“RENOVATION” was the theme of Nicolas Sarkozy's first France-Africa summit, held in Nice on May 31st-June 1st. In symbolic terms the two-day meeting was certainly different. As well as the usual collection of African heads of state and government, 38 of them this time, over 200 businessmen went along. Mr Sarkozy also made a point of inviting not only French-speaking leaders from former colonies, but English-speaking ones too, notably the presidents of South Africa (Jacob Zuma), Nigeria (Goodluck Jonathan) and Rwanda (Paul Kagame).

The rhetoric was fresh too. In his opening speech, President Sarkozy called for a “new French-African relationship” that would be “free of complexes” and based on “equality”. Exactly 50 years after France granted 14 of its colonies independence, Mr Sarkozy hit back at those who accuse France of neo-colonialism by holding such a summit. The point, he insisted, was to treat Africa as a strategic partner. As a mark of mutual respect, African troops will march alongside their French counterparts at this year's July 14th Bastille Day parade in Paris.

In some ways Mr Sarkozy has tried to turn the page on what is known as françafrique: the backroom network of personal, business and political links, fed by petro-dollars and backed by left and right, that has traditionally characterised French Africa policy. He has updated old defence agreements. He has reoriented France's military presence on the continent, often seen locally as a sign of post-colonial paternalism, towards the Horn of Africa. Last year Mr Sarkozy opened a new base in Abu Dhabi, and this year he decided to scale back the one in Senegal.

Mr Sarkozy has also taken the lead in promoting a place for Africa on the world stage. He backed South Africa's participation in the G20 forum. In Nice he said it was “absolutely abnormal” that there was no permanent African representation on the UN Security Council. (Yet as nobody can agree on who should occupy such a seat, or how many Africa should claim, this remains a fiendishly difficult matter.)

Yet old habits die hard. Mr Sarkozy may no longer have installed at the Elysée Palace a “Monsieur Afrique”, as Charles de Gaulle called his special Africa fixer, Jacques Foccart. But informal contacts still count. Two years ago, Jean-Marie Bockel, Mr Sarkozy's overseas-aid minister, lost his job not long after deploring the “weight of bad habits, the preservation of individual interests, the defence of certain inherited rentier situations” in françafrique. According to Robert Bourgi, a lawyer to Omar Bongo—a former president of Gabon, who died last year—Mr Bockel went on the instructions of Mr Bongo.

Moreover, in parts of French-speaking Africa, which the French used to treat as their backyard, they are being squeezed by competition from Chinese and Indian business, for commodities as well as infrastructure projects. China has overtaken France as the leading exporter to sub-Saharan Africa. This week Senegal's president Abdoulaye Wade told Le Parisien, a French newspaper, that the Chinese were easier to deal with. “If I want to get China to finance a project, I pick up my phone and send an envoy to the ministry of commerce in Beijing,” he declared. “A fortnight later, two months at the most, I get an answer. If I want to do the same thing with France, the United States or the World Bank, it takes five years.”

Despite the fine words about a new era, transparency campaigners feel frustrated. Last October, a French appeals court rejected a case brought by the French branch of Transparency International, an anti-corruption lobby, against three African leaders, among them the deceased Mr Bongo. A preliminary judicial investigation had shown that Mr Bongo and his family had 39 properties in France, nine cars and 70 bank accounts. In May the Gabonese presidency, now occupied by Bongo's son, Ali Bongo, announced that it had bought a swanky mansion on one of the poshest streets in Paris, partly for diplomatic use. The presidency was making this known, it said, apparently without irony, in the interests of “full transparency”.