Today, the Rwandan government is one of the closest allies the U.S. has in the region,underscoring the distinct shift away from France. In Gallup polls of global attitudes towards American leadership, sub-Saharan Africans express the highest degree of approval, topping 75 percent of those polled in 20 countries. In seven French-speaking countries -- including Burundi, Chad, Senegal Mali and Ivory Coast -- approval ratings exceeded 85%.

France still holds significant influence in Africa, of course, and likely will for some time. The country maintains three military bases on the African continent: in Senegal, Gabon, and Djibouti. Members of the French military are flying over Libya; they also have played a critical role, and for a long time, in Côte d'Ivoire and Chad. And French economic power among its former colonies remains enormous. The common African currency in West Africa, for instance, remains linked to the Euro, at French insistence. The linkage facilitates France's lopsided trade with Africa and, perversely, inflates living costs in Francophone Africa.

The new appreciation that French-speaking Africans display for the U.S. is significant for cultural as well as a geopolitical reasons. Immigrants from Francophone Africa are chiefly Muslim, so they bring a different mental and religious experience to the U.S. than do Anglophone African immigrants (including my own wife, from Port Harcourt, Nigeria) who are mostly Christian.

The style of Islam practiced by African immigrants is far different than the Western stereotype of the militant fundamentalist. Senegalese Muslims, especially followers of the Mouride brotherhood sect, are intensely private about their religious practices and beliefs. Mouride members also invest heavily in their home communities, applying remittances to social services. The scholars Ellen Foley, of Clark University, and Cheikh Anta Babou, of the University of Pennsylvania, recently documented these tendencies in an fascinating article in the journal African Affairs on the creation of a medical hospital in the holy city of Touba in central Senegal.

A more engaged, secularized Islam is apparent among non-Mourides too. In 2009, I celebrated the ending of Ramadan with a Senegalese Muslim in Marin, California. He had only recently brought his wife (not his first, either) from Dakar to the U.S. Before I arrived at his house, he had gently warned me to refrain from even shaking her hand. I expected her to remain silent. Yet over the course of the dinner, she spoke freely in halting English and he showed great pride in her university education and her past work as a teacher in Senegal. She declared she preferred the U.S. to France -- and had consented to marriage to my friend because doing so allowed her to move to America. I recently saw his wife again, and found her speaking English with confidence and helping my friend run his business.