Why Europe's visit to Africa will always arouse grave suspicion

French President Emmanuel Macron and President William Ruto at the AFrica Forward Le concert at Kasarani indoor arena in Nairobi.[David Gichuru, Standard]

The old historical debate about Africa and Europe refuses to go away, despite repeated dramas of friendship and brotherhood. Emmanuel Macron's visit to Kenya has stirred them up, once again. Can Europe engage Africa without arousing suspicion? If she admires Africa and attempts to be brotherly and friendly, does Africa trust her? 

Such is the thrust of popular conversations that informed the French President’s visit to Nairobi for the two-day French-sponsored Africa Forward conference. Social media and civil society on the continent smelled a rat of hierarchy, self-interest, and paternalism.

An African is saying that if you eat with a visually disabled person, you can never trust yourself. If you give a big portion of the meal, he wonders how much bigger your own must be. And if you give him only a little, he concludes that you are up to selfish mischief. What do foreign gift-bringers want in Africa? That was the question.  

Traumatic encounters with colonialism and their agonising spill-overs into neo-colonial fragilities have left Africa wary of Europe. Even when Europe imagines that it is now a born-again, caring, good friend, Africa is restless. Karen Blixen, for whom a prestigious residential estate in Nairobi is named, was a perfect embodiment of the tensions and contradictions between Africa and Europe. While she thought that she loved the continent, her critics thought she was a nasty racist.  

Ngugi wa Thiong’o was especially disturbed by her habit of describing Africans in analogies of animals. In the essay titled “Her Cook and her Dog,” Ngugi was scandalised that Blixen loved her cook the same way she loved her dog, or even the wild animals of Africa. Blixen said that what she learned from Africa’s animals and plants was useful in her dealings with the natives.

Was she perhaps thinking of the guilelessness of the people, or did she think they belonged to a lower life than a European? More critically, Blixen compared her servant’s invitation to her to sample a Gikuyu delicacy to a civilised dog offering a human being a bone from its meal.  

This kind of European tension between love and contempt for Africa is what makes people chatter at the back of the room, in the middle of a serious public address. They do not believe in what is going on in the hall.

But they must sit through it. It may be a visiting French president attempting to unbundle his agenda for Africa. Away from state officials, the African gathering is disinterested. The people will carry on with alternative conversations, completely oblivious that they are offending the visitor.   

But Macron also triggers other related anxieties that he did not create. Yes, he presents himself as a modernised European leader who does not believe in the conquering and domination of one set of people by another. He is a post-colonial European. He is an intellectual and universalist who describes himself as a Pan-Africanist. He wants cultural partnership and economic cooperation, dialogue, and innovation. And this is just where he gets into trouble.

Historical military interventions in West Africa and the forced removal of governments raise the antennae of a predominantly Kenyan audience at the University of Nairobi. Why should they trust him?

Recent French-related ruptures with both regimes and publics in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger reflect accumulated decades of suspicion and fatigue. When Macron shouts at the noise-making mobs, asking them to shut up, he only animates old suspicions against his continent, despite many young Africans’ desires to migrate to the global North, in this age of failed African states. 

The historical symbolic moments are also disturbing. In one, there is Blixen, a European aristocrat, comparing her African servant to a dog. This is havoc when the landscape is defined by dispossession and domination of Africa by Europe.

In French colonies in the age of Blixen, a superior “civilizing mission” is assumed. Africans who achieve a certain cultural benchmark become Frenchmen, “évolués (the evolved ones).” Today, the roles are reversed; the Frenchman declares himself a Pan-Africanist. 

History makes each European visit to Africa be received with suspicion. Africa does not like it when Europe sees her as a landscape, no matter how beautiful; a domestic or wild animal, no matter how fascinating; or a servant, no matter how trusted.

Prof Hugh Trevor–Roper of Oxford talked of partnerships between Africa and Europe as workable only where Africa is a horse and Europe a rider. Overdramatised state visits to Africa by latter-day European aristocrats disturb unresolved European history in Africa.  

-Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser