In 2000 Beyala produced her second essay, Lettre d'une Afrofrançaise à ses compatriotes, in which, according to the publisher's blurb, ‘l’écrivain Calixthe Beyala réagit et pousse un coup de gueule contre le racisme, elle qui aime la France et les Français, ses frères’ [the writer Calixthe Beyala, she who loves France and the French people, her brothers, reacts and rants against racism]. The title of this essay marks a significant shift in Beyala's self-positioning, particularly when compared to that of her earlier essay, Lettre d'une Africaine à ses soeurs occidentales (published in 1995). From the geographically located ‘Africaine’, Beyala's chosen identity tag has now moved to the more ambiguous, hyphenated neologism, ‘Afro-française’. Moreover, Afro-French appears to foreground French rather than African identity; the ethnic descriptor ‘Afro’ functioning as a sub-category or ‘type’ of Frenchness. This new label is echoed in Lettre d'une Afrofrançaise when Beyala criticizes French journalists for always labelling black people ‘Franco-something’:

Such a pro-Republican statement is rather surprising from an author who, as president of Collectif Egalité, condemns French universalism for not respecting its ‘minorités visibles’ [visible minorities] (LAFC, p. 33) and who actively campaigns for positive racial discrimination in the form of quotas. At the same time, it implicitly points to the tensions around locating immigrant identity in a Republic which, although ostensibly multicultural, is determined to remain ‘unie et indivisible’. Perhaps inevitably, it appears that Beyala is beginning to identify herself – and immigrants more generally – in terms of nationality rather than ethnicity. This is reinforced by the shifting identification of Beyala's intended readership for each essay: whereas Lettre d'une Africaine was addressed to her ‘soeurs occidentales’, Lettre d'une Afro-française is addressed to Beyala's male and female ‘compatriotes’.