Niger bid goodbye to the Avenue Charles de Gaulle on Tuesday as its ruling junta renamed several historic sites in the capital Niamey which previously bore references to old colonial master 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.

With the sound of marching bands blaring in the background, several junta officials took to the streets to witness the new names’ inauguration.

“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.

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.

‘Honour our ancestors’

Other monuments across Niamey will bear new names from Tuesday onwards.

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.

Amadou hailed Sankara as a man whose “struggle for liberation” and “emancipation of peoples” was “still inspiring people” today.

Meanwhile the Place de Francophonie was renamed after the Alliance of Sahel States – a confederation created with Mali and Burkina Faso in 2023, cementing relations between the coup-hit countries.

All three had their membership suspended to the 88-state International Organisation of La Francophonie in the wake of their coups.

From now on “we are going to honour our ancestors”, vowed General Assoumane Abdou Harouna, the capital region’s governor and a junta figure.

Oumarou Abdourahamane, president of the Niger branch of the NGO Urgences Panafricanistes, welcomed the new names.

“It makes no sense for our streets to continue to bear the names of former colonists… and so justice is being done by renaming these streets, by naming them after our country’s heroes,” he said.

Urgences Panafricanistes is headed at the international level by activist Kemi Seba, known for his virulent anti-Western views, who was arrested on Monday in Paris for as-yet unknown reasons.

Seba, who was born in France to Beninese parents, holds a Nigerien diplomatic passport as special adviser to junta leader Abdourahamane Tiani.

The controversial militant, who was recently stripped of his French nationality, is a radical black power activist who is regularly accused of anti-Semitism and has been sentenced in France several times for incitement to racial hatred.

In June 2023, shortly before the coup that toppled elected president Mohamed Bazoum, Niger also adopted a new national anthem titled “For the honour of the fatherland”, which references the anti-colonial struggle.

It replaced “La Nigerienne”, whose lyrics were written by French composer Maurice Albert Thiriet in 1961, a year after the country gained its independence.

Source: AFP