Decolonizing Françafrique: Unravelling Françafrique and the Formation of the Alliance of Sahel States

This chapter decolonizes françafrique and discusses its systematic unravelling in the last decade. Françafrique has been defined as “the French strategy of exerting military, political and commercial influence over its former colonies in Africa”. The term covers the French sphere of influence on the continent, with strong connotations for that sphere in which France calls the shots, influences progress and engineers the opposite. Originally targeted towards ex-colonies of France, françafrique as a policy encompasses non-ex-colonies or other African territories that allow themselves to come under the spell of French influence. France appears to have kept a tighter influence over its ex-colonies in areas of economy and governance. As discussed in Chapter 5 , one modus operandi of the French Colonial Pact signed with ex-colonies is that, francophone Africa became the epitome of longest-serving heads-of-state in Africa to facilitate the pact, while governing with impunity, and in the process generated political contexts prone to conflicts. Hence, Sahelian West Africa and Central Africa which make up most of françafrique territory became conflict-prone; this territory has faced the worst jihadist and terrorist campaign on the African continent so far (see Fig. 6.1). This chapter examines françafrique, the military aspect of the post-independence relationship and the increasing contention between francophone sub-Saharan Africa and the “Metropole”. The chapter discusses the Francophone Spring and explores to what extent françafrique has been unravelling in the last decade, with the departure of French troops (Operation Sangaris) from Central African Republic (CAR), and later from Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad (Operation Barkhane), along with the wave of regime changes to remove French puppet-presidents from Mali (August 2020 and May 2021), Guinea (September 2021), Burkina Faso (January and September 2022), Niger (July 2023), Gabon (August 2023) and Senegal (March–April 2024), plus the shock announcements by Chad and Senegal on 28 November 2024 to end defence cooperation pacts with France. The chapter also provides detailed analysis on the formation of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES).