The speed with which China has achieved its African breakthrough is nothing short of stunning. For the last four decades, it was France alone among global powers that paid consistent, high-level attention to Africa. French-African summits became fixed biannual rituals, a sort of geopolitical high ma**, as they came to be called, meant to bolster France's place in the world and to harness Africa's economies to France's.
Suddenly, even France's ties to the continent, which date back centuries and include periods of slavery, conquest, colonization and what some have called neocolonization, look decidedly old hat.
The new Chinese player on the block carries none of the historical baggage of its Western counterparts, and has been completely uninhibited in its new African embrace.
Having begun not long ago from a very small base, in the last year or so, China surpa**ed Britain as Africa's third-largest trading partner, behind the United States and France. China may still be a developing country in some respects, but it has also recently zoomed past the World Bank as a lender to the continent, which should tell us something both about China's ambition and Western generosity.
China's leaders have not only summoned their African counterparts to Beijing. In recent years, they have also traveled to Africa with a frequency that leaves their Western counterparts in the dust. This year, in the space of six months, the Chinese president, prime minister and foreign minister all made multicountry visits to the continent.
Just listen to the words of Olusegun Obasanjo:
"From our a**essment, this is the century of China to lead the world," Obasanjo said. "And when you are leading the world we want to be very close behind you."
Many in the West have focused on China's African advance as a threat to their interests. Such criticisms of this latter day scramble are driven by a poor understanding of the stakes for the world, or simply by bad faith. But just as there is real opportunity for Africa in the surging Chinese interest, there are real potential dangers. Africans may have grown weary of the preachiness of the West about democracy and free markets and human rights, and especially about the casual inconsistency, even hypocrisy, with which such notions have been applied in a world whenever they bump up against more tangible interests.
With an ardent new suitor on the scene, feelings of exhilaration may still be too fresh and too powerful to coolly weigh what exactly China has to offer and to distinguish the good from the bad in terms of Africa's own interests.
If one takes China at its own word, though, there are already distinct reasons to worry. China has shown no qualms building a lucrative oil industry in Sudan in the midst of a genocide about which Beijing has found very little to say. In Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, an African nation with far better than average prospects driven into the ground by a mean spirited and capricious dictator, China has provided technologies to security services enabling them to reinforce their repression, while gobbling up contracts in mining and other industries.
All of this can be placed under the heading "Business is business," which is how a former foreign minister actually explained Beijing's investments in Sudan, which now supplies 7 percent of this country's oil imports. A slightly more politic phrase frequently heard from China is the pledge not to interfere in other countries' internal affairs.
"We believe that people in different regions and countries, including those in Africa, have their right and ability to handle their own issues," said Prime Minister Wen Jiabao during a visit to Egypt in June.
Besides a grating hint of selfishness contained in this kind of language, even a pa**ing familiarity with African realities suffices to know that no-strings-attached commerce and investment is a recipe for disaster.
The grand malady of Africa is its lack of institutions, of good governance and of a functioning pact between state and subject, and a trade in raw materials alone, no matter how booming, is unlikely to fix this.
While democracy and accountabili ty are spreading, far too many African leaders still live as if there is no tomorrow, grabbing up whatever they can now for themselves.
The problem is that tomorrow already looms troublingly on the horizon. Africa has the fastest-growing population of any continent. By 2025, it will equal China's 1.3 billion people, according to the United Nations. By 2050, there will be 1.94 billion Africans.
One thing that is certain today is that the current raw materials boom will not last forever, nor will Africa's natural resources themselves. With populations increasing this rapidly, the threat of laissez-faire, see-no-evil trade that fails to harness revenue to the real needs of Africans is not a threat to the West. It is a menace to the entire world.
