Rogers Orock Research Lecture: French-African Relations in Times of Crisis and Critique: Rumors, Suspicion, and Conspiracy Theories.

Since the 1990s, Francophone sub-Saharan Africa has been in turmoil that can understood in terms of what anthropologist Charles Piot has termed a “post-Cold War moment”, defined by the crisis of the postcolony. Historically political developments in former French African territories illustrate how ‘French-African ties serve to maintain in power those local elites permitted by France to inherit legal [colonial] sovereignty’, Richard Joseph (1978) wrote. In recent years, these developments have culminated in several crises in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa. In Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Mali, Niger, and elsewhere, a growing wave of mobilizations questions France’s continued influence in these countries. Strikingly, events in these regions, from the fight against Islamic terrorism to struggles over extractive resources such as Uranium in Niger and oil in Gabon and Cameroon, have also been inflected by the explosion of rumors and conspiracy theories linking French authorities and African elites in power.

These rumors and conspiracy theories, Rogers argues, should be read as new and popular strategies that interrogate postcolonial relations between African governments and their formal imperial power, France. This brief talk will outline my new book project on conspiracy theories and critique in French-African relations. Framed as an anthropology of geopolitics in Francophone Africa, this project is a set of essays that take suspicion as an important category to examine the way conspiracy narratives are simultaneously re-invigorating older anti-colonial critiques of France as well as redefining French-African relations today.