Historically, Africa has been a battleground for geopolitical, ideological and economic competitions between great powers (Weise and Macaulay 1985, Bonnier and Hedenskog 2020). This study focuses on the revival of the geopolitical struggle in Africa between the U.S. and Russia (Stronski 2019, Cohen 2020), notwithstanding the denial of the American Secretary of State Anthony Blinken during his visit to South Africa: “And our commitment to a stronger partnership with Africa is not about trying to outdo anyone else. We’ve all heard that narrative, that South Africa and the continent as a whole are the latest playing field in the competition between great powers. That is fundamentally not how we see it.” The analysis relies on both Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and analyses in Cognitive Linguistics (Thompson 1988, Fairclough 1992, van Dijk 1995, Chilton and Lakoff 1995, Reisigl and Wodak 2009, among others). It investigates the speeches given by the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (12,821 tokens) and the U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken (14,830 tokens) during their respective visits to Africa in July and August 2022. The corpus-based analysis seeks to understand how the two antagonists combine various discursive constructions and strategies with figurative language (Chilton and Lakoff 1995 and Twardzisz 2011) to sustain and convey the narratives and the international agenda of their countries. The findings reveal that the two diplomats extensively conceptualize (metonymically and metaphorically – see Kövecses 2003) Africa as a key geopolitical FRIEND or PARTNER. The ultimate goal of these conceptualizations is to foreground their own ideologies in order to tighten their “special” relationship with Africa. We also examine the socio-cognitive effects of the discourses on the African leaders and people. The study of a sample of reactions and counter-discourses shows that the geopolitical and ideological subordination of African nations to the so-called “Eastern or Western bloc” is increasingly being challenged. For instance, the remarks of Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni during Sergey Lavrov’s visit, and the South African Minister Naledi Pandor’s with Anthony Blinken are indicative in this regard. References Bonnier, Evelina and Jakob Hedenskog. 2020. “The United States and Russia in Africa: A survey of US and Russian political, economic and military-security relations with Africa”. Swedish Defence Research Agency FOI-R--5039—SE: 1-79. Chilton, Paul and George Lakoff. 1995. “Foreign policy by metaphor”. In Christina Schäffner and Anita (eds), Language and peace. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 37-59. Cohen, Herman. 2020. US Policy toward Africa: Eight Decades of Realpolitik. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity. Kövecses, Zoltan. 2003. Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reisigl, Martin and Ruth Wodak. 2009. “The discourse-historical approach (DHA)”. In Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (Eds.), Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, 87-121. Stronski, Paul. 2019. “Late to the Party: Russia’s Return to Africa”. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1-32. Thompson, John. 1988. “Mass Communication and Modern Culture: Contribution to a Critical Theory of Ideology”. Sociology 22(3): 359–383. Twardzisz, Piotr. 2011. “Metaphorisation of international relations discourse”. Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny 1: 17-32. Van Dijk, Teun. 1995. “Discourse analysis as ideology analysis”. In Christina Schäffner and Anita Wenden (eds.), Language & Peace. London: Routledge, 41-58. Weise, Eric and Ekido Macaulay. 1985. “The Soviet-American struggle for influence in Africa: A pragmatic assessment”. The African Review: A Journal of African Politics, Development and International Affairs 12(2): 32-42.