France stirs ill will as officials consort with African autocrats

Reports of the luxuries Biya treated himself to on his Paris visit “enormously shocked people,” said Jean Faustin Kinyock, president of the National Human Rights League in Cameroon, and the French were seen as complicit.

Analysts said that sentiment was pervasive.

“People don’t like France because France isn’t helping Africans freely choose their leaders,” said Achille Mbembe, a political scientist and historian at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. “And the democratic process is blocked, practically everywhere.”