By November 1940, les forces françaises libres had swelled to 19,679 soldiers. Arguably the setback at Dakar became a benefit, because it hardened and focused the French exile movement, forced it to adjust to a long-war strategy, and obliged de Gaulle to initiate the transition from a military organization with a political agenda into a political movement with an, albeit constricted, armed wing. With the creation on 27 October 1940 of a Conseil de la défense de l’Empire, the external resistance was now a legitimate territorial power. In the BCRA, la France libre had an organization with the potential to structure and operationalize an as yet diminutive but inevitable internal resistance. On the debit side, la France libre remained an insecure movement with a narrow and underdeveloped African base, factionalized between soldiers and civilians, between the various branches of the movement, torn between its civil war with Vichy and the compulsion to fight the Germans. The BCRA was inexperienced in clandestine mobilization, without a strategy, and dependent on the British for resources. While de Gaulle exhibited many noble qualities, even elements of true greatness, and had stamped his personality on his organization, his attributes were offset by an autocratic temperament and imperious behavior that exasperated allies and alienated potential supporters. Furthermore, Vichy still commanded its High Seas Fleet and controlled the strategically important Levant, Dakar, and AFN. Pétain also enjoyed patriotic prestige and credibility with a French population disoriented by defeat, eager to secure the release of French POWs, and convinced that he was plotting “la revanche” against Germany. British policy continued to recognize Vichy while supporting de Gaulle. With the United States poised to enter the conflict, relations among the three allies would grow more complex.

The bombardments at Mers el-Kébir highlighted the tensions between Britain and metropolitan France. Two months later, Operation Menace aimed to bring Senegal into the Free French colonial sphere. Heavy resistance from forces loyal to Vichy derailed British-Gaullist plans. The operation was abandoned on 25 September 1940.

This chapter presents the complex triangular relationship between Britain, Vichy and the Free French. At the forefront was the contradiction between British desires to foster Anglophilia within metropolitan France and its willingness to intercede violently in Vichy colonial territory. Its solution was to frame the operations as entirely French, in both conception and leadership. Official descriptions and justifications of Operation Menace argued that the beleaguered population within Senegal demanded to be allied with the Free French movement.

The British-Free French failure to capture Dakar highlighted the relative weakness of de Gaulle’s movement. Public and media criticism in the British metropole and the United States favoured military victory over altruistic claims that the operation had been abandoned to ‘avoid a fight amongst Frenchmen.’ At the same time, the Dakar operations fostered tensions between British officials and de Gaulle, which contradicted public declarations of cooperation. These would become increasingly difficult to resolve in the following years.

The Coda to this book examines the latest edition of Dak’Art, Senegal’s biennial art exhibition, which – while operating in a neoliberal art market – has retained a Pan-African agenda. In Dak’Art 2016, the organizers used various colonial buildings to exhibit contemporary art and thus appropriated the colonial cityscape for its decolonizing agenda. More than 50 years after Senegal acquired its political independence, a nostalgia for Pan-African politics remains on the utopian horizon. In the Coda, this decolonial utopia is situated in a wider temporal landscape of lost and reclaimed futures. In Reinhart Koselleck’s understanding of historical time, the imagination of political alternatives in the historical present assumes an untimely quality. Indeed, as we have seen throughout the book, the process of decolonization is not a linear historical process; rather, it is refracted by ‘uncanny returns, repetitions, and re-enchantments’. The Coda explores how such untimely temporalities are embodied in the African Renaissance Monument, inaugurated in 2010 to celebrate Senegal’s independence amidst widespread dissatisfaction with government politics. It posits that the imagination of African futures is as untimely as it ever was.