France’s Persecution of Pan-Africanist Kemi Seba

Masked men violently seized one of Francophone Africa’s leading anti-colonial activists, Kema Seba, in Paris on October 14. The 42-year-old is the President of Urgences Panafricanistes  (Pan-Africanist Emergencies) which has been on the frontline of the movement across France’s former colonies in West Africa against its continuing monetary stranglehold through its colonial currency of CFA-Franc.

Along with the group’s coordinator, Hery Djehuty, Seba was held and interrogated in the basement of France’s Directorate General of Internal Security (DGSI), which is tasked with counter-terrorism and counter-espionage. He was released on Wednesday, October 16. The prosecutor’s office said that although no charges were pressed on him, the investigation into possible “foreign interference” in French affairs will continue.

Military codes applicable to spies and high-ranking officials sharing intelligence with a foreign power to promote attack on France are being invoked against the civilian activist, his lawyer Maitre Branco complained in a press statement while Seba was still in custody. These charges entail a prison term of 30 years.

Seba is no stranger to French prisons, having served sentences in 2009, 2011 and 2014 for his role in organizing militant Black power movements. Born in France to Beninese parents who had named him Stellio Capo Chichi, he first came to prominence in the mid-2000s after forming Tribu KA, a Black-nationalist organization modeled on the US-based Nation of Islam whose popular members in the 1960s included Malcolm X and boxer Muhammad Ali.

After France banned Tribu KA, accusing it of racism and antisemitism, he reconstituted the organization twice under different names. Both were dissolved by the Interior Ministry, following which he went on to head the New Black Panther Party’s branch in France.

Beyond France, Seba has also endured state repression in some of its former colonies in West Africa, like in Senegal’s capital Dakar in 2015 where he founded Urgences Panafricanistes.

The flaming CFA note in the movement against French colonialism

Two years later, in August 2017, Seba was arrested in Dakar after he publicly burnt a 5,000 CFA franc note, denouncing it as “colonial currency” at the rally he led “against Françafrique”: a term that has come to refer to the system through which France continues to maintain economic, political and military dominance over its former African colonies.

“I knew that by carrying out this purely symbolic act, the BCEAO (the Central Bank of West African States)…probably on orders from the Bank of France, would initiate proceedings aimed at putting me in prison. I knew it, and I am ready to pay the price,” he had posted on social media the night before his arrest. The Senegalese Penal Code prescribes five to ten years imprisonment to “any person who voluntarily burns… notes, bills of exchange”, among other items listed.

When he was produced in court days later, along with another member who had been arrested with him, Urgences Panafricanistes held demonstrations not only in Dakar but also in city of Cotonou in his home country of Benin, Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, Moursal in Chad, Mali’s capital Bamako, Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou and Niger’s capital Niamey.

Having thus contributed to the growing movement across France’s former colonies in West Africa, he walked free, securing an order from the court for his release on the technical grounds that he had burnt ‘a note’, in singular, while the law only proscribed burning “notes” and “bills”, in the plural.

A persona non-grata

However, Senegalese authorities deported him to France and declared him persona non-grata, following which Guinea and Togo turned him away in 2018. In March 2019, Seba arrived in Abidjan, the largest city of Ivory Coast, after deriding its president as a “voluntary slave” for publicly defending and justifying CFA Franc. He was to lead a public meeting “against neocolonialism”, that Urgences Panafricanistes had organized.

The police preempted the meeting by arresting its members, including its coordinator Hery Djehuty who was also apprehended in Paris earlier this week. Seba presented himself to the police, who forced him aboard a flight to Cotonou. He was taken into custody right off the plane and released after interrogation by the intelligence of Benin, of which he is a national and whose passport he was carrying on travel.

Later that year, Seba was arrested, once again with Djehuty, in Burkina Faso after he addressed a thousand youth at the University of Ouagadougou on the “revolutionary fight against the forces of French neo-colonialism in Africa” on December 21 – the birth anniversary of Thomas Sankara. The Ouagadougou High Court gave Seba a suspended sentence of two months for “insulting” the then Burkinabe head of state, Roch Kaboré.

The regimes subservient to Paris “obviously find it easier to attack African youth than to attack the French oligarchy”, Seba said in his statement to the media after the trial. Days later in January 2020, he was stopped at the Cotonou airport in Benin from boarding a flight to Mali’s capital Bamako to attend the intensifying protest demanding the withdrawal of French troops from their country.

France on retreat

As these protests grew bigger and more radical over the next months, the regime of Mali’s then-president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, perceived domestically as a puppet controlled by his French master, fell to a popularly supported coup led by Colonel Assimi Goita in August that year. His military government, backed by the trade unions and the mass movements against French colonialism, expelled France’s ambassador and sought the withdrawal of its troops from Mali two years later in February 2022.

Hundreds of thousands gathered in the capital Bamako’s Independence Square in celebration. “What this government is now doing has never been done in Mali before. It has the full backing of the Malian people because it is willing to fight for our independence,” one jubilant protester had told Peoples Dispatch at the time.

A month before, mass demonstrations in Burkina Faso had culminated in a similar coup removing Kabore’s regime. After consolidating power with the support of popular movements, the president of the new military government, Capt. Ibrahim Traore, ordered the French troops out in January 2023.

In the meantime, Mohamed Bazoum, the then president of Niger, had invited the French troops forced out of Mali into his country where he was already struggling to suppress the growing anti-French protests. The head of the presidential guard, Gen. Abdourahamane Tchiani, removed Bazoum and dissolved his regime in July 2023, to the joy of hundreds of thousands who took to the streets of Niamey in celebration. France, whose troops had already been marched out of Mali and Burkina Faso along with their diplomats, declared that it will not withdraw its troops or its ambassador from Niger.

When masses of angry Nigeriens surrounded its embassy and military bases, France threatened war, shooting from the shoulders of the regional bloc, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Mali and Burkina Faso came to Niger’s defense. The three countries entered into a military pact with a degree of popular support which the ECOWAS countries could not claim.

People’s movements warned their governments against attacking Niger. In the Francophone countries of the bloc, Urgences Panafricanistes, which had been leading protests against their governments’ subservience to France, organized several campaigns in solidarity with the people of Niger.

Eventually, France backed down, announcing the withdrawal of its troops in late September, within days of which Seba went to Niamey, where he was received and honored by General Tchiani and other members of his popular government. “They told us, they are counting on us for the total destruction of Françafrique,” Seba said about the meeting, adding “We will not disappoint them.”

After the French troop withdrawal was complete by the end of 2023, Tchiani announced this February that Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso – united as the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) – had begun charting a way out of CFA Franc to a new common currency as “a first step toward breaking free from the legacy of colonization.”

“I am a free Black man. I am a free African”

That month, a wounded and weakened France – whose parliament’s chairman of the defense committee in March 2023 had accused Seba of “relaying Russian propaganda” – initiated the proceeding to revoke Seba’s citizenship. A letter notifying him of this proceeding stated as a reason his criticism of “French presence in Africa” as “neocolonialism.”

“Your passport is not a bone that you give us or take away depending on how submissive we are to you as if Black people were dogs. I am a free Black man. I am a free African. I am a free Beninese,” Seba declared, after burning his French passport during a live press conference in March, months before the French government completed the process of stripping him of his citizenship in July.

He maintains that the aim of the French government was “to limit my movements and thus slow down the impact of my anti-colonialist actions.” However, by August, he had a new diplomatic passport, granted by Niger “in recognition of the fight I have been leading for 25 years for Africa, at the risk of my life.”

“As a Beninese patriot with a long-term political project for my country,” he added, “I feel deeply connected to the Pan-African revolution in Niger, just as the Martinican Frantz Fanon was drawn to the Algerian revolution, the African-American Stokely Carmichael to the Pan-African revolution in Ghana and Guinea, or… the Argentine Che Guevara to the Cuban revolution.”

It was the Nigerien diplomatic passport he was carrying when he was on a tour to mobilize the African diaspora across the continents for the Pan-African cause, starting with Turkey, where he was invited for a series of interviews. From there, he went to Azerbaijan to attend the Anti-Colonial Congress organized by the Baku Initiative Group (BIG), and on to Europe where he had meetings with civil society organizations in Belgium and Spain.

Before concluding his tour with a speech at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, he had arrived in France on a Schengen visa to meet Beninese dissidents and visit his sick father when he was apprehended in Paris.

“Kemi Seba is one of the most important figures in Africa’s struggle for independence, opposing the policies of neo-colonialism for many years. His detention, besides being a violation of freedom of expression and political activity, proves once again that France is trying to maintain its presence and influence in Africa through illegitimate means,” read BIG’s statement. “Such actions show that the French state has not yet come out of the colonial mindset…”

While France maintains that its apprehension and interrogation of Seba was part of its investigation into “foreign interference”, Seba’s lawyer Branco insisted that Seba was not involved in any covert intelligence activities warranting the charges for which he was being investigated.

“He has never hidden his actions and partnerships with many forces that counterbalance the power of the United States and the West, whether it be Venezuela, Cuba, Russia or others,” Branco said in his statement ahead of Seba’s release.

“We started this political struggle in 1999, when neither Macron, Putin, Maduro, Kim Jong Un, nor anyone else were in office as presidents. We are fighting for our people, and no one can stop us from continuing our work,” Seba said, declaring upon his release, “We are free… We are a generation of free Black men and women, with only one obsession: the ultimate decolonization of the African continent and its diaspora. We are not fighting against a country, but against a system of oppression that suffocates Africa and the Caribbean.”