ABIDJAN: African leaders, opposition figures and social influencers are stepping up their support for the Kremlin even as Russia’s image elsewhere is being shredded by the war in Ukraine. Some of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal defenders are pan-Africanists — advocates of the doctrine of African unity and anti-imperialism that flowered at the height of the Cold War. Putin “wants to get his country back,” Kemi Seba, a Franco-Beninese pan-Africanist, declared in early March. “He doesn’t have the blood of slavery and colonisation on his hands,” Seba argued. “Putin is not my Messiah …

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