For Malians, the French-led intervention has been an emotional roller-coaster. At times critical of their former colonizer in the past, many are now cheering French troops.
The first casualty named in the two-week old fight to liberate northern Mali from Islamists militants was a Frenchman. Damien Boiteux, a lieutenant, was reported killed while flying his helicopter into battle near the city of Konna.
For Younouss Dicko, a Malian political party leader, the story of Lt. Boiteux inspires a mix of sorrow, gratitude – and a certain watchfulness.
“It’s valorous of France to come aid Mali,” he says. “But the French know there are limits. I think that with friendship and brotherhood, they won’t stay longer than necessary or interfere too much in our internal affairs.”
France never sought this battle. After decades of meddling in Africa, it says it wants former colonies to look after themselves. For Malians, French-led intervention has been an emotional roller-coaster. At times critical of their former colonizer in the past, many are now cheering French troops.
The drama is playing out against a backdrop of colonial history and human ties that still link French and Malian society – sometimes complicated by old wounds, sometimes transcending them. For now, smiles abound. But a misstep by Paris could swiftly sour things.
“There’s never been a moment in French-Malian relations when people have supported France this much,” says Gregory Mann, an associate history professor and Mali specialist at Columbia University in New York. “But France could make just one or two mistakes, and lose goodwill quickly.”
France first came to Mali amid the 19th-century Scramble for Africa, as European powers gobbled up the continent in a race to build empires and extract resources. By mid-century, French colonialists in Senegal were eyeing the territory that would eventually become modern Mali.
In the words of Louis Faidherbe, a colonial administrator and an architect of France’s African empire, writing in 1863, “if…you use the Senegal River to gain a route to the Sudan and the banks of the Niger, you will create a French colony that will count among the most beautiful in the world.”
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