G. Pascal Zachary: How France Lost Africa to the U.S.

G. Pascal Zachary, a former foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, is the author of Married to Africa. He is a professor of practice at the Walter Cronkite school of journalism at Arizona State University.

In the scandalous case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French IMF chief currently held in New York facing attempted rape charges, the powerful issues of race and gender easily overwhelm one curious geopolitical detail: what's a woman from a French-speaking, former French colony in West Africa doing in the U.S. in the first place? In this case, she is from Guinea, but she could just as likely be from Senegal, Cameroon, Rwanda, Gabon, or Benin -- all Francophone countries that once sent their most ambitious immigrants almost exclusively to France. Now these and other French-speaking African countries experience a steady outflow people to the U.S.

The presence of a growing number of French-speaking Africans reflects a monumental shift in the relationship of sub-Saharan Africa to France and to the U.S. The shift has been years in the making, and its still-unfolding consequences are dimly appreciated....

The drive for economic opportunity explains much of America's attraction of African immigrants, but there's a political element as well, best illustrated by the recent history of Rwanda. A Francophone country, it added English as its third official language after the trauma of the 1994 genocide, signaling a shift in linguistic allegiance. On the surface, the change was an accident of history. Paul Kagame, the leader of the Tutsi rebel forces, had lived for years in English-speaking Uganda. He didn't even speak French. Because he knew English, he chose to receive military training in the U.S., at Fort Benning, Georgia. When he took power, he favored English, setting up a new national media network and criteria for government posts, all in English....