When French President Emmanuel Macron took to the stage at the Africa Forward summit yesterday, the audience may not have expected a scolding.
“Hey! Hey! Hey! I’m sorry guys, but it’s impossible to … have people … coming here making a speech with such a noise,” he said. “This is a total lack of respect.”
Macron’s harsh words directed at the crowd, somewhat ironically, come as he tries to rebuild ties with Africa. The French leader met with over 30 African leaders in Nairobi on Monday as the Africa Forward summit, co-hosted by Kenyan President William Ruto, gets underway this week. It is the first time France has held such an event in an English-speaking nation, and it is intended to showcase a “renewed partnership” between France and Africa built not on shared colonial history, but on economic partnerships.
To that end, Macron announced $27 billion in investments, including $16 billion in private and public funds from French entities and over $10 billion from African investors. The funds will support energy transition, digital and AI, the ocean economy — key to African coastal states — and agriculture, creating 250,000 direct jobs in France and on the continent. Macron also touted Europe as Africa’s “ethical partner,” which “defends the international order, effective multilateralism, the rule of law, free and open trade.”
The pitch comes as France tries to regain some of the economic, military, and political influence it has lost across the continent, most notably to Russia and China. Now, France is trying to reposition itself as a supporter of African economic ambitions. It has already grown its imports from Africa by a quarter between 2021 and 2024, but Macron is pulling out all the stops to take Paris from colonial patron to commercial partner — and overcome a controversial legacy.
The rise and fall of “Françafrique.” From the 1800s to the mid-1900s, France colonized nearly 1.8 million square miles of the African continent. After decolonization began in the 1950s, France maintained influence across many of these nations for the next half-century. The system became known as “Françafrique” — a term coined in 1945 that implied a mix of military protection, political dependency, and economic access.
Paris stationed thousands of troops across Africa, guaranteed the currencies of several former colonies through the CFA franc system, intervened repeatedly in domestic conflicts to preserve political stability, and cultivated close ties with African political elites. France’s military and financial support gave French companies privileged access to African oil, infrastructure, and telecommunications industries.
By the end of the century, however, Françafrique came to symbolize corruption, patronage, and political interference. French economist, historian, and activist François-Xavier Verschave famously dubbed Françafrique “the longest scandal in the Republic,” in which French companies funded repressive regimes in exchange for access, and the military intervened to stabilize authoritarian governments that were friendly to French interests — but not necessarily to their own people.
Repudiation of France opens the door to Russia. The breaking point came in the 2020s, with a series of coups across the Sahel that effectively ended the French military presence. In Mali, a military junta seized power in 2020 and 2021; Burkina Faso followed in 2022, and Niger in 2023. In 2025, Mali accused France of fomenting a counter-coup, something Paris denies, and ordered all French troops out of the country; Operation Barkhane — France’s flagship anti-terrorism mission in the Sahel — effectively collapsed. Chad then terminated its defense pact with Paris in late 2024, and in early 2025, the Ivory Coast announced the withdrawal of French troops, while Senegal forced France to close its last major permanent military base on the continent.
Moscow seized the moment and stepped into the vacuum in the Sahel. Through Wagner Group mercenaries — and later the Kremlin-controlled Africa Corps after the death of Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in August 2023 — Russia embedded itself with the juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, promising security and an end to Islamic insurgencies. Russian operatives trained soldiers, protected regimes, supplied weapons, and amplified anti-French narratives on social media and state-linked media outlets in Africa.
But Russia’s security model has not stabilized the region. In 2025, Malian forces and Russian paramilitary groups reportedly killed more civilians than jihadist groups themselves. And recently, Russian-backed forces in Mali suffered major losses after coordinated attacks by Tuareg separatists and jihadists — and saw their fighters jeered in the streets.
China wins economically. If Russia sought to displace France militarily, China eclipsed it economically. Over the past decade, Beijing has financed ports, railways, highways, dams, airports, telecom systems, and energy projects across Africa through its Belt and Road Initiative. China has also leveraged the anti-colonial sentiment to its advantage, portraying France’s involvement as nostalgic and paternalistic, while framing its own engagement as forward-looking and commercial.
And that engagement is substantial. At the 2024 China-Africa Cooperation Summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged nearly $51 billion in new African financing over three years, together with infrastructure projects and the creation of 1 million jobs. Beijing is also expanding trade deals with the continent, recently dropping tariffs on imports from all African nations, except Eswatini, which has diplomatic ties to Taiwan. Beijing also deploys soft power through educational opportunities; In 2020, China offered 12,000 scholarships to African students, eclipsing the 600 offered by France. As of this year, 16% of China’s foreign students now hail from the continent.
But China has also been criticized for environmental degradation and rights violations in its pursuit of African resources. Last year, when a toxic spill from a Chinese-owned mine in Zambia poisoned the country’s most important waterway, Beijing was accused of covering up the catastrophe. During this week’s summit, Macron also accused China of operating “according to a predatory logic: it does the processing at home,” and creates “dependencies with the rest of the world.”
Macron’s Africa strategy: two steps forward, one step back? Macron has made redefining France’s relationship with Africa a priority — with mixed success. In 2017, he laid out a new Africa doctrine built on three pillars: apologizing for colonial wrongs, shifting aid toward small business development, and broadening French alliances beyond its former colonies. The Élysée has since pursued several symbolic initiatives, including returning looted artwork, seeking forgiveness for France’s role in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and a political assassination in Algeria, and launching a new series of France-Africa summits.
But despite these efforts, the coups kept coming — as did the gripes from Paris. In January 2025, Macron complained publicly that Sahel governments had “forgotten to thank” France for stopping Islamist insurgencies, adding that “ it will come in time.” He struck a similarly combative tone during a December 2024 visit to the cyclone-devastated island of Mayotte, a French territory off Africa’s southeastern coast, where he lambasted residents angry about the slow pace of aid, saying: “If it wasn’t for France, you’d be 10,000 times deeper in shit.”
Missteps like these will not help France’s cause or overcome the legacy of colonialism — a legacy not shared by France’s competitors. But investments like those made at the Summit, coupled with the promise of ethical guardrails, might convince African leaders to give France a second chance.
