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The 20th Century m'zuŋ u Scramble for Independent Africa

"Veni, Vidi, Vici ",Steti - ego adduxit inimici mei"

Between 1968 and 1974, the UK forcibly removed thousands of Chagossians from their
homelands and sent them more than 1,600km (1,000 miles) away to Mauritius and the

Seychelles, where they faced extreme poverty and discrimination."

"Chagos Islands Dispute: Mauritius Calls US and UK 'hypocrites'," 134
BBC News." (October 2020)
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France, EurAfrica, FrancAfrique & Empire

Eurafrica and the myth of African independence

" Independence did not decolonise African countries and did not put an end to European
exploitation.

This is neatly illustrated by the now largely forgotten Eurafrica project. Conceived in the

interwar years, it was a plan to replace European colonial competition for Africa's
resources with an internationalised colonialism that would allow Europeans to jointly
exploit the continent under the auspices of what became the European Union.

As European scholars Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson of Linkoping University in
Sweden have noted, "the EU (or the European Economic Community, EEC, as it was called
at its foundation) was from the outset designed, among other things, to enable a rational,

co-European colonial management of the African continent".

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The Rome Treaty, which established the EEC in 1957, was nothing short of a resurrection
of the Berlin Conference's General Act, which 73 years earlier had sought to create an

internationalised regime of free trade stretching across the middle of Africa.

In Rome, six European countries, without the involvement of any Africans, promised each
other equal access to trading and investment opportunities in what is today the territory

of 21 African countries: Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Benin, Mauritania, Niger,
Burkina Faso, the Republic of the Congo (Congo Brazzaville), the Central Africa Republic,

Chad, Gabon, the Comoros, Madagascar, Djibouti, Togo, Cameroon, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Burundi and Somalia. In fact, as noted by Hansen
and Jonsson, three-quarters of the territory covered by the EEC actually lay outside

continental Europe.

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It was into this context that the countries of Africa were born. Congenitally misshapen,
they were easy prey for Europe. The Eurafrica project was simply given a makeover as