Welcome to the 54th issue of The Funambulist. In it, you will read texts about the endurance of colonial structures in western and northern European societies, namely Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, and Italy. A text on Denmark – from its occupation of Greenland to its highly spatialized racialization in the so-called “ghettos” – was meant to also be present, but unfortunately failed to be. With this present text, I will add France to the list myself. However, before doing so, this introduction is also meant to provide an argumentative framework for reading the articles of this issue.
The concept of colonial continuum is central to this framework. In the context of France, it is an expression that can be easily traced back to (at least) 2005 and the conversations following the “Appel des Indigènes de la République” (which I would roughly translate as the “Manifesto from the [French] Republic’s Colonized People”), which tied French structural racism with France’s colonial history. In anti-racist activist circles, the phrase “colonial continuum” has been regularly invoked since then. I would like to argue that often in these uses, this phrase only designates a temporal continuity between a historic period that is explicitly colonial, and a present in which the colonial racialization has perdured.
Instead, I would like to advocate for a use of the phrase “colonial continuum,” through which the richness and complexity of the term “continuum” can be expressed, where we understand a continuum as a surface on which time and space are inseparable.
This allows for time to no longer be understood as a line where past, present, and future are queuing after one another, but rather as a curved surface where what we designate as “past,” “present,” and “future” all exist together. Similarly, this allows for space to no longer be understood as a flat area of a map, but rather as a geology containing the various layers of political forces that make it what it is, as well as the numerous potentialities of what it could be. Such an interpretation may be perceived as unnecessarily abstract; however, I am convinced that it allows us to bridge different space-time to understand the way colonial structures operate, to draw transnational solidarities, as well as imagine liberated futures.
Oftentimes, these bridges are drawn through generations. On June 23, 2023, a 17-year-old French teenager of Algerian and Moroccan descent called Nahel Merzouk was murdered by the police in Nanterre (Paris western banlieue), a couple of hundreds meters away from where the large shantytown of La Folie previously stood, whose inhabitants had contributed significantly to the Algerian Revolution on the northern side of the Mediterranean. Is this overlap merely symbolic, or is there a deeper political meaning to be found in it? The genealogy between the police harassment experienced by Algerians inhabiting this shantytown in the early 1960s – when a special police brigade was in charge of destroying any new dwelling built by the self-built village – and the one experienced by Arab, Black, and Rroma teenagers and young men today surely is not symbolic. Racialization itself is a colonial invention, and its endurance attests of the simultaneity of past and present. Racist policing does not solely move through time, it also moves through space. Colonial administrators, chiefs of police, and military officers navigate the colonial continuum, acquiring counterrevolutionary skills in one colonial geography, and perfecting it in another. These are not personal trajectories: they rather reveal the structural lines that hold the colonial continuum together.
In the same way Adam Eliott-Cooper brings attention to the lines followed by British colonial administrators and militaries in Malaya, Kenya, Ireland, and Palestine (see the conversation with him following this introduction), we can pinpoint numerous figures of French public servants, administrators, and army officers whose trajectories reveal the colonial continuum. Funambulist past contributor Mathieu Rigouste has used this methodology several times to show, for instance, how French public servant Pierre Bolotte served the Vichy regime, later took part of the counterrevolution in so-called “Indochina” and Algeria, then being responsible for the massacre of over a hundred Guadeloupeans in May 1967 as the Prefect of Guadeloupe. When Bolotte was the Prefect of Seine-Saint-Denis prefecture in 1971, he created the infamous BAC (Brigade anticriminalité) police brigade, well-known for systematically harassing the banlieue racialized youth, in particular boys and men. Of course, Bolotte’s example is just one among many of its kind. We can also think more recently of Amaury de Saint-Quentin, born a settler in a capitalist family in Kanaky, later serving as Prefect of Guadeloupe, then Prefect of Reunion, when he took a curfew against the Gilets Jaunes in 2018. He was then named Prefect of Val d’Oise (northern Paris banlieue prefecture) and distinguished himself by lying to the press when young Black Sarcelles resident Ibrahima Bah died in a motorbike accident triggered by the police in October 2019.
These trajectories should not make us forget that it is one thing to write about the enduring colonial structures in a European society; it is another to describe these structures in the context of the colony itself.
I write this text while Kanaky still lives under a counterrevolutionary curfew. For the first time in three decades, the Kanak indigenous struggle against the French settler colony of New Caledonia has received numerous marks of internationalist solidarity. In January 2024, the Macron government initiated a constitutional reform to “unfreeze” the electoral body of the country, which would allow about 25,000 recent French settlers to vote in Kanaky. Independentist political parties organized against this reform for months, leading up to April this year, where two massive and joyful protests in the settler neighborhoods of Nouméa were attended by close to 15% of the entire Kanak population. However in France, 17,000 kilometers away, these protests went relatively unnoticed, including in anti-colonial activist circles. On May 13, 2024, some Kanak prisoners at Nouméa’s Camp Est prison initiated a revolt, while independentist organizers decided to construct roadblocks on main axes of the city (mostly), thus materializing the gates of the settler gated community embodied by the capital city – reinforced by the fact that the city is built on a peninsula. Young Kanak allowed cars to come through these activist checkpoints one by one. They also defended the barricades against police assaults, burned cars, targeted key buildings, and stole basic goods from supermarkets. Settlers organized themselves in militias, constructing their own checkpoints, and attacked activist groups and individuals at gunpoint. At least four Kanak were killed in these attacks and many more were wounded after being shot at. Moreover, a state of emergency was declared from Paris that forced about two dozen Kanak organizers under house arrest.
This Kanak uprising is strongly reminiscent of the one that happened forty years ago, which I described at length in my book States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum (PMN, 2021, forthcoming in English, 2025). In November 1984, the newly formed Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS, a clear homage to the Algerian FLN) launched an insurrection aiming at the liberation of the country from French settler colonialism. Taking advantage of the narrowness of Kanaky’s Great Earth (the main island), and the reliance of the colonial order upon two roads (one on the west coast, one on the east coast) to hold back the military police, activists occupied settler villages and claimed some land back, in an attempt to radically switch the balance of power between the French state and them. This insurrection was met by killings of Kanak activists by settler militias (in particular the December 5, 1984 massacre in Tiendanite, the tribe of FLNKS President Jean-Marie Tjibaou), the assassination of Kanak leader Éloi Machoro by the French special forces, and the massacre of nineteen Kanak activists by the French army on May 4, 1988 on the island of Ouvéa, after they took military police officers as hostages. This collective trauma led to the signing of agreements between the FLNKS, the main settler political party, as well as the French state. The dissension it created among Kanak political parties was such that it led to the assassination of FLNKS President Tjibaou and Vice-President Yeiwéné Yeiwéné by Kanak Ouvéa activist Djubelly Wéa.
In 1998, the Nouméa Accord paved the way for the country to be decolonized, as enshrined in the French constitution. Kanaky reached a increasingly greater autonomy, the implementation of a parallel legislative council (Customary Senate) and a judiciary system according to Kanaky customary law, the collection of ethnic-based statistics to make visible the abysmal wealth disparity between some settler communities and most Kanak people, and the freezing of the electoral body whereby only settlers (and their descendants) who lived for at least ten uninterrupted years in the country before the signature of the Accord could continue to vote in New Caledonian elections. This electoral body was crucial for the implementation of three referendums about the country’s independence, as planned by the Accord. The two first ones occurred in 2018 and 2020, when voters against independence outnumbered those for Kanaky’s full sovereignty by a small margin, despite the active abstention of some independentist parties. The ultimate referendum was therefore meant to be a historic moment for which, if well organized, independence was on the horizon. The Macron government thus decided to bring forward this third referendum to December 2021, one year before its potential date, at a moment when Kanak communities were undertaking a national mourning of the people who had died from the Covid-19 pandemic in the country, making political campaigning an impossibility. Kanak political parties thus refused to participate in this referendum and considered its result as null. The French state, on the other hand, considered the matter of independence as belonging to the past, and thus moved forward to “unfreeze” the electoral body in Kanaky.
If I had written this text a few years ago, I would have described how young Kanak on the barricades embody the same anti-colonial and anti-racist figure, as the racialized youth facing the police in France’s banlieues following the police murder of Nahel Merzouk last year. I would have written that the colonial continuum was precisely the concept that allows us to think of them both as essentially identical in their resistance. This is the risk of concepts that aim to encapsulate multiple political realities: they often disregard crucial specificities and take shortcuts to make their claims work. The colonial continuum nevertheless explains that the people facing state violence and the tactics used by police and military police in the banlieues and in Kanaky are essentially the same. It explains that the capitalist interests in the extraction of Kanaky’s nickel are essentially those at work in the plunder of Niger and Gabon’s soils to extract uranium, or in so-called “French” Guiana for gold. It explains how the 19th century dispossession of indigenous lands in Algeria and Kanaky are simultaneous and analogous. It explains how the colonial racialization of the majority of African people as black can find echoes in the racialization of Kanak people as Melanesian (i.e. black, as well). The colonial continuum also enables “encounters” between those who are subjected to its violence. This is how in 1871, it deported members of the proletarian Paris Commune and Algerian Kabyles who had just led a massive anti-colonial insurrection to its New Caledonia penal colony. Although our internationalist naivete makes us wish that this encounter be one made of solidarity against colonial forces, the political reality is always more complex. Indeed, in 1878, during the great Kanak revolt led by Atai, most Communard and Kabyle convicts were enticed to participate in the French counterrevolution and many remained as settlers in Kanaky.
The colonial continuum undeniably creates bridges between geographies, temporalities, and people. Reclaiming these bridges for solidarity is not easy.
As we discuss with Lis Camelia and Fayo Said in this issue, what kind of commonality can be found between Black Dutch Caribbean communities in the Netherlands, and Melanesian West Papuans in their relationship to Dutch colonialism, anti-Blackness, and indigeneity? Could that be a similar commonality that the FLNKS found in the Algerian Revolution, or later on in the Palestinian (First) Intifada? How can the ghosts of the German genocide of Nama and Ovaherero peoples manifest their presence in contemporary Germany (Fatou Sillah and Abdur Rehman Zafar)? What should the anti-fascist movement in Italy learn from the anti-colonial resistance in Libya and Ethiopia (Amalie Elfallah with Maaza Mengiste and Alessandro Spina)? How can the Spanish state pay its debts to the Sarhaoui people (Inma Naïma Zanoguera)? What does the Portuguese Revolution owe to the Guinean, Cape Verdean, Angolan, and Mozambican anti-colonial struggles and its legacies among the diasporas (Ana Naomi de Sousa)? These questions are a few we ask in the pages of this issue. ■