Over the last few months, whether in Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, Niger, Senegal, or elsewhere, Africans, the youth in particular, have, in their thousands, frequently and stridently protested French policies in Africa. This is striking when compared to the attitudes of previous generations. This unmistakable intensification of the rancor against France’s policies in Francophone countries’ populace and political and intellectual classes alike seems to have now reached most of the rest of Africa’s elites.

In recent weeks, in major English-speaking countries, (South Africa and Nigeria) political and civil society organizations rallied (in dramatic fashion, in South Africa under the leadership of Julius Malema) to express their opposition to France’s policies in its former colonies, singularly Mali, pointedly demanding the withdrawal of French troops from the continent. Clearly, there has been a growing awareness in most of the intelligentsia of many African countries that there is something amiss with the current relations between France and its former ‘possessions’ on the continent, with Mali as an exemplar. The elites’ sense is that there is something new, different in the animosity Mali’s transition authorities are facing. The orientations and policies they have enacted since May of last year seem to have particularly irked France’s leaders, well beyond the normal disagreement about ephemeral policies and transient interests.