In May Jirgui

In the centre of the square of May Jirgui, a Nigérien town on the edge of the Sahel, five hundred miles east of the capital, Niamey, are the graves of two French soldiers who were shot dead at the spot in July 1899. Captain Paul Voulet and Lieutenant Julien Chanoine led one of the most brutal military campaigns in colonial history. More than twenty thousand Africans were killed in a six-month operation at the height of Europe’s so-called Scramble for Africa that secured for France the territory that is now Niger. Every Nigérien schoolchild learns about the atrocities perpetrated by the Voulet-Chanoine mission, and the officers’ deaths at the hands of their own African mercenary troops.

Residents pass the graves on their way to work in their fields, to collect water from the wells, to attend school. The concrete markers are a symbol of an invisible force that many Nigériens feel continues to control them from afar. And it goes some way to explaining why the junta that seized power in Niamey on 26 July, repudiating fifty years of military co-operation with France in the process, has such strong popular support.

In January 2019 I spent a day with a BBC film crew recording graveside interviews with the residents of May Jirgui for a documentary on colonial violence. The mayor, Idi Saley, told us to dig up the French officers’ remains and take them back to Europe: ‘Get them out of our town, now!’ Batoula Adamou, a farmer, blamed ‘those men down there’ for forcing her children to leave home in search of a better life, never to return.

Until independence in 1960, the municipality of May Jirgui was obliged by the colonial authorities to maintain the tombs. The residents have continued to preserve them in the hope of possible tourist revenue, but tourists have been scarce since jihadist insurgents took up kidnapping foreigners a few years ago.

Birnin Konni is a large town on the Niger-Nigeria border, a line drawn by the French and British as a result of Voulet’s depredations. The sultan, Mamane Salifou Ousmane, estimates that between seven and fifteen thousand Konni inhabitants were killed by Voulet’s forces over six days in May 1899: ‘He found us rich and left us poor. We will never get over what Voulet did to us.’ Since the coup, Birnin Konni is in the crosshairs of a possible invasion by ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States), which may start from a Nigerian army base across the border in Sokoto.

Sultan Mamane is part of an association of traditional leaders in Niger who are opposed to any external military overthrow of the new junta. They haven’t declared allegiance to the military leadership but have offered to work with them for ‘peace and progress’. One of the first mediators sent to Niamey by ECOWAS was the sultan of Sokoto, Mamane’s superior in the Hausa hierarchy that transcends the border. It is grim to contemplate an army from one side of the colonial divide attacking its kinfolk on the other.

The route we took for our film followed the trail of French massacres. It wasn’t hard to find, since it maps almost exactly onto Route Nationale 1, Niger’s main highway. The people we met felt a close connection to the events of a century ago. Assan Ag Midal, a former government adviser, explained: ‘For them, the day Voulet came to their town was the Beginning of Now. For so many Nigériens, things have not changed that much in the last hundred years.’

In 2021 many of the communities we worked with made submissions to a United Nations inquiry into the legacy of colonial crimes conducted by the Special Rapporteur for the Promotion of Truth and Justice. They demanded that France acknowledge the wrongs it had committed from 1899 till independence, not least to recognise the injustice of forcing survivors of the Voulet-Chanoine massacres to construct the RN1 at gunpoint. They also wanted meaningful reparations: development as an act of restorative justice, rather than charity at the donor’s discretion. For some, it was important to make historical archives available.

When he was researching the Voulet-Chanoine Mission in the 1950s, the French historian Jean Suret-Canale found many of the official files empty. A lot sensitive material had been destroyed. What survives is now held in a somewhat haphazard state in the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence. Under current immigration controls it is almost impossible for Nigériens to travel to Aix. And even if they were allowed, few could afford the airfare. The UN submissions called for the entire archive to be duplicated and brought to Niamey.

Much has been made since the coup of French exploitation of Nigérien uranium. It doesn’t rely on it as much as it used to, but when France declared ‘energy independence’ in 1974, this was in large part thanks to Nigérien uranium, which it extracted on an opaque profit share basis. According to the historian Gabrielle Hecht, Niger received no dividends at all in the early years of production. This inequitable arrangement derived from a Defence Agreement that Niger (along with other former French African colonies) signed in 1961, shortly after independence, which obliged Niger to give priority to France’s national security requirements.

The current standoff between Niger’s junta and the West is essentially about two competing priorities. For the junta, sovereignty is paramount: the self-proclaimed leader, General Tchiani, referred to it six times in his first television address. Felwine Sarr, the Senegalese economist, has called for a redrawing of the post-colonial dynamic which respects the ‘strong desire of Nigérien and West African youth for symmetrical relations with Europe and the West that are free of coloniality’. For ECOWAS and the West, the stated priority is a return to constitutional democracy, which may mask more real concerns about the proliferation of independently assertive military-run states in a region that remains strategically significant because of resource extraction and migration flows to Europe.

Mahamane Salissou Issa, the deputy mayor of May Jirgui, would like a fund to enable his town to chart a path of development that he says was abruptly interrupted in 1899. At a screening of the Hausa version of our film in Bristol last year, he spoke by video call of how the Nigérien government had not provided toilets or even classrooms with roofs for the schoolchildren of the town. He would also like, he said, to create a museum about the Voulet-Chanoine mission, not for tourists drawn to the darkness of colonial violence, but as a way to help envision a brighter future.