Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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 Posted: Tue May 31, 2011 6:32 pm Post subject: How France Lost Africa to the US |
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How France Lost Africa to the US
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For too long, France had exerted enormous economic dominance among its former colonies. Learning English gave the business class new access to the Anglophone capitalist world, and to American capital especially.
The pragmatism and openness of American capital differs sharply from France's more closed, status-oriented managerial culture. About the time that France experienced a wave of protests by African immigrants in 2005, I met with a group of university-educated black Africans living and working in Paris. All of them uniformly complained about racial bias and about limits on the potential of even highly talented to immigrants to advance up French corporate ladders. They showed little gratitude for the government of France having paid for their university educations, a practice meant to bind elites from Africa to French society. The contrast with America's embrace of talented immigrants -- and racial equality -- was impossible to ignore. In a 2009 study of Francophone Africans, Whitney R. Henderson of Providence College found similar reasons for their choice of the U.S. over France. |
But the statistics are remarkable.
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| In Gallup polls of global attitudes towards American leadership, sub-Saharan Africans express the highest degree of approval, topping 75 percent of those polled in 20 countries. In seven French-speaking countries -- including Burundi, Chad, Senegal Mali and Ivory Coast -- approval ratings exceeded 85%. |
The Africans are hostile to the French penchant for cultivating and insulating its elites. |
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