Mail for example. But there are quite a few French troops still protecting French interests in their various former colonies in Africa - a place where statehood is a nebulous concept so I think it’s fair to say that many of these places still act in effect as protectorates. Add in resource extraction and it also starts to look like a colony again.

Most of the mining industry in Mali is owned by Barrick, Allied Gold and Anglogold Ashanti, none of them are French. The French intervention in northern Mali was to avoid a spillover into western Niger (where France sources most of the uranium it uses for its power production).

go and have a read about the CFA franc

> What colonies are you referring too? The last one was Djibouti in 77...

Monetary exploitation is the most effective means of bondage and most widely accepted form to control over a population because it is required for any transaction that doesn't get solely resolved by violence, in doing so you can essentially tax, govern, and structure Society without the need or expense of an occupying presence just the occasional military operation to remind them of said colonization: up until 2020 or so the CFA was used in 8 African nations and had a dire strain on those nation's people [0]. You should listen to Francis Ngannou's talk about the effective bondage African nations were operating under French rule because of the CFA that made trade between even neighboring African nations impossible.

Colonialism takes on many faces, but as the saying goes: He who controls the money supply of a nation controls the nation.

> go and have a read about the CFA franc

Agreed, also look into why France has had continual conflicts in the Ivory Coast to see how it achieved this.

0: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/23/africa/france-stops-use-of-cf...

Aren't states free to adopt or drop the CFA franc? How does that make them colonies?