CFA Franc and Monetary Sovereignty on the African Continent

When thinking about money and neocolonialism, few instances appear as striking as the CFA franc imposed by France on fourteen west and central african countries; a monetary apparatus central in the maintenance of what came to be known as “Françafrique.” To understand its mechanism and, crucially, how monetary sovereignty operates, we talked with Dakar-based economist Ndongo Samba Sylla.

MYRIAM AMRI & LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: Many of us associate Françafrique with the CFA franc (among other things) and, indeed, on a superficial level, it is not so difficult to think of this currency as the neocolonial structure par excellence in West Africa—Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Togo—and in Central Africa—Cameroon, Congo Brazzaville, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic, and Chad. However, it is one thing to think about it superficially, and quite another to examine it in detail, as you do in your book with Fanny Pigeaud. Can you tell us about how it works, which makes it the main tool of “Françafrique”?

NDONGO SAMBA SYLLA: In the aftermath of World War II, the French economy had been devastated, and it was necessary to devalue the metropolitan franc, which was in circulation throughout most of the French empire. A decision had to be made as to whether to devalue the metropolitan franc uniformly across the empire or to apply different devaluation rates, given that the colonies had suffered much less from the war than the metropolis. The Minister of Finance in the provisional government at the time secretly decided to implement different devaluation rates for the metropolis and the colonies. This is how the CFA franc was created in December 1945: from a devaluation of the metropolitan franc that was in circulation in the colonies. The acronym then stood for “Franc des colonies françaises d’Afrique” (Franc of the French colonies of Africa). It was the currency in circulation in the sub-Saharan part of the French colonial empire.

At the end of World War II, the dominant power was the United States, and the dominant currency, the dollar. The French elites were aware that if France wanted to remain a politically independent nation from the United States, it had to free itself from US aid. They said to themselves, “The empire can provide us with the foreign currency we need, and we can also use our own currency, the franc, to pay for some of our imports of raw materials.” The CFA franc enabled a depleted and uncompetitive French economy to obtain resources, particularly raw materials from the empire, without spending dollars and to benefit from captive markets. In addition, the empire’s exports brought in foreign currencies that were controlled and used by France. The fact that most countries’ acquired independence in the early 1960s did not change the situation.