While the world is experiencing great challenges (the climate crisis, terrorism, Russia’s war on Ukraine, etc.), Africa is facing a revival of geopolitical, ideological and economic competitions between great powers (Stronski 2019, Cohen 2020), as it had been during the Cold War. The recent visits of the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to Africa are a clear illustration of a wide-ranging geopolitical struggle in motion. Adopting a critical discourse approach (Thompson 1988, van Dijk 1995, Reisigl and Wodak 2009), this study investigates a corpus of discourses (respectively 12,821 tokens and 14,830 tokens) delivered by the diplomats in their visits to Africa in July and August 2022. The notion of ‘discourse’ is conceived here through Fairclough’s (1992: 72-93) three-dimensional conception, i.e. “discourse-as-text”, “discourse-as-social-practice” and “discursive practice”, i.e. processes of text production, distribution and consumption in society. The study seeks to demonstrate how the two antagonists, through opposing worldviews, conceptualize their relationship with Africa in order to alter or uphold their ideological hegemony. Throughout their diplomatic tour, the two leaders tried to characterize dynamically and positively Africa’s geostrategic role so as to convey and sustain their own narrative. Thus, geopolitical language in motion is encoded in the combination of figurative language with the lexicon (nominal and verbal construal) and in dynamic grammatical constructions (such as BE + V-ING and modals CAN and WILL). In this connection, we examine to what extent both diplomats use metonymic and metaphoric conceptualizations either to praise African nations as key geopolitical partners/friends, or to foreground their own dynamics and positive role toward Africa and the world, using conceptualizations such as: choose/follow a path, pursue/bring peace, create pathways, stand up, shape the world, working with partners/friends, etc.