A critical analysis of the ambiguous status of French as an official language in contemporary Francophone West Africa: Exploring the cultural, social, economic and political implications for locals

In Africa, colonialism has left many cursed legacies in its wake with far-reaching implications for the social, cultural, political and economic life of locals. The use of colonial language as an official tongue of government business is a factor with enduring negative consequences for locals, but which do not appear obvious on face value. In Francophone West Africa, the French language was impishly presented as something that was performing an innocuous and benign function in local societies, yet behind the veil, there were ominous and nefarious motives at play. The French colonial authorities imposed French as an official language, purportedly to operate as a neutral language on account that there were several indigenous languages. Language is the central pivot of any culture, so by elevating the French language over indigenous tongues, the colonialists were subtly yet effectively supplanting local cultural and traditional values with French cultural values. This study argues that the French language was and has never been in congruency with the emancipatory aims of local African traditions, local customs and values, and as such, local people need to rise to the occasion and (re)claim their rightful position as legitimate agenda setters of their own polities. Data for this study were gathered by way of document analysis, digital ethnography and online information. Findings suggest that far from being a neutral language, French has been a major destabilizing factor in undermining the social, cultural, economic and political life of the people of West Africa, especially by entrenching their marginalization. Further, the continued imposition of French is inconsistent with relevant United Nations (UN) human rights conventions on the fundamental rights of indigenous peoples in terms of usage and promotion of their own languages as mediums of official communication. Furthermore, the study exposes the spurious democracy mantra of France in Africa, whereby, French pronouncements emphasizing the value of democracy have largely been a smokescreen for France’s furtherance of its neocolonial agendas of dominance, repression, economic colonization, forcible assimilation, and the divide-and-rule tactics of pitting local ethnicities against each other to create enmity. None of the aforementioned practices resemble democratic values; for, there can be no genuine political democracy without relational equality in society. The study concludes that to reverse this foreign dominance trap that has continued to entrench local inequalities, West African states should - in the interim – elevate their indigenous languages to the status of official tongues alongside French, with the ultimate objective of eventually dropping French all together at some future point. Already, Mali has led the way; in 2023, it discarded French as an official language and replaced it with indigenous languages.