Siddhartha Mitter writing for Quartz:
In his speech to “Africa’s youth” in Ouagadougou, last November, France’s president Emmanuel Macron made a big deal of his plans to promote the French language around the world, with advice from African thinkers and others. Two weeks later, he invited Alain Mabanckou—the celebrated Congolese novelist and essayist—to take part.
But Mabanckou—who divides his time between Paris and Los Angeles, where he is a professor at UCLA—said non. In an open letter to Macron that ran on January 15 in the French magazine L’Obs, he rejected the whole venture. The French language is not under threat, he argues. Instead, La Francophonie—the Paris-based organization with 57 member countries, roughly equivalent to the Commonwealth—and other initiatives predicated on shared French language serve France’s political interests and those of African repressive elites...[more]
