Alain Mabanckou, the acclaimed Congolese writer, has rejected Emmanuel Macron’s project to boost French speaking worldwide, calling instead for a complete overhaul of the club of French-speaking countries known as la Francophonie, which he said had become an instrument of French imperialism propping up African dictators.

The institutional network of French-speaking countries “cannot continue as it is today because it goes against everything we ever dreamed of”, Mabanckou told the Guardian in Nantes, where he was artistic director of the Atlantide world literary festival this weekend.

“It is not – and it has never been – the great common melting pot that would ensure cultural freedom and courteous exchange. Today it is one of the last instruments that allows France to say it can still dominate the world, still have a hold over its former colonies.”

The award-winning novelist, 51, is hailed as one of the world’s best writers in French – winner of France’s top Renaudot literary prize and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. On Martin Luther King Day, Mabanckou published an open letter to Emmanuel Macron, refusing to work on the French president’s new plans to boost the French-speaking world. Since then, other writers and have joined him in criticising what they describe as France’s imperialist and out-of-touch approach.

The French president has promised a project next month to reinvigorate the “Francophonie”, the official grouping of more than 50 countries – from Senegal to Canada via Belgium, Madagascar and Mauritius – where French is an official or significant language.



When Macron announced in a speech to students in Burkina Faso in November that French could be “the number one language in Africa and maybe even the world” within decades and that it fell to young Africans to defend it, he underestimated the cultural row that would ensue.

French is the sixth most spoken language in the world – after Mandarin Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish and Arabic – and there are now more French speakers outside France than inside it. With population growth, there will be more than 700 million French speakers by 2050, 80% of them in Africa.

Macron, 40, who was born long after most French colonies became independent in the 1960s, presents himself as turning his back on the old system known as françafrique – in which kickbacks, petrodollars and privileged relations defined Paris’s foreign policy towards its former colonies in Africa. He has appointed as his “personal representative” to the grouping of French-speaking countries the award-winning French-Moroccan novelist Leïla Slimani.



But there has been a backlash against Macron from global French-language writers, after Mabanckou accused him of failing to go far enough in transforming the official group of French-speaking countries. They say Macron should tear down and totally reinvent the cosy institutional club.



Mabanckou, who has French and Congolese citizenship, said the network’s international summits allowed French leaders to have quiet meetings with African dictators and be “uselessly complicit” with despots.



“You can’t talk about the French-speaking world if you don’t ask the question of democracy in Africa,” he said. “There’s an incongruity in wanting to talk about defending the French language and then holding summits when we’re still in dictatorships in countries that speak French. And today, there are more countries that are dictatorships in the French-speaking world than the English-speaking world.”

Civil society groups in countries like Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, Guinea and Togo have warned against the trampling of democratic rights.

Mabanckou argued that the world club of French-speaking countries was “still defined by France, from a diplomatic point of view” as a continuation of hazy, old foreign policy ideas, a way of “sustaining French imperialism”.

He also spoke of a damaging literary divide that had not been bridged. He lamented that while English-language literature had embraced its global diversity, France had been slow to do so. In some commercial bookshops in France, key French-language writers, even with joint French nationality, were being placed on “foreign literature” shelves. He regretted what he called the Paris hierarchy’s tendency to look down on global French-language writers, set them apart and consider them as “authors who write with an accent”.

“Today Hanif Kureishi is as valid as any other writer in English,” Mabanckou said. “But in France we’re still at that delicate distinction in literature. In other words, discrimination is not just social, it’s also literary.”

Mabanckou said it was a lost opportunity that global French-language literature was currently not taught on the national curriculum in French schools and yet it was thriving at US universities and widely translated into English, such as the work of the acclaimed late Ivory Coast novelist Ahmadou Kourouma or the French-Lebanese Amin Maalouf.

He felt the challenges to the institutional club of French-speaking countries were part of an “end of an epoque” mood, where all institutions “that serve as a reminder of colonial domination” were being questioned, including the CFA franc – a currency pegged to the euro used in 14 African countries, which some have criticised for being a relic of colonialism.

For Mabanckou the solution would be to create a new partnership in the French-speaking world led by civil society, writers and artists that did more to protect local African languages, was more supportive of freedom of travel and breaking down borders. In his opening speech at the Atlantide festival, he talked of a French-speaking world where no one would be seen as “foreign” or need a visa.

Slimani insisted at a convention on the French-speaking world in Paris last week that she wanted to modernise global French, open up the language with “real objectives in terms of human rights, gender equality and the defence of democracy”.