If the question of independence always arises here and there, it is because it has not been resolved. Not that of African “independence” which gives rise to the same sterile debates every year in the first half of August (there was no independence, etcaetera) but those of our so-called Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Reunion, and in another genre, Mayotte, Kanaky, Polynesia …

Because to say that these territories are colonies is even of a banality, so much it is obvious for some of them that a relative majority of the population is of African origin. It is so obvious that these territories, which today receive a discourse already well experienced by Africa, have been going through a situation for too long which is not unlike that of the original continent.
A situation of withering away based on policies and above all on methods which are almost the exact copy of the ultraliberal injunctions of the World Bank and the IMF: to build the inevitability of the catastrophe. And therefore to force people to reinvent themselves if possible by leading them by all means in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

However, the type of education knowingly constructed to exclude any serious reflection on Africa (and Pan-Africanism as an obvious solution to emerging from coloniality) means that the generations from these territories have always been perceived (or have been brought to perceive) in the French imperial scheme as intermediate minorities – mainly subordinate from France, potentially hegemonic from Africa – and therefore adjustment variables to which “we make people believe that”. It seems to me that for North Africans, it looks like “zarma”.

By sometimes helping a part of the colonized to feed without their knowledge a comparative argument serving the hexagonal-centered policies based on the idea that there are “serious” people and “not serious” people, by adding again and again a dose humiliation and racism in the media treatment of the colonial situation, it emerges a total absence of self-criticism but also of project.

What was not successful by our ancestors must be successful for our descendants. Aimé Césaire said that the first drama of colonization is the drama of betrayed trust. There is therefore no need to look in rum or voodoo to understand how the news made tragic – but yet quite predictable in view of the policies imposed for a very long time – is the perfect illustration of this tragedy.

Coloniality, when intervention from elsewhere inferior the life and decisions of peoples who have asked for nothing other than the means to manage themselves and for themselves, that is to say to be able to simply represent oneself. Coloniality, when the answer to a public problem is not found in dialogue but in the paternalistic identification of the other as an anomaly or a deviation to be corrected.
As much as one can only fight a system with another system, one science with another science, so death is and will always remain a lesson to be meditated on for the living. We must take care of ourselves and our struggles while we are reborn. 

Don’t Agonize, Organize.