The summit that French President Emmanuel Macron convened in Kenya this week was supposed to be the hard launch of a new version of France in Africa.

This France 2.0 wasn’t just interested in its backyard – or le pré-carré – of former French colonies. It wanted alliances continent-wide. This new France didn’t wring its hands about the past. Instead, it was forward-looking, “entirely free of hang-ups,” as Mr. Macron declared at the Africa Forward Summit’s opening ceremony on Monday.

The gathering was the first that France had ever convened in an anglophone African country, which “speaks volumes to the new approach France is taking towards Africa,” says Nicasius Achu Check, an expert in France-Africa relations at the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa. As the summit finished on Tuesday, Mr. Macron announced that French and African companies had pledged to invest $27 billion on the continent in sectors ranging from energy to artificial intelligence. And on Wednesday, the French president traveled to Ethiopia for diplomatic meetings there.

Why We Wrote This

France is trying to bolster its fading influence in Africa, with promises of big investment and equal partnership. But its colonial history continues to create road bumps.

But the Kenya summit also held reminders that the new France in Africa comes mingled with the old, such as when Mr. Macron barged on stage during a panel discussion, interrupting the presenter to shush chattering audience members. “Hey!” the president shouted as he seized the mic from the emcee. “I’m sorry, guys, but … this is a total lack of respect.”

Mr. Macron is known in France for often chiding the public, but as a video of this incident went viral, young, online Africans appeared to collectively wince. Was Mr. Macron really scolding his African counterparts like a school teacher, at an event meant to showcase their status as equal partners?

For many observers, the incident called to mind exactly the uncomfortable history that Mr. Macron had hoped to sidestep, and underscored a larger truth about France’s role in Africa: Mr. Macron had spent nearly a decade in office promising a “refounded relationship” with the continent. But in reality, Professor Check says, “we haven’t seen much change.”

President Emmanuel Macron attends the final day of the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, May 12, 2026.

A fraught relationship

When Mr. Macron was elected in 2017, France’s youngest-ever president quickly laid out a vision for a new kind of French comportement, or behavior, in Africa.

“I am from a generation that does not come and tell Africa what to do,” the then-39-year-old told an audience of university students in Burkina Faso a few months after he took office. France’s fraught and painful history in Africa, he declared, was no longer a place worth dwelling. “Our duty is not to stay in this past but to wholeheartedly live this generation’s adventure,” he declared.

But for many in France’s former African colonies, the image of a shared French-African “adventure” approached the farcical. For decades, their countries had been economically and politically tethered to France in ways that many felt left them fundamentally worse off.

Simmering resentment over this unequal relationship, dubbed françafrique, broke into the open when a wave of coups swept across the Sahel in the early 2020s. The young military leaders who came to power in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger made no secret of their disdain for France. They, along with Chad, soon booted out the French troops stationed inside their borders. The Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, and Senegal also requested the withdrawal of the French military.

At times, Mr. Macron could not hide his bitterness. “I think that they forgot to say ‘thank you’” for France’s military assistance, he complained to a group of French ambassadors last year.

Chad’s president, Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, shot back, saying that Mr. Macron was “living in the wrong era,” and that his comments “border on contempt for Africa and Africans.”

Chad President Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, who has butted heads with French President Emmanuel Macron in the past, attends the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, May 12, 2026.

All this meant that, by the time Mr. Macron arrived in Kenya this week, he was in damage-control mode, says Adekeye Adebajo, an international relations specialist and senior research fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

Macron’s legacy

Mr. Macron framed his overtures to the rest of Africa as a “leap together” into the future, and at the summit’s opening on Monday, Kenyan President William Ruto saluted Mr. Macron for “having the courage to recalibrate the relationship between Africa and France.”

But Professor Adebajo sees a more pragmatic aim. With less than a year before the end of his second and final term, Mr. Macron is trying to salvage his administration’s standing in Africa – as well as his own legacy as a progressive leader. “He’s acting out of necessity but trying to sell it as something that is a strategy,” says Mr. Adebajo.

Yet, even as Mr. Macron attempts to secure his legacy, the French president is facing another uncomfortable truth: France matters less than it ever has in Africa.

Across the continent, Paris is being elbowed out of the way economically and politically by ascendant powers such as China and Russia, even as it tries to cast itself as a more responsible partner.

“The paradox is that we are not the predators of this century,” Mr. Macron told The Africa Report in an interview just before the summit. “Europeans may once have been. But they are not now.”