More than a century after its troops burned villages and looted cultural artifacts in the quest to include Niger in its West African colonial portfolio, France has signaled willingness over possible restitution, but is yet to acknowledge responsibility.
“France remains open to bilateral dialogue with the Nigerien authorities, as well as to any collaboration concerning provenance research or patrimonial cooperation,” the office of France’s permanent representative to the UN wrote in a document seen by the Guardian.
The June 19 response was given to a letter dated two months earlier from a UN special rapporteur working on a complaint by four Nigerien communities representing descendants of victims of the 1899 Mission Afrique Centrale, one of the most violent colonial campaigns in Africa.
In 1899, French officers led by the captains Paul Voulet and Julien Chanoine marched tirailleurs — as the African soldiers under their command were known — through communities in present-day Niger. They killed thousands of unarmed people and looted supplies, terrorizing local people into compliance. The next year, Niger became officially absorbed into French West Africa.
Authorities have been reluctant to acknowledge the Voulet-Chanoine mission, which is largely absent from schoolbooks and only faintly remembered in Niger’s national curriculum. Instead, there was a bureaucratic cover-up, and accounts of survivors’ descendants have been weak or subdued, often due to decades of silence and trauma.
The case relied on documents written by Nigerien historians and limited archival materials including reports by Voulet himself, said the British-Senegalese lawyer Jelia Sané who worked with the affected communities. The communities are now requesting access to official archives in order to reveal the true extent of the atrocities.
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