On Bastille Day this year, African troops from Mali, Chad and other nations proudly marched down the Champs-Élysées as part of the traditional French national-day military parade.
The event was a celebration of the successful military campaign earlier this year in which French and African troops pushed back jihadist groups from northern Mali, allowing the government in Bamako to recover full control of its country and call presidential elections for July 28.
President François Hollande later told a television interview that it was also a tribute to the heavy toll paid by Malian soldiers in the battle for France during the Second World War, when they were part of the French colonial empire.
It has been a long time since Africa was honored so prominently in France. That reflects a significant shift in France’s interest in Africa, created in part by the decline of France’s global influence in a changing world.
Relations with Africa, and particularly with France’s former colonies, have long been sufficiently important for Paris to merit a French advisory unit in the president’s office known as the cellule africaine (African cell).
When France gave most of its African colonies independence in 1960, it retained considerable control. French advisers pulled the strings in ministries from Abidjan to Libreville and reported directly to Jacques Foccart, Charles de Gaulle’s powerful chief advisor on African affairs, a man who could decide to overthrow a president or send French paratroopers to rescue one.
These arrangements, dubbed “Françafrique,” remained almost untouched for nearly three decades, no matter who ruled in the Élysée Palace.
All that changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. France’s attention progressively turned to Europe, with the enlargement of the European Union, the opening up of Central and Eastern Europe and the perception that the troubled African continent was waning as an asset.
The disengagement reached a caricature point when, soon after his election as president in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy — a man with no historical or emotional links to Africa, unlike all his predecessors — made a disastrous speech in Dakar, Senegal, in which he said, “The African man has not yet entered history.” The speech created an uproar and turned young Africans further away from the former colonial power.
President Hollande, Sarkozy’s successor, is changing that.
In Mali, he tried for months to promote an “African solution” to the jihadist takeover of a territory in the Sahel region as big as France.
But when the rebel columns began advancing on Bamako last January, Hollande moved in decisively with troops and jets, seeking at the same time to mobilize regional forces to take over from the French as soon as possible.
Then in May, the French president traveled to Addis Ababa for the 50th anniversary of the African Union, the only Western head of government to do so. And he surprised his audience by inviting all 54 African states to Paris next December for a “summit on peace and security on the continent” to discuss Africa’s failure to deal with its own security issues in the past half century.
This is the biggest diplomatic initiative taken by France on the African continent in many years. And even if some African leaders felt “summoned” rather than “invited,” they recognized the validity of the issue.
Without much notice from French public opinion, which is focused more on gloomy economic statistics, Hollande is bringing France back into Africa. President Barack Obama’s recent trip to Africa shows that the United States may likewise be showing a greater interest in the continent.
For Paris, it’s a recognition that Africa — and not only the French-speaking countries — is France’s hinterland, an integral part of its past, but also of its future.
With new generations rising and high global growth rates in many countries, Africa offers new opportunities for a European nation with diminishing global clout.
The challenge for the French Socialist president in a time of a global reshuffling of cards is to create a clean and ethical “Françafrique” — to recover some of France’s lost influence in Africa without reviving the negative aspects of colonialism.
Pierre Haski, former deputy editor of Libération, is co-founder of the French news Web site Rue 89.