Russia-Africa Summit: Putin Denounces Neocolonialism, but Sells Influence First

According to Le Monde, Vladimir Putin tried to win over his African hosts at the Russia-Africa summit, held on 28 and 29 October in Moscow, by denouncing the West's "neocolonialism". He promised to increase trade with the continent. But, still according to the daily, political and military influence remains the pillar of Russia's presence in Africa. Beyond that, the dispatch we have does not detail the sums announced, the agreements signed, or the list of countries represented: we will not invent them.

What follows is therefore our reading, not an established fact.

First, Moscow's diagnosis is not wrong. Neocolonialism exists, and Amílcar Cabral described it with precision: indirect domination, exercised by a political power composed largely of local agents. The debts that strangle budgets, the loans with strings attached, the raw materials shipped out and resold processed: Africans live all of this, and they did not wait for the Kremlin to say so. When a Western leader expresses outrage at Russian influence, the irony is delicious, but it changes nothing about the matter.

That leaves the awkward question: what does the accuser offer? If, as Le Monde reports, trade comes after political and military influence, the offer looks less like a partnership than a place to be claimed. Lenin saw rivalry between great powers as competition for outlets, raw materials and spheres of influence, of which military alliances and arms contracts are the political wrapping. Read this way, the Russian tour is not anti-imperialism: it is one more competitor in the market for other people's sovereignty.

The decisive criterion is the one Cabral and Fanon posed: national liberation without social transformation lets a local elite settle into the apparatus inherited from colonisation. Changing protector is not changing structure. A regime that swaps one patron for another, in exchange for a security guarantee, may gain diplomatic room for manoeuvre; it gains nothing for its peasants and miners if the economy stays oriented towards exporting raw resources and debt remains the lever.

Two questions, then, that the summit does not settle, at least on what we know of it. Will the promised exchanges include local processing, technology transfer, prices negotiated as equals? Or security in exchange for resources, in the usual opacity? Until the answer is written down in black and white, denouncing neocolonialism remains a matter of rhetoric, and rhetoric is free.

Africans are not spectators of this contest: they have their own history, Cabral reminded us, whatever their stage of development. They know how to count offers. It is for them to judge whether they are being bought, sold to, or simply recruited.