President Emmanuel Macron of France has embarked on a quest to win favor across Africa on the basis of a policy of “profound humility,” chastened by a decade-long frustrated military intervention and a wave of anti-French sentiment in France’s former African colonies.
In practice, as he outlined in a speech this week, this reset will mean a much-reduced military presence at six bases that will be converted into academies or hubs of new partnerships. He said it would involve “balanced, reciprocal and responsible” relations, respectful of African needs at a time of intense competition for influence and profit across the continent from Russia and China.
“Macron wants to salvage what he can,” said Thierry Vircoulon, a research associate at the French Institute of International Relations. “His first term was a failure, both in terms of the war on terrorism and the attempt to maintain French influence.”
An era is coming to an end. France left its colonies decades ago, but old habits and presumptions about French power and dominance across a swath of Africa have endured, symbolized by a significant military presence and the continued use of the colonial-era C.F.A. franc currency. French nostalgia for the zenith of their geostrategic influence sustained these tendencies.
“Once and for all we have to get rid of reflexes, habits and forms of language that have become a handicap,” Mr. Macron said before leaving on Wednesday on a five-day visit to Gabon, Angola, the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo that will end Sunday. “We must adopt a resolutely clearer posture of modesty and listening.”
There was nothing modest about Operation Barkhane, the long-running war against Islamist militants that France waged in cooperation with five nations across the vast Sahel region. At one point 5,000 French troops were deployed. The insurgencies survived and the mission grew increasingly unpopular before being terminated in failure last year.
“It was in some ways to France what Afghanistan was to the United States,” said Mr. Vircoulon.
Mr. Macron, in a speech before his departure, refused to accept sole French responsibility for the setbacks, saying that he would never again let French troops be “stained” by a situation where France became “the ideal scapegoat.”
He did not elaborate, but the Sahel intervention became a symbol of French meddling. Countries including Mali, the Central African Republic and most recently Burkina Faso have turned against the French presence, and France withdrew its troops from all three countries over the past year.
The reversals have stemmed in part from a wave of intense anti-French propaganda, often orchestrated by the Kremlin, playing on the French colonial past. That messaging has resonated with local populations, as mercenaries from Wagner, the Russian military contractor with close ties to President Vladimir V. Putin’s government, have extended their influence in several African countries.
Mr. Macron’s attempts to counter this trend by portraying Russia as the real imperial power of the current era, as illustrated by its war of aggression in Ukraine, have proved largely ineffective.
Mr. Putin’s Russia does not build many bridges or hospitals in Africa, but is the master of pitiless protection services, plunder of natural resources and propaganda. It is the continent’s largest supplier of arms. It befriends governments, many of them repressive, through hard power. As in Syria, its readiness to use force secures the outcome it seeks.
“Wagner is a group of criminal mercenaries,” Mr. Macron said this week. He added: “Its role and aim is to protect failing regimes and putschists and, in the end, provide only security for these as it pursues predatory operations with mines and raw materials.”
The problem for France and the West more generally is that the Russian strategy in African conflict zones of taking one side and crushing the other — sometimes with extreme brutality, as has happened in the Central African Republic — has often been effective, at least in the short run.
Of the four countries that Mr. Macron will visit, three — Angola, Republic of Congo and Gabon — abstained in the vote last month at the United Nations on a resolution calling for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. The resolution was adopted with a two-thirds majority, but as these abstentions suggest, many African states have declined to back Western condemnation of Mr. Putin.
They see Western hypocrisy in the moral outrage of the United States and its allies over the Russian invasion, double standards for European as compared to African wars, and amnesia over colonialism. How far Mr. Macron will be able to counter such doubts is unclear.
Mr. Macron portrayed Africa as a land of opportunity on the eve of his departure and will pursue economic cooperation, not least in Angola, where TotalEnergies, the major French oil company, has substantial interests. In Gabon, he will co-host a meeting, known as the One Forest summit, centered on environmental protection. The Congo basin is home to the world’s second-largest tropical forest after the Amazon.
“We must no longer think that economic markets are ours by right because we were there before,” Mr. Macron said.
The French president, 45, born into a post-colonial generation, is much given to radical reimagining of France’s international relations, with mixed results. He embarked in 2019 on an attempt to integrate Russia into a new European security architecture, as he put it, only for Mr. Putin to go to war in Ukraine and anchor his global strategy in a “no limits” anti-Western partnership with China.
Now Mr. Macron has turned his mind to Africa. “I have no nostalgia about France-in-Africa,” he said. “But I do not want to leave an absence or a void behind it.”
