
thumb|right|400px|Map showing French colonies, protectorates and mandates (in blue) in Africa in 1945; namely French Equatorial Africa, [[French North Africa, French Somaliland and French West Africa. Along with former Belgian colonies (shown in light blue), these areas today make up the bulk of francophone Africa. ]]
thumb|right|400px|Map showing French colonies, protectorates and mandates (in blue) in Africa in 1945; namely French Equatorial Africa, [[French North Africa, French Somaliland and French West Africa. Along with former Belgian colonies (shown in light blue), these areas today make up the bulk of francophone Africa. ]]
In international relations, '''''' () was France's sphere of influence (or in French, meaning 'backyard') over former French and (also French-speaking) Belgian colonies in sub-Saharan Africa. The term was derived from the expression , which was used by the first president of Ivory Coast, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, in 1955 to describe his country's close ties with France. It was later pejoratively renamed by François-Xavier Verschave in 1998 to criticise the alleged corrupt and clandestine activities of various Franco-African political, economic and military networks, also defined as France's neocolonialism.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).