A year-long series looking back on the most significant moments of the past 25 years, how they changed our world, and how they will continue to shape the next 25.
Howard W. French is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a former New York Times bureau chief for West and Central Africa, among other places. His books include Born in Blackness, and, most recently, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide.
When I moved to West Africa fresh out of college to begin what would become a lifelong career in journalism in the early 1980s, one of the most powerful first impressions I had was how utterly the political and economic landscape of my new adopted home was dominated by a former colonial power.
The place I had moved to was Ivory Coast, and although it had its own flag, constitution, and president, the country that was still its clear overlord was France, which made Ivory Coast a colony in 1893. By the time of my arrival, Ivory Coast had already been independent for two decades, but many of the major roads and boulevards in the bustling economic capital, Abidjan, still bore the names of French figures from the recent past, like the former presidents Charles de Gaulle and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.
French "technical" advisers occupied spacious offices next to the executive suites in all the key government ministries. The families of French business people and coopérants, or aid workers, filled the best beaches along the palm-lined Atlantic coast on weekends. And the French Cultural Center remained the premiere venue in the city's arts scene, hosting screenings of French films, book readings and other performances. Even the currency, the CFA franc, was controlled by Paris, where all of the reserves owned by the former colonies that used it were required to be banked.
As my work as a freelance reporter gathered pace, I began to discover another side of French-speaking West Africa. Travelling in the semi-arid, landlocked region known as the Sahel, whose countries were much poorer than France's coastal former colonies like Ivory Coast and Senegal, a world of vastly greater dependence on France than anything I had seen before was revealed to me.
In nations like Burkina Faso (then still known as Upper Volta), Mali and Niger, the manner in which Paris held sway was far less subtle and involved fewer niceties than in the much more prosperous Ivory Coast. French budgetary support was the economic lifeline for those who governed the Sahel countries, and French troops garrisoned in the region were often the deciding factor in whether a local ruler could remain in power.
This was brought home to me most powerfully in another Sahelian country, Chad, where France maintained a large military presence and had played an open role in seating and unseating leaders in the 1980s, and where the deciding factors were repeated armed interventions, some of which I covered.
But early in this decade, something era-defining happened. Beginning on Feb. 18, 2022, when Mali's ruling junta requested that French troops leave the country "without delay," each of the three core Sahelian countries (Mali was followed by Burkina Faso and Niger the following year) demanded that French troops leave their territory in short order, ending a long period of postcolonial domination.
With this, rather than the dates in 1960 upon which they raised national flags, sang new anthems and swore in their own presidents for the first time, France's former colonies in West Africa should be thought of as embarking on their true journey of independence.
And the results of their experience of autonomy and even defiance vis-a-vis Europe, will be of profound effect for their entire region, one of poorest and fastest-growing in the world.
Against the backdrop of my early experiences in West Africa, I also got to know the region's English-speaking countries. They could scarcely have been more different.
Back then, young nations like Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone suffered plenty of instability and misrule and lacked the surface veneer of Western-tinged cosmopolitanism that the French had brought to Ivory Coast, but their governments made their own decisions, both wise and foolish.
For reasons of its own, Britain had never sought to perpetuate its hold on this region, and this gave independence in English-speaking West Africa a deeper, truer quality. Back then, plenty were those who thought that France's former colonies were poised to advance more quickly, but I had real doubts. Time alone would tell where the advantages lay for Africans in the trade-offs between real autonomy and continuing tutelage.
Now, many years later, the answer seems much clearer to me. Francophone Africa is in profound disarray, its states locked in the grips of stalled democracy or skirting collapse. Even Ivory Coast, though still relatively better off economically than almost every country in the region, has experienced a civil war since I left the country for the second time in 1998. This occurred after a previous president, Henri Konan Bédié, rewrote the electoral laws to eliminate his main rivals and perpetuate himself in power.
After the war, which ravaged the country, he was eventually succeeded by one of those rivals, Alassane Ouattara, 83, who has employed much of his predecessor's old playbook, disqualifying rival candidates to assure that he could win yet another mandate. In late October, this strategy secured an official score of almost 90 per cent of the vote in an election whose cynicism has resulted in low turnouts, but little prolonged domestic protest - and almost none from the international community. More immediately to the point, it delivered a fourth presidential term for the aging Mr. Ouattara, despite a prior constitutional limit of two terms.
West Africa's English-speaking countries have by and large become much more mature democracies. Located right next door to Ivory Coast and comparably prosperous, rival political parties in Ghana have made the democratic alternation of power between themselves routine. Some of their recent elections have been decided by razor-thin margins without sparking strident disputation of the results, never mind civil war.
If this all raises questions about how the French legacy in West Africa has turned so sour, one must look toward the Sahel for the most worrisome outcomes. There, in some of the world's poorest countries, France has been totally repudiated. The Sahelian countries are in the grips of some of the world's most violent and persistent attacks by radical Islamic insurgencies. The main actors are shadowy regional affiliates of Al-Qaeda and Islamic State. Violence by insurgencies in the Sahel accounted for roughly half of the terrorism deaths worldwide in 2024, according to a survey by the Institute for Economics and Peace.
Despite their dire situation, in recent years the three countries that sit at the region's core - Burkina, Mali and Niger - have each radically downgraded their relations with Paris, including the hosting of French soldiers, having decided that France, with its imperial reflexes and penchant for violent militarized solutions to challenges from Islamists, has little to offer them.
Each of these countries, as well as Chad, which is further to the east, is now led by soldiers. In the three core nations, the heads of state are uniform-wearing populists and nationalists whose rhetoric draws on the Pan-Africanism of Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana to independence in 1957, and more recently, of Thomas Sankara, the young revolutionary officer who changed Upper Volta's name to Burkina Faso - land of upright people - in 1984, and ruled as a progressive populist until he was overthrown with likely French approval in 1987.
Readers may wonder why they should care about three usually little-heard-from countries tucked in the internal recesses of West Africa, never mind why their changing fortunes rank as one of the biggest stories of this century so far, as I contend here.
The most immediate reasons are bound up in demographics and migration from Africa, which are driving the West's increasingly hostile and even poisonous attitudes toward the continent, just as they are helping fuel the rise of far-right populism in the rich world.
There is an even bigger picture consideration, though, one that harks back yet again to Nkrumah and concerns the deeply unresolved future of the entire African continent and not just the bleak fortunes of one of its most troubled regions.
Just as the rich world has begun to spiral into a crisis of prolonged fertility decline and aging, Africa's population growth is reaching a historic upward stride. In many ways, this can be understood as a rebound from the centuries of demographic depression brought about by the slave trade, when scores of millions of people were killed in the chaos that swept the continent in the drive for captives or shipped away in chains from Africa in their reproductive primes.
Now, United Nations experts project that Africa's population will more than double to roughly 3.25 billion before 2070 and could far surpass the combined population of India and China by the century's end.
The Sahelian nations that are locked in economic misery and prey to violent insurgencies count as some of the highest-fertility places on Earth. Because of this, Mali's population of roughly 25 million, for example, is projected to reach about 50 million just 15 years from now. Niger is growing even faster. These countries are also some of the leading sources of migration across the Sahara and into Europe, as well as points beyond. Not to put too fine a point on this, but whether they can conjure better dispensations for their people will strongly condition the global debate about migration, North-South economic relations, and the tightly linked risks of state failure and terrorism in the decades ahead.
There is a bigger picture question, believe it or not, and it centres on the preoccupation of Nkrumah: Can Africa fundamentally reinvent itself, and to what degree will this require breaking out of the jigsaw mould of countries bequeathed by European imperialism? The present map of African nation states closely resembles the one drawn up the European powers when they divided up the continent among themselves at a conference held in Berlin in 1884-85. No regard was given then to African needs or sensibilities, and most of the resulting countries are small, with many of them - like the Sahel states - being landlocked, which is a lasting recipe for severe economic hardship.
Nkrumah understood the challenge of Africa as being one of bringing the continent into modernity on its own terms, and an essential first step, he believed, was forming larger federations. Only these, he believed, could give African countries the heft they would need to develop thriving markets, to industrialize, and to fend for their interests in an indifferent or hostile world.
In some ways, the embattled Sahelian countries seem like almost ideal candidates for an Nkrumahist strategy. Their governments already loosely embrace an ideology and rhetoric of Pan-Africanism, and this seems to have won them a purchase on substantial popular support, at least in the short term. All of them face a common enemy in the form of shadowy and ruthless transnational insurgencies that pay no heed to the old colonial borders and routinely attack one country from the territory of another. All of them have weak and dependent economies, living from mineral extraction and scarcely modernized, peasant-based agriculture. With a collective population of more than 71 million, they have almost no industry to speak of.
Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger are already experimenting with enhanced military and intelligence co-operation to compensate for the loss of French firepower in their fight against Islamist groups. They have also begun to tinker with economic co-operation, although countries this poor may find the benefits of an additive approach like this limited.
What they lack most - besides the political will that would be required to achieve fuller integration - is a coastal partner, or partners. In his day, that was one of the strategic assets that Nkrumah touted as he pursued union or federation with a variety of nearby countries, including Mali and Upper Volta. Ghana offered port access to landlocked Sahelian countries, and it also built an enormous hydroelectric dam both to spur its industrialization and to offer cheap electricity to neighbours as an inducement to integration.
Colonial rule divided Africa in countless ways. Europe, in general, did little building in its colonies, which were sites of extraction far more than of nation-building. The scant infrastructure it left these countries at independence tended to run straight from mine to port, for the shipment of commodities straight off to France or Britain, for example. Almost no roads or rail were built to connect colonies, and especially not to those of rival powers. The patchwork of legacy colonial languages - English, French, Portuguese and Spanish - further served to keep the continent's newly independent countries divided.
Unlike Ghana, Ivory Coast - which also has modern ports and a bit of industry - shares the legacy of French colonial rule with the core Sahel countries, and hence the French language. Ivory Coast's continuing close relations with Paris, though, have estranged these countries as they have sought to break free from French domination. Left undiscussed thus far is the region's giant, Nigeria, with a population larger than the rest of West Africa combined. By the end of the century, it is projected to have a half-billion people and some of the world's largest cities.
Like the Sahel countries, it has also struggled to defeat a variety of Islamic insurgencies, the most infamous of them being Boko Haram, which has kidnapped people on a large scale for ransom and terrorized large swaths of the country's north. Although more democratic than most of France's ex-colonies, with regular, hotly contested elections, what has further hobbled Nigeria is that it has long been a chronic economic underperformer and beset with deep corruption and severe overdependence on oil.
Where does this leave things? The West, having helped create the dysfunctional Africa we know, must also summon the will to help Africa reinvent itself. It can do so by following the lead of China and financing much more of the infrastructure that Africa so badly needs. Unlike most of the projects done by China, though, these should help Africa integrate itself and not be aimed primarily at the evacuation of minerals and commodities. The continent also has vast unmet needs for electricity, with most Africans making do with an amount of power comparable to the annual consumption of a kitchen refrigerator.
Against its demographic backdrop, Africa is now urbanizing at the fastest pace any continent has seen in history, and the West should look for ways to help bring this enormous shift to city from countryside about in ways that maximally enhance ways of life. This will require much better urban planning, water and sewage systems on an enormous scale, modern mass transit, and much better access to education in both quantity and quality. The needs are so great that it is hard to rank these priorities, but a compelling argument can be made that schools are the greatest need of all.
Things like these should be seen as a matter of necessity, and not of charity. Reinventing Africa will require reinventing the way the outside world relates to the continent. There is little chance that much of what has been outlined above will be accomplished through old-fashioned aid. Needs like these will have to be met by investments on a monumental scale. In the coming decades, estimates for the additional annual need for infrastructure alone run close to US$100-billion.
If solutions to Africa's problems cannot be found, and the continent cannot reinvent its nation-states, this will not only be a tragedy for a vast and growing portion of humanity, including a disproportionate share of the world's working-age population, in the decades ahead. It will be a disaster and failure of the global north that will bend its trajectory in negative and unpredictable ways for the next generation and beyond. There is little sign that Africa is capturing the imagination of the outside world to the degree that is necessary. Time is wasting.