Barack Obama’s election five years ago sparked audacious hopes in people around the globe — but nowhere did it stoke such outsized expectations as in Africa, where his appearance at Nelson Mandela’s memorial Tuesday drew some of the event’s biggest cheers.

Many Africans thought the election of the first African-American president of the United States would herald a new era of U.S. relations with the continent, one marked by intensified economic ties, high-level diplomatic interaction and visits by the newly installed chief executive that would give Africa the respect and attention it has long been denied.

But as this son of an African man returns there to mark the death of the leader regarded by many as the continent’s greatest, those early hopes for Obama have long since crashed down to earth.

While Nelson Mandela is still revered as a saint, there is now a consensus in Africa that the popular U.S. president is a mere mortal whose political ascendance has produced little dramatic change in America’s relationship with the roughly 1 billion people who call Africa home.

“There was certainly huge enthusiasm, but as the years have gone by that has dampened quite a bit, though not completely, as people found he really was not that into Africa,” said Deborah Bräutigam of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. “He’s not made it a priority at all. He’s actually paid less attention to Africa than George W. Bush. So, I think there’s been disappointment in this administration.”

The feeling that Obama and the country he leads have given Africa short shrift hasn’t turned public opinion south of the Sahara in an anti-American direction, but it has fueled concern that the United States may be effectively ceding much of the continent to a looming geopolitical rival: China.

“If you compare [Obama’s] visits with Chinese leaders’ visits, it’s minimal. They travel a lot and really rack up the frequent flyer miles,” Bräutigam said. “Their foreign minister goes to Africa for the first visit of the year every year. They’re just much more engaged, constantly bringing over delegations trying to find business opportunities.”

During Obama’s first term, he spent less than a day in sub-Saharan Africa, making a 22-hour stopover in July 2009 on the way back from a meeting in Moscow with Russia’s president and a G8 economic summit in Italy. White House officials insisted that tacking the Africa stop onto more routine presidential travel abroad wasn’t a slight to the continent, but instead a measure of how the president and his team were insistent on integrating Africa into the everyday focus of U.S. foreign policy efforts.

At the time, it seemed to many journalists like a particularly brazen and counterintuitive act of spin. That is precisely what it turned out to be.

Obama never set foot in Africa during the remainder of his first term. He did not return until June of this year, when he, first lady Michelle Obama and their two daughters embarked on a weeklong trip to three African countries: Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania.

“We’re sort of baffled by Obama,” said Richard Poplak, a South African author. “There is a sense, a general sense, of a sort of cultural melding [with him]. Certainly with his initial speech in Cairo in 2009, there was a sense that an Africa speech would be coming down the line and that a different attitude would be coming down the line. To say that never happened, would be an understatement. … That’s confused a lot of people.”

Meanwhile, China’s assertive courting of Africa has fueled concerns in many quarters that the UnitedStates is losing ground in a new version of the so-called Great Game of decades past, when it competed with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War to sign up countries of all sizes and significance as allies.

“If there is going to be a Great Game being played, American barely has a foot in the game,” Poplak said. “When you talk about boots on the ground, the U.S. is just leagues behind the Chinese.”

It’s not that typical Africans think ill of the United States., it’s that they just don’t think of them very much, Poplak said. “When I’m on the ground working, there’s zero conversation about America — good or bad,” he said.

But those worried about the rise of Chinese influence in the region can take solace in one fact: There’s little evidence that China’s stampede into Africa is winning the emerging superpower a slew of new friends on the continent.

In fact, there are indications, especially in South Africa, that China’s ubiquitous and increasing economic presence may be breeding resentment. Chinese investment is hailed in some more impoverished parts of Africa, but in South Africa — the continent’s most industrialized country — the flood of cheap Chinese goods and the importation of Chinese labor to carry out construction projects are seen by many as another obstacle to local production that could employ the vast numbers of local workers with few advanced skills.

In countries like Kenya, Senegal and Nigeria, China is seen favorably by about three-quarters of the people, according to Pew. However, in South Africa, approval lags behind, at just 48 percent.

Numbers in Africa for the U.S. and Obama, by contrast, remain high. In South Africa,confidence in Obama’s handling of world affairs stood at 74 percent this spring in the Pew survey. But in Nigeria, approval of Obama’s foreign policy slipped markedly from 84 percent in 2010 to 53 percent this year.

“There’s a lot of concern in South Africa about China because of economic impact,” said Bräutigam. South Africa’s “a middle income country and China’s a middle-income country. They’re not really competing with us, but they are competing with China.”

It’s also unclear whether China’s determined foray into Africa is part of a carefully plotted effort to build strategic influence, or simply an aggressive effort to exploit an underserved market. Indeed, one of the concerns some in the West express about China’s investment in Africa is not that it comes with too many strings attached from Beijing, but that the drive often seems to come with no value system beyond that of increasing trade.

“The airports, roads and buildings are important, but the Chinese companies bring all their own employees, the contract is a two-page document — ‘Sign here…’, they live among themselves and they don’t train anybody,” observed Witney Schneidman, a fellow with the Brookings Institution. “American companies send two or three expats and are looking to hire local employees. … This feeds into people wanting to see more of us on the continent and into a feeling that we are not taking the region as seriously as China is.”

But Obama and his aides have explained his lack of high-profile focus on Africa during his first term as the product of a preoccupation with other events, while insisting that less attention-grabbing work on Africa continued throughout his first four years in office. The global economic crisis demanded a coherent response from the world’s major economies and took up much of the president’s diplomatic bandwidth in his first couple of years in office. The White House was also acutely worried about feeding perceptions that Obama was sightseeing at taxpayer expense or promising new foreign aid while ordinary Americans were struggling.

However, some analysts say the backlash Obama’s election engendered among some on the right, and the persistent rumors that he was actually born in Africa and not Hawaii, led to a reluctance at the White House to give much public attention to the continent.

“It’s true he inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression, and two wars, but what people don’t like to talk about is the race factor and the birthers. I think it was as significant as any of those other factors,” said Schneidman, a deputy assistant secretary of state for African Affairs under President Bill Clinton and a member of Obama’s transition team. “He just couldn’t give ammunition to the birthers to say things like he was president of Africa and all that. For all those reasons, Africa just didn’t play much at all.”

Events during Obama’s first term like the global economic crisis and the Arab Spring not only distracted from sub-Sarahan Africa, they sometimes led to friction with its governments.

In the United States, the U.N. resolution authorizing military action to protect civilians in Benghazi was widely seen as a fiction giving cover for a campaign to drive Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi from power. However, South Africa — which had one of the temporary seats on the security council at the time — signed on under American pressure and officials there later grew alarmed when the operation quickly evolved in a less defensive direction.

“South Africa felt some buyer’s remorse,” said Schneidman. “They believed this was a humanitarian mission to stop a massacre, but in fact it became an effort to remove Qadhafi from power. That still rankles them and has led to a loss of trust.”

In addition, Obama’s use of drones in Somalia and his creation of drone bases elsewhere in Africa has rankled some elites sensitive to Western military involvement on the continent.

“This sense that Obama is the drone president is very pervasive in the discourse here,” Poplak said.

As Obama’s first term drew to a close, he tried to put a sharper point on U.S. efforts in Africa. In June 2012, he signed a presidential directive directing interagency coordination of Africa policy. And in connection with his trip earlier this year, he rolled out several new policy initiatives aimed at upgrading Africa’s power infrastructure and boosting trade with the U.S.

Schneidman praised the policies for their innovation but noted they haven’t garnered much publicity on the continent.

“They do something that none of Obama’s predecessors, Clinton or Bush, did. These are not traditional aid programs. The private sector is deeply involved in each of these initiatives. … That’s what the future of Africa is all about,” he said. But, he added, “this administration is not good at selling their programs, putting them in context and exciting the imagination. … People on this continent like things in bold colors, like bold ideas. The administration has been unable to connect with the man on the street.”

Schneidman said that if the new efforts take hold, Obama may yet deliver on some of the promise so many in Africa celebrated five years ago.

“The initiatives are strong,” the analyst said. “I think it’s too early to conclude or write the story on Obama in Africa.”