FillyofDelphi
Banned
A significant number of the Free French African forces are exactly that - African.
While scholars discuss the exact ratio of volunteers to conscripts, their families and villages are in Free French Africa.
I think I must agree that the long term viability of a Free French polity is poor, but the question is what it becomes.
I like to think of some kind of "Taiwanisation" and slowly going from being Free French Africa to being independent
francophone Africa, whether a union or separate sovereign states, but much of that depends on the attitudes of the
European Free Frenchmen, the British and the Americans.
I can't quite see them being handed back to curry favour and drive wedges, but that is because I, as a ITTL Allied politician,
came to the conclusion that "handing our allies-protectorates-sort of colonies, with all their natural resources, the people
they'd treat even worse than we do and the money we've spent on improving the place, over to the Nazis" would hurt us
more, nationally and internationally.
(Cf. the discussion elsewhere in this forum on whether the rest of NATO would go to war if Russia invaded the Baltic states.)
This is the third time I've had to say this in the last two weeks, but I could have phrased my argument better and apologize. I can see how you got your perception out of what I said.
When I speak of abandoning the Free French cause, I'm not saying they had the territory to Vichy. Rather, I'd argue that why the higher echelons of the Brazzaville government get thinned out (being exactly the White French types most likely to defect, but also the glue holding the localities together into a single polity) the Allies are going to be increasingly faced with less of a Taiwan and more of a South Vietnam as local demands for autonomy push up against an increasingly authoritarian regeime. At some point, they are either going to need to reform/Africanize to the point that claiming to be the government of France is absurd, or the Allies will run the numbers and decide a controlled breakdown into friendly native states is better than trying to prop up a military junta that's collapse will only produce hostiles and unrest in the British African territories