The French government has signalled its willingness to discuss reparations for colonial atrocities committed in Niger more than a century ago, according to a letter seen by the Guardian. The response, dated 19 June, was addressed to a UN special rapporteur investigating a complaint from four Nigerien communities whose ancestors were victims of the 1899 Mission Afrique Centrale (MAC), one of the most violent colonial campaigns in Africa.
France's permanent representative to the UN wrote: 'France remains open to bilateral dialogue with the Nigerien authorities, as well as to any collaboration concerning provenance research or patrimonial cooperation.' However, the letter did not acknowledge responsibility for the massacres, which saw French officers Paul Voulet and Julien Chanoine lead troops through present-day Niger, killing thousands of unarmed people and looting villages.
In Birni-N’Konni alone, an estimated 400 people were massacred in a single day. Entire villages, including Tibiri and Zinder, were burned and looted, with corpses hung at their entrances. Some survivors fled to neighbouring Nigeria and never returned. When Paris sent Colonel Jean-François Klobb to replace Voulet, he was shot dead by soldiers acting on Voulet's orders.
France has recently engaged with its colonial past, including admitting responsibility for the Rwandan genocide in 2021 and apologising for the 1947 Malagasy uprising in 2023. But the Voulet-Chanoine mission remains largely absent from French schoolbooks. The affected communities are now seeking access to official archives to uncover the full extent of the atrocities.
Hosseini Tahirou Amadou, a history teacher who began the campaign in 2014, said: 'After this recognition, now we can move on to the next step, which is reparation.' The French government cited the principle of non-retroactivity of international law, stating that any treaties it may have contravened were ratified long after the incident. It also said it had not received formal restitution requests for looted artefacts or human remains from Nigerien authorities.
