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French President Emmanuel Macron intends to make good on his pledge to reorient France’s approach to Africa through a five-day tour this week that will take him to Mauritius, the G20 summit in South Africa, Gabon and Angola.
The aim is to turn the page on French setbacks in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, after the military juntas in these countries severed defence agreements with Paris and forced the withdrawal of French troops in 2022 and 2023.
The withdrawals confirmed the decline of former colonial power France in Africa against a backdrop of rising anti-French sentiment and increased competition on the continent from Russia and China.
Read more‘Time to move on’: France faces gradual decline of influence in Africa
The French president’s trip aims to revitalise France’s relationship with Africa, according to the Élysée Palace, and confirm a break from France’s colonial legacy – something Macron had spoken about early in his first term.
“I am from a generation that doesn’t come to tell Africans what to do,” Macron, then 39, said during a speech to students in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou in 2017.
“I will be alongside those who believe that Africa is neither a lost continent nor one that has been saved,” he said.
However, eight years later, the situation is grim. Macron has taken 40 trips, made visits to 26 African countries and attempted to make amends for France’s colonial past in Algeria, Senegal and Rwanda, but to little avail. The former “gendarme of Africa” has been driven out of the Sahel, from Mali to Chad. Accused of interfering in African countries’ affairs, France is facing profound popular disaffection.
A big economic focus
Finding itself on the back foot, French diplomacy has shifted its focus to English- and Portuguese-speaking African countries – countries with no colonial history with Paris and whose dynamic domestic markets offer significant opportunities for French companies.
A key partner in this change of strategy is Nigeria, with its 220 million inhabitants, whose President Bola Tinubu was received by Macron in a grand state visit just one year ago. In 2024, Africa’s most populous country became France’s leading economic partner in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Élysée Palace points out that each stop on this African tour has a “strong economic component”. The first port of call is the Indian Ocean nation of Mauritius, one of the region’s richest countries in terms of per capita income with an economy that grew by 4.9 percent last year, according to the IMF.
Macron’s scheduled visit to Mauritius earlier this year was postponed due to Pope Francis’s funeral. With this first visit by a French president since François Mitterrand in 1993, Macron aims to strengthen a long-standing partnership that has become somewhat “strained” in recent years.
Beyond economic opportunities, France is also seeking to strengthen security cooperation between Mauritius and the French islands Mayotte and Réunion, located less than an hour away by plane – with Madagascar not far either.
“France has just suffered a setback in Madagascar, where President Andry Rajoelina, who was close to Emmanuel Macron, was deposed,” François Gaulme, associate researcher at the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri), told AFP.
Rajoelina fled the country in October after widespread protests that led to a military takeover. Gaulme said there was “a need to rebalance” French diplomacy in the region.
Read moreMadagascar’s pattern of popular revolts gets its Gen Z update
Win-win partnership
Macron will then travel to South Africa for a more diplomatic leg of his trip, including a bilateral meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and the G20 summit on Saturday and Sunday in Johannesburg. In addition to his tête-à-tête with Ramaphosa, he will also attend the launch of a Franco-South African business council modelled on the one that already exists in Nigeria.
The Johannesburg summit, the first G20 meeting to be held on African soil, will be marked by the absence of US President Donald Trump, who accuses Pretoria of persecuting the Afrikaner minority, descended from the first European settlers.
Read more‘Not in our name’: Afrikaners push back against Trump’s false white genocide claims in South Africa
While there will be no photo-ops with Trump, Macron could meet his Algerian counterpart, Abdelmadjid Tebboune. A few days after Algiers granted a pardon to Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, a meeting between the two presidents could help to extend the thaw in relations between Paris and Algiers.
Macron will then head to Gabon to meet with President Brice Oligui Nguema, leader of the 2023 coup d’état that ousted then-president Ali Bongo, whose family had been in power for 55 years. Nguema was elected president in April this year following an election in which international observers reported no major irregularities.
After Nguema’s election, the African Union (AU) announced the lifting of sanctions against Gabon, which had been suspended from the AU in 2023 after the coup.
Macron will “welcome the completion” of the political transition and “support” the new authorities, according to the Élysée Palace. Macron is also expected to defend the “win-win” defence partnership between the two countries, which was renewed for two years by Nguema after he took power. At the heart of the arrangement is the Camp de Gaulle in Libreville, whose role today is focused on training Gabonese armed forces.
Since the French military base in Ivory Coast was returned to Ivorian control in mid-February and with the last French soldiers due to leave Senegal by the end of the year, Camp De Gaulle could be one of only two remaining French permanent military bases in Africa, along with the one in Djibouti.
AU-EU Summit
French companies are hoping to participate in the diversification of Gabon’s economy, particularly the mining sector, which is over-reliant on manganese and gold, though the country has rich deposits of iron, uranium, copper and zinc.
Another flagship project is the French Development Agency’s involvement in the renovation of the Trans-Gabon Railway, which is crucial for the economy and passenger transport. It crosses five of the country’s nine provinces but is in need of significant investment.
The French president will conclude his African tour on Monday in Angola, where a European Union-African Union summit will be held. The meeting aims to take stock of progress on the European “Global Gateway” strategy, launched in 2021, which includes €150 billion in funding for African infrastructure.
Among the priority projects is the railway designed to connect the Angolan port of Lobito to the mining region of Kolwezi in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The so-called Lobito Corridor is a way of asserting Europe’s presence in Africa as a counterweight to China, one of Luanda’s main economic partners, and securing the EU’s access to critical minerals such as copper and cobalt, which are essential for the ecological transition.
This article has been translated from the original in French by David Howley.
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