A recent book When Africa Turns: why Africans reject France and the West[i] was spurred, says its author, Franco-Cameroonian historian and geopolitical analyst Charles Onana, by the need to debunk superficial discourses both in academia and main stream media, concerning the growing (often also defined as dangerous) Russian or Chinese influence in Africa, as well as an alleged anti-French stance on the part of many Africans. Such simplistic tropes hinder, according to Onana, a comprehensive geopolitical debate, while also canceling decades of international relations.
Onana looks into the reasons certain African countries have today tied stronger relationships with Russia or China, by placing the issue within a historical time line: spanning over half a century he recalls multiple accounts of relations between France, the wider west, the African continent and Russia or China. To reconstruct the various historical accounts Onana uses a wide range of sources from declassified diplomatic, defense and other strategic government reports or UN documents, to first-hand high- level testimonies, as well as an array of secondary sources.
Multiple historical incidents from the last 70 years reveal that geopolitical power struggles for hegemony involving a variety of countries have been on-going on the African continent and are also well documented. Onana cites a French secret service report from 1959 on Russian (Soviet) influence in Africa and a US intelligence report from the CIA dating 1969 on the same topic. Chinese expansion was also closely scrutinized by western embassies at the time. Far from begin a recent phenomenon, Chinese and Russian expansion was vibrant decades ago.[ii]
Quand l’Afrique Bascule begins with a glimpse into the French war of liberation against Nazi Germany on the African continent, a war waged with the enormous support of Africans, who fought alongside the French against the pro-Vichy authorities. This historical episode is often eclipsed from established accounts of the second World War: French General Charles De Gaulle’s liberation movement grew in central Africa, in Cameroon, where he retreated following his defeat in Dakar in 1940.
French Prime Minister De Gaulle was however subsequently horrified by the emancipation speech held in September 1958 by newly independent Guinean President Ahmed Sékou Touré, that opted for full independence from France, rather than embracing the French proposal of joining the former colonizer in a form of commonwealth. Operation Pérsil, a French operation that flooded the market with fake bank notes to destroy the country’s new monetary system was but one of the many vengeful actions taken by France against Guinea’s choice of full independence.[iii]
De Gaulle thus fought for the liberation of his country during WWII, yet was not ready to accept an effective decolonization of a French African colony. This is the first irony in French-African relations, a French denial of African agency. This entails a further denial of the acknowledgment of colonialism as a crime against humanity as well as the persistence of French neocolonialism, which, Onana argues, have contributed substantially in the deteriorating relationship between France and its former African colonies.
By using pretexts such as ethnic or religious reasons the enormous role played by the continent’s natural resources is often eclipsed when discussing African conflicts, so as to suppress the underlying motive of resource appropriation. Reports throughout the past decades reveal the astonishingly large percentage of the world economy that Africa provided for with its natural resources.
Onana points to countless examples of exploitation: uranium was considered a strategic mineral for US national defense and security during the second world war and the Americans secured Congolese uranium, then held by Belgium, for the first two atomic bombs Nagasaki and Hiroshima; in the Central African Republic, recounts President Jean-Bédel Bokassa, uranium was simply stolen by France even after independence; in Gabon neocolonial contracts were stipulated after independence which allowed for a French monopoly over the mineral.
African mineral wealth as well as natural gas, petrol, wood and other natural resources permeate each historical account.
The chapters span different countries from west and central francophone Africa, but also include accounts on Angola and South Africa. Particularly disturbing is the chapter covering apartheid South Africa: we learn that economic interests dictated the policies of many western countries towards apartheid South Africa, interests which preceded the fight against the racist and supremacist regime, which thus did not fall much earlier.
Examples of double standards on the part of France, the European Union and the west are pervasive. Onana mentions the recently 2024 stipulated EU memorandum of understanding with Rwanda on rare minerals, although it is known that these very minerals are mainly stolen from eastern Congo via an illegal occupation and a genocide. Europe thus underwrites an economy of genocide in the African Great Lakes region for its own economic interests. [iv]
Double standards are also entrenched in international law. The recent French aggression of Mali which Mali denounced at the UN security council in 2022, has still gone unheard as the complaint has not yet been addressed. Mali states it has evidence France has backed up jihadist groups in the region, a grave accusation which should be further investigated.
According to French Ministry of Defense sources, published by Bruno Charbonneau in France and the New Imperialism: Security Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa[v] there were more than 150 French military interventions in sub-Saharan Africa since 1945. Onana recalls some of these violent regime changes : the French-led overthrow of President of Niger Hamani Diori in 1974 ; the overthrow of Central African Republic President Jean-Bédel Bokassa in 1979 and a more recent forced resignation of Michel Djiotodia in 2014; as well as the UN-French regime change against Laurent Gbagbo in Ivory Coast in 2011, which threw the country back decades in its democratic achievements.
Ivory Coast also suffered a French psychological operation in 2004, where nine French soldiers and a US citizens lost their lives in Bouaké, Ivory Coast, yet the decades-long judicial case on the dossier stalled in France and no one has been brought to justice since. Former Ivorian first lady Simone Ehivet Gbagbo recalls the chilling days when France bombed the Presidential palace in April 2011, a regime change that former French President Nicholas Sarkozy has in the meantime openly admitted, yet faces no consequences.
We hear from high-level African diplomatic perspectives such as long-serving President of Chad (1990–2021) Idriss Déby on the war against Libya in 2011 and how he had foreseen the unleashing of a flood of arms in the region once Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown. This is what effectively happened. A more peaceful resolution to the conflict espoused by the African Union was sidelined. Chairperson of the African Union (AU) Commission, the chief executive officer of the AU’s secretariat Jean Ping asked in 2014 Should Gaddafi have been killed? Although also western analysts acknowledge this destabilization factor today, they fail to underline that it is due to the NATO-led intervention for achieving regime change. This denial hinders a much-needed critique of unilateral or multilateral interventions (often under the banner of the responsibility to protect) as a viable foreign policy option.
African countries are choosing to turn away from France and the wider west as a reference point or reliable partner, due to its denialism, double standards, deception, lack of accountability on past policy errors and a persistence in neocolonial actions and violent regime change policies.
Opaque economic networks, most exemplified on the African continent by petrol-producing Gabon where the Bongo family held the entire country’s petrol economy, abound on the continent. States are taken hostage by private interests. It is usually only through rare judicial affairs that some aspects of these networks surface.
Quand l’Afrique Bascule cites French-Lebanese businessman and former advisor to many African Presidents Robert Bourgi’s recent autobiography where he recounts how 3 million dollars were given to French President Jacques Chirac for his 2002 election campaign by then President of Burkina Faso Blaise Compaoré hidden in three huge djembes (African drums) brought directly to the Elysée in Paris, as just one anecdote of a system which has streamlined corruption amongst respective Franco-African elites, often bypassing official institutions. Onana cites passages from one of his mentors, French investigative journalist Pierre Péan, that published in 2011 a book whose title says it all: La République des mallettes,The Republic of Briefcases. The role of Freemasonry is yet another layer of overlapping power networks in Franco-African relations, as are NGOs and Swiss banks.
92-year-old Cameroonian President Biya signed many contracts with French magazine Jeune Afrique to propagate a positive image of his regime. In a recent interview Onana says on the topic of whitewashing dictatorships [vi]: “Receiving so much money to spread fake news in France is not only in total contradiction with the practice and ethics of journalism (especially for a so-called news magazine) but it is also an undisguised support for the maintenance and promotion of corrupt and autocratic regimes in Africa.”
After French President Emanuel Macron did not recognize and spoke despairingly about Niger’s new authorities, all while imposing a French ambassador that had been declared persona non grata by Niger in August 2023, the Nigerian authorities seemed to have had enough. Onana comments on this episode: “Exasperated by these statements, Niger’s new head of state, Abdourahamane Tchiani, not only demanded the withdrawal of the French army from his country, but his government also nationalized the mining company Somair, a subsidiary of the French company Areva (now Orano) in Niger. Somair had been exporting uranium to France for decades. On September 25, 2025, the long-taboo Franco-Nigerien economic and mining dispute erupted into the open. Nigerien Prime Minister Mahaman Lamine Zeine declared before the UN General Assembly that “in half a century of exploitation, uranium has brought Nigerians only misery, pollution, rebellion, corruption, and desolation, and to the French, prosperity and power.” What we are discovering is that behind the fight against terrorism, there is primarily a real battle over uranium between China, Canada, the United States, and France in this country.” [vii] Niger also joined the newly established Alliance of Sahel States, a military and political pact between the West African nations of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, formed in September 2023.
Zeine denounced France at the UN for its destabilizing efforts against Niger, including training terrorists, fomenting inter-ethnic conflict, creating a campaign of disinformation, fueling tensions with neighboring countries, and waging economic and financial war.
In a growing multilateral power sharing world acknowledging and changing these fallacious policy choices could be a beginning for France, and the wider west, if it does not want all of Africa to turn away.
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[i] Charles Onana, Quand l’Afrique Bascule, Pour quoi les Africains rejettent la France et l’Occident, Paris, L’Artilleur, 2025.
[ii] Subsequently the establishment of the United States Africa Command (Africom) in 2003 was also a reaction to Chinese expansionist policies in Sudan.
[iii] On Operation Pérsil Ndongo Samba Sylla et Fanny Pigeaud, L’arme invisible de la Françafrique: Une histoire du franc CFA, La Découverte, 2018.
[iv] Onana has written extensively, over ten investigations, on the African Great Lakes region.
[v] Bruno Charbonneau, France and the New Imperialism: Security Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa, Routledge, New York, 2008.
[vi] “Recevoir autant d’argent pour diffuser de fausses nouvelles en France est non seulement en contradiction totale avec la pratique et l’éthique du journalisme (surtout pour un magazine dit d’informations) mais c’est aussi un soutien non dissimulé au maintien et à la promotion de régimes corrompus et autocratiques en Afrique” in Charles Onana : « Le rejet de la France en Afrique n’a rien à voir avec la Russie ni avec la Chine » [Interview]
[vii] “Exaspéré par ses déclarations, le nouveau chef de l’Etat du Niger, Abdourahamane Tchiani a non seulement exigé le départ de l’armée française de son pays mais son gouvernement a carrément nationalisé l’entreprise minière Somair, filiale de l’entreprise française Areva devenue Orano au Niger. Elle assurait l’exportation de l’uranium en France depuis des décennies. Le 25 septembre 2025, le contentieux économique et minier franco- nigérien, longtemps tabou, éclate au grand jour. Le Premier ministre nigérien Mahaman Lamine Zeine déclare à la tribune de l’ONU qu’en « un demi siècle d’exploitation, l’uranium n’a apporté aux Nigériens que misère, pollution, rébellion, corruption, désolation et aux Français, prospérité et puissance ». On découvre en réalité que derrière la lutte contre le terrorisme, il y a surtout une vraie bataille autour de l’uranium entre la Chine, le Canada, les Etats-Unis et la France dans ce pays.” in Charles Onana : « Le rejet de la France en Afrique n’a rien à voir avec la Russie ni avec la Chine »[Interview]
Source: Nicoletta Fagiolo
Face à PYR with Charles Onana: How did France and the West lose Africa? (Cercle Aristote - Pierre Yves Rougeyron, 10.31.2025)