In early January, the beleaguered president of France, Emmanuel Macron, told French ambassadors at a conference that none of the countries in the Sahel region would be sovereign today “if the French army had not deployed in the region” to support their fight against jihadists. “I think someone forgot to say thank you. It does not matter, it will come with time,” he added. “Ingratitude, I am well placed to know, is a disease not transmissible to man.”

Macron’s remark was blasted by several African officials, including Chad’s president, Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, who said he thought Macron was in the “wrong era.” Senegal’s outspoken prime minister, Ousmane Sonko, also objected in a post on social media. He said that France didn’t have the legitimacy or capacity to ensure the sovereignty of African states, and added that France had often “contributed to destabilizing certain African countries such as Libya, with disastrous consequences noted for the stability and security of the Sahel.” Burkina Faso’s military leader, Ibrahim Traore, said France should pray for his country’s ancestors, as without having plundered them during the colonial era it wouldn’t enjoy the global standing that it does today. Pierrette Herzberger-Fofana, a German-Malian former MEP for the Green party, asked whether France should be thanking Africans “who gave their blood for Europe” in WWII.

Eric Orlander, host of the popular China-Global South Project podcast, gasped when he played the soundbite in a recent installment of his program. “Oh my goodness,” Orlander reacted as he put Macron’s comments to his guests. Ovigwe Eguegu, an analyst at the Development Reimagined think tank who participated in the conversation, fact-checked the president. He explained that Malians, for example, were very positive about France’s intervention in 2013 and gave a warm welcome to then-president Francois Hollande, waving French flags and shouting “Vive la France”. Eguegu also added that from each French-led regional military initiative to the next, whether Operation Serval, Barkhane, or G5 Sahel, “what you’d find is a consistent decline in the security situation.” Macron said thanks would “come with time,” but time has joined his adversaries. Every year that passes only adds fuel to the fire of growing disdain for his administration. 

Orlander’s guests asked the simple question: what caused the instability in the Sahel? Did the Libyan government overthrow itself and then allow arms and newly redundant militants to flow into the Sahel? France was a key contributor to a problem it claimed to be solving with its post-2013 interventions, and as the ledger of French sins grows longer, more voices across the continent are joining in calling out Macron, either for tone-deafness or for deliberate or mistaken attempts to gerrymander the historical record.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the best course of action when you unnecessarily cause offense is an apology—and while that might not solve the problem entirely, it would likely set things moving along a path toward a more desirable outcome. When it comes to matters of African diplomacy, however, France and its leaders consistently seem to run afoul of these expectations, instead adopting a subtly paternalistic attitude tinged with scorn and condescension. After suggesting Paris’ African security partners should be more grateful to France for deploying its army to their countries, Macron’s special envoy to the continent, Jean-Marie Bockel, has doubled down on his tactless remarks.

“France cannot always be in repentance or mea culpa,” said Bockel. When pressed on whether he understood why some African leaders took offense, Bockel told Jeune Afrique that he did not want to “fan any flames.” Not only did the longstanding politician and diplomat not understand why they were mad, but it felt clear that had he been pressed further, he would have confessed his view that not only should France stop repenting, but that it deserves gratitude.

This is far from an isolated incident with Macron though. It is the latest outburst in a long series of foul-mouthed and crude exchanges with people and leaders across the Global South leaving you wondering when Macron was ever in a posture of “repentance or mea culpa,” as Bockel suggested he was. Sure, he said that French colonization of Algeria was a “crime against humanity,” but that is simply to acknowledge reality. The Algerian government estimates that more than five million people lost their lives because of it. It is hardly a noble concession to state a fact. 

Emmanuel Macron also went off script during a visit to the French-ruled Indian Ocean island of Mayotte following Cyclone Chido, a ruinous storm that devastated it. At the time, the official death toll stood at 31, with Mayotte lacking crucial supplies such as medicine and water. Macron was responding to a crowd of angry Mahorais who blasted the president for his feeble response to the disaster, which he thought was a good opportunity to remind them how lucky they were to be a part of France, otherwise, they’d be in “10,000 times deeper in shit.” The “10,000 times” deeper shit Macron was probably subtly referring to is the rest of the Comoros archipelago, which declared independence from France in 1975 without Mayotte. France does plenty for Mayotte, he implied, despite the fact that basic issues, such as the shortage of usable water on the island, has led to water cuts in the capital. This has prompted a campaign by politicians and activists under the slogan “Mayotte a soif” (Mayotte is thirsty). 

Macron has often sought to deflect responsibility from himself and France more broadly for the problems in formerly French-controlled parts of Africa, playing down the legacy of colonial rule by asking questions about what (didn’t) happen after independence, which is why these countries, as Macron once put it himself, are having “civilizational problems.” France, he believes, isn’t really responsible for any of these issues and, if anything, is contributing to solving them.

During a trip in 2023 to the continent, Macron made a similar blunder when he lost his composure in a visit intended to outline a vision for a new partnership between France and its African allies on a four-country tour, including Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He had made a promising start. “The days of la Françafrique are well and truly over,” Macron said in Libreville, Gabon’s capital. The tone of his statement implied remorse. But it wasn’t long before he reverted to factory settings. 

Whilst in the DRC, on his first-ever visit to the country, Macron offered his own unsolicited diagnosis of the ongoing insecurity in parts of its territory. “Since 1994, and it is not France’s fault, I’m sorry to put it so bluntly, you have not been able to restore the sovereignty—neither military, nor security, nor administrative—of your country,” he told Félix Tshisekedi. “Build a solid army, establish security around the state (…), impose transitional justice so that you don’t have war criminals still in charge or on the ground,” Macron publicly suggested, sounding more like a teacher speaking to an incompetent pupil than a national leader engaging his peer. 

In another incident during his visit to the DRC, President Félix Tshisekedi had to check Macron, telling him that he often took a “paternalistic tone, as if you were always absolutely right.” Cheikh Fall, a Senegalese activist, described the incident as full of “contempt,” and Abdennour Toumi, an Algerian researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies (Orsam) think tank in Türkiye, said that the entire visit had been a “total failure”. Macron went to Africa to change France’s image; instead he helped make it worse and got told off. 

Unlike in the past Macron doesn’t have the good fortune of being able to hide behind the quietism of African leaders eager not to stir the boat due to excessive diffidence. People across Africa continue to find various ways to make clear they don’t share this view of France’s function as the savior of an inherently doomed people, despite Macron’s insistence to the contrary. Macky Sall was ousted by Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who came to power in Dakar on a tsunami of anti-French sentiment. In Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, the emerging military regimes have adopted a resolutely anti-French geopolitical posture, exploring alliances with non-western powers and even the Africa Corps, a leaner and rebranded version of Wagner. And in Chad and Ivory Coast, France has seen the last of its military footprint on the continent, except Djibouti, given an eviction notice. As France packs up to leave West Africa, today there is more al-Qaida, more displacement, and more instability. What’s there not to be thankful for?  

The Léopold Sédar Senghors and Hamani Dioris of West and Central Africa have given way to Bassirou Diomaye Fayes and Ibrahim Traorés. And it’s spreading. These younger leaders can hear their publics’ better and tune themselves into their frequencies which has allowed for a gap to emerge between France and the political imaginations of many Africans. “It used to be that when Paris coughed, Dakar sneezed!” a close friend of Ousmane Sonko, the Senegalese prime minister, told Le Monde as France grappled with the prospect of prolonged political instability following Macron’s election call last summer. “The new generation no longer sees Paris as the metronome of our lives.”

The near-total collapse in France’s soft power is a consequence of France attempting to shed the image of an arrogant former colonial power without actually altering its beliefs or the nature of its engagements with African countries, which is partly why these incidents continue to occur. 

When a change in rhetoric on colonization and other issues from France didn’t suffice for African audiences, Macron reverted to saying what he truly thinks. The great irony is that if Macron were ever genuinely in a state of “repentance” for France’s colonial crimes, things might well improve. But even without such contrition, France’s reputation wouldn’t necessarily nosedive on autopilot. Macron, however, seems determined to accelerate the decline with his loose-lipped and overly opinionated remarks. He would do better if he kept his private views to himself, as every time he speaks on the African continent, he seems to be taking a joyride on what remains of his country’s tattered reputation in the region.

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