Dakar, from entire Africa — From the living, the dead, the sold, drowned, displaced, humiliated — From the continent you never stopped leaving full hands

Ladies and gentlemen,

Let me start as I see fit.

It accuses Europe of having carried in its holds, in its counters, in its ports, in its banks and in its cathedrals one of the largest dehumanization enterprises that history has known.
Accused the West of having built a considerable share of its wealth on the capture, sale, transport, exhaustion and death of African bodies.
Accused your kingdoms, your republics, your companies, your churches, your silent philosophers, your pious traders, your prosperous shipowners, of turning human beings into cargoes, guarantees, and yield units.

Because this is your first crime, perhaps the most lasting one: you have not contented yourself with enslaving. You produced the theory that allowed you to do it without looking at yourself as monsters. You have invented the hierarchy of races, the civilizing mission, the falsified science, the accompaniment anthropology, the convenient religion, the flexible law, an intellectual architecture designed to give predation the face of necessity.

You didn't just take land, arms, minerals and crops.
You also wanted to make sense.
You wanted to be innocent in your own language.

J'accuse the slave trade for having been something other than a crime of the past: a matrix.

You call him sometimes. « dark page », as if history was just a book that we turn to move on. But slavery was not a page. It was a grammar. A method. A school of profitability. A way to teach Europe that a distant body could be broken so that a centre could become rich, and a well-organized consciousness could survive this evidence.

You have torn men, women, children from their tongues, their gods, their names, their lands, their dead. You made the ocean a missing corridor. You turned the Atlantic into a cemetery without steles. And later, you dared to talk about adventure, expansion, triangular trade — admirable expression in its geometry, almost elegant, almost academic — so as not to tell the truth: the industrial organization of the rapt.

And also accuse the present. For slavery is not dead with abolition. He changed his costume. He left visible irons for structural dependencies, survival wages, extractive labour, opaque supply chains, lawless workshops, childless mines, memoryless plantations.

You have closed the markets for human beings to open those where their overexploitation remains profitable at a distance.

It accuses colonization of having been a total system of dispossession.

• You didn't come to meet.
• You didn't come to learn.
• You didn't come to trade.
• You came to take, classify, administer, tax, discipline, convert, punish, extract.

You have renamed our cities, redesigned our borders, moved our centres, prioritized our languages, reconfigured our economies so that they no longer produce for our needs but for your markets. You have taught entire land to export without eating, to extract without processing, to produce without deciding.

I accuse colonization of having been a pedagogy of inferiority.

Because your empire didn't just want wealth. He wanted willing souls. He wanted the colonized to doubt his own value, his own history, his own thought. He wanted the African man to look at himself with the eyes of the administrator. The greatest looting, sometimes, was not that of the soil. It was trust.

And when we resisted, you called it rebellion, disorder, tribality, savagery. When you were massacring, you called it keeping order. When you destroyed kingdoms, you called it part of history.

I accuse your granted independence of being too often reorganized dependencies.

You left the administrative palaces, but you stayed in the banks, in the staffs, in the currencies, in the mining concessions, in the ports, in the chanceries, in the boards of directors, in the intelligence services, in the presidential palaces where your men held the lamp while others signed.

It accuses neocolonialism that it has perfected what colonisation has brutally practised: to ensure that our countries appear sovereign while remaining oriented towards your interests. You no longer needed to govern directly. It was enough to choose the right intermediaries: a loyal president, a reliable general, a minister trained at home, a network of influence, a well-calibrated debt, a few experts, a few advisers, a few bases, a few secrets.

You were talking about the rule of law in the gallery, then you would shake hands with the one who rigged the ballot box, imprisoned the opponents, had the crowds shot, emptyed the public funds, as long as it guaranteed the essential: contracts, bases, minerals, peace for your investors.

J'accuse your morals for having secret clauses.

I blame Françafrique for being a system, not a rumor.

A system of favors, dependencies, networks, phone calls, intermediaries, briefcases, bought loyalty, mutual silences. A system where African sovereignty too often stopped where the strategic, military, monetary and economic interests of the metropolis began.

Accuses monetary and financial mechanisms that have prolonged asymmetry. J. Accuses paternalistic discourses that have survived the empire as survive bad class habits. It accuses this so particular way of speaking of Africa as an area of influence, a backyard, a theatre, a dossier, never as an equal subject.

And above all, it accuses denial: this old Western reflex, which consists of recognizing abuses once they have become too visible, while pretending that they were neither structural nor intentional nor central.

I accuse your multinationals of pursuing the work of colonial companies with more elegant brochures.

Names have changed. The logos have become more sober. Sustainability reports are printed on fine paper. But the pattern remains: extraction here, transformation elsewhere, profit there, pollution at home, wealth exported, local poverty, co-opted elites, displaced populations, soil polluted, poisoned tablecloths, promises of employment brandished as absolute.

• You extract uranium, then explain the lack of electricity.
• You pump oil, then we talk about energy poverty.
• You take the gold, then you wonder about the misery.
• You load the ships with wood, cobalt, cocoa, copper, phosphate, manganese, coltan, and then you write reports on underdevelopment.

I accuse your astonishment itself. It accuses this almost artistic ability to produce a catastrophe and then comment on it as if it came from an internal failure of the continent.

I accuse your governments of choosing their African allies not according to their justice, but according to their usefulness.

You supported strong men as long as they were strong for you. You loved the autocrats who protected your interests, fought your enemies, opened their markets, signed the right contracts, held their people, contained flows, provided bases, fulfilled your priorities. You confused partnership with domestication.

Accused the Western powers of having given speeches on democracy at lunchtime and logistical support to the regime before dinner.

• You knew about corruption.
• You knew the prisons.
• You knew the disappearances.
• You knew the fortunes placed abroad.
• You knew the rigged elections.
• You knew police brutality.
• You knew the hunger of the people and the obesity of clans.
• You knew.

And you continued, as long as the pipelines flowed, the mines opened, the contracts held, the international votes were on the right side.

The West is accused of selling home security and war to others.

• You sell weapons, then stabilization solutions.
• You feed conflict, then finance peace conferences.
• You equip armies, militias or questionable states, and then you express concern about proliferation.
• You make fire a market and ashes an expert.

For the weapons in our house do not fall from heaven. They arrive by roads, planes, ports, agreements, networks and conveniences. They prolong wars, harden regimes, facilitate predations, terrorize people, defeat societies.

Then come your experts to analyze African insecurity.

Europe is accused of looting the land and then closing the doors.

You came to us without a visa, no invitation, no border controls, no detention centres, no identity debate. You crossed seas and lands, annexed, occupied, imposed, displaced, exploited. You circulated as if the world were naturally due to you.

And when, centuries later, men and women from the countries you mutilated try in their turn to cross a sea, you set up walls, radars, camps, patrols, barbed wire, exceptional laws, sorting devices, speeches about invasion.

You love our arms when they clean your cities, treat your sick, build your roads, deliver your meals, keep your children, reap your fruits, win your games. But you hate their presence when it forces you to look the story in the face. You want the immigrant useful, docile, discreet, grateful, profitable, and especially always suspect of too much existance.

I accuse your societies of having thought it possible to consume Africa without ever recognizing full human equality.

Racism is not just insult, cartoon, brutal reflex. It is also the structure that distributes credibility, compassion, attention, fear, the value of lives. It is the difference between a moving drama and a passing massacre. Between a tragic border and another routine. Between an editorial death and a thousand deaths worth a statement.

• You wanted our land without our voices.
• Our materials without our memories.
• Our bodies without our stories.
• Our markets without our dignity.

It accuses your international assistance when it is used to recycle power rather than to share it.

You like giving with press conference, conditionality, on-board expertise, visible logo, external steering, exogenous evaluation, flattering narrative for the lessor. You like to help in order to remain indispensable. You like to correct the damage without giving up the mechanisms that produce it.

You finance education programs after taking advantage of outsourced savings that drain public revenues. You support health after you close your eyes to systems that deplete. You talk about African entrepreneurship after having structured dependencies that prevent local accumulation. You celebrate the resilience of our peoples as you congratulate someone not to die with a hit.

I blame your admiration for our resilience. Often, it is only an elegant way to dispense with repair.

J. accuses the great Western story of having made himself the moral center of the world.

You describe yourself as the continent of Enlightenment, rights, reason, emancipation, democracy, political invention. All this probably exists. But I accuse your story of telling itself without its basements. Without the plantations. Without the counters. Without deportations. Without the colonial massacres. Without mines, forced rubbers, administered famines, imperial prisons, experiments, humiliations, human exposures, racial scholarly hierarchies.

• You like the idea of having brought civilization.
• You don't like the idea of industrializing domination.

Accused of your school textbooks, pantheons, selective commemorations, national modesty, endless debates on the « context of the era », your sudden passions for nuance every time your crimes are named.

And yet, despite you, we are not only your victims.

I refuse to offer you this comfort too: that of having totally succeeded.

• There are still languages.
• There are still memories.
• There are still some names you couldn't erase.
• There are still people who remember.
• There's still archives against your records.
• There are works, songs, anger, thoughts, refusals.
• There is still an African youth looking at you without forced admiration.
• There remains an intelligence of the world that no longer necessarily passes through your capitals to believe that it is legitimate.

We can now recognize your words when they prepare a grip. We can hear in « stability », « partnership », « transition », « investment », « assistance », « Security », interests that sometimes hide behind. We know that your universal was often provincial, armed and profitable. We know that your stretched hand sometimes still looks for the wrist.

And we also know that our task is not just to accuse you. It's to clear us from you.

• We will rebuild against addictions.
• Against customers.
• Against the chiefs bought.
• Against the elite subcontractors.
• Against the colonized imaginations.
• Against the habit of asking permission.
• Against the reflex of looking north to verify the value of what we are.

Epilogue — Accused

So I write clearly, so that there is no ambiguity left.

I accuse you of having taken our bodies, our lands, our minerals, our crops, our ports, our currencies, our states, our imaginations, and then demanded our gratitude.

I accuse you of wanting us to call cooperation what strangled us, and modernity what dispossessed us.

I accuse you of hurting us materially, politically, symbolically, historically.

I accuse you, above all, of having too often viewed this accusation as an excess of anger rather than a record of accounts.

• He's in the sick border.
• It is in fragile states.
• He's in the downgraded languages.
• It is in debts, in mines, in ports, in palaces guarded, in marine cemeteries, in riches that leave and in youths that flee.
• He is in arms, in refused visas, in unequal agreements, in amputated memoirs.
• He's in our lives.

I'm writing to name.
I write to restore the gravity of words.
I write for the looting to cease to be a secret of international politeness.
I write for Africa to speak without asking permission.
I write because one day it is necessary for the file to open.