French President Emmanuel Macron arrived at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre in Nairobi promising “a new chapter” in relations between France and Africa. Beneath the Africa Forward Summit’s slogan — “Africa is not waiting. It is building” — heads of state, CEOs, investors and multilateral officials gathered in the warm language of equality, partnership and African agency. Co-hosted by Macron and his Kenyan counterpart William Ruto on 11–12 May, the summit was organised around seven themes: energy, finance, agriculture, artificial intelligence, the blue economy, health and industrialisation.

A few streets away, Kenyan police gave another answer to the question of African agency. Delegates to the Pan-Africanism Summit Against Imperialism, organised by Progressive International member the Communist Party Marxist Kenya — activists, trade unionists, students, intellectuals and organisers from Kenya and across the world — tried to march toward the statue of Dedan Kimathi, the anti-colonial fighter executed by Britain in 1957. Police blocked the procession, fired tear gas and arrested protesters. Among those detained was Gacheke Gachihi, a member of the Council of the Progressive International.

France came to Nairobi wounded. Across much of its former colonial sphere in Africa, the old order of Françafrique has been shaken. In the Sahel, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger expelled French forces after military seizures of power that broke security ties with Paris in the name of sovereignty. Senegal, under President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, elected in 2024, took control of France’s last major military facility in the country last July, saying French bases were incompatible with sovereignty.

Macron has not hidden his bitterness. In January 2025, addressing French ambassadors in Paris, he complained that “someone forgot to say thank you” for France’s military deployments in the Sahel. In Nairobi, he tried another register, presenting France as a champion of African sovereignty and even claiming that France and Europe were the “true pan-Africanists.” France is trying to amplify cultural and economic relations after military and political setbacks; Kenya has been assigned the anchor of the new strategy.

The summit gave that strategy a number: €23 billion. Macron announced investment commitments across energy, artificial intelligence, agriculture and other sectors, with €14 billion from French companies and €9 billion from African entities. TotalEnergies and Orange were present. CMA CGM, the French shipping giant, said it would invest €700 million to modernise a terminal at Mombasa port.

Kenya offers France a route out of the humiliation of the Sahel and into the Western Indian Ocean: ports, logistics, trade corridors, financial diplomacy, a state that has made itself available to Western strategic planning, and a president eager to turn Nairobi into a diplomatic platform. Ruto will attend the G7 summit in France at Macron’s invitation, carrying proposals on credit reform and a new “risk architecture” for African economies.

But the summit’s soft language rests on harder ground.

In October 2025, Kenya and France signed a Defence Cooperation Agreement. Kenya’s Ministry of Defence says it covers intelligence sharing, maritime security, peacekeeping, training and humanitarian assistance. The agreement was ratified in April. Around the same time, 800 French troops arrived in Mombasa for joint training with the Kenya Defence Forces. The deal is renewable, grants French forces diplomatic-style protections, gives Paris primary jurisdiction over some offences committed by its personnel on Kenyan soil, and requires disputes to be handled through diplomatic channels.

France is not entering a vacuum. Kenya already hosts the British Army Training Unit Kenya, the largest British military contingent in Africa, based mainly in Nanyuki, in the foothill of Mount Kenya. The United States, meanwhile, is expanding the runway at Kenya Navy Manda Base in Manda Bay, a project Kenya’s Ministry of Defence describes as strengthening joint operational reach, rapid force projection, surveillance and forward logistics. France now adds another NATO-member pillar to that Western military architecture.

The official press releases speak of peace, stability, training and interoperability. The political content is deeper subordination: foreign forces, foreign equipment, foreign legal privileges, foreign strategic corridors and foreign companies embedded in the infrastructure of the Kenyan state.

Macron’s new Africa strategy updates and rebrands the old imperial relationship. Military bases become defence cooperation. Aid becomes co-investment. Extraction becomes green transition. Control of territory becomes logistics. The old dynamics of Françafrique are repackaged for Anglophone Africa, with African “agency” invoked to legitimate the terms.

The irony was difficult to miss. Ruto used the word “sovereignty” eight times in his summit speech. Macron replied that “the days of offering assistance are behind us” and promised co-investment. Then the police arrested the counter-summit delegates who insisted that sovereignty requires an end to foreign military, political and economic agreements imposed on Kenya and Africa.

The clash in Nairobi was between two futures. In one, African states are invited to the table of a declining imperial power and told to call the arrangement equality. Local comprador elites broker the access, receive the diplomatic prestige, and deploy the police when their populations refuse the bargain. In the other, the memory of Kimathi, the anger of the Sahel and the organising of the Pan-African left converge on a simple demand: Africa is not a platform for foreign power.

France came to Nairobi to prove it still has a future on the continent. The counter-summit showed who is contesting that future. Across Africa, the struggle against imperialism is making its demands and constructing a programme: close the foreign bases, break the debt architecture, recover control of ports and resources, defend democratic freedoms, and build the power to make sovereignty real. The Progressive International stands with that project — and with the organisers, including our Council member Gacheke Gachihi, who are facing repression for carrying it forward.

Latest from the Movement

Hondurasgate exposes the Reactionary International at work

Between 30 April and 6 May, a shocking set of 37 audio recordings — extracted from encrypted messaging apps — were released to the general public. Known now as ‘Hondurasgate’, the recording reveal conversations between some of the most powerful political figures in the Western Hemisphere: Honduran President Nasry Asfura, former president and convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández, Argentine President Javier Milei, and operatives linked to the US and Israeli governments.

The recordings allege a transnational conspiracy of staggering scope. The convicted narco-dictator of Honduras walked free just before the 2025 elections because, the audios suggest, Benjamin Netanyahu’s networks paid Donald Trump to deliver a presidential pardon. $150,000 public infrastructure funds of Honduras were diverted to set up a disinformation operation designed and staffed by allies of the US Republican Party in order to target the governments of Mexico, Colombia, and Honduras's outgoing leftist administration. Meanwhile, plans are laid to recolonize Honduras itself, constructing a new military base on the island of Roatán, resurrecting Peter Thiel’s pet project of the “ZEDEs”, and establishing a "Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism" in Tegucigalpa modelled on El Salvador's CECOT.

This is a story of how Israel and the United States conspired to take control of Honduras — with disastrous consequences for the human rights of its people. But Honduras is only the most visible site where the threads of the Reactionary International come together. Pull any one of them, and you find yourself tangled in a web that runs through Washington, Buenos Aires, and Tel Aviv.

Read the investigation now — and help us untangle the web.

Our History

12 May - The British General Strike

The Trades Union Congress called Britain's general strike to an end on 12 May 1926.

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13 May - May ‘68

French President De Gaulle Fled Paris on 13 May 1968.

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13 May - MOVE Bombing

The city of Philadelphia, USA, bombed its on people on 13 May 1985

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15 May - The Nakba

In 1948, Zionist militias ethnically cleansed two-thirds of the Palestinian population.

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18 May - Gwangju Uprising

The Gwangju Uprising erupted on 18 May 198 against the US-back South Korean dictatorship.

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Art of the Week

Francis Bebey (1929, Douala) was a Cameroonian-French musicologist, writer, and composer. He is said to be the first African musician to use electric keyboards and programmable drum machines, alongside traditional African instruments including the ndehu (Pygmy bamboo flute) and the sanza (thumb piano).

In 1957, he was invited by the political theorist and revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah to be a broadcaster in Ghana, and from 1961 to 1974 he worked for UNESCO, becoming the head of the music department in Paris. His music includes lyrics that challenged Western perspectives on Africans, for example, in New Track: “Have you noticed that everybody is complaining about the system” continuing “We need a change to come, a new order, Cultural, political, economically…”