History is amused to see Jean-Marie Le Pen disappear, who was a committed actor in the French Empire at a time when France suffered a new diplomatic humiliation in Ivory Coast, signifying its irremediable downgrading on the African continent. After Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Senegal and Chad, it is the turn of Ivory Coast to courteously call to do without the French service offering. Only Djibouti and Gabon are still resisting this cascade of contempt. The desire to display full and complete sovereignty does not exhaust the reasons for this eviction which are as much due to geopolitical changes as to internal affairs, sometimes trivial, of which French diplomacy has not been able to measure for decades .
It is therefore difficult not to see in France’s refusal to lift the legal action initiated against the Chadian president over ill-gotten gains the reason for his sudden ouster. Our pride pins Russia on this fiasco for failure to grasp the source of a deeper anti-colonial hatred. Due to lack of interest, Emmanuel Macron, eyeing English-speaking Africa, seems disinclined to save this Françafrique from the Old World. In the waiting room, the competition is only waiting for our desertion.
The decolonization of black Africa, from 1958, did not put an end to the French “pre-square” on the continent. Until the 1990s, France’s influence was visible through trade, the CFA Franc, the French-speaking world, but above all through an imposing armed contingent. In the midst of the Cold War, the army deployed up to 10,000 soldiers who stabilized the new regimes while exercising vigilance against communist expansion. African leaders have consubstantial links with the metropolis having sometimes been ministers – Senghor, Houphouët-Boigny – sometimes military – Bokassa, Eyadema. Jacques Foccart will embody this “Françafrique” policy until 1974. The Algerian humiliation makes this presence all the more important, from De Gaulle to Chirac, to keep France’s rank in the world intact.
If Paris’s links with African heads of state seem intangible, anti-French hatred arises from societies nourished by anti-colonialism
However, it did not take long to be assimilated to an ersatz “neocolonialism” which would make Africa a simple stock of raw materials plundered by Western powers. Through intermediary confrontation, the USSR seeks to substitute its own ideological model when the United States experiments with its soft power. The end of the Cold War ushered in a new era of protests against the Western order and their African “deputies”. The Clinton administration was thus humiliated in Somalia in 1993. If Paris’s links with African heads of state seem intangible, anti-French hatred springs from societies nourished by anti-colonialism.
The speech in 2007 on the entry of the African man into History by Nicolas Sarkozy reignited tensions. “France-à-fric” is reviled during demonstrations where the tricolor flag is burned and Chinese, Russian and Turkish flags waved, forgetting the brutality of the former Ottoman occupation. But it has been a long time since France has exercised any real influence in Africa. Trade within the French-speaking area has become residual. The English-speaking states of Nigeria, Angola and South Africa attract more attention from the Élysée. Significantly, the 2026 “Françafrique” summit will take place in Kenya! But the problem is less economic than political and cultural.
The rest after this ad
The new threats posed by armed clan groups cannot be contained by the now obsolete regular international peacekeeping forces. The putschist governments, in security failure, then have no other choice than to turn to private groups to constitute, at low cost, their praetorian guard. But even the Wagner paramilitary solution showed its limits in Mozambique as in Mali.
But the French president did not take advantage of it, preferring to settle France’s African policy buried during his Ouagadougou speech in 2017. Exporting his “at the same time”, he irritates his partners with his half-measures. Paris is thus reducing its workforce, but discreetly, and without closing bases whose usefulness, once obvious for evacuating nationals, is today debated. Driven by the pan-Africanist revival, the succession of putsches in 2022-23 then accelerated France’s exit from the Sahel.
France
