President Emmanuel Macron (right) hosts President William Ruto at Elysee Palace in Paris in 2023. President.go.ke The 2026 Africa-France summit in Nairobi on May 11-12 is the first to be held in an African country that is not a former French colony. It is also the first to be held since the dramatic collapse of relations between France and a number of west African countries – notably Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.
The 2026 summit can be understood as the latest example of President Emmanuel Macron’s new Africa doctrine, which he laid out in Burkina Faso in 2017. The doctrine’s three notable messages were:
a neoliberal small-business approach to assistance programmes
the French resolve to develop new alliances outside French Africa.
In keeping with the new doctrine, the French president hesitantly apologised in 2021 for some aspects of French colonial policy in Algeria. These include the torture and assassination of the Algerian nationalist hero Ali Boumendjel.
But mostly, Macron has looked to strengthen the position of Paris as old alliances were becoming weaker.
Read more: France in Africa: why Macron’s policies increased distrust and anger
He has consciously invested time and effort beyond French west Africa. The official visit to Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony, is a case in point.
Right after his election in 2017, France’s development aid agency (AFD) and the Tony Elumelu Foundation signed an agreement in Nigeria to empower a new generation of business leaders. Tony Elumelu Foundation is a Lagos-based non-profit that promotes youth entrepreneurship across Africa.
Macron then promoted entrepreneurship during the New France-Africa Summit in 2021. He sought to inspire the youth of Africa to innovate and set up businesses.
This year’s conference is held under the banner: “Africa Forward: Partnerships between Africa and France for innovation and growth”. The business start-up vibe is no coincidence.
Kenya has also stressed the groundbreaking nature of the meeting for its focus on Africa as a major partner for Europe. Europe is looking for new allies in the midst of a war in Ukraine; and the US is unreliable, with Donald Trump imposing tariffs and questioning the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
As a historian of global north-global south relations, I see the meeting less as groundbreaking, and more as a continuation of an older, mutually beneficial relationship between Kenya and France.
Kenya hopes its relationship with France will elevate its influence across Africa, allowing it to rival the diplomatic weight of South Africa, which hosted the G20 summit in November 2025.
By transcending the classic divide between French and British Africa, Nairobi can present itself as a continental leader and as a diplomacy city.
The economic and diplomatic relationship goes back to the 1960s and 1970s. Back in September 1970 France sent a little-known legal expert called Jaques Mollet to advise the Kenyan Ministry of Industry and Commerce on the newly-formed East African Community.
France also sought cooperation with institutions of the East African Community such as the East African Development Bank. By becoming a close partner of a newly established regional economic bloc in Africa, in which Nairobi played a pivotal role, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs sought to weaken the British influence of Africa while strengthening its own position within the European Economic Community, now the EU.
Paris somewhat cynically justified its meddling as a way to strengthen continental unity since a French and a British sphere of influence in Africa would lead to unnecessary internal competition between the Commonwealth countries in Africa and Françafrique.
Kenya sought to strengthen its trade relations with France and the EEC in the 1960s. This was partly an attempt to become more independent of the Commonwealth. When negotiating with the EEC in 1963, an east African delegation that included Kenya’s Minister of Labour Tom Mboya stressed that maintaining the East African Common Market was key – not the Commonwealth.
The similarities between Kenya’s President William Ruto and Macron further strengthen this historical bond between Kenya and France. They share the same diplomatic goals. They are both focusing on climate change funding and security, and they share a preference for neoliberal privatisation as a mode for governance at home and abroad.
