Gregory Valdespino is a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and specialist in West African and French history.
Tomorrow, Senegal votes in an election that French-backed president Macky Sall repeatedly delayed. The fact that the election is going ahead is a victory for young and poor Senegalese, whose protests resisted elites’ democratic backsliding.
The French army’s forced exit from Niger has been wistfully termed the end of an era of great-power status. We should remember what this really meant: a zombie empire that crushed democracy in order to protect French elites’ power, both in Africa and at home.