Niger ruling junta has renamed several historic sites in the capital Niamey, which previously bore references to old colonial ruler France.
Since taking power in a coup in July 2023, the Sahel nation’s military rulers have turned their backs on Paris, instead forging ties with fellow juntas in Burkina Faso and Mali – as well as Russia.
“Most of our avenues, boulevards and streets… bear names that are simply reminders of the suffering and bullying our people endured during the ordeal of colonisation,” said Major Colonel Abdramane Amadou, Minister for Youth and a junta spokesman.
“The avenue which once bore the name of General Charles de Gaulle is henceforth christened ‘Avenue Djibo Bakary’,” Amadou added.
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A socialist politician who died in 1998, Bakary was a key figure in the struggle for Niger’s independence, which it obtained in 1960.
A few hundred metres further on, the memorial to those who died in the two world wars now pays “homage to all civilian and military victims of colonisation to the present day”.
With the ruling junta frequently accusing France of wishing to topple it, the renaming of monuments and streets marks a symbolic confirmation of Niger’s break with its former imperial ruler.
Since the coup, Niger’s authorities have expelled both the French soldiers fighting against the region’s persistent jihadist threat and the French ambassador, while the Franco-Nigerien cultural centre is no longer run as a joint venture and has been renamed after Niger’s filmmaker Moustapha Alassane.
A portrait of French commander and explorer Parfait-Louis Monteil, engraved for decades in stone, was replaced by a plaque bearing the effigy of neighbouring Burkina Faso’s iconic communist leader Thomas Sankara.
An anti-imperialist hero nicknamed Africa’s Che Guevara, Sankara was killed in a 1987 coup his widow and supporters accuse France of having a hand in organising.
Maj Col Amadou hailed Sankara as a man whose “struggle for liberation” and “emancipation of peoples” was “still inspiring people” today.
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