The Rise and Fall of Francafrique

For more than 60 years, France sustained neocolonial dominance over its former African colonies in the form of policies collectively known as Francafrique. The rise and fall of Francafrique is a story of hubris, greed and neglect that today resonates globally as the geopolitical consequences of French failure in Africa come home to roost.

In 2017, while delivering a speech at the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, a former French colony located in the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa, French President Emmanuel Macron declared the end of Francafrique, the name given to a Cold War-era French strategy of maintaining military, political and economic control over its former African colonies.

“I haven’t come here to tell you what France’s Africa policy is, as others have done,” Macron, who had just been elected to his first term as president, declared, “because France no longer has an Africa policy!”

But Macron was wrong. France did, in fact, have an Africa policy, one that saw the deployment of French troops across the Sahel to combat the forces of Islamist terrorism. As with any counterinsurgency operation, the military aspects of the French military effort worked hand in glove with the political and economic systems of the involved states. This meant that even as Macron announced that France was walking away from its neocolonial past, decades of historical ties that France had to rely upon to maintain and sustain its military efforts drew France back into the morass of political, economic and military entanglements collectively known as Francafrique.

Colonial Roots

The term Francafrique (French Africa) describes France’s relationship with its former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, encompassing a wide range of overt, covert, formal, informal and clandestine activities involving political, economic and military activities that, collectively, served to define French neocolonialism in Africa.

Francafrique did not happen in a vacuum, nor was it announced as formal declarative policy on the part of France. Instead, Francafrique emerged as a byproduct of Cold War realities, where the French need to project itself as a global power in the face of the decline of its empire in the aftermath of the World War II coincided with the policies of the US to contest Soviet efforts to establish a presence on the African continent. Francafrique emerged as the result — a de facto continuation of French post-colonial influence in Africa that simultaneously served as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism.

One of the defining characteristics of Francafrique is that it is almost impossible to quantify given the informal nature of its relationships. The heart and soul of Francafrique was something known as the “Africa cell,” comprised of the French president and his inner circle of policy advisers, who collaborated with French business leaders and French intelligence to craft policy involving France’s former African colonies.

One of the mechanisms of control used by the “Africa cell” was the so-called “Franc zone,” a monetary control mechanism imposed by France on its West African former colonies that permanently pegged what was known as the “West African Franc” to the French Franc (and Euro subsequently). To ensure this convertibility, the involved nations were required to deposit half of their foreign exchange reserves with the French Treasury, an act that effectively subordinated their monetary policy to France’s. This French domination of the monetary policies of its West African former colonies helped facilitate the export-import trade with France, something the “Africa cell” used to its advantage by creating a hand-picked African political and economic elite who would, through informal business connections, determine who would benefit from this streamlined relationship. Because of the informal nature of these relationships, oversight was lacking, and corruption was manifesting throughout, leading to the enrichment of a select few in France and the West African states and the impoverishment of the majority of the populations of France’s former African colonies.

Operation Burkhane

Even as Macron sought to walk away from Francafrique, circumstances in Africa conspired to prevent this. In many ways, Macron’s experience mirrored that of Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part 3, who lamented, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”

“They” in this case was Operation Burkhane, the French-led counterterrorism campaign that had been waged by France in the Sahel region of Africa since 2013, when French troops were dispatched to Mali to suppress an Islamist insurrection enabled in large part by the flow of weapons and fighters from Libya following the 2012 ouster of Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi. The Mali operation, known as Operation Serval, took on a regional characteristic as France sought to suppress Islamist terrorist groups operating throughout the Sahel. This expanded effort, which began in 2014, eventually saw French troops, supplemented by European and American forces, operating in five Sahel states — Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad.

Counterinsurgency campaigns require an intimate level of cooperation, especially when the forces being employed to confront the insurgency are drawn from foreign sources. Macron sought to disentangle France from the web of economic and political entanglements that decades of Francafrique had spun. France moved in 2019 to end the depository requirements linked to the “Franc zone,” to take effect by 2021. However, the growing military engagement in the Sahel, driven by increasing popular resistance to Operation Burkhane, dictated that France draw extensively upon the existing socioeconomic-political establishment, a direct byproduct of Francafrique, when seeking to build local and regional support.

In the end, Operation Burkhane came to be viewed by the Sahel states as little more than a mechanism used to sustain the power structures of Francafrique in West Africa. In quick succession, three of the largest West African nations saw the Francophone governments ousted by military coups where the new ruling juntas quickly moved to divorce themselves from Francafrique and France — Mali in 2021, Burkina Faso in 2022 and Niger in 2023. These three nations have evicted French forces (and those of the US and the EU, who were supporting France) and moved to nationalize strategic industries previously managed for the near exclusive benefit of France and European interests, such as Niger’s uranium mines and the gold mines of Burkina Faso. Other states considered part of Francafrique, such as Senegal and Chad, are reassessing their strategic relationships with France, and particularly the desirability of maintaining French military garrisons on their soil. Populism has overtaken collaboration as the desired political trend, resulting in the dismantling of decades-long relationships between France and West Africa that had been built on relationships between the “Africa cell” and the compliant political elite that had been complicit in the neocolonial exploitation of their respective nations under Francafrique.

Today, Francafrique lies in ruins, with Africa, France and the world at large adjusting to the sociopolitical-economic vacuum that has been created as a result. Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have come together to form the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), a direct challenge to both the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States, the traditional bodies used to coordinate regional issues. More worrisome for France, Europe and the West is the fact that the AES has gravitated toward the Russian orbit, signifying a strategic geopolitical shift that has undone decades of work dating back to the Cold War designed to preserve Africa as a Western domain. The critical inroads being made in Africa today by Russia and China are the direct byproduct of decades of neglect of the African continent by the collective West, of which Francafrique was an obvious and important symptom too long ignored.

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