Chad's president on Tuesday accused Emmanuel Macron of being "in the wrong era" after the French president said African countries "forgot to say thank you" for France's military deployment in the Sahel region to fight an Islamist insurgency.
"I'd like to express my outrage regarding recent remarks by President Macron which border on contempt for Africa and Africans. I think he is in the wrong era," President Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno said in a speech at the presidential palace published on the presidency Facebook page.
France in 2013 began a military operation in Mali and the Sahel region to fight Islamist insurgents.
"I think that they forgot to say 'thank you'. It does not matter, it will come with time," Macron said in a speech to French ambassadors on Monday.
"We did the right thing," he said of the military deployment, adding that "none" of the states of the Sahel region would be "sovereign" today without that intervention.
France is now reconfiguring its military presence in Africa after being driven out of three Sahelian countries governed by juntas hostile to Paris -- Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.
Senegal and the Ivory Coast have also asked France to leave military bases on their territory.
At the end of November, Chad -- which hosted Paris's last military bases in the Sahel -- ended the defence and security agreements that linked it with the former colonial power, saying they were "obsolete."
Around 1,000 French military personnel were stationed in the country and are in the process of being withdrawn.
Deby, 40, who won a five-year presidential mandate last May in a vote the opposition denounced as fraudulent, said "the decision to end the military cooperation agreement with France is entirely a sovereign decision of Chad.
"There is no ambiguity in this," he said.