Gerboise Verte: The Nuclear Crime That Explains Why Africa Is Finally Done with France

There’s a reason why African nations are ejecting France from their borders with finality. It’s not just about neocolonial economics or the arrogance of French elites who still treat Francophone Africa like their playground. It’s deeper, darker, and more damning. It’s about betrayal in its rawest form — the kind that glows in the dark and leaves Black men rotting from the inside out.

In the heart of the Algerian Sahara in the early 1960s, under the blinding desert sun and the watchful eye of the French military, African soldiers — mostly from Chad — were ordered to stand and wait. They were not given protective gear. They were not told they were part of a nuclear test. They were human test subjects in France’s brutal quest for atomic glory.

The test was called Gerboise Verte — “Green Jerboa” — part of a series of 17 nuclear detonations France conducted after joining the nuclear club in 1960. But this test wasn’t just about explosions and military prowess. It was a human experiment. And the test subjects weren’t French. They were Black. Disposable.

French commanders instructed these soldiers to stand within kilometers of the blast zone. As the countdown commenced, they were oblivious. Seconds later, the sky exploded. A blinding flash. A shockwave. Radioactive dust enveloping everything. And when it was over, these men were ordered to march into the fallout zone. To crawl through irradiated trenches. To carry out mock combat maneuvers, as if on a real battlefield — but this one poisoned the very air they breathed.

France wanted to study the psychological and physiological effects of nuclear war on human beings. But instead of using their own, they used colonized Africans — men who had pledged allegiance to a republic that saw them only as test animals.

Years later, these soldiers suffered the predictable: aggressive cancers, sterility, organ failure, and early death. Many were abandoned. Denied care. Denied recognition. Their files were buried in French military archives, their names forgotten even by the country they had served. Their families, if they ever even found out the truth, were left with nothing but grief and radioactive silence.

It wasn’t until the 2000s — under pressure from journalists like Vincent Jauvert and surviving veterans — that the truth began to surface. A few meager reparations were handed out, but the French government never fully acknowledged the racial and colonial motivations behind these tests. No apology. No reckoning. Just the smug silence of a nation that once believed its power was eternal.

But Africa remembers.

That memory lives in every protest erupting in the streets of Niamey, Ouagadougou, and Bamako. It’s embedded in the decision of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger to expel French troops. It echoes in the defiant speeches of African leaders refusing to renew military or economic agreements that serve only French interests.

African nations are not pulling away from France out of impulsiveness. They are severing ties from a former colonizer that treated them as expendable — whose idea of military experimentation involved burning Black flesh for scientific curiosity. Gerboise Verte is not ancient history. Its radiation lingers in the sands of the Sahara, and its moral stain is radioactive still.

France calls it “strategic withdrawal.” Africa calls it justice long overdue.

Because when a nation poisons your people, lies about it for decades, and never once says sorry — why in God’s name would you ever let them back in?