The new "scramble for Africa"

At the very basic level, we could say that what we’re living through today is the equivalent of a scramble for Africa. It really seems to be a degree of interest that elicits mutual competition and, most importantly, tends to focus on exactly the same aspects of Africa that Western colonisers were interested in back in the late 19th century: in other words, natural resources and agricultural resources. There’s an element of strong continuity in that regard.

On the other hand, the reason why I hesitate to speak of a scramble for Africa is that Africa today has something which Africans didn’t have in the late 19th century: their sovereignty. There’s an African State system, and outsiders interact with Africans, at least nominally and legally, as equals. In other words, Africans and especially African elites are now in the position to put this new-found outside interest in Africa to the service of African development to the extent that we can’t say their predecessors were able to 120 years ago. So instead of speaking about the current moment in the exclusively negative terms that the expression “the scramble” tends to entail, it’s also important for us to think in terms of possibilities, opportunities and a degree of external interest that Africa can build on.

China is impactful in its own right, by the size and spread of its presence in Africa. But it has also crucially catalysed everyone else’s interest in the continent – especially Western powers such as the European Union and the United States, which in the late 1990s had come to think of Africa as a problem, as the continent of wars and humanitarian emergencies. The Chinese brought an entirely different perspective. They saw Africa as a frontier of economic opportunity, which was unrecognised by its traditional partners.

That has led not only to a plethora of new players on the continent but has also led the traditional partners of Africa – again, the European Union and the United States stand out – to recast Africa as a continent with a future, with economic opportunities. From that perspective, China has been absolutely determinant.

There was a strategic sense of direction established by the Chinese in the early 2000s based on the principle of going out to Africa. From that perspective, Africa had a lot of attractions for China. China had a broader goal, especially for its State-owned enterprises, of investing in the world economy. Africa seemed to be an area that was particularly suitable for that because it was less competitive. At the time, this was an area of the globe that didn’t have much foreign presence, especially outside a few specific sectors. State-owned enterprises from China could go and try out the international environment in this arena while facing less competitive pressure than they would in, for example, the European Union or OECD markets.

From that perspective, the Chinese government told different ministries, different State-owned enterprises and different State banks that were meant to lend support to this activity to go ahead. But it didn’t give very specific directions, and it allowed for a certain amount of leeway – so much so that by the early part of the last decade, there were State-owned enterprises from individual provincial governments operating in sub-Saharan Africa, including major corporations, without Beijing necessarily knowing what they were doing. There was, in other words, strategic direction but a lot of tactical space for individual Chinese actors to pursue their agendas with minimal coordination. Over the last seven or eight years under Xi Jinping, that has been reduced considerably. There’s much more of a central takeover, not just in broad strategic terms but in tactical terms.

This is very different from the way, for instance, a country like India deals with its Africa policies. First of all, in the case of India, much of the most robust forms of engagement in Africa are private sector–led. They’re not led by the government. In fact, the government is running after the private corporations. Secondly, there is a major role for people of Indian origin who are citizens of places like Kenya and Tanzania. They certainly don’t coordinate much with the Indian government.

Even mining companies or State oil companies from India have in many respects gone too fast for the government, and sometimes it’s the government pulling them back. But the cabinet in India is not the most agile in terms of giving India-Africa relations a lot of dynamism. It’s worth considering the details of India partly because after China, it’s a major and very significant presence on the continent, and partly because the comparison is such a striking contrast with the way China deals with the continent. It really highlights the specificity of the Chinese presence and the coordination of the Chinese presence on the African continent, which is increasingly the case.