volume 15, issue 3
(2019)

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Scott Ferguson: This history, it seems to me, is illuminating in a way that we often don't hear when we hear about the story of decolonization. We hear narratives about various formerly colonized peoples winning or receiving or agreeing to take up their own political autonomy or their political capacity, but they remain economically dependent. And usually, my sense of the way that that conventional narrative is told, even if it's on the side of decolonialization, it takes money for granted—sort of treats money as a commodity, and doesn't really open up a question of how money is really the central question and problem when it comes to the process of decolonialization. Is that your sense? Do you have a sense that putting money at the center of the story brings new light to this history?

Ndongo Samba Sylla: Yeah, and I must say that I have learned a lot, and [began] seeing things differently, when I started to work on the CFA franc. I had the more or less conventional view about the process of decolonization, but when you factor in the money aspect, you see why you could not really talk of real decolonization without taking into account whether the money management was decolonized or not. And clearly, in the case of the CFA franc, one of the most important aspects for France was to have the CFA franc zone maintained. And you could see many statements from ministers, from MPs, saying that it's important that African countries remain in the CFA zone. Because if they remain in the CFA zone, it is as if those African countries were an administrative department of France. Because as France could buy all African products, just by credit—so it is a very critical thing for them, very critical, because they could buy everything just by crediting it in their own currency in the operations account. And that means that what is called the exorbitant privilege for the US dollar is somehow what France enjoys in its former colonies through the maintaining of the CFA franc. Because France has an exorbitant privilege. But now this has declined with the arrival of the euro. But nonetheless, it has been a very important exorbitant privilege. And I think that, without this arrangement, it would have been really tough for France to rebuild its economy and also be a major economic power.

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Ndongo Samba Sylla is a Senegalese development economist and Research and Programme manager at the West Africa office of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Sylla is also the author of many articles and three books, including the recently published L'Arme Invisible de la Francafrique (La Découverte, 2018), or "The Invisible Weapon of Franco-African Imperialism."