“De Gaulle was worse than Hitler” – the Putin propagandist from the canton of Zug

Who is Natalie Yamb?

In Switzerland, the influencer should only be known to a few. However, in francophone Africa, her tweets and videos made her a celebrity. She has more than half a million followers on Facebook and about a quarter of a million each on YouTube and Twitter.

Her YouTube videos are sometimes clicked up to 500,000 times and attract thousands of comments. The 53-year-old is seen by her fans as a charismatic fighter for a free Africa, against European colonial powers and for pan-Africanism.

With her provocative and controversial statements, the daughter of a Cameroonian father and a Swiss mother has not only made friends: Ivory Coast, where she was politically active and also lived for a while, expelled her from the country in 2019, the BBC reports. .

But the 53-year-old has also made herself unpopular in the West: she has been banned from entering France since last year because her articles “approve or even encourage the use of violence against the symbols of the French presence in Africa”. . In fact, an analysis of their content reveals only indirect calls to violence, writes the Tages-Anzeiger. However, it is true that Yamb supports anti-French regimes across Africa, for example in Mali and Burkina Faso.

Problematic content

Your content is provocative. Yamb tweeted in February that the majority of French consider Africans “like animals in a zoo”. In a 2018 YouTube video, she said, “For us in Africa, Mitterrand and de Gaulle are worse than Hitler.”

Yamb also made statements about the war in Ukraine that are debatable at best. She calls the Russian invasion a “Nato-Russian war” sparked only by “the repeated aggression of Americans and Europeans (…) against the Russian people”.

According to the Russian narrative, Ukraine is being riddled with neo-Nazis, according to Yamb. And in a recently published video she speaks of a “war of civilizations”. Supporters of “sexual and gender imperialism” carried out their “Wokeism” against the people who advocated “traditional values”.

Whoever hears Russian propaganda in these words is not wrong: earlier this week he made similar statements to the delegations from more than 40 African countries gathered in the Kremlin. They had traveled to Moscow for the “Russia-Africa” ​​conference. Also present: Nathalie Yamb.

She strongly denies the allegations that she is spreading Russian propaganda. In February 2023, she told “Afrique Média” that such accusations were “an expression of absolute contempt for Africans”, who are seen as incapable of thinking for themselves.

Connections with Wagner-Prigozhin

But the allegations are not far-fetched. As early as November 2022, the US State Department warned about Yamb and another blogger: the two belong to the network of the Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin.

In 2019, Yamb attended the first “Russia-Africa” ​​conference, then in Sochi (she likes to call herself “Lady from Sochi” ever since). A year earlier she had been invited by a recently founded association for “free research and international cooperation” called Afric. Prigozhin is said to be behind this network, writes the Tages-Anzeiger.

Ukrainian political scientist Anton Shekhovtsov says:

Evidence for this comes from a PowerPoint document seized in Libya by an agent of Prigozhin. It describes the project as “an instrument of soft power” to promote the Russian agenda under the guise of a “network of influencers”. The participants must be funded from anonymous sources via cryptocurrencies.

The connection no longer exists. Expert Shekhovtsov: «Today the former advisers and experts of the Afric structure work alone. Your past connections with Afric should no longer be traceable.”

In an interview with Temps Présent, Yamb denied it was ever funded by Afric, Prigozhin or Putin. But, “I’ll take the money wherever it comes from.” How it finances itself is unclear; According to the Tages-Anzeiger, the videos, which are very likely to be recorded in her apartment in Zug, can raise up to 20,000 francs a year.

Incidentally, Zug is also registered in her name with a consultancy for cryptocurrencies. A lawsuit filed in America accuses it of promoting a Cameroonian cryptocurrency with a fraudulent background.

(cpf)