Macron’s French language crusade bolsters imperialism

FRANCE - Alain Mabanckou, the acclaimed Congolese writer, has rejected Emmanuel Macron’s project to boost French speaking worldwide, calling instead for a complete overhaul of the club of French-speaking countries known as la Francophonie, which he said had become an instrument of French imperialism propping up African dictators.

The institutional network of French-speaking countries “cannot continue as it is today because it goes against everything we ever dreamed of”, Mabanckou told the Guardian in Nantes, where he was artistic director of the this weekend. “It is not and it has never been the great common melting pot that would ensure cultural freedom and courteous exchange. Today it is one of the last instruments that allows France to say it can still dominate the world, still have a hold over its former colonies.” Born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the award-winning novelist, 51, is hailed as one of the world’s best writers in French winner of France’s top Renaudot literary prize and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. On Martin Luther King Day, Mabanckou published , refusing to work on the French president’s new plans to boost the Frenchspeaking world. Since then, other writers and have joined him in criticising what they describe as France’s imperialist and out-of-touch approach. The French president has promised a project next month to reinvigorate the “Francophonie”, the official grouping of more than 50 countries from Senegal to Canada via Belgium, Madagascar and Mauritiuswhere French is an official or significant language. When Macron announced in a speech to students in Burkina Faso in November that French could be “the number one language in Africa and maybe even the world” within decades and that it fell to young Africans to defend it, he underestimated the cultural row that would ensue. (The Guardian)