FRENCH AFRICA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 April 1943, Page 4

FRENCH AFRICA

PRESENT AIMS AND PAST POLICY DREAMS OF GREAT UNIFIED EMPIRE. MAY BE IN MELTING POT. The announcement that a Fightitig French military and economic mission is due in Algiers after the present Giraud-Catroux talks, points to real and comprehensive efforts at tightening liaison between French North Africa and de Gaullists, Mr Norton Webb wrote recently in the “Christian Science Monitor.” It also shows both camps now may realise that any failure to do this before long will so lower France’s prestige as to threaten directly her present sovereignty over one-third of Africa.

Contrasted to Britain's imperial policy resting on self-government, France has always stressed assimilation of the native leading to his eventual full citizenship in a Greater France, composed of the combined metropolitan and overseas domains with a highly centralised seat of power in Paris, especially in the Ministry of Colonies. The French Right minority, incidentally, making up most of the restricted group today called Vichyites, have always largely dominated French imperial policies. Revised and new plans for the extension of French hegemony and civilisation in Africa were drawn up at the French Imperial Conference of May, 1935, in Paris, which was largely secret. African plans formed part of a new master blueprint of a Greater France, characterised by the then French Minister of Colonies, Rollin, as an outstanding event in French history and the country's only path to salvation.

CONSOLIDATION PLANS. The new France, it was agreed, must be achieved by consolidating metropolitan and overseas France into a single bloc closely unified by identical economic, political, social, intellectual ties—all that is implied by French civilisation. For France, said an authoritative report of the conference, today as yesterday, had a world mission to protect “unfortunate peoples.” So measures to increase French moral and social influences went into effect among natives to raise their level of life to being citizens of Greater France. French African expansion was intrusted to a Mediterranean and North Africa Committee, these areas always being considered as springboards for development of the French dream of a Eurafrica, linking Europe and Africa as one continent through French initiative and sovereignty. French plans for African empire building, of course, recognised the solid British control of South and South-East Africa. But they figured Britain's hold on Egypt as merely nominal; while her West African domains depended strategically and partly economically on France's African network, a theory the present war seems to have borne out.

Empire-minded Frenchmen see their united African territories as a natural extension of the other side of lhe Mediterranean. Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia being the most developed and nearest Europe, are in the best position to favour the French African schemes. These three countries have a tight hold on the Sahara Desert. French West and Equatorial Africa hold great hopes with their diverse climates and immense immediate prospects for agricultural production, cattle raising, and mining. So altogether and with the Trans-Sahara railroad running southward from Oran (actually begun under Vichy) vast unexplored regions of economic riches will be opened up so that France in her position of control will be like England in her watch on Suez and the United States on Panama. MEDITERRANEAN CONFLICT. One can understand the feelings of Marshal Petain and so many other Frenchmen clustered around the Vichy regime who helped underwrite the idea of the new France at home and abroad, as they followed the fortunes of Rommel and Britain’s North African armies in their tremendous struggles along south Mediterranean shores. And when General Montgomery administered his telling coup de tonnerre, to Rommel, and American and British landings were effected in French North Africa, all Frenchmen espousing Greater France plans, with their ambitious African programme, must have wondered whether their Eurafrican dreams were not destined to be thrown into the war's melting pot. The shock at least seems in part responsible for North Africa’s violent ferment. Whatever destiny is in store for France’s role in Africa, Frenchmen will do well to recall Robespierre’s famous words that became an axiom. “May colonies perish rather than a principle,” he said, when the issue of emancipating Negroes in French colonies came up. Meaning, if freeing man from slavery involved loss of French overseas territory, it were best lhe principle of liberty prevail than mere retention of territory.