Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan boasts about being the leader who goes most frequently to Africa, but his outreach to African countries might backfire as he keeps maligning Europe’s colonial past and pursues a controversial strategy in Libya.

On Jan. 27, Gambia became the 28th African country Erdogan has visited. Erdogan's trip to war-torn Somalia in 2011 was the most publicized as he became the first non-African leader to visit Mogadishu in two decades. His most controversial visit, however, was to Sudan in late 2017. Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, who would soon be overthrown, agreed to lease Suakin Island to Turkey, animating Erdogan’s Ottoman dreams. Claims that Turkey would build a military base on the island, once an Ottoman port, after restoring its historical sites infuriated other Red Sea countries who saw the move as “the return of colonialists.”

Turkey’s outreach to Africa, which began in 1998 and intensified after Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party came to power in 2002, was initially free of controversy, focusing on trade, investments and humanitarian aid. But once Turkey began to add the military dimension in, it caused eyebrows to raise. The military base Turkey opened in Somalia in 2017 to train local soldiers and the ensuing Suakin controversy aside, Turkey’s intervention in Libya’s civil war could prove to be an engagement that alters Ankara's narrative on opening to Africa.

Since 2005, which was an “Africa year” for Ankara, Erdogan has argued that the Ottomans left a proud legacy on the continent and that Turkey was never a colonial power eyeing Africa’s resources, while pointing to the West’s colonialist past and maligning particularly the record of France.