Giles Merritt reports on Europe’s declining influence in Africa, and the bids by Russia and China to play more assertive security roles there.

Europe is retreating from Africa in what seems likely to be the greatest shift of all in the 21st century’s new era of tectonic geo-political change.

It is five hundred years since Henry the Navigator’s explorers set up Portuguese trading posts that eventually led to European colonialism. Africa was turned into fiefdoms that were exploited and fought over strictly by Europeans.

No longer; Europe is on the way out. As the EU’s foreign affairs and security policy chief Josep Borrell warned 18 months ago, “little by little, we are losing Africa.”

In that short time, the retreat has gathered pace. The EU, Germany, France and the UK have cut development funding, and a spate of military coups in seven countries of the Sahel region have seen democratic governments turned into autocracies.

Russia is filling the security vacuums there as fast as it can. Within months of France’s withdrawal of its troops from Mali last year, Moscow signed a security pact there, and others are imminent.

Just as Russia has been cosying up to Gabon, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea and Sudan since the spate of military coups began in late 2021, China is converting its ‘Belt and Road’ economic assistance into an overtly political and security presence.

In the Horn of Africa, it has built a strategically significant new railway link between the port of Djibouti, where it has a military base, and Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital that’s host to the African Union. In February, South Africa took part in a big naval exercise with China and Russia.