The second installment of the Marvel blockbuster "Black Panther" depicts French soldiers as coming to plunder resources. In any case, this is the perception that the French Ministry of the Armed Forces has of the way in which these are presented in Ryan Coogler's opus "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever". "I strongly condemn this misleading and misleading representation of our armed forces," tweeted Sébastien Lecornu, French Minister of the Armed Forces, before adding: "I think and pay tribute to the 58 French soldiers who died defending Mali at his request against Islamist terrorist groups. A reaction therefore to the fact that the film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever by Ryan Coogler, released in France at the end of 2022, depicts French soldiers prisoners kneeling before the queen of Wakanda, a fictional kingdom, in dress similar to those of French soldiers deployed in Mali until last August. A French minister must also answer for their actions before the United Nations.
In the current context of French bashing in certain French-speaking countries (Mali and Burkina in particular), it is not surprising that Paris is touchy about the image given to its soldiers. Sébastien Lecornu's entourage has indeed underlined "the minister's anger at seeing the film", while France also regularly accuses Russia of waging an information war on it by manipulating public opinion on its action in the region.
The ministry, however, wanted to highlight that it admits the freedom of an "artistic work" of which France does not claim either the withdrawal or the censorship. He cannot, however, accept any "revisionism" whatsoever "on France's recent action in Mali". And to add: "We intervened at the request of the country to fight against armed terrorist groups far from the story told in the film, namely a French army which comes to plunder its natural resources. It is the minister's role to defend the results of operations Serval and Barkhane", deployed respectively in 2013 and 2014 at the request of Bamako to fight against jihadists linked to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group. What to understand that the minister's reaction is also part of Paris' desire to respond "to the narratives of our competitors" in Africa. A direct allusion to the deterioration of the image of France in public opinion in the Sahel, amplified in particular by Russian propaganda, in particular by the galaxy of media organs linked to the Wagner group. The most recent National Strategic Review (RNS), presented by President Emmanuel Macron last November, thus established among the "strategic functions" of defense the concept of "influence", which includes the fight against false information for of destabilization.
