A TENSE FRENCH AFFAIR
Emmanuel Macron is looking to build France’s soft power in Africa. Sentiments arising from last week’s Africa-France summit suggest he’s got his work cut out for him
French President Emmanuel Macron started his short address to the New Africa-France Summit on Friday on a self-deprecating note. “Given that it’s a new summit, there shouldn’t be a president taking the floor,” he told the 3,000-odd participants gathered in the Sud de France Arena in Montpellier. He did, however, remain on stage for a threehour “conversation” with a dozen selected young leaders from around Africa.
There were no podiums or protocols, and purists objected to the use of the term “summit” for a gathering that omitted Macron’s African counterparts.
But while the absence of African leaders marked a difference from the France-Africa summits that have been held since 1973, staffers of the Élysée Palace say it is in no way indicative of an end to Macron’s engagement with the continent’s political heads.
They point, for example, to the Summit on the Financing of African Economies, held in Paris in May, as proof of continued engagement.
Entrepreneurs, activists, intellectuals, cultural workers, scientists and students from Africa and France were invited to Friday’s summit. It’s a new, personalised level of engagement that marks another step in France’s journey — starting with Macron’s November 2017 visit to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso — to increase its soft power by bypassing leaders who may lack legitimacy.
Young Africans at the event were given the chance to interact with Macron in a way they wouldn’t be able to with their own leaders. Officially, France says it hopes these young people will be “accelerators of change” to help “establish a new phase of France in Africa”.
In Ouagadougou in 2017, Macron declared that “there no longer is a French policy for Africa”, adding that he is “from a generation of French people for whom the crimes of European colonisation cannot be disputed and are part of our history”.
But while the French viewpoint may be changing, many Africans still view the former colonial power with suspicion and anger, following decades of its meddling in the continent’s affairs.
“France has a negative image in lots of Francophone Africa because the French political leaders are seen as being by the side of our rulers who are dictators, who are corrupted, who are stealing all the public money,” says Mossadeck Bally, a business leader from Mali and founder of Azalaï Hotels who was in Montpellier last week.
“France is seen as a power that is perpetuating this bad governance.”
The sentiment was on display at the summit, where Malian activist Adama Dicko, for example, had a particularly heated exchange with Macron on stage. She pointed out that he often says that if it weren’t for French involvement in Mali, there would be no government there. It’s a reference to the thousands of French troops sent to the country since 2013 to combat an armed uprising in the north.
“I want to tell you that if it were not for the Africans, there was not going to be
France today,” Dicko said, likely hinting at the benefits Europe reaped from colonialism. “We are related — stop saying that you came to help us. No! Because terrorism is not just a threat to Mali. You are also threatened. Stop making us feel guilty about [being in] a position of victims.”
Dicko went on to blame French intervention in Libya — part of the 2011 Nato-led operation that preceded the death of former leader Muammar Gaddafi — for much of the violence the region has suffered.
Macron, however, defended himself, saying France has no material interests in Mali. “We have a common enemy and we are here to fight together,” he said.
It’s been difficult for Macron to explain the deaths of at least 50 French soldiers in Mali to voters back home, and the Élysée has expressed frustration at the way France is criticised both for being involved in the conflict and for its apparent lack of involvement.
In Africa, there’s been particular anger over Macron’s decision in June to scale back France’s 5,500-strong Sahel deployment, following a second coup in Mali a month earlier.
Days before last week’s summit, Malian Prime Minister Choguel Kokalla Maïga told Russian media that France has been training “terrorist” groups from Libya in the enclave of Kidal, which the Malian military can’t access.
Tensions rose further after Mali’s leaders recently expressed their intention to employ 1,000 mercenaries from Russian group Wagner to help fight jihadists.
Also clouding the summit was France’s decision to limit visas for citizens from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. Algeria has recalled its ambassador to France after Macron said the country was being ruled by a “political-military system”.
France needs to completely change its paradigm, says Bally, the Malian businessperson, along with the way it views Francophone Africa and does business with it.
“Close to two-thirds of our people are young,” he says. “These people do not know colonisation, they did not know the independence struggle. They are modern, they are connected.”
They’re also not sentimental about the former colonial power, and would as easily partner with China, Turkey, the US or Russia if this would offer better prospects, he says. They “don’t have any effective relationship with France”, and that’s something the French government hasn’t understood, he explains.
In Bally’s view, the international economic community tends to speak to France about matters concerning Francophone Africa, rather than approaching the countries themselves.
I want to tell you that if it were not for the Africans, there was not going to be France today
Adama Dicko
But the summit suffered from more mundane hiccups too. For example, Marita Walther, co-founder of a Namibian enterprise that makes solar-powered electric bikes, says while she appreciates the support the French have shown, the summit was not easy for representatives from Anglophone Africa to follow.
“I don’t really think they keep Southern Africa in mind — [it] is not so French,” Walther says.
Her compatriot and fellow entrepreneur Tanyaradzwa Daringo says some Angolan delegates similarly complained that Portuguese speakers weren’t considered.
“I know that in the pre-conference they
did speak a lot about bringing in the Anglophone countries to have them as part of the conversation, but it wasn’t really catered for,” she says.
It is not only language that’s a barrier. Anglophone Africans fail to understand the complexity of Francophone Africa’s relationship with France or the depth of feelings involved, says Cameroonian tech entrepreneur Rebecca Enonchong, who followed the summit online.
On a Twitter thread afterwards, she likened the relationship between Africa and France to an abusive marriage, where the husband holds the bank account.
It’s a reference to the CFA franc, a colonial hangover that still allows France to exercise control over the common Francophone currency and hold some of it in reserve in the French Treasury.
“The wounds are still raw,” she tweeted. “And the history still very close.”
France continues to treat Africans “in the same patronising, condescending, demeaning way”, despite all the money it has spent on positive PR.
In Enonchong’s opinion, the summit isn’t the “reboot” or “remix” it’s been branded as. “This is Francafrique as we’ve always known it,” she says, using the term for the colonial relationship.
Cameroonian, postcolonialist thinker and academic Achille Mbembe has felt the depth of Francophone anger for his decision to help organise the summit, news site France24 reports, referencing an op-ed by Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop about “a fake stirring up of the hornets’ nest”.
“The face-to-face between Macron and African civil society would have been a lot more credible and even fruitful had we at least detected concrete signs of his will for change on the ground,” Diop wrote on news site senegalactu.info.
It’s a sentiment that echoed among participants at the summit. Many of those informally polled were uncertain that Macron’s words would really translate into actions.
However, since Ouagadougou, Macron has returned stolen artworks to Senegal and Benin, promised an end to the CFA franc, and asked for forgiveness for France’s role in the Rwandan genocide.
Already other European countries have followed suit in addressing their own colonial legacies. Germany, for example, said in August it would return Nigeria’s looted Benin Bronzes.
Macron’s leadership on this count is significant, as he is due to play a leading role in the EU as German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s tenure comes to an end, and in light of his likely re-election next April. France will also hold the presidency of the Council of the EU in the first half of next year.
But it’s not always been easy for Macron to convince French institutions to make the policy shifts he seeks.
An aide tells the FM: “We can’t have the whole machine change direction overnight, be it the diplomatic network or the economic sector, businesses, or the higher education establishment.
“So as we are moving into a phase of reform and refounding of links, and perhaps a different conception and perceptions of relationships on the continent, we have to take the institutions of French society with us. That takes time. That is something we are working on every day, because without stakeholders, our words will not become reality.”
The writer’s flights and accommodation were paid for