Africa's Global Summits: The Rise of the Continent or Back to the Scramble?

Hardly a few months now go by without a major summit between Africa and the world's leading economic powers. One and half years ago, in November 2006, there was the glittering Beijing Summit which I wrote about in an earlier blog that brought leaders from 48 African countries to China and signaled to the world China's entry into the world's second largest continent. Then last December came the second African Union-European Union Summit held in Lisbon, Portugal, followed in early April this year by the first India-Africa Forum Summit, and last month-about two weeks ago-came the fourth Japan-Africa Summit otherwise known as the Tokyo International Conference on African Development, which was attended by 40 African heads of state.

Despite differences in their agendas and atmospherics, the summits are remarkably similar in their soaring rhetoric and Spartan results. Premised on tense (with Europe) or tepid (with Asia) histories, they promise a new era of strategic partnership based more on trade and investment rather than aid, although summit declarations dutifully announce increased levels of development assistance from the summit hosts to their African visitors still conditioned to being supplicants. Each summit seeks to signal the changing face and fate of Africa, noisily announce the continent's new found stride, its march from the margins of the global system to the center, that it is finally discarding its assumed dependencies on the mercy industrial complex and its clutches of charity.

What accounts for Africa's sudden attention, its new moment in the sun? Undoubtedly, it has a lot to do with the rise of China and the latter's relentless drive to secure new sources of raw materials, markets and investment outlets, which has shaken Europe from its neo-colonial complacencies and complicities, and awakened the other two Asian powers, the old industrial juggernaut, Japan, and the rising one, India, to the economic possibilities of African partnership. It can also be attributed to the restructuring of African political economies themselves, the emergence of new contexts of politics and conditions of production, the expansion of capitalism and entrepreneurial classes from the shackles of state capitalism or socialism. This combination, changes in the international and domestic divisions of labor, of course manifests themselves unevenly across Africa, but there is no question that Africa is enjoying its fastest economic growth in a generation.

Analyses and commentaries of Africa's growing relations with the world's old and new economic powers tend to be presented in terms of imperial, solidarity, and globalization imperatives. According to the first perspective, Africa is too weak to have agency, so what is happening is nothing but a new scramble for the continent. In this narrative Africa's poverty dooms it to powerlessness, to eternal victimhood, to either exploitation or charity. Ironically, it is a discourse most loudly propagated by western commentators and policy makers, for whom their countries' engagements with Africa embody compassion while those of their competitors, specifically China, entail the opposite; the latter's behavior is even reminiscent, it is sometimes grudgingly conceded, of old style European colonialism, which postcolonial Europe has of course apparently transcended.

If some see the new economic powers of Asia as the continent's new colonizers, many others believe the machinations of the old economic powers of Euroamerica harbor hackneyed imperialist attitudes and practices. The critics include those who prefer to see the role of the new economic powers as a manifestation of the solidarity imperative of postwar Thirdworldism. To many leaders and analysts in Africa and its new partners in China and India, the new partnerships are part of what was once called Afro-Asian dialogue, which spawned non-alignment movement during the Cold War, and has now mutated into South-South cooperation. Not only do these countries share histories of colonization and pillage by Europe, not against each other, in so far as they are developing countries they have much to learn from each other, to serve as development models for each other.

To those for whom the language of solidarity strains credulity in this era of fierce global competition for resources, markets, and capital, globalization provides a better analytical frame. China and India and their businesses scouring Africa and the globe for resources represent important new players, no better or no worse, than other historical actors on the train towards globalization which has not only accelerated but become decentered in recent decades. We have entered a post-western world characterized not so much by the decline of the West as such, but by the rise of the rest. What we are witnessing are the amoral dynamics of globalization, the growing connectedness between communities, countries and continents as flows of capital and commodities, ideas and images, peoples and practices, values and viruses accelerate. This is a perspective that eschews the politicized language of imperialism and the moral vocabulary of solidarity.

In reality, globalization is as much a description of a historical process as it is a prescription of an ideological project. In other words, globalization is not new: the world has been globalizing for a long time. What gives contemporary globalization its apparent novelty, besides the compression of time and space facilitated by new information and communication technologies, is the supremacy of neo-liberalism, the drive for global capitalist restructuring. In other words, we live not simply in an age of globalization, but neo-liberal globalization. The distinctions between the old imperialism and the new globalization should therefore not be overdrawn.

What has changed is history: precisely because of the long sordid histories of old imperialism, which generated generations of resistance including struggles for independence that created many of the world's nation-states, contemporary globalization cannot operate through the arsenals of colonial conquest and the apparatuses of the colonial state. This is of course of little solace to the countless victims of neo-liberal globalization within and between countries, whose livelihoods and prospects have diminished as they lose out in the relentlessly widening divides between rich and poor.

It is not too long ago that African used to be written off as irrelevant to the global economy, a continent irretrievably doomed to eternal marginality and poverty. I have always been suspicious of discourses about Africa's marginalization. I fail to see how Africa could have ever been marginal to its peoples, now rushing towards a billion, and the tens of millions more in the diaspora. And as a historian I am only too aware that over the past half millennium Africa has been central to the construction of the modern world system in all its dimensions-economic, political, and discursive-if the pivotal role of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism are factored in the emergence of industrial capitalism in the Atlantic world and the rise of global Euroamerican hegemony. Clearly, Africa has always been deeply integrated into the world economy-just as the African diasporas were firmly incorporated into the economies of the Americas-but this has not been historically beneficial to the continent and its peoples. The problem, then, is not Africa's marginalization from the world, but its modes of engagement with the world.

Thus the global summits represent neither the rise of Africa nor the continent's descent into a new scramble, but rather a particular moment in Africa's long involvement in global affairs which will either bring or save us from further historical grief. The challenge for Africa in its global relationships is not, in my view, the intentions of its old or new partners, let alone its incorporation into the global system. It is about the form of these relationships and Africa's own agency. It stands to reason that China and India, no more than the classic colonial powers of Europe and the neo-colonial powers of the United States and Japan, seek to promote their own interests with or without Africa's connivance. It is up to African leaders and civil societies to ensure that these relationships benefit their countries. We owe it to ourselves to be the guardians of our own interests. It is a responsibility that simply cannot be transferred to others in whatever name or for whatever reason, whether due to apparent vulnerabilities to imperialism, the seductive affectations of solidarity, or the inexorable drive of globalization.

First Published June 9, 2008