Activist André Blaise Essama, 44, has served time in prison and been fined for his longstanding campaign against colonial statues, notably that in the Cameroonian city of Douala of French wartime hero general Philippe Leclerc, which he says he has decapitated seven times and toppled on 20 occasions, calling for statues to be erected to the country's own national heoes.
There has been a steep increase in the number of African visitors who have had their visa applications rejected by the French authorities over the last five years. According to applicants and lawyers, requests to visit France regularly get turned down for no good reason. Yet, as Fanny Pigeaud reports, a recent case in Nantes in western France shows that some visa refusals can be overturned by the courts.
Ruben Um Nyobè is a symbolic figure in the story of anti-colonial resistance in Africa. A champion of independence in his native Cameroon, Nyobè was killed by the French army in 1958 after which France and its local allies sought to wipe him from the country's collective memory. In his latest album Cameroon musician Blick Bassy pays homage to Ruben Um Nyobè, his achievements and his personal struggle in an attempt to spark new interest in his life and writings. Fanny Pigeaud reports.
More than 100,000 people have fled from the Central African Republic (CAR) to neighbouring Cameroon since the explosion of inter-religious violence in CAR over the past 18 months.The carnage in CAR, a former French colony and majority Christian country, began in earnest after the overthrow by the mostly-Muslim Seleka rebel coalition of the country’s Christian president François Bozizé in March 2013, after which a number of Muslim militias exacted killings and lootings against Christian communities. The inter-religious violence heightened towards the end of 2013, and most notably after the resignation in January this year of Bozizé's successor, Muslim president Michel Djotodia, which saw the retreat back to the north of the country by the Séléka forces, and a resulting campaign of hateful revenge by Christian militias, called the anti-Balakas, against the Muslim population.Since the end of last year, a peace-keeping force of about 2,000 French troops and almost 6,000 soldiers from a pan-African mission, Misca, have been struggling to quell the carnage that has seen tens of thousands of Muslims flee their homes in what Amnesty International has described as a campaign of “ethnic cleansing”. Some have fled to the largely Muslim north of the country, others to neighbouring Chad and Cameroon.Of all the refugees from CAR arriving in Cameroon since March 2013, an estimated 97% are Muslim, while the remainder are Christians and animists. Most of the Muslim refugees are Bororo (also called Wodaabe), a people from the Fulani ethnic group. The Bororo, traditionally nomadic cattle herders, have long been the target of violent persecution in CAR. This began in the mid-2000s, mostly the because of jealousy at their relative affluence gained from the large herds they manage, but spiralled over the past 18 months during the savage conflict between Christians and Muslims in the country.Over several years, French photographer Frédéric Noy, who has long specialised in African affairs, has reported on the plight of the Bororo, and Mediapart publishes here a selection of his photos from both 2009, when many were already forced to flee to Cameroon, and in 2014, when the exodus became massive. “The situation in 2009 is like the embers upon which it sufficed to blow to set-off the manhunt led against the Bororos that we witness today in the Central African Republic,” says Noy.A list of links to Mediapart reports on the situation in CAR can be found at the bottom of this page.
The Central African Republic (CAR), where French troops are engaged in attempting to restore order amid inter-religious violence and which has long been the scene of political chaos, is governed more by its influential neighbouring states than any true national leadership, writes Mediapart international affairs correspondent Thomas Cantaloube. In this analysis of a complex and seemingly blocked situation for the country’s future, he concludes that the French military intervention is unlikely to remove - and more likely to maintain - the fundamental reasons for the turmoil in CAR.
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