French intellectuals denounce their country's economic relations with black Africa

What is it about?

This article examines the issue of economic predation in a selection of mainstream metropolitan French writings on black Africa produced between 1945 and the present. It begins with the writer Gide and the critic and philosopher Sartre, some of whose works on black Africa belong to the first decade after the Second World War, which was marked by France's continued imperial presence in the continent. It then considers the agronomist Dumont, the sociologist Negroni, the economist and human rights activist Verschave, and the novelists Le Clézio and Constant, whose books appeared in the following decades, which saw the official dissolution of empire and the emergence of a politically independent Africa. The aim is to analyse closely how these scholars and writers call into question the economic realities of France's expansionist policy in black Africa. My claim is that, read as a unit, their texts constitute an act of European self-confession. These essays provide the intellectual basis, within their narrower, specialized frameworks, of an uncompromising denunciatory stance on the economic crimes of imperialism and neo-imperialism, which the novels echo in their much broader, imaginative domain.

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