By Spy Uganda Correspondent
French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday said “colonialism was a grave mistake,” and called for “turning the page” on the past during a visit to Ivory Coast, a former French colony in West Africa.
Macron, speaking in Ivory Coast’s main city Abidjan, said France was often viewed as having a “hegemonistic view and the trappings of colonialism that was a grave mistake and a fault of the Republic.”
During his election campaign for presidency Macron had created a storm by calling France’s colonisation of Algeria a “crime against humanity”.
In a 2017 TV interview, he said French actions in Algeria, which achieved independence in 1962 after eight years of war, were “genuinely barbaric, and constitute a part of our past that we have to confront by apologizing”.
Colonialism encouraged and intensified class struggle, tribalism and ethnicity within the African colonies. These were strategies introduced by the colonialists in order to perpetuate or prolong their rule and domination of African territories.
