3 things we’re thinking about
West Africa’s new currency might be more than just a symbol
On December 21st, in Abidjan, French President Emmanuel Macron and Alassane Ouattarra, President of Côte d’Ivoire, announced the end of the West African CFA franc and welcomed the “eco,” the proposed replacement currency. The “CFA franc” stems from the phrase “French Colonies of Africa,” was established in 1945, and is the only colonial-era currency remaining on the continent. As Senegalese development economist Ndongo Samba Sylla recounts in a recent article on the CFA franc, most of the West and Central African countries in the so-called “franc zone” have suffered either economic stagnation or decline in recent decades. Accompanying the renaming of the currency is a revised set of standards regarding the cooperation between France and the West African states. The requirement that the countries store half of their reserves in France is dissolved and no longer are the states required to reserve a seat for a French representative on the bank’s board. But France’s neocolonial influence lingers as the eco will remain tied to the euro.
Fifty years on, Nigeria is still struggling to talk about its civil war.
It was a conflict that devastated a young country and its young people. Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun helped provoke a new generation to ask questions and begun a thawing of conversation around this painful memory. “I remember there was only one paragraph about the Biafran War in our world history textbook and the book was over a thousand pages long,” Maryam Isa, a 25-year-old English teacher told Quartz. “I didn’t even know it happened until I read it.” Much is left to be done.
Isabel Dos Santos, daughter of former Angolan President José Eduardo Dos Santos who ruled for four decades, and who is often referred to as Africa's richest woman, has announced she will run for president after having her assets frozen by the new government in an anti-corruption move. She is said to owe the state a 1 billion. Several of the Dos Santos children have come in for stick, in fact, since their father stepped down including brother José Filomeno who was the former chair of the Angola’s sovereign wealth fund, and sister Welwitschia, who was “suspended from parliament for ‘unjust enrichment.’” Isabel run the state-owned oil firm Sonangol, but has always maintained she is a self made billionaire whose dad just happened to be in charge of the country. Oil is Angola’s largest export (98%) and source of government income. In 2011, the IMF found that between 2007 and 2010 alone, $32 billion was gone missing from national accounts. Most of the missing money could be traced to off-the-books spending by Sonangol.
We read about
Some countries celebrating Coptic Christmas
South Sudan’s democratic desires
The slave trade’s lingering connections to corporate structures
Eritrea’s EU-driven forced labor problem
Mwalimu Ngugi’s 82nd birthday
A colonial palace becoming an African art museum
Draining the Mediterranean to connect Europe and Africa
What is Postcolonial Literature
Oh, also:
How a blind photographer makes his art
How the slave trade is connected to corporate ownership
We’re listening to Chadian-Senegalese rapper MC Solaar
Peace ✌🏿,
Anakwa and Katie