic and cultural integration. They have received additional support from neighboring Guinea. While Senegal has remained part of ECOWAS, it has taken steps to assert sovereignty, working to remove all French military bases from the country before the end of the year—coincidentally, the 80th anniversary of the massacre of Senegalese tirailleurs who demanded overdue wages for fighting alongside the French in World War II.

The impact of the wholesale rejection of France’s paternalistic diplomacy continues to ripple throughout the continent. Immediately after Senegal’s request for military withdrawal, Chad announced that it would be removing French armed forces from their borders, followed by Côte d’Ivoire. “It used to be that when Paris coughed, Dakar sneezed!” said a close friend of Senegalese Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko in an interview with Le Monde. “The new generation no longer sees Paris as the metronome of our lives.” Chad’s foreign minister, Abderaman Koulamallah, concurred, stating that France “has often been limited to its own strategic interests, without any real lasting impact for the development of the Chadian people.” There is now a new generation of leadership that has the will of the people behind them, unified by the goals of self-sufficiency and rejection of France’s constant imposition of will via soft power, taking on the roles that Senghor, Sankara, and Hamani Diori once filled. While we can only wait and see if Bassirou Diomaye Faye and Ibrahim Traoré will realize their postcolonial visions, it is indisputable that a new vigor has been added to the diasporic struggle for Black autonomy, independence, and liberation.

The narrative that France purports to uphold as a universalist republic is one of benevolent patriarchy, the remaining tendrils of a formerly ruthless colonial empire that is in the process of atoning for its sins throughout the Black diaspora. For those of us who are descendants of the vestiges of the French empire and its colonial afterlives, it is nigh impossible to accept that fiction. It is a fable that requires its adherents to commit to what Frantz Fanon described as “racialized disengagement,” a system of relating to colonial overlords via assimilation and adherence to whiteness, while turning one’s back to ostensibly closer relations. While traces of such othering remain, the last few years have reflected an increasing dissatisfaction with the results of capitulating to France. Despite its desire to retain its global empire, the decaying material conditions of the French colonial legacy are accelerating. While it would be brash to expect global Black liberation from France tomorrow, the headwinds are clear: If we are meant to fail, grant us the right as Africans to fail on our own terms unfettered by the constraints of our colonizer’s self-mythology.