Reconfiguring Transregionalisation In The Global South: African-Asian Encounters 3030283100, 9783030283100, 9783030283117

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 6
Contents......Page 8
Notes on Contributors......Page 10
Acronyms......Page 15
List of Tables......Page 17
Chapter 1 Rethinking African-Asian Encounters in Terms of Transregionalisation: An Introduction......Page 18
1 Situating African-Asian Encounters Globally......Page 22
2 Challenging Asia–Africa Grand Narratives......Page 25
3 Embedding African-Asian Transregionalisation......Page 28
4 Shifting the Debate......Page 30
References......Page 31
Part I Situating African-Asian Encounters Globally......Page 33
1 Introduction......Page 34
2 The State-Society Complex in Africa......Page 35
3 “Africa Rising”......Page 38
4 The New Saviours?......Page 40
5 Plus Ҁa Change, Plus C’est La Même Chose......Page 46
6 Conclusion......Page 49
References......Page 52
1 Introduction......Page 56
2 Comparative Geography and History......Page 59
3 Comparative Culture......Page 60
4 Comparative Strategies of Development......Page 61
5 Comparative Politics......Page 69
6 Comparative Socio-cultural Ideologies......Page 71
7 Conclusion......Page 72
References......Page 73
1 Introduction......Page 76
1.1 Globalising Foreign Investment in Africa......Page 77
1.2 In Comes the Dragon—Chinese Investment in Africa......Page 78
2 Features of Chinese Investment in Africa—A Paradigm Shift......Page 80
2.2 Equality of Partnerships......Page 82
2.3 Aid Versus Investment......Page 83
3 Global Growth Companies......Page 84
4 China’s Success in Africa: Lessons for Other Investors......Page 86
5 Conclusion......Page 87
References......Page 89
1 Introduction......Page 93
2 An Overview of India’s Presence in Nigeria in the Twentieth Century......Page 95
3 Indians and Other Asians in the Nigerian Business Environment......Page 97
4 Challenges, Lessons and Prospects......Page 101
References......Page 107
Part II Challenging Asia-Africa Grand Narratives......Page 109
1 Introduction......Page 110
2 Cape Noir......Page 114
3 China Mall......Page 118
4 On the Road......Page 122
5 Conclusion: Dark-Brown-Grey......Page 126
References......Page 127
1 Introduction......Page 130
2 Of Spirits and Spectres: The Rise, Demise and Afterlife of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association (AAWA)......Page 132
3 Intimate Contact: Afrasian Entanglements in East African Literature......Page 139
4 Conclusion: Beyond Postcolonial Nostalgia in Afrasian Literary Studies......Page 148
References......Page 149
1 Introduction......Page 153
2 China–Africa Relations as a Transnational Project......Page 156
3 Current Sino-South African Interactions in Gender Politics......Page 159
4 Modes of Engagement: Exploring Feminist Encounters with(in) China–Africa Relations......Page 162
5 Gender Politics in (South) African–Asian Interactions......Page 172
References......Page 173
1 Introduction......Page 178
2.1 China–Africa......Page 180
2.2 China–Southeast Asia......Page 182
3 Where All Sides Meet: The Illegal Wildlife Trade Crisis......Page 185
Multilateral Engagement—FOCAC and ASEAN......Page 188
The Bilateral Environmental Approach......Page 190
3.2 Engaging in Environmental Governance from the Bottom-Up: Chinese NGOs Abroad......Page 193
3.3 Analysis of China’s Approach to Illegal Wildlife Trade in Africa and Southeast Asia......Page 195
4 Geopolitical Concerns: Further Analysis on Differences in China’s Approach to Environmental Concerns in Africa and Southeast Asia......Page 199
5 Conclusion......Page 201
References......Page 202
Part III Embedding Transregionalisation......Page 206
1 Introduction......Page 207
2 “Longing for Exile”......Page 209
3.1 Distant History......Page 214
3.2 Muslim Enclaves in the South and Recent History......Page 216
4 The Production of Locality, or “A Young Man’s Homeland Is Wherever He Finds Success”......Page 217
5 Trading Posts and Tradespeople......Page 219
6 Long-Distance Brokers......Page 222
7 Second-Generation Businessmen......Page 223
8 Beyond the Trading Post......Page 226
References......Page 228
1 Introduction......Page 233
2 Afro-Asian Solidarities—A Long History......Page 236
2.1 Brotherhoods of Unfree Labour: African and Asian Alliance Building......Page 238
2.3 Ethiopia and Japan......Page 239
2.5 Black Maoism to Bandung......Page 240
2.6 China’s Anti-African Protests......Page 241
3 Asians in Africa: Settlers, Privileged Minorities, Non-Whites, and Comrades......Page 242
3.1 Idi Amin’s Expulsion of Uganda’s Asian Population......Page 243
3.2 Chinese South African Communities from the 1880s Through the Post-apartheid Era......Page 245
4.1 Africans and Chinese in Intimate Relationships......Page 248
4.2 Isookanga and Zhang Xia in Bofane’s “Congo, Inc.”......Page 250
5 Conclusion......Page 251
References......Page 255
1 Introduction......Page 258
2 The Sino-centric Perspective......Page 259
3 The Collaborative Perspective......Page 261
4 The Case of LAPSSET......Page 267
4.1 Political Mobilisation......Page 268
4.2 Ecological Mobilisation......Page 273
5 Conclusion......Page 276
References......Page 279
Chapter 13 Afterword......Page 283
Index......Page 288

Citation preview

Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South African-Asian Encounters Edited by Ross Anthony · Uta Ruppert

International Political Economy Series Series Editor Timothy M. Shaw Visiting Professor University of Massachusetts Boston Boston, MA, USA Emeritus Professor University of London London, UK

The global political economy is in flux as a series of cumulative crises impacts its organization and governance. The IPE series has tracked its development in both analysis and structure over the last three decades. It has always had a concentration on the global South. Now the South increasingly challenges the North as the centre of development, also reflected in a growing number of submissions and publications on indebted Eurozone economies in Southern Europe. An indispensable resource for scholars and researchers, the series examines a variety of capitalisms and connections by focusing on emerging economies, companies and sectors, debates and policies. It informs diverse policy communities as the established trans-Atlantic North declines and ‘the rest’, especially the BRICS, rise. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/13996

Ross Anthony · Uta Ruppert Editors

Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South African-Asian Encounters

Editors Ross Anthony Department of Modern Foreign Languages Stellenbosch University Stellenbosch, Western Cape South Africa

Uta Ruppert Faculty of Social Sciences Goethe University Frankfurt am Main Frankfurt, Germany

ISSN 2662-2483 ISSN 2662-2491  (electronic) International Political Economy Series ISBN 978-3-030-28310-0 ISBN 978-3-030-28311-7  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: © Rob Friedman/iStockphoto.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The initial point of departure for this book was the second international conference of AFRASO, the transdisciplinary research programme on “Africa’s Asian Options” at Goethe University, Frankfurt. The conference was entitled “African-Asian Encounters (II) Re-Thinking African-Asian Relationships: Changing Realities—New Concepts” and held in March 2015. AFRASO and the Centre for Chinese Studies at Stellenbosch University collaborated in hosting the conference, which took place in Cape Town, South Africa. The wide variety of papers, both at the level of discipline and scale of analysis, served as impetus for thinking about a framework in which these disparate approaches could function. The perspective of transregionalisation, which accommodated thinking from the local to global scale, and which avoided the pitfalls of essentialism, became the editors’ paradigm of choice and informs the organisation and selection of the chapters in this book. The volume would not have been possible without the AFRASO transdisciplinary programme at Goethe University, Frankfurt, which was funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research. Special thanks go out to Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel, Stefan Schmid and Frank Schulze-Engler from the AFRASO programme who supported the Cape Town conference in innumerable ways. We also thank Meryl Burgess and Yejoo Kim at the Centre for Chinese Studies for their support in the realisation of

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

this volume. We would also like to express gratitude our toward the team at Palgrave Macmillan, particularly the International Political Economy series editor, Timothy Shaw, and the series editorial director, Christina Brian, as well as our external editor, Gregory Penfold.

Contents

1

Rethinking African-Asian Encounters in Terms of Transregionalisation: An Introduction 1 Ross Anthony and Uta Ruppert

Part I  Situating African-Asian Encounters Globally 2

Afro-Asian Trade and the “Africa Rising” Story 19 Ian Taylor

3

Reason and Number: African Reflections on Japan 41 Seifudein Adem

4

The Globalisation of Foreign Investment in Africa: In Comes the Dragon 61 Adams Bodomo and Dewei Che

5

Indian Influence on Nigeria’s Development: Challenges, Lessons and Possibilities 79 Joseph C. A. Agbakoba

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CONTENTS

Part II  Challenging Asia-Africa Grand Narratives 6

Poaching Plots, Plastic Forms and Ambiguous Goods: Ways of Telling the China-in-Africa Story in the Anthropocene Age 97 Meg Samuelson

7

Entangled Solidarities: African–Asian Writers’ Organisations, Anti-colonial Rhetorics and Afrasian Imaginaries in East African Literature 117 Frank Schulze-Engler

8

Bringing Transnationalism Back In: On Gender Politics in South Africa’s China Interactions 141 Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel and Uta Ruppert

9

China’s Global Environmental Engagement—Africa and Southeast Asia in Comparison 167 Meryl Burgess

Part III  Embedding Transregionalisation 10 Seeing Like Scholars: Whose Exile? Making a Life, at Home and Abroad 197 Mamadou Diawara 11 Afro-Asian Solidarities to Afrasian Spaces and Identities: Exploring the Limits of Afrasia 223 Yoon Jung Park 12 Scale and Agency in China’s Belt and Road Initiative: The Case of Kenya 249 Ross Anthony 13 Afterword 275 Ross Anthony and Uta Ruppert Index 281

Notes

on

Contributors

Seifudein Adem received his early education in Ethiopia, where he was born and raised. He holds a B.A. with distinction (Political Science), M.A. (International Relations) and Ph.D. (International Political Economy). Dr. Adem has taught in Ethiopia (1988–1992), Japan (2000–2005), the USA (2006–2016) and China (2017). He has also served as President of the New York African Studies Association (2010–2011). Dr. Adem’s most recently edited book is China’s Diplomacy in Eastern and Southern Africa (Ashgate, 2013; reprinted by Routledge, 2017) and his research generally focuses on Africa’s interactions with Asia’s major powers. Seifudein Adem is currently Professor of Global Studies at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan. Joseph C. A. Agbakoba is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nigeria. He is a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a fellow and grantee of the Volkswagen Foundation, in addition to other fellowships and scholarships that he has held, notably at Budapest, Bayreuth and Frankfurt. Agbakoba has been visiting professor at Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. He was Chair of Philosophy at the University of Nigeria from 2007–2010; Dean, School of General Studies, 2012–2013; Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Vice President) at Madonna University Nigeria, 2013–2017 and President of Nigerian Philosophical Association, 2008–2016. He is widely published locally and internationally. He has been a collaborator in the AFRASO

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project since 2013. Agbakoba’s current research interest is mainly in the fields of philosophy of development and intercultural philosophy. Ross Anthony has researched ethno-politics within China and, more recently, the China-Africa relationship, where he has written on diplomacy, security, energy politics, and ecology. His most recent work, a Social Science Research Council project, focuses on the political and environmental impacts of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in relation to East Africa. He holds a Doctorate in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and was the Director of the Centre for Chinese Studies, Stellenbosch University, between 2014 and 2018. He is currently a research fellow in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages at Stellenbosch University. Adams Bodomo is Professor of African Studies (holding the chair of Languages and Literatures). He has done pioneering work on twentyfirst century Africa-Asia studies, with a particular focus on the African Diaspora in China, Africa’s experiences with globalisation, and on the linguistic and cultural relations between Africa and Asia. Meryl Burgess  is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Chinese Studies, Stellenbosch University. She completed her Ph.D. in Political Science in 2017 at the same institution. Her Ph.D. study assessed how the contrasting political systems of China (authoritarian) and South Africa (pluralist) shape the roles of environmental Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) in conservation policy. Her post-doctoral work continues in this vein of research, with greater attention to the role of policy development within the China-Africa environmental relationship as well as implications for other East-Asian actors. Dewei Che is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of African Studies at the University of Vienna. Her research interests centre on linguistics, China-Africa socio-economic relations, and diaspora studies. She is currently teaching a course called “The Chinese Diaspora in Africa: Topics in Sociocultural Linguistics and Beyond”. Mamadou Diawara is Professor of Social Anthropology at Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main. He is Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary African Studies and Deputy Director of the Frobenius Institute. He is the principal investigator at Frankfurt University for the

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Cluster of Excellence’s research project, The Formation of Normative Orders, and for the AFRASO research programme. He is also founding director of Point Sud, the centre for research on local knowledge in Bamako, Mali. He is a member of the International African Institute, London, and has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Nantes, as well as John G. Diefenbaker fellow at Université Laval, Canada. He previously taught at Yale University. His research focus includes: oral tradition and history, media, migration between Africa and Asia and development in sub-Saharan Africa. Among his publications: With Ute Röschenthaler: Copyright Africa. Staging the Immaterial: Intellectual Property, Piracy and Performance in sub-Saharan Africa. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2016. Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel  is a Visiting Professor for Gender Politics at the University of Kassel. Prior to this she lectured at the Department of Political Science and was a Research Fellow at Africa’s Asian Options (AFRASO), Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research centres on the international relations of gender politics in the Global South. Among other publications, she is the author of the widely reviewed monograph Mobilizing Transnational Gender Politics in Postgenocide Rwanda (Routledge, 2015) and co-editor of the volumes Negotiating Normativity: Postcolonial Appropriations, Contestations and Transformations (Springer, 2016) and Afrasian Transformations: Transregional Perspectives on Development Cooperation, Social Mobility and Cultural Change (forthcoming). Yoon Jung Park  is a leader in the growing field of China/Africa studies. She is the author of A Matter of Honour. Being Chinese in South Africa (Jacana/Lexington Books) and is currently completing a book on Chinese migrants in Africa. Her research focuses on ethnic Chinese in Southern Africa and perceptions of Chinese people by local communities, centering on migration, race/ethnicity/identity, race/class/power, gender, affirmative action and xenophobia. Dr. Park is Associate Director of the China-Africa Research Initiative at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS-CARI), Johns Hopkins University; adjunct professor in African Studies, Georgetown University, and Executive Director of the Chinese in Africa/Africans in China (CA/AC) Research Network. She also has an affiliation with the Sociology Department,

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Rhodes University. She has degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand (Ph.D.), the Fletcher School at Tufts University (M.A.), and Pitzer College (B.A.). Uta Ruppert is Professor of Political Science and Political Sociology with a focus on South-South relations, Development and Gender Studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt. She is one of the directors of the Cornelia Goethe Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies at Goethe University. Most of her work centres on transnational feminisms, transnational movement politics and feminist theories and practices from the Global South. She was one of the initiators and principal investigators of the AFRASO research programme. Meg Samuelson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English & Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide and an Associate Professor extraordinary at Stellenbosch University. She has published widely in Southern African and Indian Ocean literary and cultural studies. Her recent research engages with coastal form in narrative fiction from the African Indian Ocean littoral, photography in Zanzibar, surfing cultures and the shore-break, sharks as uncanny figures of racial terror in the Anthropocene, the southern orientations of J. M. Coetzee’s writing, and the literary world ocean. She co-edits the Palgrave Macmillan series on Maritime Literature and Culture. Frank Schulze-Engler is Professor of New Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the Department of English and American Studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt. His research and publications focus on African, Asian and indigenous literature, comparative perspectives on the New Literatures in English, Indian Ocean Studies, postcolonial Europe, postcolonial theory, and transculturality in a world of globalised modernity. He is currently joint programme leader of “Africa’s Asian Options” (AFRASO), a major collaborative research programme at Goethe University Frankfurt funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. His most recent publications include Habari ya English—What About Kiswahili? East Africa as a Literary and Linguistic Contact Zone (Leiden: Brill, 2015, co-edited with Lutz Diegner), and “‘Even the Dead have Human Rights’: A Conversation with Homi K. Bhabha”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2018).

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Ian Taylor is Professor in International Relations and African Political Economy at the University of St Andrews and also Chair Professor in the School of International Studies, Renmin University of China. He is also a Professor Extraordinary at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa and a Visiting Professor at the University of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Focusing largely on Africa, he has authored 12 academic books, edited another 12 and has published over 70 peer-reviewed scholarly articles and over 90 chapters in books. He has been invited to present his research in 53 different countries on 6 continents. He is also the co-editor of the Journal of Modern African Studies.

Acronyms

AAJA Afro-Asian Journalists’ Association AALF Asia-Africa Literature Festival AAPSO Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation A-ASiA African Association of Asian Studies AAWA Afro-Asian Writers’ Association ACWF All-China Women’s Federation ADB African Development Bank AFRASO Africa’s Asian Options AIIB Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank ANC African National Congress ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations ASEAN-WEN Association of Southeast Asian Nations Wildlife Enforcement Network BRI Belt and Road Initiative BRICS Brazil Russia India South Africa CAGR Compound Annual Growth Rate CATTF China-Africa Think Tank Forum CCCC China Communications Construction Company CDB China Development Bank CIF Cost Insurance and Freight CITES Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora CNOOC China National Offshore Oil Corporation CNPC China National Petroleum Corporation COSCO China Ocean Shipping Company CPC Communist Party of China xv

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ACRONYMS

CPI Consumer Price Index CSR Corporate Social Responsibility DAWN Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era DEA Department of Environmental Affairs DRC Democratic Republic of Congo ERC Energy Regulatory Commission Exim Bank Export-Import Bank of China FDI Foreign Direct Investment FOCAC Forum for China-Africa Cooperation GDP Gross Domestic Product GED Global Environmental Institute HIPC Heavily Indebted Poor Countries ICAS International Convention of Asian Scholars ICBC Industrial and Commercial Bank of China IFAW International Fund for Animal Welfare IIAS International Institute for Asian Studies IIED International Institute for Environment and Development JKUAT Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology KWS Kenya Wildlife Service LAPSSET Lamu Southern Sudan Ethiopia Transport Corridor LWA Leading Women of Africa MDRI Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative MoU Memorandums of Understandings MPAC Masterplan on ASEAN Connectivity NAM Non-Aligned Movement NEMA National Environment Management Authority NGO Non-Governmental Organisation NICE-CG National Inter-Agency CITES Enforcement Coordination Group NLC National Land Commission OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development SACPFA South Africa-China People’s Friendship Association SADTU South African Democratic Teachers Union SGR Standard Gauge Railway SOE State Owned Enterprise UN United Nations UNCTAD United Nations Commission on Trade and Development UNECA United Nations Economic Commission for Africa UNEP United Nations Environment Programme UNESCO United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation WWF World Wildlife Fund

List of Tables

Chapter 2 Table 1 BRICS countries facts and figures Table 2 Correlation between GDP growth for SSA and the Commodity Price Index (CPI)

26 34

Chapter 4 Table 1 International trade, aid and investment: select country data Table 2 A partial list of the 2014 global growth companies in greater China

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CHAPTER 1

Rethinking African-Asian Encounters in Terms of Transregionalisation: An Introduction Ross Anthony and Uta Ruppert

Within recent decades, the rapidly growing economic, political and cultural interactions between Africa and Asia have been dominated by the China–Africa relationship. While remarkable in its scope and speed of growth, research in this field has eclipsed broader processes of transnationalisation and transregionalisation with additional Asian actors, including India, Japan, Korea and others. Within this broader context, such interactions increasingly require analysis and conceptualisation from a transregional perspective, not only because they are interwoven with all underlying processes of economic globalisation, but also because they unleash numerous emergent cultural, social and aesthetic interfaces

R. Anthony (*)  Department of Modern Foreign Languages, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa U. Ruppert  Faculty of Social Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Anthony and U. Ruppert (eds.), Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7_1

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2  R. ANTHONY AND U. RUPPERT

at the regional level. On the one hand, the political economies of both Asia and Africa represent an important force behind the ongoing dynamics that have become increasingly embedded within the global market economy (see Taylor; Bodomo and Che; Anthony in this volume). On the other hand, this convergence has been tempered by a broad range of transregional dynamics at various levels and scales of interaction, including travelling ideas of development (see Adem; Agbakoba in this volume), civil society collaboration (see Mageza-Barthel and Ruppert in this volume), peoples’ mobility (see Diarwara; Park in this volume) and cultural imaginaries (see Samuelson; Schulze-Engler in this volume). These ongoing processes involve a variety of actors, engaging in a diversity of relations, which complicate simple state-to-state and region-to-region relations. Consequently, the main focus of the current volume is to re-examine Africa–Asia relationships from the perspective of transregionalisations within the context of the Global South. Transregionalisation, in the sense we use the term in the context of this book, is informed by, but simultaneously distinct from, notions of inter-and transregionalism, which have been increasingly discussed within in International Relations and Area Studies since the beginning of the millennium. While such disciplines tend to understand regionalisms mainly “as an instance of international institution building at the regional level” (Börzel and Risse 2016: 621), we view institutional and governance-related perspectives as only one dimension of transregional relations. Instead, our approach resonates closely with concepts of regionalism found in critical International Political Economy, insofar as they are less institution-focussed and more process-oriented—that is to say, regionalisms are viewed as horizontal inter-local alliances (see Jessop 2003, 2016). The privileging of process-orientation over political outcomes accounts for why we emphasise transregionalisation rather than transregionalism. Like the term, “globalisation” itself, transregionalisation thus emphasises the dynamism of emergent processes. Furthermore, in looking beyond formal institutional relations, the volume is interested in marginal interactions and perspectives, including the experiences of petty traders, inter-regional literary associations and even at the level of personal biography (see Diwara, Schulze-Engler and Yoon respectively, in this volume). To our understanding, such examples, and others like them, are key to “trans”-regionalisation(s) in the sense of processes that transcend not only the geographical borders of existing regions and regionalisation(s) but inform the “trans”-formation of limitations

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of pre-determined regional practices and notions. In this vein, recent discussions of incomplete concepts such as “civil society regionalism” (Söderbaum 2016) which highlight the multi-layered, heterogeneous and paradoxical character of interactions (ibid.: 144ff.), resonate with our view on South–South transregionalisation (see Fanta et al. 2013). We apply such an approach not only to collective social actors but also towards people-to-people interaction and everyday life experiences. This approach to transregionalisation draws on a growing body of work which exists across several disciplines. In addition to International Relations, some of the most important work stems from research within Area Studies and Human Geography, which, in the past two decades, has examined economic, political and cultural spaces as “trans-regional”, i.e. between and across regions (for example Dent 2003). The work went beyond an analysis of institutions and organisations, with communities and even individuals taken into account as “constituent agents” (ibid.: 231). With the subsequent rise of cultural studies and the spatial turn in the social sciences, which were integrated into certain branches of Area Studies, the discussion on “socio-spatial” relations as hierarchical and power (re)producing relations increasingly focussed on the economy, politics, culture and society at the micro level. This led to an understanding of space making as a result of diverse deliberations of transnational and transregional developments (Middell 2018) which brought into focus relations between political and economic actors, but also relations between people and objects (Bachmann 2016). While we acknowledge the analytical need for transregional studies to maintain, in part, a “conventional” Area Studies focus on territory-­ bounded processes, this book directs much attention towards the “trans” instants within, between, and beyond the geographical regions of interest. In this vein, one of the most important aspects of transregionalisation lies in the fact that various units of analysis, be they at the community, nation state or even continental level, can never be fully comprehended without paying attention to influences beyond these parameters. Many research agendas already take this into account, including global history (Bayly 2004; Bulliet et al. 2014; Conrad 2017), colonial history (Hanson and Jonsson 2015; Mignolo 2012), critical Cold War history (Brazinsky 2017; Chamberlin 2018) and environmental studies (Latour 2017; Moore 2015). Such approaches have done much to dismantle stilted and essentialist spatial categories, insofar as they focus on the emergent properties of flows between places—cultural,

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ecological, economic, political and so forth—as opposed to a priori designations, of which the nation state is the most common. Approaching the issue from the position of a circulatory logic influences the way in which we conceptualise pre-conceived identities themselves. Take, for example, the Swahili coast of East Africa. For centuries, trade and politics linked the region with India and Arabia as intimately as with the African interior. The rise of national identities has subordinated these alternative identities to a certain extent, while at the same time, they persist in a number of ways, not least in the form of ongoing resistance to the nation states of which they are part. Thus, the transregional approach insists on taking not only the nation state narrative into account, but also the way it contends with other levels and dimensions of the political, especially with more fluid forms of identity which have existed historically and continue to exist in the present. From a conceptual perspective then, nationalism of the “blood and soil” type contends and overlaps with a number of other identities which are as much “outside” as they are “inside”. Within the African context, historically, the most significant dimension of inter-and transregionalism in the above noted sense, has been Europe, and more recently the United States—hardly surprising, given the former’s colonial legacy and the latter’s global hegemony. While there has always been a marginal academic interest in Asia–Africa transregionalism, it has been the “China Rising” narrative (see Bodomo and Che in this volume) over the past three decades which has brought the question of African-Asian transregionalism to the fore, not only within academia, but also within media and policy-making circles. At the same time, certain strains of the “China-Africa” discourse, rather than opening into a broader discussion on Africa–Asia connectivity, revert to the very rigidity of fixed space and identity which transregionalism aspires to transcend. This is in part because a significant component of the discourse is driven by state interests and heavily influenced by, for example, in the case of China, a narrative of “win-win” development, “harmonious co-operation” and “non-interference” in a world of nation-state equals. Beyond such abstract imaginaries, the relationship has engendered a number of far more messy and unpredictable connections. These include, for instance, Chinese migrants who move from one African state to another, attracted not only by opportunity, but also by regional kin ties, and illicit wildlife trading routes, whose networks include rural African trappers, local politicians, European transit points and Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai buyers. In fact, even in terms of connections closer

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to official narratives, such as Chinese investments in extractive industries and infrastructure, such deals often involve a multitude of investors, stemming from India, Korea and Japan, Europe, America, the Middle East and Africa itself. Although a portion of the contributions in this book focus on the China–Africa relationship, they nevertheless correspond with our approach to transregionalisation. All articles refer to multilevel processes and dynamics in and between the regions, and invite and include comparison, contrast, and connection with other strands of the Africa–Asia relationship, represented in more depth through the remaining chapters. Much of the literature on African-Asian relations has focused on the political and economic spheres and the dominance of “hard data”. Though there are growing numbers of scholars who focus on the more sociological, anthropological and even aesthetic elements (Nielsen 2014; Park 2008; Simbao 2016), these different spheres rarely speak to each other. The volume thus includes as wide a range of interdisciplinary perspectives as possible. Because the conceptual approach of “Africa-Asia” is still not fully developed, the book comprises basic research perspectives, as well as more conceptual approaches. Chapters include works of political economy, comparative philosophy, literature, ethnography, history, development and gender studies. The multi-faceted approach serves to elucidate “Africa-Asia” in a variety of ways, so as to interrogate and think through more familiar configurations, such as “China-Africa” and “South-South” co-operation, thus providing fertile ground for conceptualising transregionalisation(s). The organisation of the diverse materials is scalar in nature. Section one situates Africa–Asia relations within a broader global context, section two focuses on various emerging discursive formations, and section three examines localised, ethnographic/on-the-ground forms of the interaction.

1  Situating African-Asian Encounters Globally In thinking of Africa and Asia today, issues of politics and economics offer the easiest ways of conceptualising commonality. Within mainstream discourses, as has already been mentioned, the China–Africa relationship prevails. Other dominant forms of conceptualising the relationship exist through ideologies of development assistance, including notions of South–South co-operation (Chaturvedi et al. 2014) and the

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rise of the BRICS grouping (Gu et al. 2016; Xing 2019) which bind these regions in terms of their common history of being subject to European colonialism. In this vein, grasping the Asia–Africa relationship can be conceptualised horizontally, through the analysis of contemporary developments, but also vertically, in terms of historical experience—both through the lens of colonialism but also in terms of much deeper currents, such as Indian Ocean trade routes, which brought these regions into contact with each other long before European colonialism. In terms of the global political economy and the emergence of new configurations of trade and power, such relations are undeniably important—but do these new relations between “rising powers” differ from the current global order, and to what degree? Do the new economic realities of the Asia–Africa relationship offer connections significantly different—emancipatory perhaps—when compared to Europe and America’s traditional role as the major economic actors on the African continent? If so, what might these scenarios look like? Ian Taylor, in an analysis of Indian and Chinese investment within Africa, argues that the “Africa Rising” narrative, including the roles which China and India have played in this rise, is a mirage. These countries, and the broader BRICS grouping, base their interaction in Africa, in a similar vein to many traditional Euro-American partners—namely, maximising their own strategic and economic interests. In this sense, collusion between exploitative foreign actors and dysfunctional regimes is something which is reproduced in the Asia–Africa relationship. Thus, these new development partners, increasingly integrating themselves into the existing market-orientated global political economy, are not significantly different from what has occurred previously. According to Taylor, in terms of their own political discourses of engagement, these countries draw on colonial-era discourses of colonialism as a way of fostering solidarity with African nation states. However, in the post-Cold War era, in which former left-leaning states have now become part of economic globalisation, the notion of Indian and Chinese “exceptionalism” is a smokescreen for a kind of economic engagement common in the Western world. While Western commentators are quick to point out the new “neo-­ colonial” role of certain Asian actors, deeper historical analysis on Africa and Asia and their relationship to European colonialism invites philosophical reflection from far less familiar quarters. Seifudein Adem’s chapter takes a highly original look at the comparative colonial experiences

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of Africa and Japan and how they have resulted in two very different presents. In the colonial and post-colonial period, Adem argues, Africa underwent a process of “soft-Westernisation”, which was, and continues to be, “value-intensive” (i.e. rapid acquisition of Western religions, tastes in music, cuisine, dance and the dress code). In missionary and colonial schools, Africans learned much more about history, philosophy, literature, and even classical Greek and Latin than they did about technology and applied sciences. The Japanese in the Meiji and Post-Meiji period, on the other hand, underwent a process of “hard-modernisation”, which was skills-intensive. In Japan, the goal was first clearly set: “Rich Country, Strong Army” [fukoku kyohei], and the means for achieving this goal was quickly identified: “Reason and Number” [jitsugaku]. Japan’s leaders then pursued the skills of production and strategies of military defence under the guidance of “Western Technique, Japanese Spirit” [wakon yōsai]. While Nigeria and the Congo have produced cardinals considered as candidates for the papacy in the Vatican, Adem argues, the Japanese continued to produce bullet trains, whaling ships and supercomputers. The primary explanation for this disparity lies in the divergent responses to the challenges of modernisation. In contrast to Taylor’s argument, Bodomo and Che argue that such engagement offers a wholly new mode of engagement—and cause for hope—on the African continent. In terms of volume of trade, a number of infrastructure projects, and foreign policy discourse towards Africa, China has initiated nothing short of a paradigm shift on the African continent. While the authors acknowledge that it is not only China, but a host of other new economic actors who are now active on the continent, it is China which stands head and shoulders above the rest. They argue that by not imposing political and economic conditionalities on African states when doing business (as opposed to Western donors’ common insistence on improving human rights records, democratic accountability and demonstrating fiscal prudence), China is becoming an increasingly attractive choice for many African states. Additionally, they argue that this approach offers a new paradigm of globalisation in Africa. This position is echoed by a host of African actors who feel that China’s rise has offered respite from dominance by former European powers and other allies such as the United States, Canada and Australia. Philosopher Joseph Agbakoba focuses on the longue durée of Asian influence on Africa, with a focus on Nigeria and its relationship to India. Using culture as an analytic category, Agbakoba argues that India, more

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than any other Asian country, carries the most influence in Nigeria. India has not only the longest history of engagement with Nigeria but also shares close relations in terms of cultural orientation, institutional practices and wealth creation. From Muslim Indian influence in pre-colonial West Africa to colonial-era politicians such as Ghandi, the author illustrates a number of overlapping themes between the two countries. Agbakoba also addresses the issue of the contemporary East Asian developmental state and how this model—in an era where Africa increasingly looks to the East—is difficult to square with issues of social justice inherent in African conceptions of development. These discussions of transregionalisation on a macro level, highlight some of the important vectors of the process, first and foremost in the form of globalisation, manifest in processes such as market capitalism and colonialism. In the analyses, it is interesting to note how these largescale interactions are, in the words of Levi-Strauss, “good to think” with (Levi-Strauss 1971: 89), not so much in the sense that they create coherent world views, but rather that they invite innovative ways of comparing and contrasting regions in terms of the emergence of political and economic ideologies as well as modernity itself. While such global influences traditionally were thought of almost exclusively in terms of Western influences upon Africa, such processes have in fact ushered in a number of connectivities which have partially or entirely short-circuited Western relations.

2  Challenging Asia–Africa Grand Narratives Two opposing narratives have shaped the prevailing discourse of Africa– Asia for almost two decades. On the one hand, presented in the first part of this volume, is the notion of the “new scramble” for Africa (Ouma 2012), reflected in controversial ideas about well-known dependencies and new options in African-Asian economic relations. On the other hand, are the ideas and imaginaries of a second wave of South–South solidarity (i.e. Mahler 2018) which constitutes the ideological foundation of almost all ongoing political relations between African and Asian states. Referring to historical Bandung ties—the historical Afro-Asia conference held in Indonesia in the 1950s—the current solidarity discourse continues to stress norms such as equality, reciprocity and dialogue, with hardly any official contradiction of this narrative. Interestingly enough, challenges to this all too harmonic picture emerge particularly from social

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practices in the broad sense of the term. Civil society actors, namely formalised groups (such as registered NGOs), non-formalised groups (such as grassroots organisations) and individuals (such as leading intellectuals), express and enunciate critique, counter-narratives and alternative visions of a romanticised and simplistic portrayal of Africa–Asia relations. Coming from diverse backgrounds and vantage points, they nevertheless share ideas of a better life for all that do not solely build on the platform of transregional South–South encounters, but reconnect African-Asian realities to salient thinking and debates on justice and equality within the broader contexts of those processes of transnationalisation that constitute the societal complement of political globalisation. Relations, contradictions, balance and prevalence between the transregional, the transnational and the global are the subject of the first contribution to this section, from literature theorist Frank Schulze-Engler. His contribution traces the negotiation of Afro-Asian solidarity from the perspective of African literature and the Afro-Asian Writers Association from the 1950s to the present day. While the idea of a literature of the “Global South” based on Afro-Asian solidarity might remain influential, this chapter reconstructs quite a different trajectory. The focus on Anglophone East African literature foregrounds representations of both solidarity and conflict and their impact on negotiations of what SchulzeEngler calls “Afrasian identities”. This argument establishes the relevance of transregionalisation as a critical concept to be taken into account in cultural and literary studies. Such literature signals a much broader transition from former dichotomies of North–South versus South–South towards much more complex, historically embedded ways of perceiving global as well as transnational and transregional realities. Another approach to linking the local, regional and global is discussed in Meg Samuelson’s chapter on how contemporary African literary content has incorporated Asian tropes. Rather than being explicitly linked to a growing Asian presence (although that is certainly part of it), such content is viewed increasingly as part and parcel of the Anthropocene era—namely a point in the earth’s history where human interaction is affecting ecology to the extent that it has become a geological force. Viewing Asian content such as cheap Chinese goods featured in African novels within this broader context has the dual benefit of accounting for the growing Asian presence and resisting the bracketing of this presence from the much broader impact of the market-driven Global North. A large portion of the literature—particularly the China–Africa

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literature—tends to focus on the Chinese presence in a binary form, as if cut off from the rest of the global political economy. By viewing its presence within the context of contemporary global capitalism and the Anthropocene era, which it is driving, the work invites us to reconceptualise the Asian presence in Africa within this broader context. The third paper in this section shares the idea of the interconnectedness of the transnational and the transregional but remains more sceptical of the latter. Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel and Uta Ruppert contribute to a critical re-reading of the two dominant narratives of African-Asian transregionalisation through an account of political civil society. In contrast to state-led grand narratives about Africa–Asia, the focus on peopleto-people interactions permits an understanding of deep experiences and longstanding strategies in transnational civil society politics as well as a rethinking of political realities in terms of spaces and contexts which elide dominant versions of the Asia–Africa discourse. The authors’ recourse to the realm of gender politics explores one of the most vibrant areas of transnational civil society with more than twenty years of recent experiences in African-Asian networking, from the World Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995 onwards. Although the discourse on South–South solidarity seems to be especially congruent with feminist concerns such as equality and justice, feminist praxis remains critical for African-Asian transregionalisation. Empirical examples from South African women’s organisations show a continuum of feminist answers to state-led transregionalisation, ranging from abstention to selective cooperation to rejection. Most of the classified types of feminist groups and networks tend to transgress the transregional frame and emphasise the relevance of experiences and norms of feminist transnationalisation. Thus, they contribute to demystifying the current South–South transregionalisation narrative as a mainly governmental discourse and point towards the complexities and paradoxes of space making (not only) in a transregional perspective. Meryl Burgess’s chapter grapples with processes of transregionalisation that are much closer to the mainstream understanding of transregionalism in a comparative study of China’s approaches to environmental conservation in Africa and Southeast Asia. Despite having developed similar environmental policies and action plans in both regions through platforms such as the Forum for China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), China appears to engage somewhat differently within these contexts. Through its policy

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plans with ASEAN, Burgess highlights disproportionate attention to economic ambitions, access to resources and securing territorial claims in regions such as the South China Sea. On the other hand, in Africa, China appears to address environmental concerns in more direct and practical ways, such as establishing formal agreements with effected countries. This disparity highlights how issues of proximity and realpolitik lurk under the surface of standardised sets of policies across regions.

3  Embedding African-Asian Transregionalisation A major theme in most theoretical literature on “trans” processes, especially in the context of transnationalisation, foregrounds the idea of embeddedness within local contexts. Anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai, for instance, already in the last century made the case that all manner of border transcending—what he refers to variously as “scapes”: “ethno”, “techno”, “finance”, “media” and “ideology” (Appadurai 1996)—exist as mobile and transnational, while simultaneously being embedded within given locales. Thus, on the one hand, there is “actually existing” transnationalisation: vectors of movement, facilitated by a variety of technologies. On the other hand, these vectors must simultaneously be imagined to some degree, as they can only be subjectively perceived from a given time and place. Within the context of South– South transregionalisation, migrant literature has been at the forefront of the intersection between the physical and the imaginary, with novels on the South Asian experience in East and Southern Africa and more recent accounts of Chinese experience in South Africa (Accone 2011; Ho 2012). In terms of the theoretical analysis of new types of embeddedness, a growing body of ethnographic literature is beginning to emerge within the African-Asian context, particularly in the form of ethnographic accounts (Hsiu and McGovern 2017; Degani 2017). Within the interdisciplinary context of the present volume, reflections on what constitutes local practices as well as the movements of transregionalisation are developed from historical, sociological and anthropological angles. Mamadou Diawara’s reflection on the lives of migrants, both at home and abroad, across the West African—Southeast Asian trajectory, exemplifies what transregional space making may mean and how it works through the mobility of people. While long-distance migration is most frequently described in terms and imaginations of “exile”, Diawara, following the routes and the voices of Africa–Asia migrants themselves,

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develops rather different considerations. Through living with and listening to migrants moving between these regions, he explores intersecting modes of living abroad and being at home that forcefully contradict the exile observation. “How do we build a life” in the country of origin and elsewhere is a driving question for many migrants. In answering it, Diawara touches on how the African and Asian locales, in a sense, merge. He explores how social and economic practices of “in-between spaces” structurally unite them and examines how these “niches” contribute to the production of transregional localities. In doing so, he likewise unfolds mobility as a set of socio-spatial relations and practices that concurrently constitute and transform the regional, in terms of place; the transregional, in terms of space; and the transnational, in terms of subjectivity. Another perspective on migration as socio-spatial relation and practice is discussed by Park. By drawing a line from the history of Asian labour in (South) Africa to solidarity movements—from the Bandung era to the more recent treatment of Asian migrant communities in Uganda and South Africa—she criticises some aspects of current conceptualisations of African-Asian interactions as too euphemistic. Park highlights the need to embed African-Asian relations historically and to take colonial contexts properly into account, especially colonial efforts to privilege “Whiteness”. While she agrees with Diawara’s views, as well as those of literature studies, on the strong potential of people-to-people interactions in creating new transregional spaces, she makes a plea to excise notions of the West and the meanings of Whiteness from the new African-Asian picture(s). Following Park, the extent to which people, social groups and collective actors see, feel and live “third spaces” beyond the traditional geographical regions, should make a decisive difference in conceptualisations of what we might describe analytically as transregional spaces. Such an analysis also raises the question of the extent to which (Western) epistemologies have played a role in initial formulations of transregional concepts—something which is rarely discussed (see Mielke and Hornigde 2017). Ross Anthony’s chapter approaches the notion of embeddedness from the perspective of infrastructure. In an examination of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), he analyses the slippage of meaning between the project’s function as a global discourse disseminated by Beijing and its functioning as a particular material manifestation—in this case, port, road, rail and industrialisation in Kenya’s port city of Lamu. From a

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“top-down” perspective, representations of the BRI depict a diagrammatic global imaginary stretching over a relatively flattened and homogenous world. However, from the perspective of implementation—whose contexts vary widely across a heterogeneity of polities, ethnic groupings and environmental niches—the projects mobilise different, often unintended, effects. Within the Kenyan context, the chapter outlines how the BRI has motivated a number of economic, political and ecological transformations which have, in turn, given rise to political resistance by local civil society groups. Furthermore, their struggles are pitched predominantly against the Kenyan state, as opposed to China itself, in a context where the Lamu project is viewed primarily as a national development initiative rather than part of the BRI. The chapter argues that the BRI can be better understood through the analysis of particular projects within particular contexts, coupled with a comparative approach towards these various contexts.

4  Shifting the Debate In offering a collection of chapters which examine Africa–Asia relations from various disciplines, the current volume encourages different ways of thinking through the relationship. While the Africa–Asia relationship is in many senses underpinned today by economic relations, the economy functions as a vector of far more than just trade, finance and investments: it also functions as a carrier of people, culture and modes of thought which have long-term implications for both regions. Transregionalisation, in the most generous sense of the term, is the analytical approach we have taken in terms of shifting the debate in this direction. While it is impossible to grasp the totality of the relationship, it is nevertheless prudent to approach the dynamic in a more holistic way, side-stepping the straight jacket of an analysis which mistakes economics and politics—while remaining crucial to the analyses—as the be-all and end-all of the relationship. We hope that this approach encourages more research—independently, collaboratively and comparatively—which takes into account both the interdisciplinary, multi-regional, and trans-regional nature of engagement in an increasingly multi-polar world.

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References Accone, D. 2011. All Under Heaven: The Story of a Chinese Family in South Africa. Cape Town: New Africa Books. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bachmann, V. 2016. Spaces of Interaction: Enactments of Sociospatial Relations and an Emerging EU Diplomacy in Kenya. Territory, Politics, Governance 4 (1): 75–96. Bayly, C.A. 2004. Birth of the Modern World: 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons. Oxford: Blackwell. Börzel, T., and T. Risse. 2016. Conclusion: Three Cheers for Comparative Regionalism. In The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism, ed. T. Börzel and T. Risse, 621–648. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brazinsky, G.A. 2017. Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry During the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Bulliet, R., et al. 2014. The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History. Stamford: Cengage Learning. Chamberlin, P.T. 2018. The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace. New York: HarperCollins. Chaturvedi, F., et al. (eds.). 2014. Development Cooperation and Emerging Powers: New Partners or Old Patterns? London and New York: Zed Books. Conrad, S. 2017. What Is Global History? Cambridge: Polity. Degani, M. 2017. Race and Electricity in Post-Socialist Tanzania. The Corridor, Cityscapes. Dent, C.M. 2003. From Inter-Regionalism to Trans-Regionalism? Future Challenges or ASEM. Asia Europe Journal 1 (2): 223–235. Fanta, E., et al. (eds.). 2013. Comparative Regionalisms for Development in the 21st Century: Insights from the Global South. Farnham: Ashgate. Gu, J., et al. (eds.). 2016. The BRICS in International Development. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hanson, P., and S. Jonsson. 2015. Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Ho, U. 2012. Paper Sons and Daughters: Growing Up Chinese in South Africa. Athens: University of Ohio Press. Hsiu, H.F., and M. McGovern. 2017. China-Africa Encounters: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Legacies. Annual Review of Anthropology 46: 337–355. Jessop, B. 2003. The Political Economy of Scale and the Construction of CrossBorder Micro-regions. In Theories of New Regionalism, ed. F. Söderbaum and T. Shaw, 179–196. Houndsmills and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Jessop, B. 2016. Territory, Politics, Governance and Multispatial Metagovernance. Territory, Politics, Governance 4 (1): 8–32. Latour, B. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity. Levi-Strauss, C. 1971. Totemism. Boston: Beacon Press. Mahler, A.G. 2018. From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press. Middell, M. (ed.). 2018. The Routledge Handbook of Transregional Studies. London: Routledge. Mielke, K., and Hornidge A. (eds.). 2017. Area Studies at the Crossroads: Knowledge Production After the Mobility Turn. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mignolo, W.D. 2012. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Boarder Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Moore, J. 2015. Capitalism and the Web of Life. London: Verso. Nielsen, M. 2014. How Not to Build a Road: An Analysis of the SocioEconomic Effects of a Chinese Infrastructure Project in Mozambique. In Chichava, China and Mozambique: From Comrades to Capitalists, ed. C. Alden and S. Chichava. Auckland Park: Jacana. Ouma, S. 2012. The New Scramble for Africa. Regional Studies 46 (6): 836–838. Park, Y.J. 2008. A Matter of Honour: Being Chinese in South Africa. Lanham: Lexington Books. Simbao, R. 2016. Walking into Africa in a Chinese Way: Hua Jiming’s Mindful Entry. In Afrique/Asie: Réseaux, Échanges, Transversalités, ed. D. Malaquais and N. Khouri. Mont-Saint-Aignan Cedex: Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre. Söderbaum, F. 2016. Rethinking Regionalism. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Xing, L. 2019. Mapping China’s ‘One Belt One Road’ Initiative. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

PART I

Situating African-Asian Encounters Globally

CHAPTER 2

Afro-Asian Trade and the “Africa Rising” Story Ian Taylor

1  Introduction Until the collapse in commodity prices in 2011, Africa was eulogised as “rising” and providing investors with unlimited potential for capital accumulation and profit. “Business conferences [were] filled with frothy talk of African lions overtaking Asian tigers” (Economist, March 2, 2013). What was interesting was the way in which the discourse about “Africa Rising” reflected—and was an extension of—the wider narrative surrounding emerging economies, mostly emblematically captured in the acronym BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). The BRICS term became a neologism symbolising a putative changing world order where the normative principles associated with the capitalist core were allegedly threatened by a new set of alternatives, mostly located in Asia. Clearly, the ever-increasing role of emerging economies in Africa has been of importance to the continent. According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), “trade with the BRICS I. Taylor (*)  School of International Relations, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Anthony and U. Ruppert (eds.), Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7_2

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[grew] faster than with any other region in the world, doubling since 2007” (UNECA 2013: 1). What accompanied such developments was the apparent sudden realisation that Africa is not marginal to the world. Sub-Saharan Africa is in fact very well integrated into the global system and has been for decades. It is the pundits, as well as diverse speculators and opportunists, who have abruptly discovered that Africa’s foreign trade represents 45% of its Gross National Product (compared to 30% for Asia and Latin America and 15% for the core countries). Quantitatively, the continent is “more”, not “less”, globally integrated. However, the problem, which will be expounded upon below, is the terms of this integration and how the patterns of Afro-Asian trade continue and in fact deepen the problematic structural features facing the continent. Obviously the situation depends on national context, but broadly, “as a result of their colonial legacy, the present-day economies of the African countries are characterised by a lop-sided dependence on the export of raw materials, and the import of manufactured goods” (Harris 1975: 12). That little has changed for most countries since this assessment was written nearly forty years ago reflects the tragedy of many of Africa’s post-colonial trajectories. Set in motion by colonialism and the insertion of Africa into the global political economy, the status quo has been ably assisted by the African elite political class. Any analysis of Afro-Asian relations (or relations between African and any other external actors) needs to be grounded in the above understanding of the dialectical relationships engendered. This necessarily recognises that “government serve[s] as the foreman to keep civil society producing a surplus to be accumulated by foreign finance capital and parasitic native social classes that enjoy almost absolutist power” (Mentan 2010: xii). This latter clique needs some discussion.

2  The State-Society Complex in Africa Due to the manner in which colonialism created states in Africa and the nature of the independence process in most African countries, the ruling classes lack hegemony over society (Gramsci 1971). By the ruling class, we mean the senior political elites and bureaucrats, the leading members of the liberal professions, the nascent bourgeoisie and the top members of the security arms of the state (Markovitz 1987: 8). The early years of post-colonial nationalism in Africa were, broadly speaking, an attempt to build a hegemonic project which bound society together

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around more issues than simply discontent with the imperial powers. This project quickly collapsed into autocracy and failure, a process accelerated by dynamics linked to the Cold War and to the new political leaders’ failure to make a decisive break with the past: “the nationalist movement which arose from the contradictions of the colonial economy achieved political independence, not economic independence” (Ake 1981: 93). Consequently, “unlike the ascending bourgeoisie of Europe, which transformed all political and economic institutions into its own image and became socially hegemonic, the petit-bourgeoisie in Africa has no criteria of its own, it merely inherited colonial institutions with which the mass of the people did not identify” (Nabudere 2011: 58). Of course, “Africa’s leaders are neither autonomous nor robots; they reflect diverse class and fractional interests located within the continent but separable from their extra-continental connections” (Shaw 1985: 5). These interests vary from state to state and within each state too: “state power rests in the hands of a local class or classes which constitute the ruling class. This class or classes have their own class interests arising from the place they occupy in social production” (Shivji 1980: 740). How the centralised organs of the state relate to external contexts depends on the positions of various domestic classes and the balance of forces between the external and the internal. Indeed, “African interests can expel and exclude external interests should they wish to do so. In practice they rarely exercise this option, preferring to modify the ‘balance of power’ over time through almost continuous negotiation” (ibid.: 11). “Condemnation there must be; but compassion too, for those who talked so boldly about freedom but had so little room for manoeuvre” (First 1982: 465); this dialectic is central to any analysis of Africa’s international relations and the agency of African governments. Within the realm of the superstructure, moral and political modes that rise above notions of economic-corporate interests and instead reflect broader ethico-political ones have remained missing. Consequently, because the ruling classes have been unable to preside over a hegemonic project that is viewed as legitimate, they have been forced to revert to modalities of governance that seek to dominate. These are commonly expressed through both the threat and actual use of violence and the immediate disbursal of material benefits to supporters within the context of neo-patrimonial regimes. Without these twin strategies, the ruling elites in much of Africa cannot maintain order. After all, “the state [in Africa], unlike the bourgeois state, is not entrenched in the society

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as a whole. It is … a bureaucratic connivance” (Mafeje 1992: 31). What ideological legitimacy that exists, in terms of bolstering the incumbent regime, is conveyed by the idea of “development”. This is something that is abstractly agreed to by all and a “good idea” in the same way that motherhood and apple pies are. Statistical reporting on the measurement of economic growth, invariably merely commodity production, is then used to support the myth of “development” and progress (Williams 1980: 40). The sort of political culture that has matured has had important consequences for Africa, further adding to the problematic of underdevelopment. Here, a brief definition of what we mean is required. The orthodox criterion is the per capita measurement of national income, used in a rather formalised comparative fashion. This study follows Tamás Szentes’ objection to such quantitative indices, namely, that “they do not point out qualitative sameness and differences” (1971: 25). Underdevelopment is a much too multifaceted phenomenon, irreducible to mere quantitative portrayals. Instead, “there are two aspects, two sides of underdevelopment: the basically external, international aspect, which, from the historical point of view of the emergence of the present state, is the primary aspect; and the internal aspect, which from the point of view of future development, is increasingly important” (ibid.: 163). In short, “poverty [is] not the result of some historical game of chance in which [Africa] happened to be the losers; it [is] the result of a set of economic relationships, rooted in the colonial era, that [has] served to enrich a minority by impoverishing the majority” (Adamson 2013: 12). In general, the modes of governance in Africa have encouraged despotism and unpredictability. As a result, for most of the post-colonial period, much of Africa has been trapped in cycles of crises, which have stimulated societal conflict. Although Africa’s elites undoubtedly command the state apparatus, with varying levels of intensity, their own practices often undermine and subvert the state’s institutions on a daily basis. The relative autonomy of the state is absent and their rule is intrinsically unstable, even though many manage to tenaciously cling to power (Fatton 1999). There is very little political space to allow reform. Instead of a stable hegemonic project that binds different levels of society together, there are intrinsically unstable personalised systems of domination. Corruption is the cement that binds the system together and links the patron and their predatory ruling class together. If political elites do ever articulate a vision for the country, “their notion of emerging out

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of economic backwardness amounts essentially to Westernisation”, where “the general trend is to try and stimulate economic growth within the context of the existing neocolonial economic structure” (Ake 1981: 139). This is indeed an accurate appraisal of the contemporary “development strategies” which characterise much of Africa, only now with the BRICS included, furthering the continent’s underdevelopment. Underdevelopment is a dynamic, not static, condition: it is a relationship and “expresses a particular relationship of exploitation: namely, the exploitation of one country by another. All of the countries named as ‘underdeveloped’ in the world are exploited by others; and the underdevelopment with which the world is now pre-occupied is a product of capitalist, imperialist and colonialist exploitation” (Rodney 2012: 14). The external domination of Africa’s economies and the pathologies of dependency, constructed during the colonial period, that this engenders, have proven markedly resilient. “The root dilemma of Africa’s economic development has been the asymmetry between the role of the continent in the world and the degree to which that world … has penetrated Africa” (Austen 1987: 271). Broadly speaking, “The rigidity of the international division of labour has not allowed African economies to break out of the role of primary producers, for reasons which include lack of access to technology, the comparative advantage of the industrialised nations in manufacturing, and the constraints of the domestic market” (Ake 1981: 92). Indeed, African economies are integrated into the very economies of the developed economies in a way that is unfavourable to Africa and ensures structural dependence. In short, “the geo-economy of [Africa] depends on two production systems that determine its structures and define its place in the global system: (1) the export of ‘tropical’ agricultural products: coffee, cocoa, cotton, peanuts, fruits, oil palm, etc.; and (2) hydrocarbons and minerals: copper, gold, rare metals, diamonds, etc.” (Amin 2010: 30). This has not radically changed since independence and is overlooked in the rush to both anoint Africa as the new frontier of opportunity for speculators and exaggerate the role of emerging economies as potential redeemers.

3   “Africa Rising” The “Africa Rising” discourse which developed as a result of increased Afro-Asian engagement neglects a most fundamental context: “only for nine of the forty three [Sub-Saharan] countries were growth rates during

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1980-2008 high enough to double per capita income in less than thirty years, and only sixteen in less than one hundred years. Performance would have been considerably worse had it not been for the brief years of relatively rapid growth in the mid-2000s” (Weeks 2010: 3). Africa needs to grow by at least 7% a year for the next twenty or thirty years if any serious tackling of continental poverty is to be realised. However, growth induced by commodity price increases, new discoveries of natural resources or increase in sources of foreign capital “is simply not sustainable” (Amoako 2011: 24). What Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth that occurred was: Overwhelmingly characterised by the deployment and inflow of capital intensive investment for the extraction and exportation of African natural resources. There is a distinct lack of value added on the African side. The principal focus of this activity is in oil which not only offers limited opportunities for local employment, but also deliberately and actively seeks to avoid the hiring of African labour for fear of encountering resistance and the costs of appeasing affected local communities. (Southall 2008: 148)

Problematically, while the hope of the development literature has been that higher rates of inflow of capital investment will have downstream effects on African employment (through increased government revenues and spending alongside an injection of consumer wealth into local economies), there is little evidence that this will take place on a substantial scale. The fundamental reason for this is that the [growth] rests heavily on the engagements of foreign governments and corporations with African elites. (ibid.: 149)

In most neo-patrimonial administrations, sustainable and broad-based development is unlikely to occur (cf. Kelsall 2013). In late 2012, the Deputy Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa noted that Africa’s relatively good economic growth performance over the past decade had been driven mostly by non-renewable natural resources and high commodity prices. Alongside this, he noted, de-industrialisation had been a key feature, with the share of manufacturing in Africa’s GDP falling from 15% in 1990 to 10% in 2008, going hand-in-hand with an increase in unemployment (Addis Tribune, December 8, 2012). In fact, McMillan and Rodrik (2011) show

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that since 1990, Africa has experienced a relative shift in the composition of employment towards sectors that create too few high-productivity jobs. Manufacturing growth has been near the bottom in twelve growth sectors, with only public administration lagging behind. This of course is not to write off the recent growth as devoid of any value at all. At the minimum, improved fiscal space is being generated. Retail sectors are growing, with revenue increasing by around 4% per year, and there is growing investment in infrastructure (McKinsey Global Institute 2010). Given that there is a correlation “between infrastructure and export diversification, and [that] the current low levels and distorted composition of exports from SSA [sub-Saharan Africa] are partly due to poor trade infrastructure”, it can be stated that the improvement in infrastructure “has per se a positive impact on SSA growth and trade capacity” (Sindzingre 2013: 44). Africa’s debts have fallen, partly thanks to the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC) and the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI), and partly due to improved management (although it is noteworthy that “in spite of the HIPC initiative, only half of SSA countries have witnessed a temporary reduction of their annual debt service”) (Petithomme 2013: 119). In social sectors, performance is varied, but increases in the years of schooling are reported across the continent, albeit unevenly. Health outcomes, particularly life expectancy at birth, have also generally improved, in some countries substantially. These are all obviously to be welcomed. However, there is a desperate need to convert natural resources and high commodity prices into structural change, “defined as an increase in the share of industry or services in the economy, or as the diversification and sophistication of exports … or as the shift of workers from sectors with low labour productivity to those with high labour productivity” (Sindzingre 2013: 26). This is not happening. Instead, with the arrival of emerging economies in Africa alongside traditional trade associates, the historical process of underdevelopment is in danger of being further entrenched.

4  The New Saviours? Comprehension of the extent of the challenges facing the continent, as well as the actual nature of Africa’s insertion into the global order, is vitally needed, as is a more critical look at some of the “new” actors engaging in Africa (see Carmody 2013). These have been held up in

26  I. TAYLOR

some quarters as the new saviours of Africa—the latest cargo cult to latch onto. In the process, the huge variation in countries’ economic and social profiles was flattened out and all were collapsed together as the BRICS, as if they somehow constituted a unified bloc of similar-status nations. A quick glance at some figures demonstrates that this is wholly inaccurate (Table 1). It is true that the emergence of new or “non-traditional” actors, primarily from Asia, opened up varying degrees of space for African elites to manoeuvre. Problematically, however, this has been seized on as evidence of a new and emerging set of dynamics in international politics, one that creates room for alternatives to neoliberal capitalism. Walter Mignolo, for example, asserts that “The economic success of the BRICS countries comes from the fact that the leadership is engaged in epistemic economic disobedience vis-à-vis the IMF and World Bank” (2012: 43). Martyn Davies, formerly of Frontier Advisory (a research, strategy and investment advisory firm), has similarly asserted about the BRICS that “After the onset of the (Western) financial crisis of 2008, there has been a deep questioning of the free market ideology” (Financial Times, March 25, 2013). This naïvety really does need challenging. Such jubilation was somewhat redolent of Bill Warren’s thesis (1973) that the Third World, under the effect of local industrial development, was storming ahead, playing a progressive role in reducing the gap between the core and the developing world. Yet, then as now, such predictions were based on growth per capita figures which seemed to Table 1  BRICS countries facts and figures

Brazil Russia India China South Africa

Population (millions)

Total GDP in USD (2011)

197 143 1.2 billion 1.3 billion 52

2.4 trillion 1.8 trillion 1.8 trillion 7.3 trillion 408 billion

Source World Bank (2013)

GDP Per capita growth rate GDP (2011) (%) in US$ (2011) 2.7 4.3 6.3 9.3 3.1

12,594 12,995 1509 5445 8070

Share in Ease of world GDP doing busi(%) ness rank 2.9 3 5.4 13.6 0.7

126 120 132 91 35

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suggest a noteworthy redistribution of world industrial power. However, as McMichael et al. (1974) wrote in their rebuttal of Warren’s argument: To measure distribution of world industrial power by “growth rates” of industry, which include economies starting from the barest minimum of industrial production and cover a generation, is delightful simplicity. The volume of production, the level of technology, the research capabilities, the allocation of resources, the development of education and the use of manpower, are equally or more relevant to measuring the historic capacity of a country to become a significant industrial power. Warren wishes to prove a “redistribution” of industrial power, but can only scrape up a one per cent difference in the industrial growth rate between the imperial centres and the Third World: a very slender reed upon which to hang such a weighty claim!

This might be reflected upon today. Whilst per capita growth rates are most relevant with regard to standards of living, for the evaluation of any notional distribution of industrial power and the growth of the market globally, industrial production rates are key. Aggregated figures from the World Factbook suggest that whilst the BRICS are doing well, they are not doing that much better than the capitalist core. Whereas in 2010, the average industrial production growth rate was 8.7% for the BRICS and 5.6% for the G-7, in 2011 estimates were 5.24 and 1.96% respectively. This sounds substantial. However, if one leaves out Japan’s negative rates (distorted by the earthquake and tsunami), then the G-7 (minus Japan) have an average industrial production growth rate of 5.7%. This might well indeed be “a very slender reed” upon which to announce the replacement of the West by the BRICS. Besides, the cost to the global ecology is never factored in: “all eyes are on the so-called emerging powers. Why? Because they have rocked the global economy with their stunning GDP growth rates. Never mind, of course, the cost in terms of ecological degradation and social impoverishments that the achievement of this status has implied” (Fioramonti 2013: 154). Indeed, “the four BRIC economies alone account for over a third of global carbon emissions caused by land use and deforestation” (International Energy Agency 2012). Furthermore, the status of the BRICS as poster children for gross inequality is equally ignored: “Data from household statistics reveal that income inequalities in all BRICS countries have remained well above the … OECD average. From the

28  I. TAYLOR

early 1990s to the late 2000s, China, India, the Russian Federation and South Africa all saw steep increases in income inequality. In the same period, Brazil’s Gini indicator was almost twice as large as the OECD average” (Ivins 2013: 3). Background noise about South-South solidarity aside, none of the BRICS has any serious agenda to change the world. There is no ideal world order that the BRICS wish to promote. Rather, increasing the bargaining power of the BRICS elites with the core is the sum total of any “vision”: BRIC states, while officially denouncing US-originated neoliberalism are implementing neoliberal economic policies to boost their own economic growth…The rise of the BRIC states will not bring the new economic world-order [or] bring the redistribution of economic power through the existing system, since the BRIC states have in general accepted (not all of them in the same degree) the neoliberal economic ideology and applied neoliberal economic policies or some of its aspects. (Kurečić and Bandov 2011: 30)

This is an important point to make. During the period of economic growth in emerging economies, a variety of non-academic commentators cropped up to gloat that the core was finished and that the future belonged elsewhere. Deploying a rather crude Occidentalism to castigate the West for every evil, an unprocessed form of Asian triumphalism (in particular) momentarily took stage. Unformed but provocative statements were temporarily given attention during a time when the core appeared to be in irrecoverable crisis (see e.g. Mahbubani 2008). Analysis like this now seems rather embarrassing. As Sharma (2014: 52) notes, such media pundits “stopped looking at emerging markets as individual stories and started lumping them into faceless packs” and objectified spatial entities (such as “The New Asian Hemisphere”). “They listened too closely to political leaders in the emerging world who took credit for the boom and ignored the other global forces, such as easy money coming out of the United States and Europe, that helped power growth”. Some “experts” even “cited the 17th century economic might of China and India as evidence that they would dominate the coming decade, even the coming century” (ibid.: 53). Emblematically: “From year 1 to 1820, China and India provided the world’s two largest economies. By 2050, we will return to the historical norm” (Mahbubani 2011: 132). This supremacism however was merely a celebration of elitism, hierarchy,

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inequality and local imperialism; after all, “China and India dominated merely based on the size of their populations, and economic production was largely driven by the need to produce enough food for the masses to survive and for the small elite to preserve their higher standards of living” (Lin and Rosenblatt 2012: 173). As one source caustically notes: The future is seen in terms of a historical continuity ruptured temporarily by a couple of hundred years of decline … Celebration of thousands of years of historical glory, punctured only by attacks by hostile forces from without and disunity within, takes the place of the emancipatory, progressive liberatory impulse of anti-colonial or revolutionary nationalisms. The source of pride is the emergent nation, but one which is merely a modern expression of an ancient civilisational entity. There is limited tolerance of dissent from this picture of centuries of glory upset by decades of humiliation that are over now and will soon be followed by a regaining of rightful place as a great power in the scheme of things. (Anand 2011: 75)

Interestingly, the relative rise in profile of these emerging economies has gone hand in hand with internal developments within Africa where, under strong pressure from the international financial institutions and Western donors, many African states have opened up their economies through deregulation, privatisation, etc. In a number of African countries, the elites have bought into the neoliberal message and now actively seek to attract foreign investment. These two factors have served to facilitate the expansion of foreign capital in Africa more broadly, and from emerging economies in particular. Alongside some new developments, however, a lot of continuities remain the same. There has been a huge rise in commodity prices, which has contributed significantly to Africa’s impressive growth figures, if taken as an increase in GDP per capita, but the benefit to African economies in terms of providing a sustained platform for development is far more muted. After all, “growth is a quantitative process, involving principally the extension of an already established structure of production, whereas development suggests qualitative changes, the creation of new economic and non-economic structure” (Dowd 1967: 153). Pertinent to the “Africa Rising” narrative are the words of Amin (2014: 139): Emergence is not measured by a rising rate of GDP growth (or exports)… nor the fact that the society in question has obtained a higher level of GDP per capita, as defined by the World Bank, aid institutions controlled by

30  I. TAYLOR Western powers, and conventional economists. Emergence involves much more: a sustained growth in industrial production in the state [or region] in question and a strengthening of the capacity of these industries to be competitive on a global scale.

A key question about the role of emerging economies in Africa is whether routine collusion between exploitative foreign actors and dysfunctional regimes—a depressing and undeniable feature of Africa’s international relations—may be simply reproduced. This is precisely what Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, warned against in March 2013 when, referring specifically to Sino-Nigerian ties, he asserted that “China takes from us primary goods and sells us manufactured ones. This was also the essence of colonialism. China is no longer a fellow underdeveloped economy. China is the second biggest economy in the world, an economic giant capable of the same forms of exploitation as the West. China is a major contributor to the de-industrialisation of Africa and thus African underdevelopment” (This Day, March 13, 2013). Talking more broadly of the BRICS, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa notes: [BRICS-Africa] trade is in primary commodities with few linkages to the rest of the economy and with most export earnings going to foreigners, and so Africa’s development and employment receive few gains. Also, the growth of the BRICS suggests it will become harder for African exporters to break into new (non-commodity) sectors – and their home country producers (as in footwear or clothing) may be hurt by the BRICS’ low-cost output. (UNECA 2013: 1)

Some proponents of the “Africa Rising” trope have argued that improved governance and modes of doing business have facilitated the upsurge in African GDP. In a detailed study, Scott Taylor (2012) argues that a “hospitable climate for business” has been spurred by institutional change and political and economic reform. This is one of the central arguments around which much of the new-found optimism about Africa has been built. For instance, the Oxford Companion to the Economics of Africa claims that “improved macroeconomic frameworks and political governance in a majority of countries were key drivers for the improved economic performance” (Aryeetey et al. 2012: 8). The Economist cannot resist its own spin on the story, claiming that “Africa’s retreat from

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socialist economic models has generally made everyone better off” (Economist, March 2, 2013). In fact, however: If one disaggregates the countries into conflict-affected, and those not affected by conflict into petroleum exporters and others, the recovery during 2004-2008 appears less impressive. For the twenty-nine countries that did not export petroleum and were not burdened by severe conflict, the average growth rate in the second half of the 2000s was hardly different from the average ten years before. (Weeks 2010: 6)

Already, what one representative from the African Development Bank (ADB) has referred to as export-led jobless growth in Africa characterises the current situation, where job creation at 3% per annum has trailed far behind GDP growth (5.4% per annum) and way behind export growth, which stands at 18.5% per annum (Ancharaz 2011). Indeed, the UN Development Policy and Analysis Division noted that Africa’s economic growth will “continue to be driven by expanding economic ties with Asia, fiscal spending on infrastructure projects and oil-exporting countries. Whilst income per capita is anticipated to grow, this will not be at a sufficient pace to accelerate poverty reduction” (UNDESA 2013). This makes nonsense of strident claims that: What took the UK centuries can now be a matter of decades, even years … Today Africa has the greatest room to boom on the back of two centuries of global progress…In other words, Africa is ideally poised to leapfrog centuries of industrial development…It has an added advantage in that it does not have to carry baggage from the past. (African Business, January, 2013: 19)

Thus (yet another) commodity-driven boom in Africa, this time propelled by emerging economies, wipes the historical slate clean, makes dependent relationships and unequal terms of trade vanish instantaneously, and positions the continent to reach OECD status virtually overnight! Much of this is said to be hinged on the BRICS as the new saviours.

5  Plus Ҁa Change, Plus C’est La Même Chose It hardly needs repeating here that most commodity-rich African countries, which are the main partners of the emerging economies on the continent, have poor records in terms of inequality, human development indices, etc.

32  I. TAYLOR

With a few exceptions, such as Botswana (which is, however, an extremely unequal society [Taylor 2003]), many are corrupt entities managed by leaders at the apex of neo-patrimonial systems. These elites have been previously quite happy to extract rent from Western corporations wishing to exploit their country’s resources. What is perhaps now new in Africa is the range of competitors vying for attention. As Rampa et al. (2012: 248) note, “It is clear that [emerging economies’] growing presence on the continent brings trade, massive investment in infrastructure and resources development. Politically it helps Africa become more assertive in the world and increases development aid and technical assistance”. This should not, however, be seen in terms of India vs. China or France vs. the USA but rather as an expression of inter-capitalist competition, something which has long been integral to the global system. What the emerging economies bring are more competitors and, at times, different business practices, but the broad pattern remains the same. Yet, we are told confidently that “[T]he Africa-pessimists have got it wrong” (presumably including The Economist a few years ago) as “the engines of development are still going strong. Democratic governance, political participation and economic management look set to improve further” (Economist, March 2, 2013). The patterns of continuity are, of course, taking place within the context of global capitalism, which historically has generated growth in the centres and peripheries but in different ways. “Whereas at the centre growth is development – that is, it has an integrating effect – in the periphery growth is not development, for its effect is to disarticulate. Strictly speaking, growth in the periphery, based on integration into the world market, is the development of underdevelopment” (Amin 1974: 18–19). What is remarkable about the “Africa Rising” discourse is that this is generally ignored: growth is fetishised and taken as a Good Thing in its own right. There is no acknowledgement that what is occurring reflects an ongoing trend of polarisation, where there is “the concurrent construction of dominant centres and dominated peripheries, and their reproduction deepening in each state” and continent (Amin 2004: 13). Exploitation by capitalist productive relationships and the appropriation of Africa’s economic surpluses characterise the continent’s political economies. Such a milieu encourages visionless African elites to focus on the static comparative advantages of the spaces which they control. Given the weak levels of diversification and strong concentrations in specific export sectors, it is remarkable that a narrative has been built that

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claims that Africa is “rising” in the absence of any indication of a widening domestic manufacturing base or actual industrialisation. This is problematic given that a task ahead for Africa is to develop an industrial base that can assist the agricultural sector in its growth and transformation. Both of these sectors could potentially compose the engines of development, but only under conditions where instead of the exigencies of global capital being paramount, domestic and internal requirements of various social formations are prioritised. A rebalancing away from allowing global capitalism to dictate the pace rather than the logic of domestic development is absolutely central. Yet in the context of the new trading geographies being crafted, many extant pathologies are being reproduced, even reified. As one commentator puts it, the “BRIC’s trading approach towards Africa, while favouring bilateral trade, does not encourage a … necessary African coherence and regional integration. Rather, such an approach that is based on mutual benefits, and thus not necessarily need-based, marginalises countries with lower income, while favouring resource-rich countries” (Mbaye, n.d.: 3). Such dynamics also reproduce dependency. Due to the colonial experience, Africa was inserted into the global division of labour in a particular fashion. This is well known and the effect has been to generate and reproduce underdevelopment. As noted, a central characteristic of capitalism is “development at one pole and underdevelopment at the other” (Smith 1990: 188); this may be graphically witnessed in Africa. As James Ferguson (2006: 38) has noted: Capital does not “flow” from New York to Angola’s oil fields, or from London to Ghana’s gold mines; it hops, neatly skipping over most of what is in between. Second, where capital has been coming to Africa at all, it has largely been concentrated in spatially segregated, socially “thin” mineral-extraction enclaves. Again, the “movement of capital” here does not cover the globe; it connects discrete points on it.

Replace New York with Brasilia or London with Beijing and the same logic of spatially uneven investment applies to the dynamics of the BRICS in Africa. Of course, the extraction of economic surplus by global corporations, without reinvesting it to transform agriculture and industry, has been a key feature of Africa’s political economy since independence, with compliant elites collaborating in this venture (Amin 2002).

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6  Conclusion The issue of Africa’s continuing underdevelopment cannot be ignored, despite assertions that the emerging powers have brought something new to the continent. In fact: the empirical evidence on growth and policy related indicators is consistent with the null hypothesis that more than twenty years of so-called policy reform had limited impact on strengthening the potential for rapid and sustainable growth in the sub-Saharan region. The drivers of the brief recovery during the second half of the 2000s appear to have been a commodity price boom, debt relief and a decline in domestic conflicts. (Weeks 2010: 10)

This intimate link is revealed by World Bank figures for SSA’s annual percentage GDP growth rate at market prices, based on constant local currency (for all income levels, rounded up), compared to the movement of the Commodity Price Index (Table 2). The years when SSA’s growth figures surpassed 1996 levels (2004– 2008) can be demonstrably linked to the period when China and India (and other emerging economies) began to demand commodities in great amounts, as reflected in the CPI (Consumer Price Index). In the energy Table 2  Correlation between GDP growth for SSA and the Commodity Price Index (CPI)

GDP growth CPI

GDP growth CPI

1990

1991

1.3

0.9

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

−0.9

0.4

1.8

3.7

4.9

3.7

2.3

2.4

52.6

52.5

50.06

58.6

58.7

64.6

51.0

43.3

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

3.7

3.7

3.5

4.4

6.4

5.8

6.1

6.9

5.0

1.9

59.4

61.9

50.1

66.3

69.1

86.7

113.1 112.9 162.4 102.4

GDP growth CPI Sources World Bank, IMF data

2010

2011

2012

4.9 146.1

4.5 182.1

4.2 188.4

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realm, concern over predicted declines in petroleum reserves, apprehensions over the so-called “peak oil” scenario, instability in the Middle East, and oil price speculation placed further upward pressure on prices, which peaked in 2008 (only to tumble after the core underwent the worst recession in a century). This reality is qualitatively different from the picture Goldman Sachs, Renaissance Capital et al. portray, where “spectacularly right” policies have driven growth. Official reports from international organisations have at times bolstered this latter interpretation, postulating Africa’s “economic resurgence” as being hinged on the ability of the continent to recover from the global crisis relatively quicker than other areas of the world (World Economic Forum et al. 2011: v). Whilst valid in and of itself, Africa’s growth record over the last ten years or so has occurred within the context of overall global growth. In this regard, Africa’s growth has only been around 1% higher than the world average: credible, but not fantastic (African Development Bank 2012). The real story as it pertains to contemporary excitement about Africa seems to be in the upsurge of interest in Africa by formerly non-traditional actors. High economic growth in Africa must be understood in the context of the rise in importance of various “emerging powers” within the global political economy (Cornelissen 2009). The relationship that these “new” powers have with Africa has elevated the continent in the strategic thinking of the extant “traditional” (largely ex-colonial) partners. As one French minister was quoted as saying, “Thanks to the Chinese, we [have] rediscovered that Africa is not a continent of crises and misery, but one of 800-million consumers” (Business Day, October 19, 2007). Though this comment was directed at the “rise” of China in Africa (see Taylor 2009), it might be equally applied to relatively new sets of economic and political linkages. Embedded in “a fluid period of transition in the global balance of power and the international state system characterised by traditional and emerging powers”, the continent now plays a more prominent role in international politics (Kornegay and Landsberg 2009: 171). Obviously, of fundamental importance to Africa is what this development actually means. Indeed, such processes may be interpreted in alternative ways. It may be put forward that these new actors now emerging are merely exploitive and self-interested—overall just as damaging to Africa as the extant and well-established set of relations with the traditional powers. Alternatively, these new relationships may be seen as somehow reflecting SouthSouth values (whatever that may mean) and contributing to Africa’s

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developmental goals. This appears to be what many African elites believe. Yet it seems obvious that Africa is the weaker partner in these new relationships. Specifically regarding the BRICS, actors from those states are in Africa not because of some notional love of Africa or Africans, but for reasons based on capitalist logics. Interest in gaining access to natural resources in Africa is often central (Naidu et al. 2009: 3). As Kimenyi and Lewis (2011: 20) put it, the attention of emerging economies towards Africa “is not based on an altruistic goal to improve the economic well-being of Africans”. Instead, just like most other external actors, actors from emerging economies are “trying to maximise their own strategic economic and political interests by engaging with African countries”. Their relationships with SSA do not exhibit any notable “exceptionalism”, displaying patterns that are “broadly similar to those of SSA ‘traditional’ partners and mostly reinforce existing commodity-based export structures” (Sindzingre 2013: 45). This contrasts with the emerging economies’ diplomatic claims that their engagement with Africa is qualitatively different—and better—than that of the North, with relentless incantations about “South-South” ties, “solidarity”, “mutual benefits”, “win-win relations” and “partnerships”. A set of new relationships based on the intensification of natural resource extraction will be equally problematic. One of the key lessons for Africa from the financial crisis was that those countries that were more diversified generally tended to be more resilient than those that were highly dependent on a few primary commodities (Mutenyo 2011: 29). Reinscribing African dependence on commodities hardly offers any novel framework to emerging relationships with Africa and undermines the BRICS claims to be somehow “different”. Even if the emphasis placed by some of the BRICS on addressing structural bottlenecks in Africa has been beneficial for the continent, in the absence of serious reforms, new roads and railways will hardly make a sustainable and longterm contribution. This returns us to the question as to whether emerging economies’ increasing engagement with Africa is exploitative or benign. This question can only be answered in a contextual manner, depending on which actors from which emerging economy and in which sector of which country in Africa are being discussed. But it is important to remember that actors such as the BRICS have increased engagement with Africa as a means to achieve their own economic and political goals and that

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overall, Africa remains the weaker partner. The weakness is usually ascribed to the continent’s dependent status in the international system and Africa’s historic insertion into the global capitalist economy. However, dependence is “a historical process, a matrix of action”, that permits the prospect of alteration stemming from changes in the dynamics, processes and organisation of the international system and the fundamental tendencies within Africa’s political economy (Bayart 2000: 234). Current emergent trends, such as robust economic growth and an increasing diversification of the continent’s international relations, may play important roles in this regard, yet massive challenges remain. The bulk of the growth in African exports in the last decade or more has been heavily underpinned by mining-related commodities, which is deeply problematic in terms of development. After all, the export growth that the Asian economies used to leapfrog development was based on an increasing list of manufactured goods. Africa is nowhere near that position.

References Adamson, P. 2013. A Measure of Progress. New Internationalist, 460, March. African Development Bank. 2012. African Economic Outlook 2012. Paris: OECD. Ake, C. 1981. A Political Economy of Africa. Lagos: Longman Nigeria. Amin, S. 1974. Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. ———. 2002. Africa: Living on the Fringe. Monthly Review 53 (10): 41–50. ———. 2004. The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. ———. 2010. Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure. Oxford: Pambazuka Press. ———. 2014. Samir Amin: Pioneer of the Rise of the South. Heidelberg: Springer. Amoako, K. 2011. Transforming Africa: Start Now, We Can’t Wait. African Business, July. Anand, D. 2011. China and India: Postcolonial Informal Empires in the Emerging Global Order. Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture and Society 24 (1): 68–86. Ancharaz, V. 2011. Trade, Jobs and Growth in Africa: An Empirical Investigation of the Export-Led Jobless Growth Hypothesis. Paper Presented at the ICITE 3rd Regional Conference on Trade, Jobs and Inclusive Development, September 22, Gammarth, Tunisia.

38  I. TAYLOR Aryeetey, E., S. Devarajan, R. Kanbur, and L. Kasekunde. 2012. Overview. In Oxford Companion to the Economics of Africa, ed. E. Aryeety, S. Devarajan, R. Kanbur, and L. Kasekunde. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Austen, R. 1987. Africa in Economic History. Oxford: James Currey. Bayart, J.-F. 2000. Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion. African Affairs 99: 217–267. Carmody, P. 2013. The Rise of the BRICS in Africa: The Geopolitics of South-South Relations. London: Zed Books. Cornelissen, S. 2009. Awkward Embraces: Emerging and Established Powers and the Shifting Fortunes of Africa’s International Relations in the TwentyFirst Century. Politikon 36 (1): 5–26. Dowd, D. 1967. Some Issues of Economic Development and of Development Economics. Journal of Economic Issues 1 (3): 149–160. Fatton, R. 1999. Civil Society Revisited: Africa in the New Millennium. West Africa Review 1 (1): 2–18. Ferguson, J. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fioramonti, L. 2013. Gross Domestic Problem: The Politics Behind the World’s Most Powerful Number. London: Zed Books. First, R. 1982. The Barrel of a Gun. London: Penguin. Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Harris, D. 1975. The Political Economy of Africa: Underdevelopment or Revolution. In The Political Economy of Africa, ed. D. Harris, 1–47. New York: Schenkman. International Energy Agency. 2012. IEA Statistic: CO2 Emissions From Fuel Combustion: Highlights 2012. www.iea.org. Ivins, C. 2013. Inequality Matters: BRICS Inequalities Fact Sheet Rio de Janeiro: BRICS Policy Center. Kelsall, T. 2013. Business, Politics, and the State in Africa: Challenging the Orthodoxies on Growth and Transformation. London: Zed Books. Kimenyi, M., and Z. Lewis. 2011. The BRICs and the New Scramble for Africa. In Foresight Africa: The Continent’s Greatest Challenges and Opportunities for 2011, 19–21. New York: Brookings Institute. Kornegay, F., and C. Landsberg. 2009. Engaging Emerging Powers: Africa’s Search for a “Common Position”. Politikon 36 (1): 171–191. Kurečić, P., and G. Bandov. 2011. The Contemporary Role and Perspectives of the BRIC States in the World-Order. Elektronik Siyaset Bilimi Araştırmaları Dergisi 2 (2): 13–32. Lin, J., and D. Rosenblatt. 2012. Shifting Patterns of Economic Growth and Rethinking Development. Journal of Economic Policy Reform 15 (3): 171–194.

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Mafeje, A. 1992. In Search of Alternatives: A Collection of Essays on Revolutionary Theory. Harare: SAPES. Mahbubani, K. 2008. The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. New York, NY: PublicAffairs. ———. 2011. Can Asia Re-legitimize Global Governance? Review of International Political Economy 18 (1): 131–139. Markovitz, I. (ed.). 1987. Studies in Power and Class in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mbaye, J. n.d. New Colonialists: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: BRICS Relevance to the African Creative Economy. Mimeo. McKinsey Global Institute. 2010. Lions on the Move: The Progress and Potential of African Economies. London: McKinsey and Company. McMichael, P., J. Petras, and R. Rhodes. 1974. Imperialism and the Contradictions of Development. New Left Review 1 (85): 83–104. McMillan, M., and D. Rodrik. 2011. Globalization, Structural Change and Productivity Growth. NBER Working Paper No. 17143, June. Mentan, T. 2010. The State in Africa: An Analysis of Impacts of Historical Trajectories of Global Capitalist Expansion and Domination in the Continent. Bamenda: Langaa. Mignolo, W. 2012. The Role of BRICS Countries in the Becoming World Order: ‘Humanity’, Imperial/Colonial Difference and the Racial Distribution of Capital and Knowledge. Paper Presented at the International Conference, “Humanity and Difference in a Global Age” Organised by UNESCO, Tsinghua University and Universidade Candido Mendes, May 23–25, Beijing. Mutenyo, J. 2011. Driving Africa’s Growth Through Expanding Exports. In Foresight Africa: The Continent’s Greatest Challenges and Opportunities for 2011. New York: Brookings. Nabudere, D. 2011. Archie Mafeje: Scholar, Activist and Thinker. Pretoria: Africa Institute. Naidu, S., L. Corkin, and H. Herman. 2009. Introduction. Politikon 36 (1): 1–4. Petithomme, M. 2013. Much Ado About Nothing? The Limited Effects of Structural Adjustment Programmes and the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative on the Reduction of External Debts in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Empirical Analysis. African Journal of Political Science and International Relations 7 (2): 107–120. Rampa, F., B. Sanoussi, and E. Sidiropoulos. 2012. Leveraging South-South Cooperation for Africa’s Development. South African Journal of International Affairs 19 (2): 247–269. Rodney, W. 2012. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Oxford: Pambazuka Press. Sharma, R. 2014. The Ever-Emerging Markets: Why Economic Forecasts Fail. Foreign Affairs 93 (2): 52–56.

40  I. TAYLOR Shaw, T. 1985. Towards a Political Economy for Africa: The Dialectics of Dependence. London: Macmillan. Shivji, I. 1980. The State in the Dominated Social Formations of Africa: Some Theoretical Issues. International Social Science Journal 32 (4): 730–742. Sindzingre, A. 2013. The Ambivalent Impact of Commodities: Structural Change or Status Quo in Sub-Saharan Africa? South African Journal of International Affairs 20 (1): 23–55. Smith, N. 1990. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Southall, R. 2008. The “New Scramble” and Labour in Africa. Labour, Capital and Society 41 (2): 28–55. Szentes, T. 1971. The Political Economy of Underdevelopment. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Taylor, I. 2003. As Good as It Gets? Botswana’s “Democratic Development”. Journal of Contemporary African Studies 21 (2): 215–231. ———. 2009. China’s New Role in Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Taylor, S. 2012. Globalization and the Cultures of Business in Africa: From Patrimonialism to Profit. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. UNDESA. 2013. World Economic Situation and Prospects 2013: Global Outlook. New York: United Nations. UNECA. 2013. Africa-BRICS Cooperation: Implications for Growth, Employment and Structural Transformation. Addis Ababa: United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Warren, B. 1973. Imperialism and Capitalist Industrialisation. New Left Review 1 (81): 3–44. Weeks, J. 2010. A Study for Trade and Development Report 2010: Employment, Productivity and Growth in Africa South of the Sahara. Unpublished Paper, Centre for Development Policy and Research, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Williams, G. 1980. State and Society in Nigeria. Idanre: Afrografika Publishers. World Bank. 2013. Indicators. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator. World Economic Forum, The World Bank and The African Development Bank. 2011. The Africa Competitiveness Report 2011 Geneva: World Economic Forum.

CHAPTER 3

Reason and Number: African Reflections on Japan Seifudein Adem

1  Introduction Episode 4 of The Africans, a documentary series by Ali A. Mazrui (1986), begins with the exploration of the phenomenon he calls “Westernisation without modernisation”. Mazrui first tells us that he is in “an expensive hotel in West Africa”. He uses the facilities in that hotel to illustrate how Africans acquired “Western consumption patterns without Western skills”. The episode includes the following scene: Entering his hotel room, after wrestling with a broken door handle, Mazrui looks around and points out: “We have acquired Western consumption patterns…we like our radios, our air conditioners…when we can afford them…” He continues: “We have acquired Western tastes, but have we got Western skills to make them work? Let us see”, he muses, and walks to the radio and tries to turn it on. “It doesn’t work”, he says. Mazrui then goes to the Western-style bathroom, and opens the tap for cold water where he finds that there was cold water. He then tries the S. Adem (*)  Graduate School of Global Studies, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan Ali Mazrui Center for Higher Education Studies, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa © The Author(s) 2020 R. Anthony and U. Ruppert (eds.), Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7_3

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hot water tap. In bewilderment, he almost exclaims: “It has never been connected…there is no hot water pipe at all”. He proceeds slowly back to the bedroom and sees a booklet on the table near the phone and says: “[Here] is a very courteous hotel note, encouraging me to report to the management if there is anything wrong in the room”. He picks up the phone, listens closely and, with a smile on his face and turning to the camera, utters the following words: “You got it, [it is not working!]” Mazrui concludes: “We acquired Western tastes without Western skills”. What Mazrui said in 1986 about the “expensive” hotel in an unnamed country in West Africa applies to many similar hotels in other parts of the continent. But the anecdote is also relevant to my own experience in Japan, where I was surprised to see in the decade and a half I spent there, just the opposite of what Mazrui saw in West Africa. In Japan everything worked as it was supposed to. In this chapter, we share a perspective on why Japan was able, but Africa was unable, to acquire “Western skills” in spite of the fact that both made initial contacts with Western technology at about the same time. We will base the argument on my observations of Africa and Japan as well as the scholarship of Ali Mazrui (1933–2014), including his impressive repertoire of mesmerising theories and colourful concepts. We will also rely on archival materials based on the observations of a man widely regarded as the founder of modern education in Japan: Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835– 1901). In his Autobiography, Fukuzawa (1899: 215) noted: It was not until 1853 that a steamship was seen for the first time [in Japan]; it was only in 1855 that we began to study navigation from the Dutch in Nagasaki; by 1860, the science was sufficiently understood to enable us to sail a ship across to the Pacific. This means that about seven years after the first sight of a steamship, after only about five years of practice, the Japanese people made a trans-Pacific crossing without help from foreign experts.

Writing in 1969, the Japanese historian Daikichi Irokawa (1988: 7) similarly observed: A little over a hundred years ago the American Commodore Perry, led a small flotilla; he brought the samurai of this closed country a small model train as a present and set it in motion before their eyes. At first the Japanese watched the train fearfully from a safe distance, and when the

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engine began to move they uttered cries of astonishment and drew in their breath. Before long they were inspecting it closely, stroking it, and riding on it, and they kept this up throughout the day. A mere hundred years later those same Japanese, by themselves developed and built the highspeed ‘Hikari’ trains that travel along the Tokaido safely at speeds of two hundred kilometers an hour. And now they are exporting that technology to Perry’s country.

Japan succeeded in economic modernisation (hard modernisation) because it creatively synthesised the “Japanese Spirit” and “Western Techniques” [wakon yōsai]. That is what Fukuzawa and his compatriot were apparently suggesting above. It is about how the foundation of a “Rich Country, Strong Army” [fukoku kyohei] was laid. This was an organic development as well as a top-down strategy. More generally, Fukuzawa (1899: 215) also formulated hypotheses about the cause of and solution for Japan’s economic backwardness: Japan could not assert herself among the great nations of the world without full recognition and practice of ‘reason and number’ [jitsugaku]… ‘Chinese philosophy’ [kangaku] as the root of education was responsible for our obvious shortcomings.

Reason and number [jitsugaku] thus became the guiding principle of hard modernisation in Japan. But, in practice, what exactly did this principle entail? What were the manifestations of the divergent responses of Africa and Japan to the challenges of modernisation? And what are the insights that could be gained from comparing them? In the next two sections of this chapter we shall first introduce the “initial conditions” in Africa and Japan from a comparative perspective with a specific focus on the timeframes of precolonial Africa and Tokugawa Japan. These conditions pertain to geography, history and culture, conditions over which neither Japan nor Africa had had no or little control. They are remote causes of contemporary realities in both places. By focusing on strategies of development, section four compares the immediate reactions of Japanese and Africans after contacts were made with the West. These represent factors over which Japanese and Africans had had some control. As such, they qualify as the intermediate causes of the Japan-Africa development divergence. Section five concentrates on the political experiences of post-colonial Africa and post-Cold War Japan.

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Section six is about the seeming overlap between a set of cultural identities in Japan and Africa. Meiji reformers and post-colonial African leaders had had substantial control over the principles that guided their ideology and politics. In this sense, these factors could be seen as the proximate causes of the current state of affairs in both societies. The concluding section assesses possible lessons Africa could extract from the Japanese experience.

2  Comparative Geography and History Physical Isolation: Africa is a huge landmass, comprising an area roughly equivalent to at least that of the EU, US, China and India combined. It is 82 times larger than Japan. In addition to its large size, Africa’s North– South axis had impeded in the distant past the domestication of animals and plants as well as the birth and consolidation of different forms of social organisations (Diamond 2008: 83–89). Cultural Isolation: With its gigantic size and without adequate means for long-distance travel, African systems and values had also been insulated from the influence of, and interactions with, other cultures and value systems. The experience of Japan was quite different. Despite its image as an insular and isolated nation, Japan had been interacting with other cultures for more than a thousand years. Confucianism came to Japan from China about 1500 years ago. Buddhism, too, came to Japan from India through China around the same time. Japan had significantly borrowed from other cultures, especially from China and Korea. Temporal Isolation: Unlike Japan, African societies had been generally pre-literate societies where only oral tradition was utilised for transmitting knowledge from one generation to another. Furthermore, to be orally transmitted, the knowledge usually had to be respected and accepted by the transmitting generation. What this meant was that innovative heresies in Africa could not easily pass on from one generation to the next; there was no opportunity for succeeding generations to experiment with different ideas and refine them, a situation which effectively trapped Africa in an unchanging state. Now consider the situation in Japan. Here again, the experience of Japan was quite different. Some of the innovations made in Japan today contain ideas which had originated hundreds of years ago. When Fukuzawa called upon his compatriots to embrace “reason and number”, Japanese society was already a literate society; he stressed “reason and number” simply because he knew that they constituted the language of science.

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3  Comparative Culture Religion and Modernisation: In Africa the church/Christianity played the dual role of the vanguard of a new religion and of a secular Western civilisation. Neither the temple/Confucianism nor the shrine/Buddhism played such a role in Japan. In fact, after the Meiji period, the Japanese turned their back on what they called Eastern education which emphasised ethics and moral principles. In his own way, Fukuzawa (1893: 117– 118) put the emerging attitude towards “Eastern education” in these terms: When [James] Watt invented the steam engine and Adam Smith first formulated the laws of economics, they did not sit alone in the dark and experience an instantaneous enlightenment. It was because of long years of studying physical sciences that they were able to achieve their results. Even if you let Bodhidarma [the man who brought the teaching of Buddhism to China] sit in front of a wall for ninety years, he would never be able to invent the steam engine or the telegraph.

This was one way in which religion (broadly defined) played a positive role in Japan’s hard modernisation—by staying out of the process altogether. Although the role of religious institutions and symbols in modernising societies was supposed to decline, as we indicated above, in Africa the church served as the vanguard of the new religion of Christianity. It promoted both Christian spiritualism and Western secularism. Given that no comparable institution had played such a role in Japan, it is not inconceivable that the hard modernisation of Japan and soft Westernisation of Africa are partially attributable to this divergence. The other part would have to do with the agentic factors embedded in both societies. Monotheism and Polytheism: Religion played a positive role in Japan also in another way. Shintoism, a traditional Japanese belief system, is a polytheistic system of values. In this regard, Shintoism is not unlike many African traditional religions. Writing on Japan’s rapid industrialisation, Japanese historian Takeo Kuwabara (1983: 82) had in any case argued: Over all Japan’s myriad gods and deities, there is no single Allah or Jehovah, no monopolistic god that devours all the others…none of Japan’s thousands of gods has too much power. As the old maxim goes, ‘If one

46  S. ADEM god throws you, another god will pick you up’…I believe that the absence of an almighty God was instrumental in that success.

Simply put, for Kuwabara, religious values were crucial for the hard modernisation of Japan. Max Weber’s observations also bear a striking similarity to that of Takeo Kuwabara, in reverse. In reference to the difference in the attitudes of various religions towards economic life, Max Weber (1958: 30) thus invoked a contemporary proverb: “The Protestant prefers to eat well, the Catholic to sleep undisturbed”. Weber viewed Protestantism as fostering hard modernisation by inculcating certain favourable values in the minds of its followers; however, Kuwabara believed commitment to a monotheistic religion is restrictive and undermines flexibility.

4  Comparative Strategies of Development Diversification: Japan’s Meiji reformers proclaimed in 1868: “Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world” (Duke 2014: 47); in so doing, they effectively put in place the principle of learning from more than one source. Subsequently, Japanese borrowed ideas and institutions from others and, even more crucially, they borrowed from as many diverse sources as possible. Tobin (1992: 3) thus observed: The genius of the Japanese lies not in invention but in adaptation of Korean pottery, tombs and textiles; Chinese script and scripture; Dutch science and medicine; French education; English colonialism; German militarism; and American egalitarianism, corporate efficiency and popular culture.

More recently, Murphy (2014: 64) also noted: From Britain came shipbuilding, naval organisation, central banking, railroad technology, and the new outward trappings of the monarchy; from France, jurisprudence, fortification know-how, and medicine; from the United States, modern agriculture, development policies for frontier areas … and public education; from small lands such as Sweden and Switzerland, lessons in how weaker countries could deploy military strength sufficient to deter more powerful neighbours.

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Similarly, the observations by Beauchamp and Vardaman (1994: 4) centred on education: …a highly centralised administrative structure with an emphasis on staterun normal schools was borrowed from France; a system of higher education rooted in a handful of elite public universities was the German contribution; the English model of the Spartan-like, character-building preparatory schools stressing moral discipline fit nicely into the Japanese context, and from the United States came the model for elementary education, a number of pedagogical approaches, and an interest in vocational education.

Meiji Japan used two avenues for absorbing Western skills. One was through enthusiastically welcoming and attracting expatriate workers [oyatoi gaikokujin] to the country and utilising their skills for laying down the necessary infrastructure for hard modernisation (Burks 1990; Pedlar 1990). Second, there was the “expedition of practical observers”, in Emperor Meiji’s apt phrase (Duke 2014: 80), whereby Japan sent its nationals abroad to bring home the skills needed by their modernising country. The experience of Africa was quite different. Europe introduced new systems of ideas and institutions into Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; Africans did not have a say in the process of selecting which ideas and institutions to import. When the transition took place from the pre-colonial to colonial state system, Africa found itself in the twin crises of normative egalitarianism and territoriality, entrapped as it was between the Protestant ethic and the legacy of Westphalia (Mazrui 1984: 301–306). If Japan benefitted from the brain gain through sending training missions to Europe and North America and inviting in expatriate workers to Japan, nothing of this sort ever happened in Africa, which was under slavery and colonialism in roughly the same period. Even post-colonial African governments were less eager to attract foreign expatriates. On the contrary, African governments sometimes erected barriers even for African returnees, in effect, pushing away the continent’s own educated and highly needed skilled human power (Mazrui and Kaba 2016). Domestication: This is the process of making foreign products, institutions and ideas more relevant or useful to local needs. What earned three Japanese citizens the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014 was not the

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invention of a new product but the modification of an existing one. They modified a red and green light-emitting diode (LED) and created the more efficient blue LED. In this way the Japanese modified imported products, ideas and institutions, ranging from Confucianism to liberal democracy, and adapted them to local conditions with little concern about whether what was modified had, or did not have, any close resemblance to the original. One could thus say, without a hint of irony, that Japanese Confucianism is more Japanese than Confucian (Morishima 1982: 6). In the same vein, could we not say that Japanese capitalism is more Japanese than capitalistic? In order to answer this question, it may be helpful to look at the philosophical foundations of capitalism in the West and Japan, as they were articulated, respectively, by Adam Smith in 1776 and Shosan Suzuki in 1661. In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith (1776: 22) memorably wrote: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.

Adam Smith’s contemporary, Immanuel Kant, as quoted in Klitgaard (1988: 64), had also said: “A nation of merchants is a nation of swindlers”. Now comparatively consider the idea of Shosan Suzuki, the seventeenth century Japanese monk, who is regarded by some as the man most directly responsible for the development of capitalism in Japan: All is for the good of the world…The all-encompassing Buddha-nature manifests in us all works for the world’s good; without artisans, such as the blacksmith, there would be no tools; without officials there would be no order; without farmers there would be no food; without merchants, we would suffer inconvenience. All the other occupations as well are for the good of the world. (quoted in Shichihei 1992: 83)

Is this the case of Japanese capitalism being more Japanese than capitalistic (domestication) or is it a case for oriental capitalism (indigenisation)? It is apparent that the two systems seem to start from quite different premises. We will return to the concept of indigenisation in the next subsection.

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School curricula, too, could be domesticated. One way in which this could be done is by organising them according to local needs. In Japan, Meiji reformers emphasised the teaching of practical subjects, adapting the best elements from what was imported, those which would take them a step closer to building a “Rich Country, Strong Army”. In Africa, the emphasis on liberal arts and literary education accelerated in post-colonial universities. Practical training took the backseat. It was perhaps no coincidence that some of the most enlightened leaders of post-colonial Africa seemed more fascinated by the literary and ideological traditions of the West than by its scientific advancement. Was such divergent emphases both the cause and effect of Africa’s preoccupation with soft Westernisation and Japan’s excellence in hard modernisation? Was this why there were no African Ngugis, Soyinkas, and Achebes in physics or chemistry? Indeed Africa has produced more Nobel laureates in literature and peace than Japan; and Japan has produced far more Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry than Africa (Adebajo 2013: 3–37). In the following passage, Fukuzawa (1893: 114) drew a distinction between the studies of morality, on the one hand, and practical subjects, on the other: To test a man’s skill in sailing a ship, one can take him on board and have him take it out to sea…to judge a man’s medical skill, one can see if he can cure patients or not…In this manner, verification of results by seeing the actual proof, item by item is called concrete testing of actual skills… Therefore, when it comes to knowledge, there is no way to deceive others. An immoral man can put on an act and assume the outward appearance of a man of virtue, but a fool cannot for long masquerade as a wise man. This is why there are many pseudo gentlemen in the world but few pseudo intellectuals.

A similar relationship can perhaps be assumed to exist between the study of liberal arts and literary education, on the one hand, and the study of hard sciences, on the other. Was soft Westernisation therefore an easy thing to achieve? That is certainly not what Fukuzawa implied. In my view, the implication is that Africans excelled in the economically non-advantageous but more cerebrally demanding areas of human endeavour. As Fukuzawa (1893: 118) elaborated:

50  S. ADEM …learning is indispensable for progress, but once intelligence is acquired it cannot be lost, while morality is difficult to teach and difficult to learn, but by dint of interior exertion one can advance in it suddenly, or lose it just as suddenly.

Fukuzawa (1872–1876: 4) also observed: In essence, learning does not consist in such impractical pursuits as the study of obscure Chinese characters, reading ancient texts which are difficult to make out, or enjoying and writing poetry. These kinds of learning may be useful diversions, but they should not be regarded as highly as the Confucian and Japanese learning scholars have seen them since the ancient times…Such impractical studies should be relegated to a secondary position. The object of one’s primary efforts should be a practical learning that is closer to ordinary human needs.

Domestication thus has a long pedigree in Japan. But it is also true that if you cannot have a say in what to import, it is even harder to have a meaningful say in what to domesticate. Japan was never colonised; Africa was colonised. Consequently, Japan enjoyed significant “economic autonomy”. But we should also not fall into the trap of Occidentalism, the tendency to blame every economic and socio-political ill on Western colonialism. Never colonised except for a brief occupation by Italy, Ethiopia is, for instance, not unlike other African countries that had suffered colonialism. That is to say that if colonialism was the primary or sole explanation for Africa’s economic backwardness, Ethiopia would be a technically more advanced country in the world today. Indeed, in the 1920s and 1930s, Ethiopia’s approach to modernisation somewhat resembled that of Japan to some extent (Clarke III 2011). Both Ethiopia and Japan emphasised the positive role of education in social transformation, showing a readiness to adapt different systems of organisation and reject abstract and monopolistic intellectual traditions in their respective efforts to modernise their societies. However, although Emperor Haile Selassie was committed to Ethiopia’s modernisation, he was unwilling to devolve power as Emperor Meiji had done in Japan. Haile Selassie sought to perpetrate himself as “absolute monarch”. The question is whether this divergence explains the failure of Ethiopia and success of Japan.

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In any case, it was books by authors such as James Watt, Adam Smith, Friedrich List, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin which were translated into Japanese just after the nation realised how far it was lagging behind the West. Even decades before the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese Shogunate had created the so-called “Office for the Translation of Barbarian [Western] Books” (Clements 2015: 182). The Meiji government was also quick to create the Office for Western Studies in Tokyo. In this period there were significant translations into Japanese of Western works in the fields of medicine, the natural sciences, military technology and military strategy. Again, the experience of post-colonial Africa was quite different. Africa’s leaders were seemingly more swayed by the ideas of, among others, Shakespeare, John Milton and V. I. Lenin. If so, one wonders if African priorities were in the right order even after allowing for the unique set of challenges and options Africa was confronted with. Indigenisation: This strategy presupposed the use of indigenous resources, special cultural resources. It is a widely known fact that in the face of the pressure from and lure of Western ideas, indigenous knowledge was seriously marginalised in Africa. This was the case whether the issue was about how rain was formed or plants grew, or how diseases were cured. Africa’s post-independence modernisers often sought to transform traditional culture in a fundamental way with little or no attempt to incorporate the modern into the traditional, or vice versa. In the end, the old was badly dismantled and the new was not in place. The effort itself was never ill-intended of course, but the outcome almost always turned out to be disappointing. As Henley (2015: 25–26) has observed: “…one legacy of Africa’s deeper colonial transformation has been a persistent and counterproductive assumption of dualism, a conviction that economic progress can be achieved only by means of a quantum leap from backwardness into modernity”. In the immediate aftermath of the end of colonialism, Mazrui and Kaba (2016: 30) also noted, “African intellectuals had already become so mentally dependent that they themselves insisted on considerable imitation of Western educational systems – including the importation of Western media of instruction for African schools and universities”. Japan’s modernisers never sought to transform their culture in order to modernise. They saw to it that if there was a change, it was only incremental, often with some kind of linkage between the old and the new.

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The Japanese never doubted that they could be modern and traditional at the same time. For almost every modern institution in Japan today, the Japanese have a theory as to how it was presumably connected to some traditional institution in Japan. The Japanese thus sought to link traditional values to modern ideas; they integrated indigenous authenticity with universal rationalism. There should be little doubt therefore about the sincerity of Lisa Martineau (1993: 87) when she puzzled over “…how this country [Japan] manages to be at once an advanced industrial nation within an agrarian fantasy; in short, a high-tech feudal state”. But it was not only foreigners who were puzzled by the harmonious co-existence of tradition and modernity in Japan. Japanese historian Irokawa (1988: 3–4) similarly marvelled that his country was filled with “a strange wonder, at once ancient and new”. To sum up, Japanese are culturally flexible people. They show the proclivity and the versatility “to change in response to the needs of the times, rather than stubbornly clinging on” (Kuwabara 1983: 80). As Murphy (2014: 115) put it: As the Occupation ended, it was a relatively simple matter for the bureaucrats overseeing economic strategy to redeploy the tools at their disposal from military objectives to the goal of capturing as many dollar earnings as possible in export markets.

Much earlier, Ali Mazrui (1978: 7) had the same phenomenon in mind when he observed: Post-war Japan replaced the imperial Samurai with the businessman, the battalions with multinational corporations, and the honour-motivated hara-kiri with profit-motivated business.

The distinguished Japanologist Ruth Benedict (1996: 305) had also observed: “The Japanese sees that he has made an ‘error’ in embarking on a course of action which does not achieve its goal. When it fails, he discards it as a lost cause, for he is not conditioned to pursue lost causes. ‘It is no use’, he says, ‘biting one’s navel’”. But the views are far from uniform about the extent of the contribution of cultural flexibility to the hard modernisation of Japan. This is where imitation should also enter the discussion. It is evidently clear that the Japanese put a high premium on imitation (adaptation or

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domestication, as some would prefer to put it) than invention—and successful imitation is a virtue rather than a vice, irrespective of the society in which it takes place. World history affirms that no civilisation has risen to pre-eminence without in some way borrowing ideas from another civilisation. It is clear, too, that the Japanese are good imitators. What is more, they are excellent modifiers of what has been imitated. An example of a foreign idea that had been modified to fit domestic purpose, as we have already indicated, is Confucianism. Confucius regarded benevolence, justice, ceremony, knowledge and faith as among the most important virtues, but believed that out of these, benevolence should be at the heart of humanity. In Japan, it was loyalty rather than benevolence which came to be considered the most important virtue, and this became more and more the case as Japan approached the modern period (Morishima 1982: 3; Yoshino 1992: 160–162; Preston 2000: 27). Honna and Hoffer (1989: 148) came up with one cultural explanation for the underlying root of and the general attitude towards imitation in Japan: At the core of the Japanese culture lies the idea that imitation is an important process of basic education. The word manabu (to learn) and maneru (to imitate) are said to have derived from the same origin, manaberu, and students and apprentices are often told to follow their masters’ models before they acquire their own ideas and skills. Nor do Japanese always distinguish between imitation and creation. Rather, they regard practical application of science and requirements of prototypes of technology as no less creative than discoveries and inventions.

What is the place of imitation in African society today? I know for sure that the Amharic culture in Ethiopia, for instance, explicitly discourages imitation. Sew endebetu inji ende gorebetu aynorim [A man should live by his own home standards, not by those of his neighbours], so goes a common Amharic saying. In this type of cultural environment there would be little incentive not only for imitation but even for adaptation and domestication of what was not one’s own.

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5  Comparative Politics Let us now turn our attention to comparative politics in post-colonial Africa and post-Cold War Japan. The reason why post-colonial Africa is relevant is obvious; but what about post-Cold War Japan? Japanese political scientists called the 1990s “the years of trial” (Yoichi 2000). In that decade Japan changed its prime ministers nine times. Despite such a high frequency of change, political transitions were nevertheless peaceful. This simple observation led me to ask the following questions: Why was political change in Japan peaceful while in Africa it was often less so? Does culture play a part? The short answer to the second question is yes; the tentative answer to the first question has at least four overlapping parts. Politics as a Multiple Sum Game: Politics is not perceived in Japan as a zero-sum game, certainly not to the same extent as in Africa. The effectiveness of a politician is generally judged in Japan by the extent to which he/she could successfully make compromises between conflicting positions. One way of arriving at this type of compromise is by ensuring a loser of today could be a winner of tomorrow. In Africa, more often than not, if one loses a (sometimes violent and bloody) political contest, that marks the end of one’s political career, if not the end of one’s life. In much of Africa, the unwritten rule of the game seemed to be, unfortunately, if you are in a political contest, you have two choices: either to win and exterminate your opponents or to lose and be exterminated (Menkiti 2001). Beyond perception, political power in Africa brings concrete material rewards for whoever is clever enough or strong enough to capture it. This is one area where politics in contemporary Japan was at variance with its counterpart in Africa. Political Recycling: This refers to the public utilisation of senior statesmen who had been out of service for one reason or another. A net effect of political recycling is the institutionalisation of a multiple-sum game of politics, or its perception as such. The idea of political recycling fosters the desire among political contestants not only to be good losers but also gracious winners. In this dynamic also lies a condition of robust cooperation among political actors because of the large shadow of the future which guarantees that another encounter between the same political actors is almost inevitable and that defection under the circumstances becomes an unprofitable strategy. In Africa, the concept of political recycling is virtually unknown: if an individual usurps political power, he realises that that is his only chance and should cling to it by all means.

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A most enabling factor for the vibrancy and healthy functioning of political recycling in Japan has been the transient nature of hierarchy. Even though Japanese tend to view things hierarchically, real or imagined, political hierarchy is also seen as transient. It does not therefore bother Keiichi Miyazawa, the former prime minister of Japan, to work as a Finance Minister two years after stepping down as prime minister. The same is true about former Prime Minister Hashimoto, and many other ex-prime ministers. One recent example is the case of Taro Aso, who served as the 92nd Prime Minister of Japan from 2008 to 2009. Aso serves today as the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s cabinet. According to the available evidence, Africa has never produced a leader who has been at the helm and lost office, only to come back to serve in the national government in a position less senior than one he had held previously. Victor without Vanquished: The win-win perspective described above also stems from and informs the distinct nature of conflict resolution in Japan. In 1877, Takamori Saigo rose up against the Meiji reformers in a rebellion that ultimately claimed thousands of Japanese lives. After the conflict ended, Saigo came to be described as “a misguided patriot”. In fact, a statute was subsequently erected in Saigo’s name, which stands to this day in Tokyo’s Ueno Park. Japan’s political culture seems to favour good rather than right if, for the sake of argument, we disregard the fact that what is, and is not, good, and what is, and is not, right, are themselves culturally contingent. We say this because in Japan’s system of conflict resolution, morality usually means establishing harmony, rather than justice. The nature of conflict resolution in Africa is more clear-cut: loser and winner. As indicated above, the Japanese follow the “winner without loser” formula. In conflict resolution mechanisms of contemporary African politics, in general it is as if political contestants are unable to grasp that they have won unless their opponents are humiliatingly defeated, and crushed—metaphorically speaking, but sometimes even literally. Civilian Supremacy: Even a cursory look at the professional background of post-WWII Japanese prime ministers reveals that they come from diverse civilian backgrounds. The overwhelming majority of them had at one time or another acquired professional training or experience

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in economics or related fields; virtually all of them had attended a handful of select elite universities in the country. The situation in Africa is quite different. In many cases, those who occupy the highest offices are also the powerful; those who are powerful have for the most part a military background, either as former leaders of liberation movements or as defence ministers or senior officers in the military. The identities and backgrounds of these individuals also seemingly condition them to perceive politics as a zero-sum game.

6  Comparative Socio-cultural Ideologies Many years ago, Afro-Japanese studies scholar John Edward Philips (1998) observed: …it is clear from the example of Japan that the use of non-Western languages and writing systems, and the belief in non-Western religions, is no barrier to becoming an advanced industrial society. Thus the Japanese experience in industrialisation is more important to the developing world, especially Africa, than that of any other industrialised country.

But we could even go further and argue that “non-Western” Africa and Japan are closer culturally than it is generally recognised. We must turn again to Ali Mazrui to clarify this point. In Mazrui’s (2001: 97–131) conceptualisation, there are many traditions or socio-cultural ideologies in Africa. Included among them are the elder and sage traditions (also see Presberg 2001). In Japan, too, the two traditions are alive and well. The question is: how were these traditions utilised for achieving hard modernisation in Japan? The Elder Tradition: It is a well-known fact that the Japanese place a higher premium on age and experience than on ideology (Campbell 1977). The principle of seniority through which party and government leaders are elected to office is a practical manifestation of this. With a handful of exceptions, all of the post-WWII prime ministers of Japan were senior both in age and experience to the next in line. Political recycling—the process of utilising the expertise of leaders in preceding governments even after they were displaced by new ones—is not unrelated to this tradition. Greatly stabilising the system, political recycling enabled by the elder tradition serves as a basis for political continuity.

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The Sage Tradition: This tradition is connected to that element of Japanese political thought which conceptualises leadership as the task of the wise (Marshall 1977). The tradition supplements the elder tradition since the wise person is usually one with a wealth of experience who, in most cases, would also be relatively senior in age. Age is therefore a factor in the sage tradition, but it is not the decisive one. What seems to be more important is the acquisition of an acceptable level of formal education, preferably in one of Japan’s elite universities, a situation which in turn gives a sense of shared experience among key political actors. Many Japanese prime ministers and senior officials have been graduates of Keio University in Tokyo, which, incidentally, was founded by Yukichi Fukuzawa—the founder of modern education in Japan.

7  Conclusion After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the Japanese asked themselves why their country was lagging behind the West in scientific advancement. They identified the culprit as the influence of classical “Chinese learning” [kangaku], which emphasised moral principles and ethics. They then asked themselves whether they could modernise without being westernised. The answer was an emphatic yes. Turning their back on Chinese learning to a great extent, they indigenised what was imported from the West and idealised what was indigenous. When post-colonial African leaders sought to ask themselves a similar question, whether Africa could modernise without being Western, soft Westernisation was already in place but without hard modernisation. For more than half a century after independence, Africa has been unable to transform the structure of dependency and economic underdevelopment because the process of decolonisation was simultaneously the process of replacing the Western “other” with the Westernised “self”. The literary and verbal culture of the West (soft Westernisation) continued to be transmitted rather than the technological technics of the West (hard modernisation). Japan succeeded in hard modernisation. Africa succeeded in soft Westernisation. The explanation for the disparity lies in their divergent responses to challenges of modernisation, which were in turn mediated by geographic, historical, cultural and ideological variables. Japanese were willing and able to resist the spread of Western values in their society; they nevertheless borrowed (Western) technics and anchored them in their traditions. Westernisation in Africa was too soft to prevent

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Africa’s scientific marginalisation; but it was too deep to inspire the innovative potentials of Africa’s own traditions. The challenges Africa faced in the immediate aftermath of the colonial period were also (perceived to be) not only different from what Japan saw but also (viewed as) less stark and less urgent. In the case of Meiji and post-Meiji Japan, the challenges of economic modernisation were framed in existential terms—as a matter of survival for the nation. In post-colonial Africa, the issue, as important as it was, was never seen as a matter of “do or die”, even if no influential African leader was prepared to go as far as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah (1957: 164) and assert: “Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all things shall be added unto you”. Nkrumah could not have been more wrong on this, unfortunately.

References Adebajo, A. 2013. Obama’s Nobel Ancestors: From Bunch to Barack and Beyond. In Africa’s Peacemakers: Nobel Peace Laureates of African Descent, ed. A. Adebajo, 3–37. London: Zed Books. Beauchamp, E.R., and J.M. Vardaman Jr. 1994. Japanese Education Since 1945: A Documentary Study. Armonk: M. E Sharpe. Benedict, R. 1996. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle. Burks, A.W. 1990. The Yatoi Phenomenon: An Early Experiment in Technical Assistance. In Foreign Employees in Nineteenth Century Japan, ed. E.R. Beauchamp and A. Iriye, 5–15. Boulder, San Francisco, and London: Westview Press. Campbell, J.C. 1977. The Old People Boom and Japanese Policy-Making. Journal of Japanese Studies 5 (20): 321–357. Clarke, J. Calvitt. 2011. Alliance of the Colored People: Ethiopia and Japan Before World War II. Oxford, UK: James Currey. Clements, R. 2015. A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan. New York: Cambridge University Press. Diamond, J. 2008. Why Did Human History Unfold Differently on Different Continents for the Last 13,000 Years? In Development and Underdevelopment: The Political Economy of Global Inequality, ed. M.A. Seligson and J.T. Passe Smith, 83–89. Boulder: Rienner. Duke, B. 2014. The History of Modern Japanese Education. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Fukuzawa, Y. [1899] 1966. Autobiography, trans. Eiichi Kiyooka. New York: Columbia University Press.

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———. [1893] 2008. An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, trans. D.A. Dilworth and G.C. Hurst III. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. [1872–1876] 2012. An Encouragement of Learning, trans. D.A. Dilworth. Tokyo: Keio University Press. Henley, D. 2015. Asia-Africa Development Divergence: A Question of Intent. London: Zed Books. Honna, N., and B. Hoffer. 1989. An English Dictionary of Japanese Way of Thinking. Tokyo: Yuhikaku. Irokawa, D. 1988. The Culture of the Meiji Period, trans. Marius B. Jansen. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Klitgaard, R. 1988. Controlling Corruption. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kuwabara, T. 1983. Japan and Western Civilization: Essays on Comparative Culture. Tokyo: The University of Tokyo Press. Marshall, B.K. 1977. Professors and Politics: The Meiji Academic Elite. The Journal of Japanese Studies 3 (1): 71–97. Martineau, L. 1993. Caught in a Mirror: Reflections of Japan. London: Macmillan. Mazrui, A. 1978. The Barrel of the Gun and the Barrel of Oil in North-South Equation. World Orders Model Project. Working Paper No. 5. New York: Institute for World Orders. ———. 1984. Africa Entrapped: Between the Protestant Ethic and the Legacy of Westphalia. In The Expansion of International Society, ed. H. Bull and A. Watson, 289–308. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1986. The Africans: A Triple Heritage. PBS Video. ———. 2001. Ideology and African Political Culture. In Explorations in African Political Thought: Identity, Community, Ethics, ed. T. Kiros, 97–131. New York and London: Routledge. Mazrui, A., and J. Kaba. 2016. The African Intelligentsia: Domestic Decline and Global Ascent. Trenton: Africa World Press. Menkiti, I.A. 2001. Normative Instability as Source of Africa’s Political Disorder. In Explorations in African Political Thought: Identity, Community, Ethics, ed. T. Kiros, 133–149. New York and London: Routledge. Morishima, M. 1982. Why Japan Succeeded: Western Technology and the Japanese Ethos. New York: Cambridge University Press. Murphy, R.T. 2014. Japan and the Shackles of the Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nkrumah, K. 1957. The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. Edinburgh and New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons. Pedlar, N. 1990. The Imported Pioneer: Westerners Who Helped Build Modern Japan. Sandgate, Folkestone, and Kent: Japan Library Ltd.

60  S. ADEM Philips, J.E. 1998. Making the Most of TICAD II: Africa and Japan Are Still Worlds Apart. The Japan Times, December 28. Presberg, G.M. 2001. The Wisdom of African Sages. In Explorations in African Political Thought: Identity, Community, Ethics, ed. T. Kiros, 7–20. New York and London: Routledge. Preston, P.W. 2000. Understanding Modern Japan: A Political Economy of Development, Culture and Global Power. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage. Shichihei, Y. 1992. The Spirit of Japanese Capitalism and Selected Essays. Lanham: Madison Books. Smith, A. [1776] 1993. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. K. Sutherland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tobin, J. 1992. Re-made in Japan: Everyday Life and Consumer Taste in a Changing Society. New Haven: Yale University Press. Weber, M. 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Yoichi, M. 2000. Years of Trial: Japan in the 1990s. Tokyo: Japan Echo Inc. Yoshino, K. 1992. Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A Sociological Enquiry. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 4

The Globalisation of Foreign Investment in Africa: In Comes the Dragon Adams Bodomo and Dewei Che

1  Introduction What is the globalisation of foreign investment in Africa and what role is China playing in this global phenomenon; why is China doing this, and how should the country of the Dragon manage it in the foreseeable future for the promotion of Africa-China relations? This paper addresses these main issues by first proposing a conceptualisation of the globalisation of foreign investment (Bodomo 2011, 2017) as one of the most salient concepts of the early twenty-first century, and then, as our specific contribution, arguing that China’s role in this process has led to a paradigm shift as opposed to an additive effect on the African investment scene. It concludes with proposals for how Africa and China can manage this situation to promote Africa–China socio-economic relations.

A. Bodomo (*) · D. Che  University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] D. Che e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Anthony and U. Ruppert (eds.), Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7_4

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1.1   Globalising Foreign Investment in Africa The twenty-first century era of globalisation has opened up many investment alternatives for Africa. There is now a rush by many governments and private companies from the West, China, and other parts of the world to invest in Africa to the extent that we can begin to talk of a process of worldwide investment (Asiedu 2002; Saibu 2004; Anyanwu 2012). At the turn of the Millennium, foreign investment in Africa was only worth about USD10 billion. By 2014, the number had climbed to USD 54 billion according to the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 2015 report. As stated in a 2017 report commissioned by McKinsey & Company, nowadays China is already Africa’s biggest economic partner (Table 1). Indeed, in order to emphasise this intensified process, we may talk of the globalisation of investment in Africa. The use of the term globalisation of investment in this paper and in several other works (e.g. Bodomo 2011; Chase-Dunn 1989) aims thus to describe this vast proliferation of investment from all corners of the globe into Africa. To understand this globalisation of investment, we need to put the term globalisation itself in context. There are many definitions and theoretical viewpoints on globalisation from works such as Meyer (1980), Meyer et al. (1997), Robertson (1992), Steger (2009), and Wallerstein (1998). In this paper we propose the following definition of the term globalisation (which focuses on the technological, and not just the

Table 1  International trade, aid and investment: select country data Goods trade, 2015, USD billion

FDI stock, 2014E,a USD billion

China, 188 India, 59

U.S., 79 U.K., 71

France, 57 U.S., 53 Germany, 46 #1

FDI growth, 2010–2014, %

Aid, 2015, USD Infrastructure billion financing, 2015, USD billion

China, 25 U.S., 10 South Africa, 13 United Arab Emirates, 7 France, 70 U.K., 11 China, 6 China, 32 U.S., 10 U.K., 6 South Africa, 30 France, 6 Germany, 4 #4 #1 #3

McKinsey report (Sun et al. 2017) aEstimated according to compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2009 to 2012

China, 21 France, 3 Japan, 2 Germany, 1 India, 1 #1

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economic, aspects of globalisation): Globalisation is a process which involves an increasing interaction of people of different cultures, languages, and identities as more and more efficient transportation and communications technologies facilitate the movement of peoples, goods, and services across vast expanses of the world. There are many theoretical dimensions to this definition and conceptualisation of globalisation, including the socio-political, socio-economic, and socio-cultural; we shall be looking closely in this paper at how this global flow of capital investments into Africa affects African lives politically, economically, and culturally. Foreign investment is an integral component of some of these goods and services mentioned in various definitions of globalisation (that may be found in any works on globalisation by scholars such as Robertson (1992) and Wallerstein (1998), including the one we have advanced in this paper. We may indeed define the Globalisation of Investment in Africa as a process which involves the transformation of the socio-economic, socio-political, and socio-cultural lives of Africans as more and more foreign investors and the foreign investments they bring from across all parts of the world move into the African continent, and how Africans react to and manage this scenario. The term as defined here is quite specific (rather than generic) and is different from the term “investment globalisation”, which is defined by some scholars (e.g. Chase-Dunn 1989) as the proportion of all invested capital in the world that is owned by non-nationals. Some of the questions we ask include the following: can Africa manage this scenario of the globalisation of investment well enough to boost its socio-economic development? How would this affect African lives politically, economically, and culturally? And what is China’s role in this constellation?1 1.2   In Comes the Dragon—Chinese Investment in Africa Two of the most fundamental questions to pose and address in this paper are: why is China investing so much in Africa, and how has China’s investment in Africa shaped up the investment stratosphere of the second largest continent in the world? It is not that China was not present in Africa before the turn of the Millennium. Indeed, the history of 1 This chapter focuses on Chinese FDI. For a discussion of FDI from traditional partners such as the EU countries, see Bodomo (2011).

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Africa–China relations goes back to the fifteenth century or earlier when a Chinese sailor, Admiral Zheng He, sailed to the East African Coast on a trading mission. The second significant event involving Africa and China (this time in the context of larger Africa-Asia relations) is the Bandung Conference—a conference that brought together for the first time mostly independent African and Asian countries in the Indonesian city of Bandung in 1955. The aim was to form an alliance against colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism; and to work together for economic development. Since then many African countries and China have established diplomatic relations. China, as a player in the Cold War era, characterised by superpower skirmishes between East and West for ideological and economic influence in different parts of developing world, was always present in Africa throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Indeed, it carried out one of the largest development projects in the World—the Tazara railway (linking the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to inland Zambia) which took five years to construct and was completed in 1974 (Monson 2009). The Tazara Railway project constitutes an epitome of Africa–China relations, especially in the area of development assistance. Because of this and many other projects, China has achieved a lot of political capital and a large amount of trust from many African leaders, which has resulted in crucial support to China on many occasions from African countries, especially in matters of voting and endorsements within the aegis of the UN. But China’s Cold War era presence in Africa is nothing compared to the intensified way it refocused its attention on the African continent from the 1990s, especially at the turn of the Millennium until now. The year 2000 saw the creation of FOCAC, the third most significant event in the development of Africa–China relations. FOCAC is a triennial gathering of African and Chinese leaders alternating between African capitals and Beijing at which various development cooperation agendas are outlined and assessed. So far, we have had FOCAC 2000 in Beijing, FOCAC 2003 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, FOCAC 2006 again in Beijing, FOCAC 2009 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, FOCAC 2012 back in Beijing, FOCAC 2015 in Johannesburg, South Africa and FOCAC 2018 returning to Beijing. This model of cooperation, which emphasises a “win-win” political-economic partnership where African natural resources like minerals and farm products are exchanged for Chinese infrastructure construction in Africa, has indeed been emulated by other investment competitors such as India

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(Broadman 2008; Chand 2011; Mathews 2011; Mawdsley and McCann 2011) and Turkey (Amra 2001; Vicky 2011). In this paper, we argue that a paradigm shift occurred with China’s twenty-first century intensified foray into Africa in search of oil and other raw materials to fuel its rapidly growing economy. This paradigm shift (which might itself be said to have been triggered by China’s decision to move away from Mao-era communism towards a freer market economy) can be calibrated in at least three ways: in terms of the volume of engagement with regards to trade and investment figures and the sheer number of infrastructure projects; in terms of the speed and efficiency with which investment projects are completed; and in terms of the discourse on trade, investment, and even development assistance.2 We develop this argument by outlining in section two some of the main features of Chinese investment in Africa that distinguish it from Europe and other competitors. In section three, to give a concise description of the quiet investment revolution that China appears to be engineering in Africa and across the globe, we focus on the new phenomenon of global growth companies (Kiggundu and Ji 2008), a group of high-growth, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), many of them from China, that are emerging as the movers and shakers of globalisation of investment that we have described in this paper thus far. Section four offers a brief discussion of how China works in tandem with other investment competitors in Africa and what lessons these competitors can learn from China’s success. Section five summarises and concludes the paper.

2  Features of Chinese Investment in Africa—A Paradigm Shift So why is China in Africa? Or in other words, what accounts for China’s increasing economic activities in recent times? There are claims that China is in Africa mainly because it is badly in need of African resources to fuel its rapidly growing economy (Chin 2014; Deepak 2014; Mhandara et al. 2013; Rich and Recker 2013; Bodomo 2016; Okolo and Akwu 2016). China not only engages Africa for economic reasons 2 Other partners such as Japan and India may have done similar things to smaller degrees but the Chinese engagement is a complete paradigm shift exactly in terms of the three ways outlined: volume, efficiency, and the very discourse of trade, investment and development assistance.

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but also to gain political capital and enhance its soft power status; thus, it would not be fair to say that it is just there for resources. However, it would be fair to say that China has dramatically increased its investment presence in Africa because of one important item: oil! Here is why. Figures from various sources in 2010 (e.g. Skarica 2010) showed that the Chinese economy consumed 10 million barrels of oil a day in that year—making it thus approximately 3.65 billion barrels that year (which is seen in the oil industry as a substantially large figure). The number could be much higher now, about 4 billion barrels and increasingly so (CNBC 2016). For instance, the State-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) sees the country’s oil demand rising to 566 million tonnes, or 11.32 million barrels per day in 2016, some 460,000 barrels per day higher than in 2015 (ibid.). This would make China the largest consumer of oil in the world, due largely to its high-speed economic growth, spurred on by rapid industrialisation, especially in its Pearl River Basin. So where does China secure its oil from, and where will it source oil from in the future? West Asia (or the so-called Middle East) is still China’s main source of oil (for instance, it received 45 million tonnes of oil from Saudi Arabia, its largest supplier of oil in 2010 and in 2014 it received 16% of crude oil imports from Saudi Arabia) (Cunningham 2015) but West Asia is not that stable politically and security-wise (especially with the expanding presence of Islamist groups in Iraq, Syria and adjoining areas in the region); moreover there is much more competition with the US for oil in West Asia. Africa has the largest known reserves of oil and its oil is among the best in the world in terms of quality, so China has very few alternatives left but to engage Africa more intensively in terms of investment in its extractive and other resource exploitation industries. Moreover, as mentioned above, the most realistic alternative to Africa, West Asia, is less stable than Africa, security-wise. To begin to answer the questions stated at the beginning of this paper, we claim here that China’s re-engagement with Africa in the twenty-first century constitutes a paradigm shift that has completely altered the investment stratosphere (stratosphere here being defined as the entire gamut of the economic sector that needs capital injection). This paradigm shift is characterised by three distinctive aspects of Chinese investments: (i) conditions, yes, but conditionalities, no— leading to speedy and efficient completion of massive infrastructure investment projects, (ii) equality of partnerships, and (iii) more

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investment than aid. These three types are basically direct contrasts to what we see with European investment in Africa (Bodomo 2011), so there inherently has to be a comparison (Taylor 2006; Meidan 2006; Downs 2007a, b). Let us address each in turn. 2.1   Conditions of Engagement but No Conditionalities One myth about Chinese forays into Africa seems to be that China’s engagement with African governments is unconditional—i.e. investment decisions are made without asking questions of a political nature. The reality, however, is that China negotiates conditions of engagement, the most important of which is the “One-China” policy. The “One-China” policy opposes Taiwan declaring independence and calling itself the Republic of China, as seen by the government in Taipei, as opposed to the People’s Republic of China, which is the official name of China, as viewed by the government in Beijing. Indeed, almost all African countries adhere to this principle, with the exception of Swaziland, which China does all it can to woo back by negotiating to initiate investments if they agree to switch. This is a typical example showing that China does actually negotiate conditions of engagement, rather than impose conditionalities, as the West does; conditions being understood here as agreements arrived at based, more or less, on symmetrical business negotiations whereas conditionalities are seen as rules imposed on business transactions based on asymmetrical negotiation standpoints. Conditions do not have consequences on the sovereignty of African countries as China only request African support to implement its One-China policy. Conditionalities on the other hand, as demanded by the West, do impinge on the sovereignty of African countries, especially in situations where the Western country or the International Monetary Fund (a pro-Western institution) demands democratisation or even regime change before investment programmes can be implemented. Because of this, Beijing has succeeded in setting up investment programmes more speedily and efficiently than many of its European competitors. 2.2   Equality of Partnerships This last point about negotiating conditions brings us to the issue of equal partnerships. A particularly attractive and rather refreshing approach that China brings to Africa with regards to investment is

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what we will call here a new language of engagement. China comes to Africa with words and phrases in its lexicon bag like “brother”, “comrades in arms against neo-colonialism”, “people of the developing world comparing notes”, “win-win” partnerships and so many other terms, all of which centre around the theme of “South-South” Cooperation. Given decades of neo-colonial discourse involving former European colonial masters handing down conditionalities on its former African subjects, this approach from China is rather refreshing to anti-imperialist movements in Africa and is indeed music to the ears of many African leaders tired of being dictated to by the West.3 China refrains from being judgemental about the internal political machinations of African countries, as opposed to the West’s socio-political conditionalities, including the need for so-called dictatorships to democratise before investment can begin. This ability to separate divisive, asymmetrical political machinations from investment is a major ingredient helping China’s engagement in Africa. 2.3   Aid Versus Investment Another feature about Chinese engagement in Africa in the twenty-first century is that it now focuses more on investment (and trade) than on aid. While both the West and China have undertaken vast development aid and humanitarian aid programmes in Africa, China has, at the turn of the Millennium, focused more on trade and investment than on aid, while the West still sticks to the old paradigm of viewing Africa as a humanitarian burden that must be addressed with “aid” packages, even after many African analyses (e.g. Moyo 2009, 2010; Bodomo 2013; McKinsey report (i.e. Sun et al. 2017); Sun 2017) have shown that Africa needs more trade and investment than foreign aid. While it is the case that China sometimes refers to what the West calls “aid” as “development assistance”, this cannot be seen as just a matter of semantic parsing. Certainly, a loan given at below-market interest rates sounds more like developmental assistance than “aid”, since “aid” implies some altruistic venture and is thus a misnomer! 3 An anonymous reviewer has challenged this view of Africa–China relations by claiming that “[r]hetoric and reality are two different entities…”. To this I, the first author, say he or she is entitled to his or her opinion while I am entitled to mine in outlining all facets of the Chinese engagements. One thing I am sure about is that I find the discourse of Western imposition of conditionalities on Africa nauseating, to say the least!

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Given these three features of Chinese investment and many more, China has shaped up Africa’s investment stratosphere in a rather profound way, to the extent that we can talk of a paradigm shift away from the Western approach to investment in Africa. China is certainly not just following in the footsteps of the West and simply adding to how the former colonial masters did in terms of investment in Africa; China’s engagement is not an additive engagement; rather, it is creating a paradigm shift by charting a different path to investment in Africa. This has resulted in a massive injection of investment capital into Africa from China. According to Berger (2007), figures from the African Development Bank (ADB) show that “…in 2006 Chinese investment in Africa amounted to USD 11.7 billion. In the same year bilateral trade reached USD 55.5 billion, an increase of 40% from 2005. In October 2007, trade volume soared 30%. One third of China’s crude oil exports are now coming from Africa, with Angola as the largest single exporting country since early 2006”. The numbers have been dramatically increasing in subsequent years. For instance, in 2014, bilateral trade between China and Africa trade surpassed USD 220 billion, a 22-fold growth since 2000, and China’s investment stock in Africa exceeded USD 30 billion, a 60-fold growth (Yanshuo 2015). Recently, China has presented even bigger opportunities to Africa and the world, including China’s BRI and China’s three new global-development finance institutions: the USD 100 billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the USD 100 billion New Development Bank (NDB, otherwise known as the BRICS Bank), and the 40 billion Silk Road Fund. These figures represent a strong paradigm shift from what was happening on the African investment scene before the era of globalisation of investment. In the next section, we shall look at another phenomenon that is likely to shape the future of Chinese investment in Africa—the concept of Global Growth Companies as emerging leaders on the African investment scene.

3  Global Growth Companies According to Kiggundu and Ji (2008), a typical global growth company may be generally conceptualised as “… a new, high-growth and SME (gross revenue range from 100 million to 5 billion USD) which has demonstrated a clear potential to become a leader in the global economy based on factors such as its business model, growth record, internationalisation, leadership, innovation, and the market or markets it serves”.

70  A. BODOMO AND D. CHE Table 2  A partial list of the 2014 global growth companies in greater Chinaa

City Super Group Deppon Express Guangxi Liugong Machinery Hanergy Holding Group HK Maxim’s Group Plateno Hotels Groups Proya Cosmetics Rainbow Group Shandong Hi-tech Chemical Group Shenzhen Energy Solareast Wowprime Yangzijiang Shipbuilding Yuantong Express aWorld

Hong Kong China China China Hong Kong China China Macau China China China China China China

Economic Forum (2014)

Apart from established Chinese companies including China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), Aluminum Corp. of China Ltd. and CNPC, which are already doing investment and trade business in Africa or currently looking for acquisitions in Africa, including buying iron ore, oil and copper assets to feed China’s growing economy, there are many other emerging companies from China, as seen below in Table 2 (for global growth companies from other emerging countries, see Bodomo 2011). Some of these companies are either already in Africa or beginning to prospect for business investment on the continent. The future of investment will be greatly shaped by these companies, in the sense that they, in our opinion, more than established companies such as CNPC and Shell, reach out to up and coming local companies dotted all over China to either acquire them or do joint business with them, and they are likely to see Africa and other Global South markets as avenues in which to expand their businesses. They thus, in most cases, stand a chance of affecting middle-class incomes in profound ways, mostly in a more positive way in terms of raising income levels for middle-class business investors. The intention of this brief analysis is to draw attention to these global growth companies as the companies to watch for in the future in terms of fundamental changes in Chinese private company investments in Africa, another aspect of China’s paradigm shift approach to investment. In the next section we will briefly outline what lessons the West and other competitors on the African investment scene can learn from China.

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4  China’s Success in Africa: Lessons for Other Investors The most important lesson any contemporary investor can learn from China is risk-taking with regards to investment in Africa (Schneidman and Wiegert 2018). In fact, prior to the era of globalisation of investment—the proliferation of investment by many foreign investors from all corners of the globe—Africa was faced with what many referred to as the marginalisation of Africa (Hagen 2002; Bouët et al. 2007). The end of the Cold War in the 1990s was read, mistakenly by some people, to mean that Africa would no longer be an important geopolitical region, and much less economically so. However, China read otherwise and while others appeared to not be paying attention, China entered Africa in full force at the turn of the Millennium, venturing into wartorn and unstable political economies. The result was that it paid off handsomely. A case in point is Angola. Angola was embroiled in civil war for 25 years and just as the end of the war was in sight in 2002, China entered and invested heavily in Angola’s oil sector (which no country was doing at the time). Its infrastructure building programmes, like the construction of the Benguela railway, succeeded in facilitating the export of oil and other natural resources such as minerals and agricultural products and facilitated inter-regional transportation between Angola and neighbouring countries. As of 2014, Angola was China’s second-largest supplier of oil, following Saudi Arabia, accounting for 13% of China’s crude oil imports. While Angola may be selling crude oil to Western countries like the US, it is certainly trading more with China (Statista, n.d.). China has also taken risks in many other countries like Sudan, South Sudan, and Zimbabwe which are either politically unstable or are seen to be countries where many of their leaders are dictatorial and are involved with human rights violations (Sautman and Yan 2009). Again, these issues should not prevent investors from investing in such countries. Investment must supersede politics; moreover, it is actually morally wrong to deny the populations of such countries much-needed investment and its attendant benefits like employment in the oil and allied sectors. These investments, if well regulated, can lead to better standards of living, so they should not be blocked just because one perceives that the leaders there are undemocratic and corrupt.

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5  Conclusion In this paper we have addressed two important questions: why is China strongly present in Africa and how has it shaped up the investment scene in Africa? As seen in this paper, China’s fast-growing economy means that it needs more than 10 million barrels of oil a day. It thus had to look beyond West Asia and other places to Africa for oil. As of 2007, China obtained almost 1/3 of its oil needs from Africa (Shinn 2007). In doing so, it has completely shaped up the investment sphere and has completely rewritten the rules about how to invest profitably in Africa— thus creating a paradigm shift that is making its competitors from around the globe sit up. Three main features have brought about this paradigm shift of success in Africa: the negotiation of symmetrical conditions rather than imposing asymmetrical conditionalities; a new language revolving around “brotherhood” and equality of partnerships; and more investment than aid. The topic of investment is important, not only in itself, but also in bringing to the fore many of the current concepts often involved in rethinking Africa-Asian relationships, including soft power (Hartig 2015; Wassermann 2015; Van Staden 2015), symmetry (Bodomo 2009, 2015), and agency (Mohan and Lampert 2012). How would the future of this investment shape up? In future we should expect more global growth companies, many of them private, as well as small-scale Chinese entrepreneurs acting solely on their own, to be the drivers of Chinese investment in Africa. Does the fact that China has rewritten the rules about successful investment in Africa mean that there is no room for improvement on the Chinese side? No, much still needs to be done. Faced with competitors and criticism mainly from Europe and other parts of the West, but also from some people within Africa itself who claim that what China is doing in Africa is far from its stated goal of “equal partnership”, China doesn’t seem to have done a good enough job of explaining itself and justifying what it does in Africa and how it does it (Bodomo 2015, 2016). Rather than being only reactive,4 it needs to constructively engage 4 For instance, in an April 8, 2017 news article titled: Chinese Mission angry over galamsey, rather than constructively engaging the stakeholders involved, the Chinese ambassador in Ghana is reported to be blaming the country’s news media for reporting harshly on Chinese activities in the illegal surface mining industry, called “galamsey” in Ghana (Nyabor 2017).

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stakeholders and address the myths and realities of the effects of its investment in Africa. For instance, it needs to rein in its own private companies and private individual Chinese investors and traders in Africa by coordinating and working with African governments and human rights organisations to identify such companies and engage them.5 This is because Chinese in Africa are seen by many Africans and other observers to be the face of the Chinese government and state, and any wrong and reprehensible behaviour on the part of an individual Chinese or Chinese company tends to be interpreted by the average person on the African street as the responsibility of the Chinese government. Finally, and rather surprisingly, the impression about the discourse surrounding Chinese investment in Africa is as if the country of the Dragon has completely forgotten about other parts of the world and turned its attention massively to Africa. Nothing can be further from the truth if we look at the statistics: even though China gets almost 1/3 of all its oil imports from Africa, only about 4% of its total FDI outflows goes to Africa (Baah and Jauch 2009)! In fact, China, under various programmes such as the BRI (Ju 2015), invests for more in Asia and Europe than in Africa. This means that there is a lot of room for improvement as far as commitment to investing in Africa is concerned. For instance, rather than just concentrating heavily on oil (which only less than half of African countries have at present, investment must go beyond “palaces and petroleum” (Kiggundu 2011), i.e. it must do more than just speedily building infrastructure to facilitate its oil and natural resource extraction; it must diversify into other areas such as agro-business. And this is especially poignant if we understand that Europe, India, and many other competing investment players are repositioning themselves to compete with China in Africa (for instance, at the last Africa-India summit in

5 An anonymous reviewer has challenged this notion of telling China to contain its own populations in Africa by claiming that since “there are more than 2000 companies [in Africa], it would be impossible to coordinate various activities.” I think this would be a huge excuse on the part of China to not do anything to rein in its own populations committing crimes in Africa. The first author has researched the African presence in Guangzhou and other parts of China quite extensively and can attest clearly that on several occasions local governments have often appealed to ambassadors and other diplomats (and even me as a researcher) to do something to impress on our fellow Africans to stop committing crimes in China. Why can’t this be told to Chinese committing crimes in Africa?

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October 2015 in New Delhi, India pledged a USD 10 billion investment in Africa and 50,000 scholarships for African students to study in India) (Haidar 2015). If China can avoid these and other pitfalls, it can play an even more effective role in the second and subsequent decades of this twenty-first century globalisation of foreign investment in Africa. Acknowledgements   The authors thank the reviewers and especially the editors of this book, Ross Anthony and Uta Rupert, for closely reading through the paper and making critical comments and suggestions that improved the content. All errors remain the authors’ responsibility.

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Sautman, B., and H. Yan. 2009. Trade, Investment, Power and the China-inAfrica Discourse. The Asia-Pacific Journal 52 (3): 1–23. Schneidman, W., and J. Wiegert. 2018. Competing in Africa: China, the European Union, and the United States. Brookings. https://www.brookings. edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2018/04/16/competing-in-africa-china-the-european-union-and-the-united-states/. Accessed 22 May 2018. Shinn, D. 2007. Africa, China, the United States, and Oil. Centre for Strategic and International Studies. https://www.csis.org/analysis/africa-china-unitedstates-and-oil. Accessed 18 Apr 2018. Skarica, D. 2010. The Great Super Cycle: Profit from the Coming Inflation Tidal Wave and Dollar Devaluation. Hoboken: Wiley. Statista. n.d. Breakdown of China’s Crude Imports in 2014, by Source Country. https://www.statista.com/statistics/221765/chenese-oil-imports-by-country/. Accessed 22 May 2018. Steger, M. 2009. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sun, I. 2017. The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. Sun, I., K. Jayaram, and O. Kassiri. 2017. Dance of the Lions and Dragons: How Are Africa and China Engaging and How Will the Partnership Evolve? McKinsey & Company. Taylor, I. 2006. China’s Oil Diplomacy in Africa. International Affairs 82 (5): 937–959. UNCTAD. 2015. World Investment Report 2015: Reforming International Investment Governance. United Nations Publication. http://unctad.org/en/ PublicationsLibrary/wir2015_en.pdf. Accessed 27 Mar 2016. Van Staden. C. 2015. Hostile Imaginaries: Internet Activism, the Poaching Controversy and Chinese Soft Power in Africa. Paper read at the Afraso Conference on Africa-Asia Encounters, March 24–26, Cape Town. Vicky, A. 2011. Turkey Moves into Africa. Le Monde Diplomatique. http:// mondediplo.com/2011/05/08turkey. Accessed 4 July 2011. Wallerstein, I.M. 1998. Utopistics: Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-First Century. New York: The New Press. Wassermann, H. 2015. China-Africa Media Contestations and Collaborations. Paper read at the Afraso Conference on Africa-Asia Encounters, March 24–26, Cape Town. Wold Economic Forum. 2014. List of Global Growth Companies Honorees 2014.  http://www3.weforum.org/docs/AMNC14/Media/AMNC14_ GCC_Greater%20China%20Honorees.pdf. Accessed 27 Mar 2016. Yanshuo, N. 2015. In Search of Synergy. Beijing Review, December 17. http://www.bjreview.com/Current_Issue/Editor_Choice/201512/ t20151214_800044690.html. Accessed 27 Mar 2016.

CHAPTER 5

Indian Influence on Nigeria’s Development: Challenges, Lessons and Possibilities Joseph C. A. Agbakoba

1  Introduction This paper intends to look at relationships between colonial and post-colonial India and the territory that became Nigeria before and after independence from Britain, especially in the sphere of politics and economics. The paper departs from the view that Africa’s relationship with emerging Asian countries (including Nigeria’s relationship with the newly emerged economic powers of Asia) is structurally the same as that between Africa and the West, namely Africa being a supplier of raw materials in the form of commodities and an importer of finished products from Asia. However, in spite of this similarity in structure, especially in the field of the economy, there are interactions, relations and exchanges between Africa and Asia, particularly between Nigeria and India, that are unique, especially in the sphere of culture and ideas, which can help us understand the evolution of Nigeria better and point to lessons and possibilities regarding Nigeria’s and Africa’s development more broadly. The purpose of this paper is to explore these interactions, relations and exchanges and their impact, lessons and potentials. J. C. A. Agbakoba (*)  University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria © The Author(s) 2020 R. Anthony and U. Ruppert (eds.), Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7_5

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Historically, from pre-colonial times, Muslims have lived in Northern Nigeria, and they might be expected to share in the Muslim view of India as the fabled land of knowledge. Since the first millennium, or thereabouts, Muslims built a picture of India as the land from whence knowledge springs: “For Islam, India had the same aura of mystery as Egypt had had for Europe in more recent years: consequently, if it was necessary to give a subject greater authority, an Indian source was invoked by Islamic writers” (Skinner 1980: 20). It was to India that Halaf al-Barbari (the immediate successor of Idris, the Arabic equivalent of the Greek Hermes Trismegistos) journeyed in search of knowledge, specifically geomancy (ibid.: 21). It is not easy to explain why this is so. Perhaps the reason lies in their obtaining of Hindu numerals, generally known in the West as Arabic or Hindu-Arabic numerals, from the Indian subcontinent, which revolutionised mathematics with the positional notation of zero, in addition to other ideas relating to mathematics that were picked up from India. Looking in a southerly direction, the hitherto animist and more recently Christian lands in Southern Nigeria have had a different, but related, picture of India. In this view, India is the fabled land of magic. It is in India that one can find the most potent forms of magical powers and charms. Stories abound of how some powerful politicians sourced their protective and offensive charms and paranormal powers from India. On a more comical note, Femi Adesina, the special adviser on media and publicity to Muhammadu Buhari, the President of Nigeria, introduced the story of his recent visit to India by recalling the explanation that many a Nigerian has heard sometime in their lives of why India does not participate in the football World Cup and other big international games (a rather false notion in the first instance): What had I heard about India? You probably heard those childhood tales too. India: the land of potent talisman. India does not take part in world soccer competitions because the world football body, FIFA, had banned it for life. What was the offence? Well, France had to meet with a country that nobody knows, in a game of soccer. But instead of depending on natural skills, India deployed its famed talisman. The opponents kept kicking the air because the Indians had made the ball invisible. (Adesina 2015: 48)

This view of India was reinforced by some of the earlier products of the Indian film industry. It should be mentioned that across Nigeria, Indian

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films have enjoyed a very good audience for many decades, not least for the dance and displays of spirituality and magic some of them display. India has, however, had a far more serious impact on Nigerians than its films alone. This is because India has, since the turn of the century, been an exemplar for Nigeria in the spheres of politics and the economy in a number of ways.

2   An Overview of India’s Presence in Nigeria in the Twentieth Century During the twentieth century, India led the British-colonised nations of the world in anti-colonialism, nationalism and the struggle for independence. In this, Gandhi’s indomitable spirit and cultural, political and economic nationalism was highly admired, as well as his methods, tactics and intellectual output. Gandhi’s bold message of cultural and political equality, as well as his advocacy of a superior Hindu-based cultural alternative to Western civilisation, resonated in Nigeria and across Africa more broadly. He was the leader who showed the way—in how to regain lost dignity and freedom from the imperialists as well as how to manage the realities of the imposed imperialist structures. He opened the eyes of Africans to anti-colonial possibilities and the management of post-colonial realities. Gandhi’s collaborators such as Nehru were also admired but to a lesser degree. A leading Nigerian nationalist and anti-colonialist, Obafemi Awolowo, an ardent federalist, who later became the first premier of Nigeria’s Western Region, writes in this regard (1960: 160): In the early thirties, I was a fanatical admirer of the Indian National Congress, and of its illustrious leaders – Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Nehru, and Subha Bose. My acquaintance with the Congress and its leaders was, if I remember rightly, first made through the pages of the Lagos Daily News in 1928. The acquaintance deepened through other media…one of the pronouncements of the Indian Leaders which struck the right chord in me was the one relating to the revision of provincial boundaries along linguistic lines, in the reframing of the country’s constitution. If this was done, it would mean that apart from the Indian Parliament, each linguistic group would have its own legislature and government…I had no doubt on which side I would be – the federalist side.

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Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the leading anti-colonialist and nationalist in Nigeria from the late 1930s to 1950s, who later became the first President of Nigeria, appears to have modelled himself in some ways after Gandhi, including in his preference for non-violence, so it is no surprise that he was referred to as the Gandhi of Africa (ibid.: 137).1 Also, in many ways, was the campaign of economic and cultural nationalism spearheaded by Mbonu Ojike, who was nicknamed “boycott all boycottables” because of his call exhorting Nigerians to boycott all non-essential imports and patronise local products and cultural items (including especially, items of clothing and food) (Isichei 1976: 235). He, for instance, popularised the substitution of the use of “Mr” with “Mazi”, the Igbo equivalent; and “He preferred palm wine to imported gin and promoted the wearing of African clothes among elite civil servants” (Wikipedia)—which at that time might have had some unwholesome consequences for the African in the colonial public service. Ojike led his cultural nationalism by example and in this, he was very much like a student of Gandhi. After independence, the part taken by India was also admired by Nigeria. The socialist-leaning Pandit Nehru—on account of serving the interests of India’s cultural identity, his discomfort with certain aspects of Stalinism and perhaps historical ties with Britain—tried to stir a middle course between the communist, authoritarian Eastern Bloc and the capitalist, democratic Western Bloc. India retained the multi-party Westminster democratic model while leaning heavily towards socialism in the sphere of the socio-economy. Nehru went on to develop the idea and doctrine of non-alignment, which became the Non Aligned Movement (NAM)—nations that neither adhered to, nor belonged to either bloc, but rather steered a course beneficial to their own interests, including the maintenance of their sovereignty, dignity and visions of development. The NAM also served to foster an independent political and cultural identity as well encourage the hope that the non-aligned nations could mediate between the two blocs while having gainful bilateral and multilateral relations with nations on both sides of the divide. Africans emerging from political servitude were wary of losing independence again in any guise to either the Eastern or Western powers due to the Cold War, 1 I should say, though, Azikiwe did not have the asceticism and renunciation that was associated with Gandhi and which he weaponised and deployed against the British in the form of hunger strikes to raise public awareness and force the British to change policies.

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in which they really had no stake. Neutrality afforded the possibility of weighing into settle issues between warring factions, which at the same time would give them some power over their former colonial masters. Thus, the model of non-alignment was very appealing to African nations such as Nigeria; they readily joined India and swelled the ranks of nonaligned nations.2 It is a mark of the appeal of India in those early years of decolonisation that the government of Nigeria undertook to send its personnel to India for training, especially military training for her officers.3 It should be pointed out, though, that the economic policies that came out of India’s ideological experiment with a Third Way were muddled and disastrous for India and most of the nations that followed her lead, because they could never deliver capitalist-based development nor Stalinist-style economic progress. In addition, the Third Way led to a certain degree of diplomatic isolation in relation to the two great power blocs. While India was too big to be really harmed by this policy politically, African states, on the contrary, were mostly small, without powerful friends, isolated and vulnerable, leading to successful foreign-inspired coups against some of them, notably Congo and Ghana. The advent of coups in Africa, beginning with Congo, spread political instability across the continent. Nigeria had its own coup in January 1966, with disastrous consequences that paralleled that of Congo.

3  Indians and Other Asians in the Nigerian Business Environment Asians in Nigeria today are mostly business people or employed in the private sector. This was not the case in the 1970s and 1980s, especially for Indians in Nigeria. During this period, a large number of Indians

2 Nigeria joined NAM in 1964, three years after it was formed in 1961; within ten years of its formation (which approximates the decade of independence in Africa), some thirty-six African states joined the NAM. 3 Numerous Nigerian military officers were sent to India for training. In a sense, this movement to India was a factor in the failure of the first coup in Nigeria in January, 1966 (see Ademoyega 1981: 64 and 69). The NAM nations were engaged in as many bilateral and multilateral relations (South-South relations) as they could muster as a counterpoint to relations with former colonial powers. The military was a sphere in which self-reliance (of the South) was highly desirable.

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migrated to Nigeria in search of jobs, which they found mostly in secondary and tertiary schools and research institutions. India was seen as a fellow third-world country that had fallen on hard times due to drought and famine. These Indians left the country towards the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s when Nigeria sank to its lowest ebb so far economically and politically. Today, Indians are mostly in business and the private sector. However, like other Asians, they can rarely be found in the downstream side of the economy as is the case in many other African countries. Asians can hardly be seen in small and medium-size businesses of any type—trading, manufacturing, agriculture, etc. The reason is that Nigerians are very competitive at these levels. This is not something new; even in the 1960s the Asian presence in the economy was more visible in big businesses, such as Chanrai and Kwellarams, which were large supermarkets owned by Indians. However, today, as Nigerians try to get into or maintain themselves in large businesses, they encounter competition from Asians and other foreigners and complain of foreign takeover of their businesses— businesses that should be theirs on grounds of nativity. They generally put up protectionist arguments, pointing to the various benefits of local and national control of their line of business. We see this, for instance, in the complaints of indigenous licensed customs agents, who are said to be “fighting the battle of their lives to control a larger market share of the juicy import and export business” (Usim 2016: 6). Nigeria operates the Cost Insurance and Freight (CIF) system that “gives powers to shippers to negotiate for freight and determine who clears the goods on arrival…So what happens now is that since most of our cargoes come from Asia, you see Lebanese, Indians and Chinese doing the clearing of this consignments”, to the detriment of Nigerians and the possible loss of 10,000 jobs according to the Nigerian agents and their supporters (ibid.). These Nigerian agents are simply concerned about their personal interest, which they cast as the interest of Nigeria. This could be seen in the fact that they do not address the reasons why Nigeria came to this liberal CIF system in the first instance, or discuss the dangers of a Nigerian monopoly. Nigeria apparently came to the liberal CIF system because of some problems and issues with operations and services at the ports. These protectionists do not show how the problems that the CIF system solves would be solved under their protectionist regime. Further, it does not seem that such protectionism will indeed favour the Nigerian workers in this sector because Asians do not really

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employ many of their own below the managerial levels and it would not matter much to the Nigerian worker if a business concern is owned by a Nigerian or an Indian. This is because compared to Western concerns and the Nigerian public service, Asian businesses as well as the Nigerian private sector in general (with the exception of multinationals and big public limited companies), commonly offer workers less remuneration for man-hours, less welfare packages and less protection against hazards in workplaces. On a general note, Nigerians complain of the business practices of Asians and of their racism—which the experiences of Nigerians in India, China and some other parts of Asia tend to support (The Conversation 2016). Conversely, Asians complain of the underhanded practices of Nigerian business people and workers. Generally, however, Indians are more entrenched than most other Asians in the Nigerian business environment, having been in Nigeria longer than new arrivals like the Chinese; besides, they can readily apply the acumen and approaches gained at home to the Nigerian context, because of similarities in income levels, political and administrative history and some cultural traits. Further, Nigerians seem to be more confident in Indian products than Chinese ones, especially in the area of pharmaceuticals. Indians and India, it would appear, have not succumbed to the penchant of Nigerian business people to import poor quality products that sell cheaply; they would rather offer better quality products at slightly higher prices, so buyers have a higher opinion of Indian products. Nigerian and Indian local producers, apparently, seem to realise that their chances of staying in business lie in producing better quality goods than the Chinese (who flood the markets directly or indirectly with cheap, glittering but poor quality products) and to make the public see them in such a light. Consequently, the business interests of Nigerian and Indian local producers appear to intersect. This is especially apparent in the new campaign of the government and private sector producers encouraging Nigerians to buy goods made in Nigeria as a consequence of the drastic fall in oil prices and the attendant weakening of the Nigerian naira against the dollar. In spite of warnings from scholars and experts, Nigeria had remained an import economy, unduly dependent on oil as its main source of foreign revenue and investing little of her foreign revenue in local production. These adverse conditions have forced the government and consumers to look inwards, much to the delight of the tiny and struggling manufacturing sector, whose members, both Nigerian and

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foreign, have been urging the government and its agencies to be more protectionist. In this regard, one can see a rise in Indian activism with Indian businessman, Sanjay Kumar, urging government to take specifically very strong and detailed protectionist policies in his sphere of business, steel; the Federal Government, he says, should enact “a local content policy which will make it mandatory to use made in Nigeria iron rods in all small and big government projects and, as well prevent dumping of foreign steel products in the country” (Adigun 2015: 21–22). This is indicative of strong Indian participation in Nigerian public affairs and how integrated they are in the country. Indeed, it should not be strange to see an Indian make such a policy pitch as they are more embedded in the economy generally than most other Asians, as indicated above. Indians can thus play significant catalytic developmental roles in the economy as they once did politically in the days of anti-colonialism. The longevity of their engagement in Nigeria is not the sole reason—in qualitative terms of cultural orientation, history, institutions, practices and wealth, Indians are closer to Nigerians and Nigeria. In this regard, both Nigerians and Indians are mostly educated in the same language, English; they have the same British legacy in terms of institutions and public values (especially freedoms, rights, democracy, individualism, educational orientation and institutions) and struggles against colonisation; the fact that India has apparently preserved these values well, if anything, reinforces the possibilities of India providing a role model for Nigeria. This possibility came out clearly in the speeches of African and Indian leaders at the Third India-Africa Forum Summit, held in New Delhi in October 2015, and attended by forty-one heads of state. In the opening session, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, said, “The dreams of one-third of humanity have come together under one roof. Today, the heartbeat of 1.25 billion Indians and 1.25 billion Africans are in rhythm…India is honoured to be a development partner for Africa. It is a partnership beyond strategic and economic benefits. It is formed from the emotional bonds we share, and the solidarity we feel for each other” (Adesina 2015: 48). These emotional bonds and solidarity were built, as I have indicated above, in “the shared history of Indian and many African states”, which President Buhari of Nigeria mentioned in his speech (ibid.: 42).

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4  Challenges, Lessons and Prospects Indians and Nigerians have addressed colonisation and racism with broadly the same sort of identitarian, nativist competitive responses. Gandhi led the way in this as already indicated. He espoused swadeshi (self-reliance) and swaraj (self-rule) for India based on his modernised formulation of Hinduism, all of which, together, to him presented a better alternative to the materialistic, grasping, violent and dehumanising philosophy and practice of the colonisers. This advocacy of a philosophical and ideological alternative to the ideology and practice of the colonisers, is one of his most profound and indispensable contributions to anti-colonialism because it made the people come to believe in themselves, their worth and dignity, perhaps even superiority, and mobilised them to remove the colonisers and their demeaning ideology and practice. Gandhi did not just start out rejecting the British and their ideology. Indeed, he initially embraced the colonisers, their ideology and achievements to a very high extent and so was himself initially a racist who, in South Africa, wanted a position on the white side of the racial divide, even if it was somewhat lower than that of the British (Herman 2008: 129–132). This was, however, denied to him. He was not inclined to any rebellion against the system while living in India or England. The anger and radicalisation of Gandhi, who at this stage held segregationist ideas, came with the placement of the Indian (including the respectable and educated ones, such as him) at the level of the African in South Africa’s nascent apartheid system (ibid.: 129–132). With Gandhi, the rebellion and rejection of the coloniser started with and centered on the denigration of the Indian identity and person by colonial racism. Winston Churchill acknowledged, in this regard, that Britain lost her empire on account of racism, saying, “‘When I was a subaltern the Indian did not seem to me equal to the white man’… It was an attitude that he had belatedly come to realise, had hurt the Raj” (ibid.: 604). A major consequence of colonial racism is that Indian anti-colonial and post-colonial engagements have been shrouded largely by nativist identitarian concerns and objectives. In Nigeria, it was also identitarian concerns that fired anti-colonisation. Many African communities in Nigeria, after initial resistance and struggles, acquiesced to the imperialist regime and her Pax Britannica. Writing of the discussions between his father and his colleagues about

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the newly established British rule, Awolowo says, “They were in the habit of discussing the white man’s regime, often referring to it with awe and admiration. Occasionally there was some criticism too. As for the praise…the white man’s suppression of intertribal war, his abolition of slavery and the slave trade, his sense of justice and fair play – all these I remember, were warmly eulogised” (1960: 17). During the initial stages of colonisation, before the turn of the twentieth century, it was possible for suitably qualified Africans to hold high positions in the public and private sector. British imperial policy soon turned against this and became racist and discriminatory. Africans regardless of their qualifications could not hold high offices or superintend native Britons, and racist theories were used to justify these. Further, this came at a time when Nigerians were increasingly receiving Western education and becoming certified by educational institutions in Britain, British colonies and the West. The result was the rapid growth of frustration and resentment among Africans with the colonial racist system, who mobilised to overthrow it. However, the nativist identitarian response to colonialism has a good possibility of evolving into an enduring nativist identitarian lens through which post-colonial affairs are observed and handled, leading to post-colonial anti-racist and anti-White overreactions—in terms of illiberality, used here in the sense of an attitude, even policy, of vengefulness or retribution regarding any sign of racism (regardless of its substantiality), and in racial and cultural matters, which, though different from economic and political illiberality, could induce or reinforce them.4 4 A good example of this nativist illiberality can be seen in Patrice Lumumba’s impromptu and unscheduled speech against the King of Belgium in the Independence Day celebrations of Congo. Lumumba, being the Prime Minister, was not supposed or scheduled to respond to the address of the Belgian King, according to protocol. The King, however, had given a speech in which he lauded the contributions of the Belgians to the making of Congo and called for collaboration between the two states in the post-colonial era. Lumumba immediately intervened before the President of Congo, Mr. Joseph Kasa Vubu, could give his response, and gave a speech rebuking the Belgian King that was widely interpreted as insulting given the context. His speech recounted the racisms, oppressions, brutalities, deaths, exploitations, etc., that the Belgians had visited on the Congolese, which the Congolese, after much suffering and death would happily be free of. The Belgians from the speech were not a force for civilisation, as claimed by the King, but a retrogressive force (see “Democratic Republic of the Congo: Marred”, The Guardian, July 1, 1960). The Belgian King left the scene immediately in fury and the ceremony derailed, though not permanently; the King was persuaded to rejoin the ceremony after about some

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One of the consequences of post-colonial nativist illiberality is the limitation of the possibilities of economic development within the global capitalist order, as can be seen when one contrasts India and Nigeria’s experience with that of some Far East countries. Nigeria, for instance, in the spirit of post-colonial nativist illiberality, adopted the so-called Africanisation policy (established earlier by Nkrumah in Ghana), which rapidly replaced experienced colonial staff with fresh inexperienced university and college graduates from Nigeria or Africa as a way of banishing racism and demonstrating that Africans, contrary to racist claims, can handle the public service well. The Nigerian public service has since then progressively deteriorated and its weakness is cited as one of the major factors that militated against Nigeria’s emergence as a developmental state (Meyns and Musamba 2010: 21–26). Further, as already indicated, nativist illiberality induces or reinforces wrongheaded economic nationalism in the developing economies. This manifested in Nigeria in the form of the “Nigerianisation Policy” of the early 1970s, which expropriated multinationals in Nigeria in favour of local Nigerian investors. The companies that were so expropriated progressively lost their shine in the Nigerian economy,—one amongst many negative consequences of that policy. The response of British India and Nigeria to colonisation contrasts with that of British Far Eastern colonies and former colonies. In Hong Kong, the Chinese majority population refused to engage in anti-colonialism, the independence movement and democracy, preferring the British to take care of politics and public administration while the locals engaged in business. In Singapore (and largely also Malaysia), governments rapidly transited from anti-colonisation to in-depth developmentarian collaboration with the former colonial powers and globally established capitalist economies. This was not because of a lack of racism in the Far

two hours. This diplomatic gaffe indicated that Lumumba was most likely to see the levels of profit required to attract and keep Western capitalist investments, not as incentives to attract Western interests but as a continuation of Western capitalist, colonialist exploitations. Belgium, the USA and other Western powers went on to support the secessionist movement in mineral-rich Katanga province, against Lumumba, and through this group, killed him, after which civil war and the retrogressive Western-supported dictatorship of Mobuto followed. This happened to Lumumba because he had no powerful globally having declared that he was not a communist and hence having no binding alliance with the Soviet Bloc. India was not strong enough to come to his rescue.

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Eastern colonies of Britain (racism was generally the same and the idea of the “coolie” or “sami” of Asia is no better than that of the “boy” of Africa) but rather a certain refusal by the Far Easterners (mostly of Chinese extraction) to view their post-independence relationship with the British principally in identitarian, political terms. Rather, they pursued a more pragmatic, developmentarian approach, especially in the form of administrative and entrepreneurial learning processes and facilitations. The relationship was seen mostly in terms of total effects of exchanges—assets and liabilities and the limitations and possibilities that went with them—aided likely by Taoist philosophical principles and thinking in terms of yin and yang limitations and transitions.5 In other words, developmental capitalism (the developmental state model), which involves the mutual affirmation of capitalism, its logic, protocols and concomitants of progress, by both the developing state and the old established capitalist states of the world, took root more in East Asia than Africa because of the more pragmatic and less identitarian, liberal nature of the post-colonial approaches of the East Asian states to the Western former imperial powers. This liberal developmental pragmatism contrasts with nativist illiberality and is rooted in the nature of the forms of responses to colonialism and colonial racism, which in turn are highly influenced by culture (especial values, beliefs and knowledge forms) and history, and their impact on personality formation and agential capabilities and orientation. The liberal developmental outlook is built on magnanimity, reconciliation, tolerance and cooperation in building a better future, and it is also pragmatic and Western capitalist oriented in the context of this

5 Yin and Yang are inseparable Taoist principles that underlie all change in the universe. Yin is negative (female) and Yang is positive (male); the one dovetails into the other. With these, any given change is seen as a transition from negative to positive or vice versa. Further, things do not remain forever positive or negative; they would always transit from negative to positive and back again. This sort of thinking can readily enable one to realise that states, causes, events, ideas, etc. do not remain intrinsically negative or positive but transit from one of these states to the other in their total effects in given situations. There are, of course, African ideas that encourage changes in thought and orientation as circumstances change, such as the Igbo adage “aroyalia egwu, aroyalia akwa”, literally, “when the music tunes and choreography change, the costumes of the dancers change”. Such ideas, however, do not have the status of fundamental philosophical principles that characterise reality generally as the Yin-Yang, and so are likely to be less impactful on behaviour and agency.

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paper. This approach opens the possibilities of vigorous integrative capitalist development collaboration (such as the type seen in the Far East and Botswana). It does this by drawing a line between the needs and demands of the anti-colonial struggle and the needs and demands of the newly independent state. These include the prioritisation of, and focus on, the aspects of development deemed fundamental, namely, economic development within the global capitalist framework and its political and social pre-conditions and concomitants, as well as the inception of a new life focused completely on the demands of the latter, thus presenting the developmental state model (see generally Woo-Cumings 1999). Nigeria, in a sense following India, held to a nativist, largely illiberal, identitarian approach as mentioned above and did not develop anything comparable with the developmental state model, Indeed, neither nation has, as yet, produced any viable alternative approach to development. It should be mentioned here that it is not for lack of effort that alternative development approaches did not flourish: efforts were made in the past but they did not seem viable, functional or acceptable for diverse reasons. For instance, Gandhi’s concept of a Luddite, low-technology, peasant state was not accepted by Indians, nor can it in any way appeal to any but the extremely ascetic. On the other hand, the non-alignment and mixed economy approach pursued by the Indian and Nigerian governments could deliver neither Stalinist-type economic progress (which remains the model for economic progress on socialist economic lines) nor Western-type capitalist development, as mentioned above. Today, African states, including Nigeria, look a good deal beyond India to the Far East for inspiration, ideas and funds for development: to China and her “win-win” approach and other versions of the developmental state model, such as that of South Korea, all of which promote what I may describe as the Far East’s “integrative collaborative capitalist” approach to development. Integrative collaborative capitalist development is an approach in which the aspirant state realises that she has to give a lot, indeed give what it takes, to the developed economies in order for these economies to invest their capital, entrepreneurship and know-how in the developing state, in order to be integrated as an industrial capitalist economy in the global system. This can be seen clearly in Singapore’s efforts at integrative capitalist collaboration with the established capitalist nations, as detailed by Lee Kuan Yew (2000). In short, the aspirant state has to make the necessary sacrifices to pay her development fees in order to join the club of the advanced economies

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(raising, of course, the question of how much sacrifice is to be made, by whom, and attendant issues of justice). Current “win-win” approaches could very well be seen as the application of the Far Eastern states’ integrative collaborative capitalist approaches to national development to relations with more economically underdeveloped nations. Here, China and other East Asian players, such as South Korea, are willing to invest financially, technically, organisationally and culturally, in concrete infrastructural development, education, cultural exchanges, etc., in order to open up possibilities in developing nations—not simply with the view of securing their interests in raw materials and commodities, but to help raise the standards of modernistic praxis in these nations so as to sustain and enlarge their trading partnerships. China realises that if African nations become increasingly developed and wealthy, they would buy more and better quality goods and services from her, not less; her economy would be the better for it. However, as Howard French notes, the West had invested to some extent in the sorts of development initiatives that China is pursuing in its “win-win” policy, with similar lines of thinking about some sort of osmotic flow of development; but these initiatives did not yield the desired results (2014: 111–117). One difference, however, between the investments of the West and those of China in this regard is that the West’s investments, relatively, have been more in the area of knowledge and technology transfer (such as research institutions and agricultural projects) whereas China has invested more in infrastructural development in the area of public works. Nevertheless, the question of maintenance and building on these foreign development initiatives remains, and the past experience of African communities including Nigeria is not encouraging. In addition to learning the necessity of how to implement integrative collaborative capitalist development, Nigeria is also learning from its interactions with the Far East, such as the need for the proper prioritisation of, and commitment to, development objectives and sectors as well as the hollowness of explaining failures of underdevelopment in terms of climate, geographical location, linguistic, religious and ethnic diversity and cleavages, structural dependency, unequal exchange, unfavourable trading terms, and international economic conspiracies. Rigorous self-examination will show the level of responsibility and culpability of Nigerians, and Africans in general, in the making of underdevelopment in the country and continent.

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Obviously, India has had a significant impact on Nigerian actors, and it has not all been positive in terms of accelerating development or preventing stagnation and counter-development in Nigeria. Nigeria’s relationship with India makes the case for critical engagement with external influences, not only from India but from other sources, as well as working out clearly the meaning, objectives, theory and praxis that would provide the framework for such critical engagement in a systematic and gainful manner. For instance, such a critical approach will enable Nigeria to deploy Gandhi’s self-critical, self-effacing, inclusive and materialistically detached beliefs, values and policies, to counter the darker and debilitating aspects and transmutations of identitarian and nativist outlooks—including illiberality—which have manifested in politics (as, for instance, in the form of an ever downward spiral of the politics of identity and difference) as well as in economics (such as economic nationalism that benefits the elite or fulfils ultimately unproductive, retrogressive populist desires) and other areas, including the intellectual world in the form of undue, extreme (hence, errant) scholarly protectionism. Further, this approach could help move Nigerians to think of not just the differences in values, beliefs, history and context between Nigeria-India and the Far in terms of their responses to colonisation and the challenges of development, but also the universalisable aspects of Far East Asian values, principles and policies, especially with respect to justice in a capitalist world, interactive skills, human relations and the good life.

References Ademoyega, A. 1981. Why We Struck. Ibadan: Evans Brothers (Nigeria Publishers) Limited. Adesina, F. 2015. A Passage to India. Saturday Sun, October 30. Adigun, O. 2015. How Patronage of Fake Foreign Goods Take Jobs from Nigerians. Daily Sun, October 19. Awolowo, O. 1960. Awo: The Autobiography of Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. French, H. 2014. China’s Second Continent. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Herman, A. 2008. Gandhi & Churchill. London: Hutchinson. Isichei, E. 1976. A History of the Igbo People. London: Palgrave Macmillan Press. Jain-Grégoire, P. 2016. How India Can Stem the Rising Scourge of Racism Against Africans. The Conversation, August 21. https://theconversation. com/how-india-can-stem-the-rising-scourge-of-racism-against-africans61820. Accessed 15 Dec 2016.

94  J. C. A. AGBAKOBA Meyns, P., and Musamba, C. (eds.). 2010. The Developmental State in Africa: Problems and Prospects. Institute for Development and Peace, INEF-Report, 101, University of Duisburg‐Essen. Skinner, S. 1980. Terrestrial Astrology: Divination by Geomancy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Usim, U. 2016. Customs Agents Cry Out: Foreigners Taking Our Jobs. Daily Sun, January 25. Wikipedia. 2017. Mbonu Ojike. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbonu_Ojike. Accessed 6 Feb 2017. Woo-Cumings, M. 1999. The Developmental State. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Yew, L.K. 2000. From Third World to First World. New York: HarperCollins.

PART II

Challenging Asia-Africa Grand Narratives

CHAPTER 6

Poaching Plots, Plastic Forms and Ambiguous Goods: Ways of Telling the China-in-Africa Story in the Anthropocene Age Meg Samuelson

1  Introduction The dawn of the millennium saw two momentous shifts being defined on both geopolitical and geologic scales: first, the FOCAC platform was launched in Beijing, inaugurating a new era of African–Asian relations that by the end of the decade saw China becoming the continent’s largest trading partner; second, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000) Some of the ideas informing this chapter were presented in a seminar at the Literature Department of Kenyatta University, Nairobi, in 2014, entitled “Postcolonial Theory and the Pressures of the Present” and a keynote address titled “From Indian Ocean Pasts to African-Asian Presents: Before the Cape, From the Cape, @the Cape” at the conference African-Asian Encounters (II): M. Samuelson (*)  Department of English and Creative Writing, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia e-mail: [email protected] English Department, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa © The Author(s) 2020 R. Anthony and U. Ruppert (eds.), Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7_6

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published their proposal for the designation of a geological epoch called the “Anthropocene”. This chapter analyses selected Southern African (non)fictions that approach their point of intersection. These narratives are arranged into three constellations—Cape Noir, China Mall and On the Road—in which the hot topics of raw-material extraction, cheap and counterfeit goods and infrastructural development are configured. Rather than distinguishing the “myths” from the “real story” of Chinain-Africa, as Deborah Brautigam (2009) and others ably do, I concern myself with how genre and form, metaphor and image, structure the terms of this Global South encounter and enable or foreclose ways of telling it within the planetary frame cast by the Anthropocene. “Anthropocene” describes an epoch in which humans exert “a significant geological, morphological force” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000: 17) that manifests inter alia in climate change, species extinction and habitat destruction; it “names the intersection of human history with geological time” (Morton 2014: 258) and presents us “with the challenge of having to think of human agency over multiple and incommensurable scales at once” (Chakrabarty 2012: 1; cf. 2014: 1). Many date its beginning to the invention of the steam-engine and the Industrial Age that kindled Western economies, propelled European colonialism and produced the template of “an energy-consuming civilisation” (Chakrabarty 2012: 2) exported as aspirational ideal under imperial conditions; others locate its origins in the “Great Acceleration” in carbon emissions following World War II, which, while indicating North American global ascendency, is also a period of decolonisation that enabled “a certain democratisation of consumption” evident in the rise of the “four Asian tigers” (Chakrabarty 2014: 15; Ghosh 2016).1 While capitalist modes of production and consumption precipitate the contemporary crisis, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Amitav Ghosh have thus also highlighted the role of empire in its germination. “To look at the Re-thinking African-Asian Relations: Changing Realities—New Concepts, held in Cape Town in 2015. I am grateful to my hosts and audiences on both occasions, and to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Africa’s Asian Options (AFRASO) project at Goethe University, Frankfurt, and the Centre for Chinese Studies at Stellenbosch University, for enabling these conversations. 1 Since this chapter was completed in early 2016, the Subcommission on Quaternary’s Anthropocene Working Group has formally proposed that the new epoch be adopted in the Geological Time Scale and that it be dated from 1950. The idea of the Anthropocene has by now been taken up widely in the public sphere and in the humanities, and alternative timeframes continue to be posed and debated.

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climate crisis through the prism of empire”, says Ghosh (2016: 87, 92), is to “recognise … that the continent of Asia is conceptually critical to every aspect of global warming” and that it has a dual role as “both protagonist and victim” in this story: the large populations living in poverty in this region are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change and are the historical victims of the Western industrial nations that set the Anthropocene on course; and, attempts to effect a democratisation of goods and elevate them from poverty are contributing to the emission spike that is hastening the progress of the Anthropocene. As both scholars acknowledge, this presents us with a wicked problem. I don’t attempt to clarify it here. What interests me rather is to bring into the picture the place occupied by Africa as fulcrum between the regions of West and East in which accounts of the Anthropocene are currently concentrated. Kevin Bloom (whose collaborative nonfiction I discuss below) avers that “Africa, as the last continent on Earth with an abundance of untapped resources and the potential for sustained and real development, is in many ways the stage where our species’ destiny will play out” (2012). I wish to keep this ramification in sight as I pursue the China-in-Africa story. As has been widely noted, two contradictory narratives of China-inAfrica circulate through official channels. One reaches back to the fifteenth century in order to present a benevolent picture of the voyages of Zheng He—which are contrasted to the violence and humiliation inflicted by Western maritime imperialism and colonial rule—or appeals to the Bandung commitment to anti-colonial solidarity and third-world idealism in order to legitimate the pronouncement of “sincere friendship” in the present;2 this “victim-brotherhood narrative”, Qing Cao (2013: 63) observes, “has permeated Chinese leaders’ speeches from Mao to Hu” even as the terms of engagement have shifted “from revolution to business”, and it has been embraced by many of their African counterparts. On the other extreme are alarmist reactions that warn of an “invasion” or point to “Chinese colonisation”; though inciting moral panic through discourses of human rights and environmental protectionism, these narratives are often issued by Western powers driven to protect 2 The claim to “sincere friendship” was, for instance, articulated by Chinese Ambassador to South Africa Tian Xuejan during a Sino-Africa colloquium at the University of Cape Town in 2015; various delegates made reference to the historical narrative sketched out here.

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their own African oil interests (Chan 2013: 34), while also finding some fertile ground on the continent. In short, the story of China-in-Africa veers between what Isabel Hofmeyr—writing of narratives of Indian–African relations—has pithily described as “too much solidarity… or too little” (2011: 14). Smoothing over the fault lines of the geopolitical present, such divergent accounts fail also to address the entanglements and implications of the Anthropocene, which, suggests Ghosh (2016: 114), “holds a lesson also for those in the Global South who would draw a wide and clear line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in relation to global warming”, while revealing that the consumption practices Western imperialism presented as a universal good can only be enjoyed by a small minority on a resource-limited and imperilled planet. Thinking between these scales presents us with the conundrum of how to represent, simultaneously, a loss of innocence in the Global South and the ways in which it labours under a cloud cast by Western industrial imperialism. Part of my enquiry directs itself to the question, simply put, of what representational forms can take us to the point where the geopolitical and geological scales of the Global South and the Anthropocene intersect. I draw some inspiration here from recent work by Hofmeyr and Ghosh. In trying to move beyond the pieties of the post-colonial and bring into focus the jagged edges of the Global South, Hofmeyr has turned to previously side-lined genres of parody, satire and slapstick in order to identify cultural archives which “unsettle the elevated moral agendas of south-south cooperation” that are part of the post-colonial hangover (2010: 726). The restoration of human subjectivity that has been so pivotal to the post-colonial project was in contrast served by the “serious” novel that Ghosh (2016: 71) has recently called out for its complicity in what he describes as the “great derangement” of our time. The contemporary “serious” novel, Ghosh (2016: 17, 61, 66) explains, has banished improbability in ways that prevent it from responding to a condition defined by abnormal events (flash floods, droughts and other freakish weather effects) and has focused its attention on character and setting, constructing “worlds that become real precisely because of their finitude and distinctiveness” and which revolve around the human subject. The world of the Anthropocene is, however, one of “inescapable continuities animated by forces that are inconceivably vast” and which draw the human back to uncanny recognitions of its repressed entanglement with the nonhuman. Ghosh suggests we might

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better apprehend it through epic and episodic narratives, and by returning to some of the forms enjoyed before the grip of rationality exerted itself on fiction and extended into the south. Examples of these narrative forms include the premodern Indian Ocean compilation known as The Arabian Nights, in which stories are hinged together by portals that open into other worlds, and the sixteenth-century Ming dynasty serial adventure Journey to the West. Both notably permit nonhuman forces and grant vitality to things. The turn to popular genres and episodic plotting, to the nonhuman and what Marina Warner (2012) has described as the “thing-world” manifest in the Nights, informs my approach in this chapter. I trace in it what I call the poaching plot, which is funnelled through crime fiction and other appropriated and repurposed genres, and functions as a shorthand for the anxieties that surround the China-in-Africa story in the Anthropocene. Translated into it are both the geopolitical concern with “resource capture” (Chan 2013: 36) and that of the “Sixth Extinction” effected by the human as “geological force” (Kolbert 2014). Another cultural site in which the China-in-Africa story is being condensed in telling ways are the cheap and counterfeit things disparaged as “Fong Kong” or “Zhing Zhong” that provide a conduit through which Africans experience China and to which—as their designations suggest—“much of the racialised and anxious discourse about China’s involvement in Africa is directed” (Rupp 2008: 69). I bring into focus their plastic forms and thus locate them within the category of things that Timothy Morton (2013) calls “hyperobjects”—“things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans”. At the same time, these plastic things also connote the malleable or pliable; the artificial, fake and insincere; and the circulation of the virtual credit of the global economy through banking cards. They are, in other words, forms that convey the ambiguous goods of China-in-Africa in the Anthropocene.

2  Cape Noir A cluster of narratives script China into Cape settings by appropriating noir crime genres; these include the novels Out to Score (aka Cape Greed) (2006) by Mike Nicol and Joanne Hitchens and Nicol’s subsequent Power Play (2015), as well as the 2013 film Cold Harbour (aka Black South-Easter) directed by Carey McKenzie and produced by Tendeka Matatu. Ranging across the peninsular, the plots of these narratives trace

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abalone trafficking rackets run alternatively by Triads or Chinese businessmen cloaked in a more legitimate mantle and which intertwine with Cape gang culture, the social scars and economic divides left by apartheid, corruption and rivalry in the award of the fishing quotas meant to ensure sustainability, and other forms of national graft. While none are explicitly Anthropocene narratives, their focus on the illicit procurement of abalone informs a story of the purloining of national goods with the consequences of species extinction. Just as classic film noir exploits the physical backdrop of Los Angeles, these works make evocative use of the “uneven geography” (Harvey 2006) of neoliberal Cape Town and the triangular shape of its peninsula. Favoured settings include the harbour with its hulking containers of hidden commodities; the glitzy touristic waterfront and Atlantic seaboard; the borderlands of the False Bay coastline; the city of Cape Town, whose foundations were laid by slave labour imported from the Indian Ocean rim by the Dutch East India Company, now identified as the world’s first multinational corporation; and the deprived Cape Flats, to which its indigenous pastoralists and hunter-gathers were driven and to where the apartheid state removed its coloured subjects. Encoded in these settings is thus the history of the town as well as its current situation in a consuming global economy (see Samuelson 2014). This world order might be said to have been first stitched together at the Cape when it was rounded by Portuguese mariners in the late fifteenth century (see Samuelson 2016). Their violent eruption into the Indian Ocean trading arena is presented by Ghosh as delivering the “death knell” to “centuries of dialogue” and “a world of accommodations” that he locates therein, inaugurating the unabating condition of “travelling in the West” (1992: 286, 237). Recent crime fiction takes us to the edge of another era, one marked by the “coming of the Chinese” (Nicol 2015), that swivels Eastward from this promontory. The Cape is thus a heuristic device for thinking the rise of the Global South and the growing presence of China-in-Africa as an emergent state that—in its articulation by finance capitalism—remains haunted by what Ian Baucom (2005) describes as “spectres of the Atlantic”. The peninsular setting intermeshes with genre in the triangulated plots through which noir forms muddy the villain-and-victim binary. Various configurations emerge and dissipate as narrative tides ebb and flow around the peninsula: for instance, we have Britain–China–Cape, Taipei–Cape Town–Shanghai and Cape Town–China–Cayman Islands

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in Out to Score;3 the plot of Cold Harbour twists and turns through a shifty assemblage of Triads, ex-apartheid security police and past struggle heroes; and, Power Play opens with a “tripartite alliance” of gangsters and ends with a ménage à trois of gangsters and government—Chinese businessmen/traffickers who deal by turn with government, industry and poachers; and, the state, secret agents and private security. The femme fatale of post-World War II noir has been read as an expression of anxieties about women’s place in the public sphere. Here she is orientalised to present the relationship between the Cape and China as a deadly seduction by an enticing agent of deception (the name of one—Candy Liu—suggests a honey-trap). Yet this is to simplify the plot: although a Triad, Candy Liu is avenging the murder of her British father; her counterpart in Cold Harbour shoots the characters that viewers may have taken to be alternatively the good and bad guy, but by the end it is no longer clear which is which. Not (part) Chinese herself, the femme fatale of Power Play is a poacher who brokers the exchange between Chinese capital and the South African national executive. Though driven by the premise that a crime has been committed, Cape Noir paints murky pictures of compromised transactions and disperses culpability across them, infusing moral ambiguity into the scene of raw-material extraction or what is in one novel described by a (dubious) character as a Chinese “invasion” (Nicol 2015). If it exposes clandestine transnational trafficking, it does so to reveal the ways in which it mimics corporate business, whose ill-gotten goods are secreted offshore (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2004; Urry 2014). Entangling the licit and illicit economies, it also blurs the line between criminality and redistributive justice. Those who have been denied access to the resources of the sea under apartheid, or whose contribution to the struggle has not been adequately rewarded, claim illegal abalone harvests as their just deserts. Spinning sticky webs of corruption and consumption, these poaching plots present conundrums that can help us approach—but surely not resolve—the vexed claim to historical justice to which China makes recourse at the climate-change negotiating table. At the same time, they draw readers into the condition of inhabiting the Anthropocene which, as Morton (2007) argues, positions humans as “a character in noir

3 See Samuelson (2014: 812–13) for a more detailed analysis of the plot of Out to Score and the intersecting axes of North–South, East–South that it entangles at the Cape.

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fiction”: “We start by thinking we can ‘save’ something called ‘the world’ ‘over there’, but end up realizing that we ourselves are implicated”. Though not detective fiction, the generic mutant novel Tanuki Ichiban (2012) by Zinaid Meeran also traverses a world of implication in a darkly comic plot that roves across a speculative geography of the Global South. Shaped by the episodic and underworld qualities of the picaresque, the narrative follows the fortunes of hunters and smugglers who satisfy appetites for extreme cuisine in a post-climate change Cape Town and concludes with “nature identical foods” triumphing over an organic industry. Meeran’s novel thus gives form to the post-environmentalist position that celebrates plasticity and which boasts that “[a]s we destroy habitats, we create new ones” (Kereiva et al. 2011). In the projected near-future of Tanuki Ichiban, Chinese fleets have swept up the tuna stock of the South China Sea and Pacific Ocean, whales and polar bears are on the point of extinction, an ice-berg is sighted off the Cape coast and the Atlantic has taken a rusty hue, but oysters now flourish in the “brown ooze off Table Bay” (2012: 49) and the Karoo has become newly fertile grain-land. The latter has attracted the Shanghaiowned biotech corporation Global Flavour to the Cape, whose “nature identical foods” are produced from great silos of grain in the processed forms of liquid, solid and gel, to which are added flavours extracted from “a polymer found… in recycled plastic milk cartons”, or “from petrol or benzene or binbags” (2012: 274, 353). Plastic and other petro products are dispersed across the narrative, and characters are constantly producing new forms with them. Human subjectivity is itself dismembered in the text, such thus agency is distributed across assemblages of humanand-human, human-and-thing or human-and/as-animal. Parodic in both form and attitude, Tanuki Ichiban retains its sharpest satire for the green capitalism invested in the “Rip Roaring Good brand”, which is shown feeding a select few while the many forage through their waste. Global Flavour’s competing claim to offer a solution to world hunger is both sent-up and endorsed in a final act of graveyard humour that environmentalists might find hard to stomach. While disabling the pieties of environmental discourse and decentring the human subject, Meeran’s wildly inventive fiction ultimately reveals a notable failure of imagination when it falls back on the conventional shorthand for the China-in-Africa story: giant Chinese industrial parks secure exemption from local labour laws and make pervasive use of child labour, which is overlooked because “‘T-I-A’” (2012: 78). Revelling in a shifting globe 

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and plastic planet, the novel is nonetheless unable to write a role for Africa beyond the Hollywood formula for a resource-cursed continent.4 If, like the other Cape Noir narratives, this novel opens space for rethinking the China-in-Africa story in the Anthropocene, it continues to position the African continent as place of extraction and exploitation.

3  China Mall Further reflecting on Africa’s place in the world, NoViolet Bulawayo’s critically acclaimed novel We Need New Names (2013) includes a brief but probing engagement with China-in-Africa amid a bittersweet critique of the failures of the Zimbabwean state, humiliating transactions with Western NGOs and the tarnished allure of the American dream. The “Country-Game” played by the young protagonists draws an imaginative cartography that locates this state as somewhere to flee from, or as a place where—in a repeated invocation of Chinua Achebe’s classic novel of the decolonisation era—“things fall apart”. The first time this allusion appears is with reference to the “made-in-China” shoes bought at the border for the child narrator, Darling, which “just fell apart”, leaving her walking barefoot. Thus unshod, Darling and her friends range across a locality infused with global references. One of their forays takes them to a large construction site they call “Shanghai”. Here, the novel seems to be entering the terrain of a neat geopolitical allegory that expresses one of the “rogue donor” myths that Brautigam deflates, namely, that China propped up the Mugabe regime in an irresponsible and self-interested extractive relationship (2009: 287ff.). But what the novel proceeds to present is instead a scene of ambiguous goods. In Bulawayo’s “Shanghai”, “machines hoist things in their terrible jaws, machines maul the earth, machines grind rocks, machines belch clouds of smoke, machines iron the ground. Everywhere machines”; Chinese men run “all over the place in orange uniforms and yellow helmets”; and, local black men work in what Darling describes as “regular clothes”: “torn T-shirts, vests, shorts, trousers cut at the knees, overalls, flip-flops, tennis shoes”. It is thus a place of people-and-machines, of the human–nonhuman assemblages that exert a “geological force” on the planet, as well as one in which the “anthropological difference” of 4 The allusion is to the line “TIA. This is Africa” in Edward Zwick’s film Blood Diamond (2006).

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race and class manifest; it creates an illustrative picture of Chakrabarty’s thesis that the post-colonial critique of the universal is both disabled by and necessary to thinking the Anthropocene, whose effects are and will be “mediated by the global inequities we already have” (2012: 9). These inequities are of course not only located within this scene of Chinese development in Africa, but also structure it from outside; hence the gratification the child characters experience at the spectacle of a country from the South outperforming the West. If the earth itself is being mauled and ironed in this scene, it represents at the same time an instance of historical justice being effected through the solidarities of the Global South. But—ambivalently again—the claim to solidarity is tempered by an incident that is opaque to the children yet expressive to the reader: an overweight Chinese man exits a tent “fastening his belt” followed by “two black girls in skinny jeans and weaves and heels”; the children are stuck by his “drum of a stomach”, which looks to them “like he has swallowed a country”. When another man joins him, they ask what they are building: “A school? Flats? A clinic?”. He responds: “We build you big big mall. All nice shops inside, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Versace… Good mall, big”. Juxtaposed against the children’s poverty, it is an incongruous encounter that suggests an alliance of the elite at the expense of the masses, and a transnational recalibration of what Jean-Francois Bayart (1989), in his study of post-colonial African statecraft, described as a “politics of the belly” in which leaders glutinously consume national resources while filling the bellies of their subjects in exchange for loyalty; it is, in short, a politics of puffed-up patrons and supplicating clients. The poaching plot that is apparently allegorised in that “drum of a stomach” is elaborated in the “black plastic bag full of things” given to the children on their previous visit to “Shanghai” (it is notable that the etymology of “poaching” is thought to be the French pocher, meaning “enclose in a bag”). Darling explains that the bag contained “watches, jewellery, flip-flops, batteries – but like those shoes that Mother bought me once, the items were cheap kaka and lasted us only a few days”. Contrasted to the abbreviated temporalities of these things are the gnomic messages “tucked inside” what Darling describes as “brown funny-shaped thingies wrapped in plastic” that were also included in this package and which address themselves to the future. In the chapter “Country-Game”, the child characters have returned to “Shanghai” in search of further gifts to replace what has broken or

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present them with new forecasts. But no plastic bag is forthcoming: “You get one time is enough. Now you want made in China, you work, nothing free, the Chinese man says”. One of the children responds angrily, “you are in our country, that counts for something”. Not understanding them, the men laugh, and then continue “ching-chonging”. In a repetition of a prior scene in which they met a British woman visiting what she describes as her father’s country, the children leave this “Shanghai” “booing and yelling”, “telling them to leave our country… that we don’t need their kaka mall, that they are not even our friends”. But—and this marks a telling difference from the encounter with the British woman—their voices are drowned out by the “noisy machines”, and when a black man “with the muscles” blocks their path, they “shut up there and then and leave Shanghai in silence”. The imputation is that critical responses to China-in-Africa are drowned out by the imported machinery of the developmental imperative and subdued by local muscle. Bulawayo’s China Mall thus seems to indicate that the transactions composing the China-in-Africa relationship cannot be trusted, that the country itself is being traded for short-lived goods with hidden costs in a deal with the dragon that will finally quash the democratic project launched during decolonisation and already under severe internal pressure. The allegory is, however, complicated by the things that are transacted in this exchange. The “brown funny-shaped thingies” are of course fortune cookies, and the temporality they convey is significant. If made-in-China goods are criticised for being short-lived, the fortune cookies are packaged in a plastic wrapper that holds a more uncanny futurity than the sibylline messages inside them. These wrappers predict a future in which they will outlast the Mall and remain among the ruins of this geopolitical present. As such, they reveal what Morton (2014) describes as the “viscosity” of the “hyperobject” in the way in which they stick to us and will stick around after us. These “thingies”, in other words, encourage us to think about how geopolitical time intersects with geological time. Their futurity points back to the “zhing-zhongs” that the children both desire and despise. If the cheapness of these made-in-China things avails them to consumers who would otherwise be excluded from accessing such goods, it indicates also their lack of durability and references consumer concerns about the absence of return policies (cf. McNamee 2012). Viewed through another lens—that of what Bill Brown presents as “Thing Theory”—the non-returnable, broken artefacts of this exchange

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might be seen as intractable yet troublingly vital matter that unsettles the “subject–object relation” (Brown 2001: 4). No longer performing the function assigned to them, and thus not behaving like good objects, they demand something of us or become a problem to which we must attend. They are an insistent presence that must be taken account of in the China-in-Africa story. Tellingly, however, fortune cookies are actually an American product. China Mall is thus another triangulated space. Chinese capital and expertise use local labour to construct on Zimbabwean land a mall that will be filled with Western goods. But the “cheap kaka” plastic forms of “zhing-zhongs” infiltrate that promised cornucopia of designer brands in ways that bring to light what Ackbar Abbas (2008) describes as “the counter-value of the counterfeit”: “the very fact that it is by definition a suspect object makes us take a suspicious or critical attitude to objects”. The fake, Abbas argues, reveals something that is concealed in the original, which is that it too “is manufactured like the fake”. As such, it describes the circular logic through which goods are invested with value. Introducing the third point of Southern Africa into the East–West contest that Abbas engages, the fortune cookie in We Need New Names reveals also that what is received in Africa as made-in-China might actually be made-in-America, while suggestively introducing the confounding categories of the fake friend and counterfeit coloniser. As Abbas concludes, the fake works “as a symptom, but not as subversion” of globalisation; design culture continues to be located elsewhere. Shopping in China Mall is thus still a mode of “travelling in the West” and partaking of its “energy-consuming civilisation” (Ghosh 1992: 237; Chakrabarty 2014: 2). This is evident when, on leaving “Shanghai”, Darling and her friends try to invent a game about China. One of the children thinks China would be a dragon, “always on top”, another imagines it as an “angel” with “superpowers…so that everyone will be going to it for help”. Unable to resolve this impasse between “too much solidarity… or too little” and in order to find a suitable form for the China-in-Africa story, they resort to their already established “Country-Game”. This is a game that organises the geopolitical around a Euro-Atlantic centre (Greece, revealingly, is situated above Dubai in its hierarchy of value). This failure presents a profound recognition of the ways in which finance capitalism maintains Euro-Atlantic hegemony in an apparently multipolar order through the value that is invested in its goods. But it is also indicative

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again of a failure of imagination. Turning now decisively towards a story of the betrayed promises of the American dream and lodging its meaning in the individual subject rather than an assemblage of things, the novel exposes its own inability to give shape to the story of a shifting geopolitical order and the plastic forms of its future.

4  On the Road The nonfictional narrative Continental Shift: A Journey into Africa’s Changing Fortunes is the result of Kevin Bloom and Richard Poplak’s investigation into how “the Asian giant’s thirst for raw materials [was] acting as the catalyst for sub-Saharan Africa’s ecstatic GDP graphs” (2016: 8). Admitting to having struggled to find an appropriate form for the story of “Africa’s changing fortunes”, the authors advise readers that they later abandoned the “lens” of the consuming Asian giant but that there is still “a lot of China” in their account (2016: 8). The form it takes is billed as “[p]art detective story, part report”. Having gathered various perspectives on China-in-Africa, the authors discover that, “[l]ike images on a television monitor, they degraded into fuzz as we leaned in for closer examination” (2016: 22). A myriad of conflicting pictures do indeed flicker in and out of focus in the chapters comprising this book: of China advancing development with awesome infrastructural projects or stealing jobs from locals, spewing cheap goods across the continent and degrading the environment; of quick profits or sustained solidarity; of transactions that bolster repressive regimes or fuel aspirations for a better future. There is, in sum, a great deal of contradictory talk. Narrative form threatens to disintegrate entirely under the pressure exerted by these contradictory positions. But what holds it all together is the road—the infrastructure that carries the China-in-Africa story and, indeed, the fossil-fuelled vehicles of the Anthropocene. Appearing and disappearing, concrete and spectral, traversable or not, the road that knits together a continent also connects the ten “reports” or “snapshots” that comprises the bulk of the book. A series of actual snapshots provide in turn the connective infrastructure of the book. Most of these photographs feature the roads on which the authors have travelled across the continent, while a couple showcase dazzling Chinese constructions, such as the African Union Headquarters in Addis Abba. Some of the roads are mere tracks through the bush, others are pockmarked and alternatively dusty or pooled or even in flood,

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while yet others boast smooth, dark tar. Vehicles of all shapes and sizes journey along them. Part of the message they convey is that of a continent in motion, renegotiating its place in the world through various states, rather than the stasis that ultimately forecloses on the other narratives considered in this chapter. Interleaving the ten reports comprising Continental Shift is a “murder mystery”—an arson attack that resulted in the death of four Chinese traders in a South African town. This mystery narrative is itself somewhat like a road, connecting as it does the various parts of the books. Recourse is thus again made to crime fiction in order to tell the Chinain-Africa story and, as in Cape Noir, it “complicates the question of victim and perpetrator in a universe defined by change” (2016: 9). In contrast to the shady political alliances and dubious corporate practice exposed elsewhere in the book, the small-time traders killed in the arson attack “existed in the gulf between official Africa and official China” (2016: 348), falling outside of state narratives and thus, it transpires, outside the law itself. The vital “clue” to their murder is finally presented in “a plastic folder containing a single sheet of paper. Typed out, in Setswana, it is a circular from the ‘Tshwaranganang Business Council’… ‘This forum is created to protect small businesses in Ganyesa from people who come from outside’” (2016: 348). The authors ponder the message contained in this plastic form on the road back to Johannesburg, driving an old Mercedes that had belonged to one of their grandparents, a Jewish immigrant who sought and found refuge in South Africa in another era of human history (2016: 349). The road that structures this story allows it to travel not only through geopolitical time, but also through geological time. We return to it in what is effectively an epilogue. Having started their narrative journey on a “150-kilometre ribbon of grit”, the authors conclude on “505 kilometres of first-rate tar” that establishes a new link on the Trans-Africa Highway which will soon realise the “long-deferred dream of ‘Cape Town to Cairo’” (2016: 351). They do not remark on the fact that this dream was initially propounded by arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes in order to extend the reach of the Pax Britannica; nor do they observe that its belated realisation is partly funded through credit issued by China Exim Bank, that much of the “first-rate tar” in East Africa has been laid by Chinese companies (parts of this highway are simply called “China Road” locally) and that this road terminates at the East African port of the envisaged 21st Century Maritime Silk Road in China’s Belt and

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Road Initiative. Instead, they take an unexpected turn to observe the collision of two distinct scales of time: “[t]he road was the world coming at the ancient lava plains at warp speed, bringing with it a future in which there was little room for negotiation” (2016: 351–352). From the vantage point of this road, Bloom and Poplak parse the journey across a continent in which, no matter how remote they were, they “detected the dissonance of the human hand” among “the stirring grace notes of what we called ‘nature’”, either “from afar” in the form of climate change or “from close by” (2016: 353). Confronted by the wicked problem that strikes at the nub of the China-in-Africa story in the Anthropocene Age, and in which poverty seems to prioritise accelerated development over environmental preservation, they conclude ambivalently, giving the near last words to David Daballen. Daballen is a local tribesman and understudy to a British conservationist who protects elephants from poachers who are themselves driven by desperation on a continent still darkened by the shadow of Western imperialism, and who endanger their own lives in order to procure tusks for Chinese markets. Daballen is for the authors a touchstone of the contradictions that now define this continent. “‘People ask [about the road],’ he says, ‘is it good or is it bad? But it’s not one thing. How can it be?’” (2016: 355). It is, as I say, the near last word. The last word goes, as it were, to the elephant. Bloom and Poplak report that when they finally start to organise their “stacks of spiral-bound notebooks” and “hundreds of thousands of words of transcribed text” (2016: 355) into a narrative, what stood out most sharply was their encounter with an enraged elephant bull from the back of an open Land Rover driven by Daballen. What they later recall is the memory of fear: “It was a good frightened, a natural frightened. The road, David’s road, was about seven kilometres to the west of us. We had, in our confrontation with the bull, forgotten that it existed” (2016: 358). This is a curious conclusion to a consciously complicated narrative, and one that seems to drive a wedge—seven kilometres, to be exact—between the elephant and the road, between raw Africa and Chinese development and between natural and human histories. Africa seems here to be again consigned to the burden of representing and maintaining Nature. This assigned role was used to legitimate the Western imperial project; in the Confucian order, as Stephen Chan glosses it, it now determines the morality of China’s relationship to Africa: Africa is “the world of nature” that the “good Confucian Chinese” must “‘balance’… with superior learning and technology”

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(2013: 16). But part of the story of the road on which Bloom and Poplak conclude their journey is also that of its predecessor, the Tazara railway built in the 1970s to allow land-locked Zambia access to Tanzania’s ports, breaking its dependence on the white regimes of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia. It was the highpoint in the “romance” of Chinese anti-colonial solidarity in Africa; and, as Chan reminds us, “It was moving” (2016: 26). In his recent lectures, Ghosh (2016)—who is himself the author of an earlier narrative that Hofmeyr (2012: 590) presents as exemplifying “romantic discourses on Afro-Asian solidarity”5— would have us remember that it moves on fossil fuels, but also that this is an intricate and sticky story. It is towards this understanding that Continental Shift apparently seeks to convey its readers. The photographs are again illustrative: petrol tankers are among the vehicles they feature; others underline either the developmental imperative or the optimism invested in a mobile continent; some confound interpretation in the gap between image (what appears to be uninterrupted bush) and caption (which informs readers that they are looking at a road). It is worth observing that while the American road narrative has indeed been associated with the pursuit of freedom (think Jack Kerouac’s 1957 Beat classic On the Road) and thus, for Ghosh (2016), participates in the “great derangement” of a culture turning its gaze away from its self-consuming propensities, the road has been a far more ambivalent object in African literature. Wole Soyinka’s The Road (1965) and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), for instance, present it as a location of colliding ways of being in and knowing the world; of visible and invisible, human and nonhuman forces. This is an insight that frames Continental Shift, which opens with an epigraph from these authors’ compatriot, Achebe: “Crossroads possess a certain dangerous potency. Anyone born there must wrestle with their multi-headed spirits and return to his or her people with the boon of prophetic vision, or accept, as I have, life’s interminable mysteries” (2012). Writing on the road in this shifting continent has thus refused to bifurcate into divergent directions; in Latour’s (1991: 2, 12; 2010: 476) terms, nature and culture are “churned up” in it, “appearances and 5 In a comparative study of the narrative in question, In an Antique Land (1992), and his more recent The Hungry Tide (2005), I suggest that the cosmopolitan structures Ghosh elaborates through the Indian Ocean trade in this work are significantly revised in response to the era of climate change (Samuelson 2015).

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reality” intermesh and the “Great Divide” between humans and nonhumans, which defines that between the “moderns” and “premoderns”, collapses. Representing the narrative of modernity-as-progress as one that is paved by the Western imperium and the accelerated development of the Global South, this road is also a place of nonhuman interlocutors—of encounters with elephants and multi-headed spirits—that deliver apprehensions of inescapable implications. It is the place towards which Continental Shift and the other narratives with which I have thought in this chapter nudge the China-in-Africa story, even as it reveals itself only in riddles or “interminable mysteries”, in plastic forms and ambiguous goods.

5  Conclusion: Dark-Brown-Grey The narratives that I have considered in this chapter are all drawn to a poaching plot that suggests the illegitimate plunder of resources and which identifies Africa as a repository of Nature. This plot leans towards a construction of China-in-Africa as a new form of imperialism and evokes the environmentalist ideal of stewardship in response to Chinese extraction; antithetically, it invites external technological expertise under a mantle of solidarity that obscures much more besides. But the binaries on which these plots depend are enfolded into the triangular configurations of Cape Noir, the futurity of “brown funny-shaped thingies”, and a continent shifting between West and East in which, even amidst the most “stark” and “oppositional forces”, the “prevailing hue was grey” (Bloom and Poplak 2016: 355). Eluding binary forms that alternatively structure a world of black-and-white, fan panic around a yellow peril or lay claim to a green custodianship, the China-in-Africa story presented in these forms is one that mutates across a chromatic range of dark-browngrey.6 Rendered in these most ambiguous of tones, they invite readers to apprehend a crepuscular geopolitical moment under the cloud of climate change, the uncanny spectres and recognitions that each entails, and the inescapable paradoxes of what Morton dubs a “dark ecology” (2010). As such, they suggest ways of salvaging some of what Vijay Prashad describes as the wrecked dreams of the “darker nations” for a “new world” “governed by peace and justice”, and shaped by “mutual 6 I’m inspired here by the approaches taken in Prismatic Ecology (Cohen 2013), even as I read these colours somewhat differently to the contributors who write on them.

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development” rather than “brute force” (2007: xv, 13, 96); but in this time of intersection, unlike in the Bandung moment, these dreams are impelled to take account of their geopolitical fault lines and their nonhuman others—of the elephant, and of the road itself as it greys beneath under an increasingly fierce sun.

References Abbas, A. 2008. Faking Globalization. In Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age, ed. A. Huyssen, 243–265. Durham: Duke University Press. Achebe, C. 2012. How Things Fell Apart. Guernica, October 15. https://www. guernicamag.com/how-things-fell-apart/. Accessed 3 Apr 2018. Baucom, I. 2005. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke University Press. Bayart, J.F. [1989] 1999. The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. London: Longman. Bloom, K. 2012. But Wait…What if This Isn’t the End of the West? The Daily Maverick, March 12. Bloom, K., and P. Richard. 2016. Continental Shift: A Journey into Africa’s Changing Fortunes. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Brown, B. 2001. Thing Theory. Critical Inquiry 28 (1): 1–22. Brautigam, D. 2009. The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bulawayo, N. 2013. We Need New Names. London: Chatto & Windus. Cao, Q. 2013. From Revolution to Business: China’s Changing Discourses on Africa. In The Morality of China in Africa: The Middle Kingdom and the Dark Continent, ed. S. Chan, 57–67. London: Zed Books. Chakrabarty, D. 2012. Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change. New Literary History 43: 1–18. ———. 2014. Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories. Critical Inquiry 41: 1–23. Chan, S. 2013. The Middle Kingdom and the Dark Continent: An Essay on China, Africa and Many Fault Lines. In The Morality of China in Africa: The Middle Kingdom and the Dark Continent, ed. S. Chan, 3–45. London: Zed Books. Cohen, J.J. (ed.). 2013. Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Comaroff, J., and J. Comaroff. 2004. Criminal Obsessions After Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing and the Metaphysics of Disorder. Critical Inquiry 30 (4): 800–824.

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Crutzen, P.J., and E.F. Stoermer. 2000. The “Anthropocene”. Global Change Newsletter 41: 17–18. Ghosh, A. 1992. In an Antique Land. London: Granta. ———. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harvey, D. 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. London: Verso. Hofmeyr, I. 2010. Universalizing the Indian Ocean. PMLA 125 (3): 721–727. ———. 2011. Indian Ocean Genres. In Literature, Geography, Translation: Studies in World Writing, ed. C. Alvstad, S. Helgesson, and D. Watson, 172–185. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ———. 2012. The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32 (2): 584–590. Kereiva, P., R. Lalasz, and M. Marvier. 2011. Conservation in the Anthropocene: Beyond Solitude and Fragility. In Love Your Monsters: Post-environmentalism and the Anthropocene, ed. I. Shellenberger and T. Nordhaus. Oakland, CA: Breakthrough Institute. Kolbert, E. 2014. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. London: Bloomsbury. Latour, B. [1991] 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2010. An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”. New Literary History 41 (3): 471–490. McKenzie, C. (dir.). 2013. Cold Harbour, Screenplay by Carey McKenzie, Produced by Tendeka Matatu. McNamee, T., et al. 2012. Africa in Their Words: A Study of Chinese Traders in South Africa. Brenthurt Foundation Discussion Paper 2012/3, Lesotho, Botswana, Zambia, and Angola. Meeran, Z. 2012. Tanuki Ichiban. Johannesburg: Jacana. Morton, T. 2007. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2010. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2014. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Term Anthropocene. The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1: 257–264. Nicol, M. 2015. Power Play. Cape Town: Umuzi. Nicol, M., and J. Hitchens. 2006. Out to Score. Cape Town: Umuzi. Prashad, V. 2007. The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the World. New York: New Press.

116  M. SAMUELSON Rupp, S. 2008. Africa and China: Engaging Postcolonial Interdependencies. In China into Africa: Trade, Aid and Influence, ed. R.I. Rotberg, 65–86. Washington: Brookings Institution Press. Samuelson, M. 2014. (Un)Lawful Subjects of Company: Reading Cape Town from “Tavern of the Seas” to Corporate City. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16 (6): 795–817. ———. 2015. Crossing the Indian Ocean and Wading Through the Littoral: Cosmopolitan Visions in Amitav Ghosh’s “Antique Land” and “Tide Country”. In Cosmopolitan Asia: Littoral Epistemologies of the Global South, ed. S.P. Gabriel and F. Rosa, 105–122. London: Routledge. ———. 2016. Rendering the Cape-as-Port: Sea Mountain, Cape of Storms/ Good Hope, Adamastor and Local-World Literary Formations. Journal of Southern African Studies 42 (3): 523–537. Urry, J. 2014. Offshoring. Cambridge: Polity. Warner, M. 2012. Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights. London: Chatto & Windus. Zwick, E. (dir.). 2006. Blood Diamond, Screenplay by Charles Leavitt, Produced by Len Amato et al.

CHAPTER 7

Entangled Solidarities: African–Asian Writers’ Organisations, Anti-colonial Rhetorics and Afrasian Imaginaries in East African Literature Frank Schulze-Engler

1  Introduction African–Asian interactions have come to play a major role in the emergence of a multipolar world in the twenty-first century. Not only are they a hallmark development of the post-Cold-War world, but they have unfolded on a wide historical canvas reaching back hundreds if not thousands of years. Much of the long-neglected transregional history linking Africa and Asia has been recuperated in recent decades by Indian Ocean Studies (Gupta et al. 2010). Age-old trade relations predating the European colonial incursions into the Indian Ocean area from the late fifteenth century onwards have moved to the focus of attention of contemporary academia (Bose 2006), as have the varied trajectories of an F. Schulze-Engler (*)  Department of English and American Studies, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Anthony and U. Ruppert (eds.), Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7_7

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East-bound trade with African slaves as a veritable counter-model to the hitherto hegemonic Atlantic model of slavery (Hofmeyr 2010). Recent Afro-Asian research has also highlighted the emergence of African diasporas in Asia (Bhatt 2018), the history of South Asian migration to Africa during the British Empire and the emergence of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanisms (Hawley 2008), the tensions between diasporic identities and the struggle for African citizenship in contemporary Asian– African communities (Rastogi 2008), the contested field of Indian Ocean memories (Karugia 2018), and the manifold legacies of this long transregional history for cultures and literatures in Africa and Asia (Desai 2013; Ojwang 2013). But there is also another—more recent—historical link that has remained influential in current attempts to make sense of intensified African–Asian relations: that of South–South solidarity emanating from a common history of colonial oppression. In contrast to the Indian Ocean perspective, this link is not primarily predicated on rich histories of mutual engagement and entanglement, but springs from a predominantly political history going back to the traditions of anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia. This appeal to a common experience of colonial oppression figured strongly in the early politics of the Non-Aligned Movement and has more recently been invoked in various attempts to revive the “Bandung Spirit”, initiated at the Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, as well as to further African-Asian cooperation in a spirit of solidarity (Wardaya 2005; Phạm and Shilliam 2016). African literature in general (and East African literature in particular) constitutes an arena where these two perspectives and traditions—concrete historical and present-day entanglements of Africans and Asians on the one hand, and an abstract political solidarity built on a common history of colonial oppression on the other—have intersected (or clashed) in particularly puzzling ways. Interestingly enough, African writers have not only written about a common African–Asian struggle against colonialism, but have themselves participated in the institutionalisation of African–Asian solidarity in the form of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association (AAWA), an organisation set up under the auspices of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO), which played a significant role in African letters in the 1970s and early 1980s. This chapter has a twofold aim. On the one hand, it seeks to critically reconstruct a history of organised solidarity between African and Asian writers that began in the post-Bandung spirit of increased cooperation

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between countries of the “Global South”, but soon succumbed to the pressures of Cold War ideology, nationalism and an overpowering victimological tale of local cultures endangered by “Western imperialism”. The essay argues that today, attempts to revive this “enchanted solidarity” (as well as the AAWA) testify to the spectral presence of an abstract solidarity of common victimhood that has little to offer either to literary theory or to literary practice in the twenty-first century. On the other hand, the essay explores new modes of “Rethinking the Global South” (Mukoma wa Ngugi) and a new “Afrasian”1 attentiveness to African– Asian contact zones in East African Literature that has largely replaced the spectral appeal to anti-colonial literary, cultural and political identities in contemporary East African literary practice. As the last part of this chapter will set out, using three literary examples, explorations of these contact zones arguably constitute one of the most dynamic and challenging features of East African writing today.

2  Of Spirits and Spectres: The Rise, Demise and Afterlife of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association (AAWA) At first sight, the founding of the Permanent Bureau of Afro-Asian Writers (later known as the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association, AAWA) at the first Conference of Afro-Asian Writers in Tashkent in 1958 appears to be a perfect evocation of the spirit first conjured up at the International Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. Similar to organisations like the AAPSO established in Cairo in 1958 and the Afro-Asian Journalists’ Association (AAJA) set up in Jakarta in 1963, the Afro-Asian Writers’ Organisation sought to contribute to the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle in Asia and Africa and to forge intellectual and political links between the two continents. AAWA gained considerable visibility in the literary field through the publication of Lotus, an international literary magazine published in English, French and Arabic from 1971 until the late 1980s, and the Lotus Literary Prize awarded from 1968 to 1983. In one of the few

1 The term “Afrasian” in this essay takes its cue from Mazrui and Adem (2013), Desai (2013) and the research work of the Africa’s Asian Options (AFRASO) Project conducted since 2012 at Frankfurt University.

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studies of Lotus existing so far, Hala Halim has characterised the journal in the following manner: Lotus’s proclaimed aims were the “emancipation of Afro-Asian culture from colonialist and neo-colonialist chains”, “the propagation of a wider knowledge of Afro-Asian literature” and the “promotion of Afro-Asian literature and presentation of its new and genuine elements” (Halim 2012: 572). “Afro-Asian Literature” in the spirit of AAWA and Lotus was thus understood as a literature of anti-colonial struggle based on a joint experience of colonialism rather than on direct Afrasian contact, mutual influence or entanglement: at issue were parallel rather than intersecting lives. As the Kenyan writer and critic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o put it in his acceptance speech for the Lotus Prize awarded to him in 1973: “This is an African story: it is also an Asian story and any cursory glance at the history of China, Indo-China, India, Africa, the West Indies and AfroAmerica, will see the testimony in tears and blood. We are truly a colonial people whose sweat has been cruelly exploited by western-monopoly capital to build the monument called western civilisation … So why not now dream the hopes of millions: of a United People’s Republic of Africa joining hands with a United People’s Republic of Asia in the service of the true Republic of man and works. What greater story can we as writers be privileged to tell? We can only hope that our hearts and pens will always be equal to the task”. (Ngugi 1981: 102/106)

As I will argue below, this essentially victimological perspective focusing on Africa’s and Asia’s common history of colonialism and anti-colonial resistance has long since given way to writing practices based on Afrasian entanglements, the importance of which Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has himself acknowledged in his more recent writing discussed below. However, the history of the AAWA and Lotus remains important even today, since one of the responses to the new (contradictory and conflict-ridden) global multipolarity and intensification of South–South interactions in the wake of the break-up of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War has consisted in attempts to revive “the Bandung spirit” and to turn to the history of the non-aligned movement as a source of inspiration for contemporary politics. In the field of literary studies, Rossen Djagalov has claimed a continuity between AAWA and contemporary post­ colonial studies that “performs some of the same intellectual labour as the Association had done earlier and relies on a literary canon that the Association has helped shape” (Djagalov 2017) and suggested that:

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… even though the Association ceased to exist the same year as its main sponsor, the Soviet state, disappeared from the map, its legacy – a distant echo of the October Revolution – continues to live a spectral, unacknowledged life in the proletarian themes of black diasporic literature, and in the scholarly approaches used to study the literature of the African continent. (ibid.)

In a similar vein, Hala Halim has suggested that the AAWA and Lotus should be seen as “a project that attests to an earlier history of postcolonial critique” (Halim 2012: 566), while Duncan M. Yoon has claimed the AAWA as a direct precursor of postcolonial studies: In fact, the Permanent Bureau in Cairo would succeed in sustaining the Global South conversation and exchange that continued up until the very creation of postcolonial studies in the Western academy during the 1980s … [T]here is the possibility that the history of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau and its later incarnations could provide an as-of-yet unexplored genealogy to the rise of postcolonial studies as an academic discipline. (Yoon 2015: 252)

While the term “postcolonial critique” seems somewhat questionable with regard to a movement that rose and fell long before postcolonialism emerged as a new field of theoretical inquiry in the 1980s and 90s,2 the retro-projection of contemporary theoretical concerns into the cultural and literary history of the 1960s and 70s indeed testifies to an epistemological nostalgia characteristic of many branches of postcolonial studies, an academic practice that often regards itself as a latter-day successor of the anti-colonial movements that shook the mid-twentieth-­ century world. Many strands of postcolonialism draw their inspiration from the historical dynamics of these movements and refuse to acknowledge that the historical constellations that generated them cannot be brought back to life. In an attempt to retrieve the utopian horizon of anti-colonial solidarity and to “revive the spirit of Bandung” (or generate a “new internationalism”), many proponents of postcolonialism embrace an “enchanted solidarity” and fail to develop a critical stance towards anti-colonial politics and their legacies in the contemporary 2 See Young (2012) for a defence of the assumption of a historical continuity between historical anti-colonial movements and present-day postcolonial academia, and Lazarus (2013) for a trenchant critique of this assumption.

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world, and instead identify with groups of people to whom they believe unconditional support is due on the part of an academic field that should supposedly transform itself into a form of activism (Schulze-Engler 2015). The history of the AAWA, including present-day attempts to revive the association, provides a sobering example of the necessity to develop a disenchanted stance on the politics and rhetorics of anti-colonialism. What is often invoked as the spirit of South–South solidarity has, in fact, over several decades evolved into a spectre of solidarity that is intimately tied to, often enough, quite cynical power struggles in a Cold War and post-Cold War world. This power struggle began early on in the 1960s with the Sino-Soviet split, one of the most important global realignments in the second half of the twentieth century that—like so many of the more unpalatable aspects of the history of international socialism and anti-colonialism—has been conveniently forgotten in much of contemporary postcolonial discourse.3 Yet the history of the AAWA was dramatically shaped by this split. The Association belonged to a corona of organisations set up in the wake of the Non-aligned Movement, many of which received massive support from the Soviet Union and its allies.4 While the Arabic edition of the first journal published by AAWA (Afro-Asian Writings, published from 1967 to 1970) and its later flagship publication Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings were printed in Cairo (the editorial offices of the journal later moved to Beirut, where the Pakistani writer Faiz Ahmed Faiz became editor of Lotus, and—following the exodus of the PLO from Lebanon—to Tunis), the English and French editions were printed and published in East Berlin (Ghouse et al. 2016: 83). When the Sino-Soviet split reached dramatic proportions in 1966, China decided to set up its own Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau and installed a Sri Lankan literary functionary, R.D. Senanayake, as new Secretary-General (Neuhauser 1968: 66–67). In his inaugural speech, Senanayake called upon Afro-Asian writers to:

3 See, for example, the contextualisation of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s writing in a Cold War context in Popescu (2014). 4 “The beginning of the Lotus era was also the era of the cold war, and the writers of Lotus in the main were socialists, and the ideology of socialism was an overriding component of their work. In this the organisation was supported and subsidised by the former Soviet Union as well as from the former East Germany” (Manji 2014).

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actively plunge into the struggle of the Afro-Asian peoples to counter-­ attack and foil the splittist activities of the imperialists headed by the United States, their agents and number one accomplice, the Soviet revisionists, and achieve final victory. (People’s Republic of China 1966)

As a side-effect of the turmoils of the Cultural Revolution in China, the Chinese-run Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau in Colombo soon folded, having published a few books of Maoist propaganda such as “The Struggle Between the Two Lines in the Afro-Asian Writers’ Movement” (Afro-Asian Writer’s Bureau 1968) and probably no more than two issues of a journal named “The Call”. While the Soviet-assisted Afro-Asian Writers’ Organisation and Lotus thus eventually prevailed in the international field of official literary African–Asian relations in the 1970s and 80s, the Maoist splitting of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau throws the contours of this historical mode of transregional solidarity into stark relief. Whatever the motivations and intentions of individual authors who participated in the Afro-Asian Writers Association, published in Lotus and accepted the Lotus Prize, the AAWA as a government-sponsored body participated in the cynical tripartite logic of the Cold War (Ross 1993) which produced “internationalist” solidarities that were geared towards the power interests of the Soviet Union or China and were deeply implicated in the legacies of authoritarianism, Stalinism and the oppressive minority rule of a bureaucratic ruling class. These legacies are often overlooked in present-day attempts in postcolonial studies to recuperate the Afro-Asian solidarity embodied in the AAWA and in Lotus as “rearticulating cultural affiliation along the lines of internationalist postcolonial solidarities” (Halim 2012: 578) and “an earlier history of postcolonial critique … that specifically held a promise of Global South comparatism” (Halim 2012: 566).5 Given the fact that the “postcolonial solidarities” in question were indeed international rather than transnational (i.e. followed logics that saw writers as implicit or explicit representatives of their countries or “peoples”), it is also hard to see why AAWA and Lotus should be seen as demonstrating “hybridities between one postcolonial intellectual’s culture and another’s” (Halim 2012: 578). What held AAWA and Lotus together was the recourse to a common history of colonial oppression and anti-colonial 5 For African American perspectives on recuperating Afro-Asian solidarity, see Blaine (2015), Frazier (2015), Ho and Mullen (2008) and Mullen (2016).

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struggle typical of all post-Bandung institutions, coupled with a critique of “cultural imperialism” and a defence of “national cultures” that helped to amalgamate socialist and nationalist ideologies; however, this history quickly deteriorated into an ideological smokescreen for new authoritarian aspirations of postcolonial power elites and was structurally uninterested in hybridities, creolisations or transregional entanglements. The same logics seem to underlie a number of more recent attempts to revive AAWA. Apart from individual writers with a wide array of individual agendas, a number of writers’ organisations (usually of a “progressive” bent) as well as several state bodies have been involved in these attempts, which are often based on a victimological appeal to a shared history of colonial oppression, an anti-colonial rhetoric targeting Western arrogance and supremacy, and an interest of at least some nation-states (such as the Russian Federation) in utilising these anti-Western sentiments for their own political ends. As early as 2006, representatives of five regional writers’ unions met in Cairo to prepare an Afro-Asian writers’ conference on “Culture and the Intellectual in an Age of Hegemony” and “to discuss ways to reactivate the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association” (El-Din 2006). In 2007, a major international Asia-Africa Literature Festival (AALF) took place in Jeonju, South Korea, that brought together some 70 African and Asian as well as some 200 South Korean writers (“Asian and African Writers Meet in Korea” 2007). Once more, colonial oppression as the rationale for African–Asian literary encounters played a major role, as the AALF Chair, Paik Nak-chung, pointed out in his opening address: “Asia and Africa … share the common experience of being marginalised by the Europeans as the Other, and of having had most areas fall victim to European colonialism” (Nak-Chung 2007). Finally, in December 2012, AAWA was officially revived under the new name of Afro-Asian Writers’ Union (AAWU) at an international conference attended by delegates from more than 35 African and Asian countries. The conference and the re-foundation of AAWU had been promoted by the All India Progressive Writers’ Association and the Egyptian Writers’ Union and took place under the auspices of AAPSO; the president of the Indian Association was elected AAWU president, the president of the Egyptian Union was elected Secretary General, Vietnam and Uganda provided the deputy secretary generals and Cairo was chosen as the permanent headquarters of AAWU.

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Interestingly enough, Russia once more played an important role in the proceedings and was entrusted with the bureau for external affairs, cooperation and public relations (Premchand 2013). Further meetings of the AAWU Executive took place in Hanoi in 2013 (Newly Reestablished Afro-Asian Writers’ Association Convenes in Hanoi 2013), where a decision to revive the Lotus Prize was taken (Award Launched to Honour Afro-Asian Writers 2013), in Moscow in 2014, where a delegate declared in an interview with Voice of Russia that “[t]he AAWA opposes a unipolar world and one-sided imposition of Western values, which is often linked to violence”6 (Asian and African Writers Unite to Exert Influence on World Politics 2014), and in Amman. The second conference of AAWU (which media often continue to refer to as AAWA) was scheduled to be held in Iraq, but took place in Cairo in 2016; the conference decided to alter the name of the association to “Writers Union of Africa Asia and Latin America” and announced the relaunch of the Lotus Literary Prize and of Lotus Magazine in several languages and as an online medium (Writers Union of Africa Asia and Latin America 2016), none of which seems to have materialised to date. The information available on the new AAWU/Writers Union of Africa Asia and Latin America is too scant, and its membership too diverse, to infer any precise standpoint on the part of the organisation. Yet it is clear that the organisational structure (harping back to the internationalist legacy of AAWA that considered writers as representatives of their nations and aimed at establishing national chapters) and some of the published evidence available points to the fact that the new Writers Union is once more at least partly a state-driven organisation which at least some states seek to utilise for their nationalist and anti-Western foreign policy rather than a genuinely transnational endeavour. There is thus absolutely no reason to view the organised Africa–Asia solidarity embodied in the history of AAWA and Lotus as well as its contemporary heritage in terms of a politically naïve enchanted solidarity. At best, it constituted one strand 6 The interview provides interesting evidence for the attempt of the Russian Federation to continue using AAWU to serve its own national interest, just like the Soviet Union had done during the Cold War. The delegate, interviewed by a government-controlled radio station notorious for its support of President Putin’s aggressive nationalist policies, continued: “This is often supported by groups that serve the interests of the West. This is confirmed by the developments in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine. In these countries, the rights of a large number of people are being violated, civilians are being killed and cultural monuments are being destroyed”.

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of African–Asian literary interactions only; although several well-known African writers such as Chinua Achebe, Alex la Guma, Meja Mwangi and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o accepted the Lotus Prize, only a few active and prominent African writers actually took part in the organisational life of AAWA, which largely remained a domain of literary functionaries rather than of practising writers with significant literary influence.

3  Intimate Contact: Afrasian Entanglements in East African Literature African–Asian literary interactions have developed along a wide variety of trajectories in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, many of which are not related to the traditions of organised African–Asian literary solidarity outlined above. These include the highly productive Afrasian contact zone that emerged around the journal Transition, edited by the Ugandan Asian writer and journalist Rajeat Neogy, which rapidly became the most important and internationally renowned literary journal in East Africa in the early 1960s. Transition subsequently became bizarrely embroiled in a Cold War affair when it became known in the late 1960s that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had supported the journal, had been financed by the CIA; Neogy and Transition were subsequently hounded out of Uganda because of the journal’s open critique of the authoritarian policies pursued by President Milton Obote (see Benson 1986; Desai 2013: 80–81; Lewis 2016; Theroux 2011). Other such trajectories formed around the works of Asian–African writers in East Africa such as Peter Nazareth, Bahadur Tejani or M.G. Vassanji (Desai 2013; Ojwang 2013; Vassanji 2014) or in the context of “Afrindian Fictions” in South Africa (Rastogi 2008). Many of the texts produced in these contexts emerged from, and sought to come to terms with, scenarios of intimate contact, entanglement and fusion. In order to appreciate the (literary and political) significance of these texts, it is necessary to break away from the idea of Afro-Asian literature being mainly or even exclusively predicated on a common history of colonial victimhood and anti-colonial resistance, an idea that is still widespread in many strands of postcolonial studies and that paradoxically reinforces and reinscribes the hierarchical relationship between Europe and its “Others” into African (and Asian) literary histories. As Evan Mwangi has noted, many postcolonial theories “seem to

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be powered by the now-naturalised notion that African literatures are a response to a singular European Other and an insurrection against an external aesthetics” and thus promote a focus on African literature as a “reactive project” that Mwangi finds problematic “because it tends to silence Africans’ articulation of self in favour of the West that postcolonial theory claims to be deconstructing” (Mwangi 2009: ix). The same reductive problematic emerges in Afrasian literary interactions when they are viewed exclusively through the lens of political solidarities engendered by colonial oppression and anti-colonial resistance. As Mukoma wa Ngugi has pointed out: Writers and scholars from the Global South often engage with one another through their own relationship to the West. But triangulating ideas, whether political or literary, through the West ends up masking historical SouthSouth relationships while feeding and giving cover to cultural nationalism and protectionist scholarly practices. We need to fracture this dialectical linkage to the West and allow South-South cultural, historical and political conversations to take place … Indeed, the major limitation of the otherwise courageous postcolonial enterprise has been a theoretical and conceptual inability to escape the West-South South-West framework … Unable to escape this locked and unequal dialectic, many postcolonial thinkers end up affirming the very relationships they are trying to undermine. (Ngugi 2012: 5)

For Mukoma wa Ngugi, “Redefining the Global South” is a question of finding lateral relations between literatures and cultures that lie beyond the historical links that tie African and Asian literatures to Europe. Invoking Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1997), Ngugi pleads for a heightened awareness of South–South interactions that have unfolded in a vast and uneven relational space that can no longer be mapped by means of time-honoured ideological categories: The goal is not to sublimate or ignore the West – far from it. Indeed the West – simply because of colonialism and globalisation – is a huge part of the dialogue. The goal is to be in relation with the West as with everyone else. Following Glissant, we are simply saying that there are other ways of knowing and relating … The idea is not to look for what Glissant calls “ideological stability” … To think about South-to-South relations is to enter a place of great intellectual vulnerability. Once we leave the relationship of, let’s say, Africa and Europe via colonialism, the world suddenly

128  F. SCHULZE-ENGLER becomes very vast, complicated, and scary as the knowledge of just how little we know settles in. Yet, this place that is just outside our comfort zone is a beautiful place to be in – it’s a place of discovery of new ideas and seeing old ideas anew. (ibid.: 6/7)

If, as Evan Mwangi has shown, African literary history provides ample evidence for the fact that “Africa writes back to self” rather than to its former colonial or imperial “Other”, the same can be argued about Afrasian literary relations that often enough are characterised by a self-reflexive scrutiny of African–Asian entanglements, conflicts and negotiations. Literary representations of Afrasian interactions (including African–Asian solidarity) predicated on historical and contemporary entanglements between Africa and Asia (and shared lives of Africans and Asians) rather than on segmentary notions of separate nations or regions united by a common colonial and anti-colonial past are thus anything but an apolitical sideshow, but provide urgently needed remappings of a “New World Order” (Phillips 2001) that can no longer be understood in terms of old colonial and postcolonial frameworks. In what follows, three examples from East African literature will be presented that engage with Afrasian entanglements between Africans and Asians, Asian Africans and African Asians, and explore intimate contact zones between people, cultures and identities. A first example of such an “Afrasian” imaginary predicated on AfroAsian entanglements rather than the idea of relations built on a common heritage of colonial oppression can, interestingly enough, be found in a recent essay by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Looking back on his life as a writer, Ngũgĩ acknowledged a theme in his life that had remained unexplored throughout most of his writing career: After I wrote my memoir of childhood, Dreams in a Time of War, published in 2006, I looked back and saw how much India had been an equally important thread in my life. I had not planned to bring out the Indian theme in my life: but there it was, staring at me right from the pages of my narrative. The thread starts from home, through school, college and after … Even today, Christmas and feasts in Kenya mean plentiful of cabaci, thambutha and mandathi, our version of the Indian chapati, paratha, samosa. The spices, curry, hot pepper and all, so very Indian, had become so central a part of Kenyan African cuisine that I could have sworn that these dishes were truly indigenous.

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It was not just Christmas: daily hospitality in every Kenyan home means being treated to a mug of tea, literally a brew of tea leaves, tanmgawizi, and milk and sugar, made together, really a massala tea … So African it all seemed to me that when I saw Indians drinking tea or making curry, I thought it the result of African influence. (Ngũgĩ 2012)

In this essay, Ngugi offers a tour d’horizon of the Indian presence in the society, politics and culture of East Africa and suggests that acknowledging its significance is part of a wider story encompassing the AAWA and Lotus. Given the fact that the role of Indian characters in most of Ngũgĩ’s earlier writings was habitually circumscribed by stock images and stereotypes of Indians as exploitative outsiders, that for much of his writing career Ngũgĩ was a staunch proponent of African nationalism, and that he had delivered the Lotus Prize acceptance speech discussed above with an exclusive focus on the anti-colonial struggle of black Africans and without once mentioning the role of Indo-African people, culture or politics, this wider story undoubtedly sounds somewhat over-harmonious in retrospect, and it is easy to understand the disappointment of M.G. Vassanji, who drily commented on Ngũgĩ’s late essay: “If only he – or someone – had said this thirty years earlier” (Vassanji 2014: 58). Yet Ngugi’s essay, together with his recent novel Wizard of the Crow that accords India (and possibly even China [see Leman 2014]) a prominent role, can be seen as marking a new phase in East African writing characterised by a sustained literary interest in Afrasian imaginaries and memories on the part of well-known writers who (in contrast to the sizeable number of Indian East African writers who have explored these themes) have no genealogical link to Asia. Another prominent representative of this new phase is Yvonne Owour’s Indian Ocean novel The Dragonfly Sea (2019). The second example of Afrasian entanglements in East African literature is a short story published in Kwani?, the most influential and active literary magazine in Kenya. Since its inception in 2003, Kwani? has engaged in an intensive literary scrutiny of cultural and linguistic diversity in Kenya and has also become heavily involved in Kenyan politics, for example, through a special issue giving voice to victims of the 2008 post-election violence in Kenya. Over the years, a number of short stories, essays and cartoons in Kwani? have engaged with contemporary Afrasian interactions in Kenya. An intriguing example is “Selling World Power”, a short story by Billy Kahora, a well-known Kenyan fiction

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writer and one of the editors of Kwani?, that engages in a subtle and ironic fictional exploration of Afrasian interactions between China and Kenya. Interestingly enough, “Selling World Power” prominently features the idea of an Afrasian solidarity built on common colonial experiences. At the end of the story, a flashback passage recounts how Jemima Kariuki, the lower-middle-class protagonist of the story, first met Han So, a Chinese businessman who sells Chinese products through a middlemen (and women) organisation called Kianshi. When Jemima asks Han So what brought him to Kenya, the latter answers with a long story focusing on his family’s involvement in the Opium Wars and on China’s and Kenya’s common history of oppression by the British: Jemima got to know about Kianshi for the first time when a vendor handed her a small promotional leaflet in a matatu. “Make money. Sell Chinese products. Call No. 0740444888 and attend seminar at K.I.C.C. February 5th” the leaflet said. That’s where she met Han So … … British then bring opium and people become weak. British first say they sell to China world power. British say British products are world power. And that Chinese will become strong. But come opium. And then opium war or Anglo China war. Me not like that. Want to make China strong and Kenya strong. Bring products that make Kenya and China strong. Bring Kianshi. Bring World Power”. (Kahora 2007: 363/364)

The plot and narrative structure of the story, however, thoroughly ironises and delegimates this grand narration of Afro-Asian solidarity. Whether Han So really believes the story he tells Jemima remains a moot point, since as readers we know too little about him to judge his veracity, but in the last resort whether he believes this story or not is of no consequence, since the very construct of “world power” in the service of the formerly oppressed is ironically undermined by the fact that Han So has not only supplied his Kenyan middlemen with goods of substandard quality, but has also involved them in a massive import tax fraud. “Selling World Power” certainly plays with the echo of a historical war conducted to safeguard free market access for a drug-peddling British empire and the present-day occult contact zone where a globalised free-market

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mentality flips into the fraudulent universe of multi-level marketing, but the cynical instrumentalisation of an allegedly shared past of colonial oppression clearly shows that not all invocations of international solidarity are to be trusted. Yet Kahora’s story does not simply portray Han So as the Chinese villain who corrupts innocent Kenyans: in a much more subtle move, it focuses on the hopes and illusions of a cast of struggling middle-class characters who are only too willing to believe in tales of global success. In a passage at the beginning of the story, three of these characters are portrayed in a conversation during their lunch break: Jemima Kariuki is becoming Chinese … “Not America, Chaina is the next world powa – everyone knows. You need to buy new Made in China. Thas why I’m selling Made in China,” Jemimah says. “Na-Sell World Power,” Feeling confident. “Yes, yes,” says Assumpta seriously, “I went shopping in Cheng Du last year. Their kitchen tiles are very good.” “Korea, Iddian, Firipino watever,” says Bessie with a glare. “I forgot my purse in the office. Can you pay for me?” Jemima has become used to forgotten purses and lost handbags since Bessie lost her Nigerian boyfriend two years ago … Obi was thrown out of the country … (ibid.: 350/351)

The story of Bessie’s lost Nigerian fraudster boyfriend who engaged in high living until his counterfeit business was exposed and he was expelled is by no means incidental at this point. From the very beginning of the story, Kahora sets up an intricate transregional correspondence between Kenya, China and Nigeria that strongly relies on acts of social imagination. As the story develops, Bessie repeatedly warns Jemima of possible dangers of her new Chinese business venture, drawing on her own disappointing experiences with Nigerian fraudulence. While Jemima herself indignantly rejects this association (“Do not compare China to Nigeria … How can you compare a world power with a foo foo drug culture” [362]), the plot proves Bessie right: the Chinese business venture ends in a legal quagmire from which Jemima barely manages to escape at

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the end of the story. What is ultimately at issue is, of course, not the quality of real-life Chinese goods, but the social imaginaries attached to transregional interactions: the idea of a Chinese-driven “world power” that would suddenly allow careworn Kenyan government employees to become players in the global economy is as cliché-ridden, the short story suggests, as the stock image of Nigeria as a “foo foo drug culture”. The third example of Afrasian entanglements in East African literature selected for this chapter is M.G. Vassanji’s novel The Magic of Saida. In this veritable maze of Afrasian identities, the plot unfolds on three time levels: a nineteenth-century setting of German colonial rule and anti-colonial resistance in Tanganyika, a mid-twentieth-century storyline concerned with the childhood and youth of Kamal Punka, the main protagonist of the novel who grew up in Tanzania and later emigrated to Canada, and the early twenty-first century present figuring Kamal Punka’s return journey to the East African coast in search of his first love Saida. The history of Afrasian entanglements in this novel reaches back hundreds of years, to the times of a flourishing slave trade across the Indian Ocean that brought millions of African captives to Arabia and Asia, and to the origins of a community of former African slaves in India known to the present day as Siddis. One of the protagonists of the nineteenth-century story is Kamal Punka’s great grandfather Punja Devraj, or Punja the Lion, as he comes to be known later in his life. Punja the Lion fought alongside a wide array of other Africans against the German colonial regime and was hanged by the Germans. His story thus unfolds as a story of Afrasian solidarity, but it also unfolds as a story of African–Asian entanglements that undermines the self-enclosed, reductive black African nationalism in contemporary Tanzania that Vassanji’s novel seeks to break open. Punja’s origins in India make it impossible to maintain watertight distinctions between “India” and “Africa”, since his very genealogy reaches back to an intricate story of Afrasian entanglements: Africa was not entirely foreign to the Western ports of India; since olden times ships had plied the ocean between the two continents, carrying a small but steady trade … But Singpur, lying in the hinterland, had a different connection to Africa. It was home to the Sidis, the dark people whose ancestors had travelled the other way, from Africa to India, some centuries before and never returned. Their saint, Sidi Sayyad, was known widely for his magical powers. (Vassanji 2013: 123)

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Punja heard it said that the ancestors of the dark curly-headed folk of Singpur had come originally from a wonderful island called Jangbar in Africa. … It was as he heard these tales of the spice island of opportunity and its friendly sultan, away from anything he’d known, that the revelation struck Punja: … He would go to Jangbar. The Pir of Jangbar, Sidi Sayyad himself, had beckoned him. This is what he would always relate, Sidi Sayyad had sent him to Africa to take his greetings to his people. (ibid.: 125)

Having emigrated (or, in a deeper sense suggested in the novel, perhaps remigrated) to East Africa, Punja becomes a successful businessman who identifies with the Africans as “his people” and enters the anti-colonial struggle on their part. However, told from the perspective of present-day Tanzania and of his great-grandson, Kamal Punka, the story does not fail to register the complexities and contradictions involved in this tale of transregional solidarity: Punja was now a man of the coast, a respected Indian trader and honorary Swahili who was convinced by now that Sidi Sayyad of Singpur had sent him to Africa with a noble purpose: to help his people, the Africans, resist the onslaught of the Europeans … He was that saint’s emissary and gift to his ancestral homeland. He would do all he could to help resist the invasion of his adopted land. Punja’s great-grandson, a century and some years later now, wonders whether Sidi Sayyad, if we grant him his supernatural powers, lying in Singpur under a mound of fragrant flowers, was aware of this singular irony, that those leading the fight against the foreign invasion on the east coast of Africa were eminent traders in slaves too; that it was slavers of this ilk who had brought at least some of his people all the way to India … (ibid.: 139)

These contradictory and uneven Afrasian entanglements also surface in Kamal Punka himself who, born to an Indian father who left his black African mother soon after his birth, grew up as a self-designated African in the 1950s in the small coastal town of Kilwa in what is today Tanzania. In order to safeguard his social advancement and give him the best possible start in life, Kamal’s mother decides to consign him to the care of his Indian relatives in Dar es Salaam, who proceed to turn him into a “proper Indian”. Despite his success at school, however,

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Kamal remains a liminal character who wears the nickname “Golo”, conferred on him by his schoolmates because of his African ancestry, with pride, because he does not see it as an indicator of discrimination, but as a marker of his African identity: Everyone had a nickname at school, and his was Golo. It was friendly; even to this day, Kamal said, some of his friends knew him as Golo. It meant, in its original sense, servant, or slave. In a strange way, he was proud of it. There was nothing to be ashamed of, he was living in Africa, his continent. And later, it was just a moniker. Later in life, in Edmonton, his wife Shamim would detest it. How could you allow yourself to be called a slave? Where is your pride? … But that’s what he was in Dar es Salaam: Golo, the African; the chotaro, the half-caste Indian; mouthing Indianisms with increasing fluency, occasionally stumbling. (ibid.: 195)

The Magic of Saida clearly aligns itself with Kamal Punka’s refusal to have his complex identity ethnically cleansed and with his stubborn determination to acknowledge a life that has unfolded in what Vassanji in one of his essays once called “the thick of multiplicity” (Vassanji 1996).7 Reflecting on his life’s trajectory during his visit to Kilwa, Kamal muses: “Well, I am of here and these are my people, and yet I have a life and family elsewhere. In Canada, I’ve thought of myself as African – though not African Canadian or African American – attractive illusions for a while. It becomes difficult to say precisely what one is anymore. Isn’t that a common condition nowadays?” (ibid.: 222)

7 See also Peter Kalliney’s comments on the critical reception of Vassanji as a “Canadian” or “South Asian” writer: “Most scholars and journalists claim Vassanji, who lives in Canada and is very active in the Canadian literary scene, either as a Canadian writer or as a member of the South Asian diaspora, and much more rarely as an African novelist … [H]is hybridity as a writer, or his ability to move and speak across national and cultural boundaries, affords his work a great deal of mobility and flexibility. The result, however, is that his value as a novelist of East Africa ends up being suppressed, while his identity as a Canadian or a South Asian postcolonial writer gets enhanced” (Kalliney 2008: 18).

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4  Conclusion: Beyond Postcolonial Nostalgia in Afrasian Literary Studies As this chapter hopes to have shown, the trajectories of African–Asian literary encounters are much more complex and contradictory than the grand narratives of Afro-Asian anti-colonial solidarity currently recycled in certain strands of postcolonial cultural and literary theory suggest. Set against the rich archival evidence of literary and cultural history, the longing for a “postcolonial” recuperation of the “golden age” of the Bandung era seems little more than epistemological nostalgia: a wish to hark back to a time when the utopian potential of anti-colonialism was untainted and a bright future for the decolonising world seemed assured. This postcolonial nostalgia shows puzzling structural similarities to the postcolonial melancholia that Paul Gilroy has diagnosed in contemporary Britain and that for him manifests itself in an inability to come to terms with the loss of Empire and a concomitant clinging to a mythologised “golden past”, particularly the historical victory over fascism in World War II (Gilroy 2004). The common enmity against the European coloniser and the legacy of a world-wide web of anti-colonial nationalism arguably constitutes another version of a golden past that functions as a symbol of political nostalgia in the contemporary world. As Lazare Ki-Zerbo put it in a review of a recent publication on “Rethinking Solidarity in a Global Society” (Khudori 2007), the “ambiguity of the appeal to history” lies in the fact that “Bandung corresponds to a golden age of African and Asian Nationalism” because it was characterised by a “real consensus on a common enemy: the coloniser”, while contemporary discourses of Afro-Asian solidarity inevitably clash with a real world “primarily marked by a preponderance of economic interests and the crude violence of their expression” (Ki-Zerbo 2009: 97). Afrasian literary and cultural studies thus would do well not to let themselves be locked into a stance predicated on postcolonial nostalgia; what is needed instead, it seems, is an attentiveness to the complex transformations that African–Asian alignments have undergone during the era of decolonisation and after, as well as to the manifold transcultural, transnational and transregional entanglements that have created a myriad of individual and collective contact zones in African and Asian societies and cultures. East African literature has long since begun to explore the ethical, political and cultural issues that are negotiated in these contact zones. Coming to terms with the history of transregional solidarities is

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part of these negotiations, as are literary decentrings of “homogenous nationalist visions” that use hybrid literary forms to project “disparate and competing identities within the nation” and to acknowledge “diverse and heterogeneous social formations within the nation-space” (Simatei 2011: 64). The idiom in which contemporary Afrasian imaginaries are generated in East African (as well as other African and Asian literatures) is not predicated on the protocols of internationalism, but is sustained by the language of transnational, transregional and transcultural entanglements and transformations.

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138  F. SCHULZE-ENGLER Nak-Chung, P. 2007. Toward a New Encounter. Address at the Opening Session of the Jeonju Asia-Africa Literature Festival, November 9. http://en.changbi. com/2007/11/15/paik-nak-chung-toward-a-new-encounter/?cat=3. Accessed 7 Feb 2016. Nân Dân online, The Central Organ of the Communist Party of Vietnam, The Voice of the Party, State and People of Vietnam. 2013. Newly Re-established Afro-Asian Writers’ Association Convenes in Hanoi, August 30. http://en. nhandan.org.vn/culture/item/1968002-newly-reestablished-afro-asian-writers-association-convenes-in-hanoi.html. Accessed 7 Feb 2016. Neuhauser, C. 1968. Third World Politics: China and the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation, 1957–1967. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ngugi, M. 2012. Rethinking the Global South. Journal of Contemporary Thought 35: 5–10. Ngũgĩ, W. 1981. The Links That Bind Us (1973). In Writers in Politics: Essays, 101–106. London: Heinemann. Ngũgĩ, W. 2006. Wizard of the Crow. New York: Pantheon. Ngũgĩ, W. 2012. Asia in My Life. Pambazuka News, May 17. https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/asia-my-life. Accessed 7 Feb 2016. Ojwang, D. 2013. Reading Migration and Culture: The World of East African Indian Literature. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Owuor, Y.A. 2019. The Dragonfly Sea. New York: Knopf. Reuters. 1966. People’s Republic of China: Soviet Union Criticised at Inaugural Meeting in Peking of Afro-Asian Writers Bureau Secretariat, August 22. http://www.itnsource.com/shotlist//RTV/1966/08/22/BGY506090259/ ?s=criticising. Accessed 7 Feb 2016. Phạm, Q.N., and R. Shilliam. 2016. Reviving Bandung. In Meanings of Bandung: Postcolonial Orders and Decolonial Visions, ed. Quỳnh N. Phạm and Robbie Shilliam, 3–19. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Phillips, C. 2001. Introduction: A New World Order. In A New World Order: Selected Essays, 1–6. London: Secker and Warburg. Popescu, M. 2014. Aesthetic Solidarities: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Cold War. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50 (4): 384–397. Premchand, T. 2013. Revival of Afro-Asian Writers Union. New Age Weekly: Organ of the Communist Party of India, January 3. http://www.newageweekly.com/2013/01/revival-of-afro-asian-writers-union.html. Accessed 7 Feb 2016. Rastogi, P. 2008. Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Ross, R.S. (ed.). 1993. China, the United States and the Soviet Union: Tripolarity and Policy-Making in the Cold War. Armonk, NY and London: Sharpe. Schulze-Engler, F. 2015. Once Were Internationalists? Postcolonialism, Disenchanted Solidarity and the Right to Belong in a World of Globalized

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CHAPTER 8

Bringing Transnationalism Back In: On Gender Politics in South Africa’s China Interactions Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel and Uta Ruppert

1  Introduction South–South solidarity narratives and especially the official discourse on China–Africa relations tend to insinuate an idea of harmonic state– society relations. Civil society groups and social movements that were central to the fight against colonialism and that waged independence struggles are expected to contribute to governmental efforts in creating and maintaining relations with southern brother and sister states that, compared to other relations, are said to take place on equal terms (Alden et al. 2010). But the current wave of South–South reality appears to be much more complex than linear ideas about “the South” and impressions of its politics within the region may suggest. In this chapter, by R. Mageza-Barthel (*)  Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany e-mail: [email protected] U. Ruppert  Faculty of Social Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Anthony and U. Ruppert (eds.), Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7_8

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referring to gender politics in South Africa’s relations with China and shifting attention towards civil society and people-to-people interaction, we aim to look at the political realities behind and between the details of the popular China–Africa framework. For this purpose, the realm of gender politics has shown itself to be significant in several ways. The first and most fundamental is that, although gender politics has spread more visibly in other fields of the social sciences and cultural studies, it has rarely been the subject of China–Africa research. Contributions such as those of Linn Axelsson and Nina Sylvanus (2010) and T. Tu Huynh (2015) are exceptional in taking the political and social effects of gender into account at all. In a comparative study, Axelsson and Sylvanus illustrate how women entrepreneurs in Ghana and Togo navigate their changing social roles in the context of the increase in China–Africa trade. Huynh provides a more current contribution to transmigration studies with a gender focus. In most other instances, gender is a typically missing analytical category and overlooked social relation in China–Africa studies. Secondly, this major research gap is even more surprising because gender politics is one of the deepest and most vibrant areas explicitly linking transnational and transregional civil society activities (see Mageza-Barthel 2017). Not least, the Fourth World Conference on Women, convened by the United Nations in Beijing in 1995, reinforced the potential of Africa–Asia gender networks. While these networks had emerged and gained dynamics over the Women’s Decade from 1975 to 1985,1 the Beijing Forum especially provided evidence of the international women’s movement’s strength, prevalence, plurality and proficiency at negotiating, coordinating and reconciling transnational civil society politics (see Baksh and Harcourt 2015). Regional feminisms, grounded in shared historical experiences and tangible commonalities in political economies and experienced in South–South cooperation within the context of feminist organising, gained in importance. By drawing on feminisms from across the globe, the Beijing process simultaneously 1 Instructive overviews of the developments during the UN Women’s Decade pertaining to the emerging disputes, discourses, strategies and concepts of inter- and transnational women’s (movements’) politics, with the first World Women’s Conference in Mexico (1975), the second in Copenhagen (1980) and the third in Nairobi (1985) as points of culmination, can be found in Peggy Antrobus (1995) as well as in Rawwida Baksh and Wendy Harcourt (2015).

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pooled and stimulated a rich diversity of women’s movements’ politics. These flowed into the mutually reinforcing processes of, on the one hand, translating international norms into local politics—referred to in activist phrasing as “bringing Beijing back home”—and informing international institutions of local demands, which one could reflect as “bringing the local realities into international politics”. We therefore regard the Beijing conference as crucial to both major theoretical underpinnings and political concepts of transnational gender politics, which consider South– South cooperation as constitutive.2 Beijing marked the initial point of a new era of transnationalisation for China–South Africa relations, becoming ever more significant in the field of gender politics on both sides. Thirdly, in the context of Africa–Asia interactions, the example of China–South Africa gender politics relations seems especially telling. South African networks of gender activists, women’s organisations and feminist representatives are among the most experienced, transnationally embedded and influential civil society actors (see Waylen 2007; Basu 2010; Salo 2010). Though Chinese gender politics might be under immense pressure, especially in the non-state sphere of women’s selforganising, the growing importance of gender politics for equal rights within the context of the Chinese state’s ongoing capitalist transformation can hardly be emphasised enough (see Chen 2015). In accordance with the general South–South solidarity narrative, one could expect that gender activists from South Africa and China actually share important past and previous experiences, challenges and ties. However, a critique has arisen from both sides in response to state-led exchanges and SinoAfrican friendship politics. During the course of our empirical research, we found that, contrary to our own initial expectations, the in-depth examination of transregional South African gender politics yielded what we suggest calling “strategic abstention”, which entails South African women’s organisations’ choice not to engage in issues related to China–South Africa politics, as the most frequent position. In the following, we examine this 2 The latest volume of the South–South network DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era), on theories and praxes of transnational gender politics (Sen and Durano 2014), provides a lot of illustrative material on the mutual relations and interconnectedness of the different levels, spheres and arenas of gender politics. They cross from the local to the national, involve the regional and international to bring to light all their border “trans-cending” dimensions.

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abstention, which clearly demands an analytical explanation. By systematising the field of actors, activities and political positions in South African interactions with China, we attempt to answer why precisely so many South African gender activists abstain from this arena. Through the empirical analysis of who pursues which strategies, we hope to unfold the political character of this abstention and, at the same time, outline what ideas and meanings of Sino-African transregionalisation are generated by contemporary gender politics. The chapter therefore begins with the transnationalisation of Africa–China gender politics, thereafter proceeding with an outline of Sino-South African interactions, and finally discussing the modes of engagement within which we find strategic abstention.

2  China–Africa Relations as a Transnational Project In the wide array of scholarship on China–Africa relations, different disciplines and theoretical angles have informed the research methodologies from which various analytic perspectives emanate. Our point of departure stems from our academic training as political scientists in African and Development Studies. We are also informed by our involvement in an inter- and transdisciplinary research programme, AFRASO, that focuses on the contents, forms and implications of ongoing interactions between African and Asian protagonists on both continents. Transnationalism and its feminist arrangement play a significant part in how we have approached the events that have unfolded in gender politics within more recent South–South relations. Our interpretation rests heavily on our own experiences in, and reading of, African gender politics and transnational feminist politics (Ruppert and Rompel 2012; Mageza-Barthel 2015, 2016; Ruppert 2015, 2017). The findings in this chapter are mainly based on empirical research undertaken in South Africa between 2014 and 2016, during which we engaged in discussions with actors involved in Chinese–African relations or gender politics. Accordingly, our data was gathered through conversations and interviews, media and press clippings as well as observations. In endeavouring to shed light on the response of African actors towards more recent global dynamics, our primary sources were mainly situated in African countries and engaged Asian partners as emerging powers on the world stage. Our research interest rested on the premise that a close working relationship between Chinese and African states, along with previous

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encounters between Chinese and African feminists, would lead to intense collaboration under the current conditions of Sino-African relations. Instead, as we will explore below, we were confronted with a puzzle. China’s increased investment and interest in Africa has brought forth a further surge of interest in the continent and revealed a distinct controversy about the nature of this specific relationship (Brautigam 2009; Taylor 2014). Alongside state and trade relations, people-to-people interactions have flourished in various guises. However, we still encounter a highly ambivalent picture in terms of gender politics where women and poverty eradication has been claimed by the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) as a topic on which to engage African women’s organisations (see Xiaohui 2009). Our question was whether this aspect was in fact an underestimated aspect of South–South cooperation in gender politics. Founded in 1949, the ACWF is the only national Chinese women’s organisation to officially engage in Chinese–African relations, acting alongside a few regional Chinese women’s organisations in this field. Credited with bringing frameworks and discourses of global feminisms to China, the Federation has also been celebrated for introducing Women’s Studies to Chinese universities and giving rise to the proliferation of smaller women’s organisations in the country (Zhang and Hsiung 2010). Ever since its establishment, the Federation has strived to ensure women’s rights and represent women’s interests in Chinese politics. However, its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) and the tension around operating independently have called the Federation’s autonomy into question. This debate arises from assumptions that civil society, in the libertarian Western sense, is distinct from the state and its influence. However, we acknowledge that in the Global South, civil society in its various shapes and sizes is more often than not a hybrid space between state and society. As a result, we would have to regard the AWCF as well as other NGOs in China and South Africa as a fundamental part thereof. That said, it must be acknowledged that hardly any independent Chinese women’s organisations exist at all—certainly none which engage in China–Africa relations. Having a seat at the table of one of the newer cross-sectoral initiatives led by the party leadership provides the AWCF with an opportunity to continue the long-established tradition of engaging African women’s organisations it has claimed for itself. Such a chance also provides the potential to reinforce the social objectives the ACWF

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hopes to foster in its own society. As evidenced by Africans’ generally enthusiastic response to the Chinese project, China seems to have something interesting to offer (South) Africans; however, we would question whether this also applies to gender politics. In common with transnational feminists across the world, we identify the Beijing World Women’s Conference in 1995 as one of the most vital moments in transnational women’s movements (see Basu 1995; Antrobus 2004; Baksh and Harcourt 2015). It represented a milestone in Sino-South African gender politics, being the first instance where both countries’ representatives could meet as interlocutors resembling partners. Under South Africa’s newly established democratic regime, South African feminists had acquired positions in the state and had placed gender equality at the centre of the racial and social equity agenda. In a similar way, the ACWF had been incorporated into the Chinese state when the Chinese revolution aimed to overturn the existing feudal structures and turn socialism into a reality. Both movements found that, through their explicitly gendered agendas, they were at once located inside and outside of their respective states. However, despite these seemingly shared experiences, the two women’s movements were positioned differently within feminist networks. Unlike the rather isolated and relatively inward-looking Chinese women’s movement, South Africa’s feminists could look back on a long history of transnational mobilisation. For Naihua Zhang and Ping-Chun Hsiung (2010), the Beijing Conference kicked off a new period in Chinese women’s organising, primarily because it provided a foothold into the transnational women’s movement that was marked by the establishment of many more autonomous and strategically diverse organisations. It was at the Beijing Conference that women’s rights as human rights were amplified on the international agenda, and that the Southern feminisms that had defined the Nairobi Conference ten years earlier could be reconciled with Northern feminist stances. Admittedly, the Beijing Conference occurred before the current renewed wave of China–Africa relations began. Both countries hoped that the conference would enable them to cement a position in the accepted global order; both having been ostracised previously as pariah states, they both appeared to be undergoing a transformation process. South Africa had become a democratic state with its first truly multi-party elections in April 1994 and was still in the midst of a political transition; China had begun liberalising its economy and, after the global

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outcry following Tiananmen Square, was inviting international scrutiny. The impact of this transnational courtship, where the world was brought to Beijing, was so far-reaching that even today “Beijing” remains symbolically potent for countries undergoing transformation across the Global South, where gender has been noticeably mainstreamed into local political processes. The extent to which the Chinese and South African women’s movements regard the transnational women’s movement as constitutive for their own outlook forms one of the main characteristics shaping the engagement between South African and Chinese women, as will be discussed later. Returning to today, common challenges to women’s movements seem to prevail. Among them, the tension between women’s liberation and leftist ideologies appears to be expressed chiefly through the question of the extent to which the South African and Chinese organisations can act both under the stewardship and independently of the ruling party. Another major challenge lies in the links between feminist strategies working under the conditions of globalisation. Grossly unequal socio-economic conditions in post-apartheid South Africa have resulted in fierce struggles around socio-economic justice. Similarly, for the AWCF, the gains in terms of greater socio-economic equality achieved by overcoming development challenges in previous eras are increasingly being jeopardised under a capitalist economy that is now extending its reach globally. For decades, the AWCF has entertained relations with its Asian neighbours and African counterparts. Yet the current official Chinese “Going Out” enterprise that pushes for public and private international commerce and entails an enormous proliferation of actors and capital make these relations appear like small initiatives rather than steadfast, bold interventions. The common question is: How can women’s movements sustain their momentum and build relationships under these conditions?

3  Current Sino-South African Interactions in Gender Politics This question comes into play in a context in which South Africa acts as the main axis of China–Africa relations in sub-Saharan Africa. Compared to other African nations, South Africa’s relative economic clout lends greater credibility to the idea of a possible partnership with China. South Africa’s official and economic relations with China have grown

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increasingly dense over the past two decades (Taylor 2006; Naidu 2008; Shinn and Eisenmann 2012; Alden and Wu 2014). Not only is South Africa the only African country represented in the BRICS group, but, apart from the abundant African microenterprises and traders in China, it is the only African country whose transnational corporations report sizable investments in China. Among them, Naspers (a South African media empire, which traces its origins back as an outlet of Afrikaner nationalism) holds a 33% stake, currently worth USD 180 billion, in the Chinese internet giant Tencent, and thereby represents the company’s biggest foreign investor. Despite this fervent economic exchange with China and the other BRICS countries, such investments cannot gloss over the fact that South Africa is the weaker partner in these relations and experiences major competition in critical sectors of its economy from Chinese imports, which are being held responsible for fading industries and job losses. On the political side, however, the scales appear to tip in favour of South Africa, which has made massive strides in processes of political transformation, and boasts well-known independent, assertive social movements that are firmly embedded in transnational networks across different issue areas. These movements’ relations bridge the North– South divide, span South–South linkages and also entail more regional alliances. Here the relationship seems more equal, with potential for South Africa to leverage its relations with China. It is an area where exchange between the two sides lends itself to the study of African agency, making it especially interesting in terms of civil society politics (see Naidu 2011; Mageza-Barthel 2017). As we argue, this also applies to the field of gender politics. Being a particularly dynamic arena, not only is gender politics open to taking on new challenges as they emerge or as the state responds to the mobilisation of women’s movements, but, taking outside forces into account, it also generates new impulses and incorporates new influences. A review of South African gender politics reveals a continuously changing landscape preceding any involvement in transnational gender politics. This is related to the (re-)constitution of the South African women’s movement under apartheid, its co-option into state structures during the post-apartheid state-building project, and the shifting nature of governmental bodies in the period thereafter (Hassim 2005). As a result—in what became a distinctive part of South African politics after the post-apartheid transition—to sustain the momentum of

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feminist successes, close ties were nurtured within women’s movements (comprising women’s interest groups, formalised women’s NGOs and governmental bodies dedicated to gender issues) and with other social movements. Over time, these translated into at least political co-existence, and more commonly fluid forms of collaboration aimed at entrenching gendered citizenship in a democratic state (Kemp et al. 1995; Seidmann 1999; McEwan 2000). Consequently, the groups of actors who have shaped South Africa’s gender politics have changed over the years, and the significance of these changes makes it difficult to pinpoint any particular organisation involved in China–Africa initiatives. Nevertheless, there remain larger national and international organisations that are involved in, or take a position on, China’s current interaction with Africa. Among them, we find renowned and vocal transnational organisations such as Oxfam Southern Africa, Sonke Gender Justice, Gender Links and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Some of their standpoints and positions on these interactions will be discussed at length later; for now it is important to note that they may occupy differing positions and that the local context is marked by charged relationships emanating from South African civil society. In contrast, governmental bodies and political organisations associated with the South African state find themselves in a web of Chinese–South African relations. Our task in this chapter is therefore to untangle all these different perspectives and standpoints. Gender issues find themselves among a range of topics that form the basis of cooperation in African–Chinese as well as South African–Chinese deliberations. Accordingly, they are not at the forefront of exchanges between (South) Africa and China. However, it seems counter-intuitive that they have not been mainstreamed into these wider relations, given that because of prior ties in gender politics, individual women are involved in the conduct of political relations (e.g. in government delegations and at embassies) and given that women are active in the economy as significant protagonists of globalisation, most notably when regarded “from below” (e.g. as entrepreneurs, migrants and traders). Collaboration between agents from both countries takes place on a societal level, fostering the likelihood of collaboration between women’s organisations. In the case of Sino-South African relations, political relations have intensified tremendously since they were officially taken up in 1996, and these political relations are nurtured by a bevy of cultural relations. The latter embody people-to-people relations as envisaged by the

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Chinese side and practised across the region to supplement the economic and political relations underway. Such a myriad of social relations involving numerous target groups suggests that varying activities and perceptions will be formed around them. The different kinds of attitudes to Chinese–South African relations we have observed accordingly occur between organisations with different approaches to engaging the new dynamics at hand. These approaches include, among others, advocacy and lobbying by professional and community-based organisations. As is the case for civil society more generally, for women’s organisations, we can identify neither efforts to only intervene in China–Africa politics, nor attempts to simply collaborate with its major protagonists. Instead, in their encounters, women’s movements have displayed differing positions that we hope to unfold in the next section. In general, we know that they have built their own networks and relations regionally, have attempted to inscribe themselves into ongoing political or economic relations at all levels, and have at the same time belonged to protest movements against these very relations. We are therefore bound to question what stance they actually take towards the relations that have increased in scale and scope recently.

4  Modes of Engagement: Exploring Feminist Encounters with(in) China–Africa Relations Having earlier mentioned an array of engagement between South African and Chinese women’s movements, we now move to systematise these. Collaboration refers to cooperation between South African and Chinese civil society or government institutions. We regard incidental interaction as an occasional, possibly unintended, meeting between them. Compared to intervention, which denotes an open contestation of South African–Chinese relations, abstention (loosely defined) is exemplified by an intentional distance between them. These were the positions we found in the South African women’s movement at the time of our research. They flow into the strategies that individual actor groups have adopted. As ideal types, they illustrate the various options and constraints that exist for political actors beyond the state in a politically free climate. It is quite possible that organisations choose to exercise different options when either existing constellations or the political context changes. In the following, we use this analytical perspective—borrowed from Shireen Hassim (2005), who describes the South African women’s movement’s

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strategies in relation to the African state as “terms of engagement”—to advance an analysis that underscores the normative and structural determinants within which it currently operates. We begin with collaboration between women’s and civil society organisations from South Africa and China, which demarcates the intentional cooperation that takes place on a wider scale, and in which organisations and their members get to know each other, interacting with one another in a concerted fashion by embarking on common actions or sharing experiences with one another. Within the realm of current Sino-African relations, fashioned around a multilateral regime initiated by the Chinese government, FOCAC, is driving these newer relations on the institutional front. A Women’s Forum has prominently reiterated the fostering of “women exchanges” in this framework by promoting gender and development between African and Chinese partners as a part of the ongoing people-to-people exchange. Despite being repeatedly raised as an issue within this framework, gender equality merely remains as an expression of fragmentary demands made by women involved in official China–Africa relations (FOCAC 2009), barely re-appearing in the main forums or affecting overall outcomes in a visible way (FOCAC 2015a, b). This stands in sharp contrast to it being celebrated as a rights-based claim that formed the cornerstone of interactions between women at Beijing in the mid-1990s. This effect, which came to light at the FOCAC meetings in Egypt in 2009 and again in South Africa in 2015, seems consistent with the transformation-based politics of African women and with the democratic credentials of the South African women’s movement in particular. Juxtaposed to this, the Chinese women’s movement’s preoccupation with economic transformation in terms of development is mirrored in the entire mechanism, which—as mentioned—is driven by China. Overall, these issues also reflect the constraints that gender activists from both countries face, and shapes any possibility of moving beyond this narrow frame. From the African side, other attempts at collaboration were initiated by Fahamu, a pan-African civil society organisation formerly based in Cape Town that focuses on social injustices across the continent. During its China-Africa Dialogue workshops in 2010 and 2011, Fahamu tried to bring Chinese and African organisations together to gain each a better understanding of the new, influential partner. The meetings were intended to sound out whether there were sufficient commonalities for further collaboration between organisations to build on the momentum

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that was becoming apparent in China’s positioning of itself as a valuable partner for Africa. Collaboration, in our understanding, hinges on integrating wide (instead of narrow) interests into African–Chinese relations. In this sense, it distinguishes itself from the next category—incidental interaction—in that it is resolute and depends on participation. Maintaining constant and steady collaboration across geographic, cultural, social and political settings is a daunting enterprise as anyone can imagine. It cannot be gauged in terms of the longevity of cooperation, which according to our observations is the major stumbling block in many interactions between Chinese and African women. More successful attempts have been undertaken in the environmental sphere, where the WWF, for example, began a dialogue on curbing pollution and poaching (Grimm and Burgess 2013; Wu 2015). It is more likely that collaboration will occur when common interests, supported by the party agenda, are involved. Practically, the sounding out of potential and the renewed uptake of interaction imply that a long-term collaboration perspective cannot be taken for granted. The short-lived nature of exchanges in gender politics also suggests that the commonalities that the two sides at face value appeared to share are more superficial than either originally expected. Instead, the driving force behind these newer transregional relations is an idea(l) of new South–South relations, which is not UN-driven but rather goes with the flow of governmental rhetoric and practice. It is neither rooted in a battle of the sexes, in gender relations as a social practice, nor grounded in transversal gendered experiences—although it is these, not the ongoing mechanisms on which the FOCAC process rests, that were fundamental to the collaboration critical to strong transnational gender activism in the past. Bi and multilateral structures and events provide important opportunity structures for joint mobilisation but, without a common experiential and strategic foundation in gender politics, they produce pockets of collaboration at most. Incidental interactions represent the next level of involvement, constituting a middle ground between the extremes of collaboration and intervention. As the category suggests, meeting Chinese (women’s) organisations may be the occasional and supplementary result of other goals and activities. In a previous era, the Beijing process provided a chance for such interactions. The vigour of current Sino-South African relations, especially with the “Year of South Africa” and “Year of China” held in China and South Africa in 2014 and 2015 respectively,

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has been accompanied by a flurry of cultural, political and economic activity. This activity has been accentuated by the holding of the Sixth Ministerial Conference of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in South Africa in December 2015, which set the stage for the next three years of Chinese–African engagement. In the context of such multilateral settings, the chances for individuals who broadly identify with the governmental transformation project and understand the economic prospects it portrays to follow the lead of existing transregional relations increase. Opportunity structures emerge that trailblazers appreciate. They are therefore able to make claims of broader representation, without necessarily representing a particular approach to women’s politics or speaking on behalf of a concrete women’s organisation. Ultimately, these kinds of gendered claims to participation accompany new processes when new policy fields open up. Women have always sought to inscribe themselves in—or have been drawn into—new developments of national significance. The latest major development that South African–Chinese relations embody is no exception to this rule. Unsurprisingly, social and economic entrepreneurs stand at the helm of such efforts and have most visibly taken up the new opportunity on a large scale. They are the beneficiaries of the current dispensation and may even belong to the class of political elites who have pushed for economic transformation in its current form. Rather than rely on their closeness to government or the ruling party itself, such trailblazers tie their fate to the wider policy initiatives that enable economic activity. In these terms, the circle of potential is still small, yet it is markedly wider than for a clique around a strongman or in patronage systems. The newness of their, albeit widening, support base inevitably means that we do not have strong data evidence in terms of numbers of organisations. Instead, specific examples suggest that the numbers are incidental precisely because they depend on individual biographies and the character of the field rather than the mass mobilisation capacities of the organisations themselves. Leading Women of Africa (LWA) director Madeleine Mkunu’s plea at the 2012 China-Africa Think Tank Forum (CATTF) for women to be included in China–Africa relations should be read in light of this discussion. Notwithstanding the plausible factors encouraging collaboration and incidental interactions between African and Chinese women’s organisations, we were most surprised to find that interaction was not only weaker than we had expected, or had been portrayed by the ACWF, but

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that it was also more sporadic than we first assumed. Language barriers, financial constraints and institutional impediments are among the more obvious factors that affect the likelihood of socio-political actors collaborating with one another. Indeed, bureaucratic hurdles formed a challenge to some aspects of our own inquiry, and probably also affected women’s collaboration in some form. These constraints were so fundamental that they made us aware that, despite the rigorous gathering of information, gaps concerning some details on the interactions remained. We can, for instance, not confirm if and in what form South African women took part in the FOCAC Women’s Forum, despite several attempts to establish this. None of the collected newspaper reports detail or depict participants. Official sources, which in other instances responded to our questions, were not able or willing to divulge this information. We would seek to explain this in relation with the particular setting and personnel constellation that we found, since the context of political transformation in Egypt could have played a part in their willingness to share these details. This appears even more likely considering that the ACWF had partnered with the National Council for Women, whose president at the time was then First Lady Suzanne Mubarak, to host the conference. Undoubtedly, as this example also shows, the data is incomplete; ours is an attempt to differentiate the apparently unitary picture of Africa’s relations with China. Once again, it seems appropriate to refer to the methodological question we raised in the introduction and stress that, beyond the empirical evidence provided in the data, our reading corroborates our previous understanding of South African feminisms and their immersion in transnational feminist discourses. It foreshadows the category of abstention that we read as a strategic feminist answer to current South African–Chinese relations and that strongly reflects our interpretation of the context and observed background to the recorded interviews we conducted. To complete our analysis, we now turn to two further modes of feminists’ engagement within Sino-South African interaction. Many of the women’s organisations we spoke to have not interacted or cooperated with Chinese women’s organisations, civil society actors or agents from Chinese gender machineries. They are, interestingly, the majority of South African women’s organisations, whose different attitudes essentially include non-cooperation with China. Their absence from China– Africa relations represents an abstention that they attribute to a lack of

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information and contact—an explanation that might apply in certain cases but leads to certain contradictions in others. The missing contact between gender activists may be explained above all by existing differences in political goals and positions corresponding with the general differences between Chinese and South African gender politics mentioned earlier. Many (South) African organisations adopt an issue-based approach and, if one were to follow their lead, then common issues would facilitate sustained common contact. However, one of the most central topics of (South) African women’s organisations—namely, gender-based violence—is not of similar priority for Chinese women’s organisations. South African organisations have built their priorities and partners around their ties with the UN and the transnational networks that have mobilised around it. In addition, international donors have backed their agenda, making organising and mobilising on identified topics feasible (see Britton 2005). Unlike these vibrant and ongoing ties, (South) African feminists’ ties with Chinese women’s organisations are based on different experiences that contour their daily lives and underpin their mobilisation. So too are their social and political practices: most importantly, this difference extends to their understanding of critical concepts, namely civil society and gender. By abstaining from interacting with Chinese organisations, South African women’s organisations and many actors in civil society do not express an open rejection of their Asian colleagues or their government’s China–Africa story. Instead, they allege that they are either unaware of their existence or neutral towards the economic and political relations underway. During conversations and interviews with South African women’s organisations, we met this position rather often. It was especially expressed by organisations whose history and experiences of transnational interaction made us anticipate that they would be engaged in such relations. However, these organisations suggested that, while they had participated in the Beijing Conference and while Sino-South African interactions happened on a daily basis, China per se was not of interest to them. This position is most graphically illustrated by the example of Gender Links, a regionally active women’s organisation that concentrates on the topics of gender equality and justice that arose out of the Beijing process and regards itself as the implementing NGO body in the region. Gender Links is located in Cyrildene, specifically on the corner of Derrick Avenue and Marcia Street, where Johannesburg’s new Chinatown is also to be found. This economic hub of Chinese

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entrepreneurship in the midst of a middle-class residential neighbourhood serves consumers from all walks of life and caters to the needs of the local Chinese community too. It concentrates not only economic activity but also community and civil organisations, which are based in the area with the alleged goal of representing the interests of local Chinese society. According to Park et al. (2010), who have studied Chinese migration to South Africa, Cyrildene represents the latest wave of settlement of Chinese in South Africa. The spatial mapping provided by Harrison et al. (2012) allows us to understand what kind of actors are located where in Johannesburg. The “Eastern Ethnoburb” within which Cyrildene and the new Chinatown are located represents the ideal meeting place and mobilising opportunity for Chinese and South African people (as opposed to state-owned enterprises or multinationals) precisely because it is filled with small-scale entrepreneurs, community-based organisations and a residential cluster in which the reality of transnational migration is ever-present. In contrast to several statements by gender activists concerning the lack of information on Sino-South African politics in general and the respective gender politics in particular, Gender Links’ geographic proximity to this vibrant transregional neighbourhood provided a decisive impulse for our discussion of abstention as a deliberate position within a newly developing section of South African South– South politics. Abstention can, however, also imply a host of other positions not mentioned as yet. This inference is derived from the observation that abstention is not only limited to non-governmental actors, but is also a position taken on by some governmental bodies. The ever-growing party ties between South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) and the Communist Party of China (CPC) have led to a string of agreements between the respective governments. A crucial selling point for the Chinese government was the ideological kinship between the CPC and ANC—a perspective the ANC has now adopted in its rhetoric (Shinn and Eisenmann 2012: 345–351). As the ruling party’s organ for mobilising South African women, the ANC Women’s League has not been exempt from these party political relations, building on them most visibly during Angie Motshekga’s tenure as president (2008–2015). Why then, we ask ourselves, despite the various cooperation frameworks and party-political ties that exist, are some ministries deeply entrenched in Sino-South African relations while others are eerily absent? This is most discernible when one compares the relations between the Department

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of Women and the Ministry of Basic Education’s involvement with their Chinese counterparts. While the latter announced the introduction of Mandarin as an optional language in schools in 2014 as one measure of its cooperation with China, the Department of Women has not boldly jumped on the bandwagon of governmental interaction. We suggest several clues that might help explain the Ministry of Basic Education’s engagement with China, and the Department of Women’s lack of involvement with it—clues that call to mind the kinds of collaboration and incidental interactions we mentioned previously. For example, Motshekga—who simultaneously presided over the Women’s League and the Ministry of Basic Education—met with the ACWF’s leadership and discussed issues pertaining to women’s development before announcing her Ministry’s policy on Mandarin. This goes to show that any kind of relations rely, among other things, on people and their positioning in the politics of the day. Individuals strengthen personal cooperation, resulting in this instance in closer collaboration in the education sector rather than the women’s portfolio. Interactions of an incidental nature carry even more weight, when we recall that the Department of Women was a late arrival in the South African government. It only became operational in 2010, long after other government departments had been established and was in “competition” with other ministries. Moreover, it had no continuity from the Beijing Conference of 1995. Prior to her tenure as the first Minister of Women, Lulu Xingwana—then in the Agriculture Portfolio—had visited China in September 2007; there she met with ACWF officials and ventured into discussions of gender issues with them. Subsequently, however, these relations were not visibly taken up by the Department of Women, possibly because it could not expect the AWCF to furnish the kind of material or ideational support that it could anticipate from other partnerships it built. In its international partnerships, the Department has assembled a medley of partners that seem the most fitting for the issues it hopes to tackle, and neither China nor the ACWF features among them. Finally, we see that South Africa—China interactions are either not coordinated formally or are dispersed across several actors. For example, former First Lady Bongi Ngema-Zuma has maintained strong ties with Chinese women’s associations based in Fujian province and in South Africa, but these do not fall under the remit of the Department of Women. These cases give an idea of abstention’s character as a contingent rather than strategic position within the more formalised political

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arena, where competing political opportunities and short-term objectives influence the political agenda. A third reason that partially explains the abstention position can be traced back to the fact that not all actors working on gender issues or active in the sphere of civil society self-identify as engaging in politics. They are not hesitant over participating in Chinese–African relations as such, but rather keep their (nominal) distance from “politics” in general. As South Africa is the only African country that has a large native Chinese community, we find several organisations there that could be regarded as hybrid in some sense. Among these are parastatal organisations that have sprung forth from the official relations and are meant to solidify these at a non-governmental level. For example, the South Africa-China People’s Friendship Association (SACPFA), which as one among many friendship associations across the continent is meant to boost economic and cultural ties in the form of people-to-people interaction. Furthermore, we find cultural associations representing the different cohorts of Chinese migration to South Africa, the oldest and largest of which is The Chinese Association (see Park et al. 2010; see also Yap and Man 1996). Despite their different rootedness in South African society, the women’s wings of these Chinese associations all decidedly refrain from politics. Instead they mainly focus on cultural promotion and promoting gender roles, even when their parent bodies have been decidedly political in the past. This form of abstention speaks to the clout of gendered subjectivities within a society that has been in flux at various stages of its history. In effect, these South African Chinese women’s associations inhabit different spaces and areas of action than the ACWF or other Chinese women’s organisations. On the far end of the whole spectrum, finally, we find the position of intervention. While relatively rare, it is characterised by an open critique and even mobilisation against current South Africa–China relations. Intervention mostly revolves around a critical perspective of recent South–South cooperation, which is accused of being a political project “from above” that tends to repeat the failures of injustice that have characterised the past and continue to define the present of the world system. Radical grassroots activists especially express their mistrust towards their governments’ South–South strategies, in which alliances are formed and promises of prosperity made, but which nevertheless copy the neoliberal trajectory instead of representing an alternative to the hegemonic Western North–South approach.

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According to this perspective “from below”, a progressive South– South project needs to commit itself to the idea of intersectional justice as “post-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist and ecological” (Bond 2015: 296). The South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU), for instance, lambasted the Education Department’s introduction of Mandarin classes and implicitly accused its own government of pandering to a new form of neo-colonialism (Nkosi 2015). Yet another voice critical of South Africa’s China relations emerged from Sonke Gender Justice: the organisation, which strongly subscribes to transnational notions of gender justice, blamed the Department of Women for not acting decisively enough on its commitments to the Beijing Platform and also joined the legions of critics who condemned Pretoria for once again not issuing the Dalai Lama a visa to attend an event in South Africa (Sonke Gender Justice 2015a, b). This move by South Africa’s government was widely seen as pre-emptively pandering to Beijing’s One-China Policy to protect its intensifying political and economic interests. Within the context of an emancipatory, civil society-led South–South discourse, the radical network BRICS from Below represents a strong leftist perspective on world development. Several South African women’s organisations—under the auspices of the South African Rural Women’s Assembly—belong to this network. Building on former dependency theory and more recent arguments of world system theory (Luce 2015), it criticises the “sub-imperialism” within this new Southern bloc. Contrary to the anti-imperialist rhetoric of the official BRICS context, the BRICS from Below initiatives detect what they name a “talk left – walk right” attitude (Garcia and Bond 2015: 6). This would not only lead to reification of neoliberalism but—through the inherent exploitation of the BRICS’ hinterlands—to an intensification of the structural exploitation of the poor, among whom poor women in the informal sector suffer most. Open confrontation and resistance against the increasing Sino-African transregionalisation pursued by the respective governments and transnational corporations is hence twofold: the positions of abstention and intervention positions do not discard South–South cooperation overall but refer in different ways to the earlier Bandung-related spirit of African–Asian relations. Thereby, they strengthen alternatives of transregional collaboration, built on the long-standing and simultaneously feminist updated norms of transnational solidarity and justice.

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5  Gender Politics in (South) African–Asian Interactions In its engagement with the advancement of South–South politics, China features prominently in South African understandings of global politics. This has prompted us to apply a feminist perspective to global politics, to shift the focus and follow the predominantly non-governmental gender trail of South African–Chinese interactions. If nothing else, our analysis shows that the picture of Africa’s relations with Asia is much more complex than the accepted discourse may suggest. When we take twenty-first-century civil society perspectives on China–Africa into account, ambiguities, contradictions and tensions in and between different groups of actors, different political standpoints and strategies come to the fore. On the one hand, they challenge the official South–South solidarity narrative and, on the other hand, they may contribute to a more comprehensive analytic picture of African–Asian transnationalisation. As an overall impression, we were able to show that these South African–Chinese interactions were sparser than anyone looking at the field of China–Africa relations would expect and to relate this back to the nature of Chinese gender politics, of the AWCF and its position within the Chinese context. Nevertheless, when taking the history of global gender politics into account, we see that numerous possibilities for collaboration of whichever kind existed. How and why they did (not) take place is something that we tried to substantiate by detailing the South African side of these interactions. A focused observation reveals that the majority of South African actors do not readily take to top-down politics as advanced in the current mechanisms and forums advanced through Chinese–South African cooperation. Rather they refrain from such stateheavy approaches and draw on bottom-up mobilisation to source the topics they choose to put forward. For the African side above all, we have identified the embeddedness and position of gender activists and feminist organisations in prior and current transnational feminist politics, as well as their experiences of feminist South–South collaboration, as being among the decisive factors determining the stand they take in the China–Africa arena. As a second dimension of current processes of African–Asian transregionalisation, the modes of engagement that we have outlined here take into account the home or national conditions of transregionalisation. In our context, that means the massive political, social and economic changes that South

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Africa has undergone over the past two decades. Where people and organisations locate themselves on the scale of interaction modes thus depends on the extent to which it is constitutive of their own politics to regard South–South politics as an emancipatory project that should engage against all forms and intersections of inequality and discrimination. An important factor affecting their position on the interaction scale is how they situate themselves domestically. The organisations’ own histories and the topics and strategies they have employed to advance themselves in the past play a crucial role here. Although state and civil society gender politics are more closely intertwined in post-apartheid South Africa than in many other sub-Saharan countries, the modes of engagement further show a scale on which activists and bureaucrats tend to hold differing positions. While both government and the majority of civil society in South Africa claim to have leftist, and in some instances radical, standpoints, civil society has not seamlessly been absorbed by the state. Conversely, gender activists’ experiences and women’s movements’ norms of South–South solidarity have barely informed government policies. From a gender perspective, China–(South) Africa interactions thus appear to be about state-driven “inter-national” relations rather than about transnational exchanges that would encourage the participation and agency of civil society actors and social movements. Instead of making a claim for participation or presenting an open critique of the current China–South Africa praxis, organisations with longstanding experience in the politics of transnational women’s movements abstain from the field. They do not challenge the current South–South friendship narratives but follow their own routes in transnational solidarity that build on decades of transnational dispute about concepts and norms of gender and social justice (see Carty and Mohanty 2015). They thereby remind us not only of the transformative core of transnational feminism(s), but also of the transnational entanglements of historical as well as recent inter- and transregional politics.

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CHAPTER 9

China’s Global Environmental Engagement—Africa and Southeast Asia in Comparison Meryl Burgess

1  Introduction In the last decade, China has undertaken major domestic environmental governance shifts, addressing extensive ecological degradation, establishing new policies and opening political space to non-state actors—specifically environmental NGOs. China has thus come a long way in its attempts to clean up the major environmental destruction caused by its rapid economic growth and development. Globally, China has also taken on a leading role in environmental protection, which is particularly visible in its efforts to tackle climate change and innovations in renewable energies. Though these efforts are laudable, since the advent of

M. Burgess (*)  Centre for Chinese Studies, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Anthony and U. Ruppert (eds.), Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7_9

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economic reforms and China’s “going out” policy,1 Chinese actors have been engaging increasingly in environmentally sensitive sectors across the world. Consequently, China’s environmental impacts are felt in diverse regions. Africa and Southeast Asia, regions where China has strategically directed its economic and political attention, have experienced environmental impact from China’s investment, from the ecological impact of major infrastructure projects to lack of adherence to host countries’ regulatory frameworks and ongoing illegal wildlife trade. Still, the Chinese government has determined to cooperate with these regions on environmental protection through multiple platforms, including FOCAC and the ASEAN. China has developed similar environmental policies and committed itself to action plans with both regions through these platforms. At the same time, different regions have different contexts, and China appears to engage somewhat differently within these contexts. Generally, China appears to invest more energy in environmental issues in Africa than Southeast Asia. In particular, illegal wildlife trade, a transregional crisis cutting across borders and affecting both Africa and Southeast Asia, showcases differences in China’s approach to environmental concerns in the two regions. It seems China is more active in addressing the issue on the African continent through several efforts taken continentally and through bilateral agreements with host countries, while in Southeast Asia, China’s national interests—such as securing access to energy routes and the South China Sea2 territorial disputes—appear to be prioritised over environmental concerns. Thus, while this paper demonstrates similarities in China’s engagement with environmental protection with both regions, there are differences in their approach as well as broader geopolitical motives to consider for those differences.

1 China formulated the “go out, go global” policy in 2001, encouraging Chinese enterprises to engage in obtaining natural resources and infrastructure development abroad so as to secure supply for China (Mol 2011). 2 The main shipping route between the Indian and the Pacific Oceans, the South China Sea carries trillions worth of trade annually and “lies at the heart of Chinese global expansion” according to Hawksley (2018: 28). The South China Sea disputes involve both island and maritime claims among several sovereign states within the region, namely Brunei, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam. China has made ructions by using its military power in order to claim sovereignty over parts of the South China Sea.

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2  China’s Broader Strategies and Environmental Impact in Africa and Southeast Asia As the world becomes more connected, China’s arc of self-protection has to spread wider, it needs to establish from where it will gather its food, raw materials, and energy and how to keep its trade routes and supply chains safe. (Hawksley 2018: 18)

Since the inception of its going out policy, China has increasingly invested and traded across the world. For regions such as Africa and Southeast Asia, Chinese investment is welcomed as development; economic growth is a top priority. China has economic relations with most African countries and has become one of the top investors and developers in many parts of the continent. Similarly in Southeast Asia, China has increased its investment and boosted trade relations with its neighbouring countries in the region. 2.1  China–Africa China’s relations with Africa have shifted over the last few decades, moving from relations based on “politics and ideology in the 1960s and 1970s” (Zhu 2014: 22) to cooperation primarily concentrated on economics but also including social and political engagement. Over the last few decades, China’s strategy towards Africa has been to develop a foreign policy that addresses the “economic, diplomatic and security needs” of the continent, thus securing China’s access to new markets and natural resources (Eisenman 2007: 29). A way in which China has further cemented its political and economic relations with China is through establishing the multilateral forum, FOCAC, in 2000. FOCAC is an official forum for China and 53 African states to come together to discuss pertinent issues on the Africa–China agenda. Thus far, seven FOCAC meetings have taken place including ministerial summits, most recently in Beijing in 2018 where China pledged project financing to the tune of USD 60 billion in the form of assistance, investment and loans. A key priority of China’s strategy in Africa is to attain raw materials and energy resources to fuel China’s economy (Zhu 2014). Africa has natural resources in abundance such as oil, timber, copper, cobalt and iron, among many others. These natural resources have provided many new trade and investment opportunities for countries such as China

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(ibid.). In particular, China’s demand for energy sources is at the forefront of its Africa strategy as China is home to only a small fraction of global oil reserves. Other natural resources and sectors are also significant. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia provide copper and cobalt; South Africa is home to vast platinum and iron ore resources; timber and other wood products are supplied by Gabon, Cameroon and Mozambique. In 2012, Chinese imports of African timber reached 4.5 million m3. Between 2011 and 2013, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) reported that more than 60% of China’s African log imports came from Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, the Republic of Congo (Congo) and Mozambique (IIED 2015). Despite its political and economic shifts, Zimbabwe is also attractive to China because of its large deposits of platinum and other minerals (Eisenman 2007). China’s engagement in Africa’s environmentally sensitive natural resources sectors has raised environmental concerns (Bosshard 2008; Shinn 2016). In 2013, Zambia, Africa’s largest copper producer, banned a Chinese mining company from running a million-dollar project because it allegedly failed to comply with certain environmental conditions. In 2014, the Chad government suspended all of China National Petroleum Corporation’s (CNPCs) activities in the country for violating environmental standards. The government demanded that CNPC pays a fine of USD 1.2 billion, as well as takes steps to repair all damage and future damage caused through pollution of the Bongor Basin. CNPC was only allowed to resume operations after the company improved its environmental practices (Burgess and Esterhuyse 2015). Chinese projects have been known to bring about pollution problems in the past; consequently, local communities’ fears about ecosystem damage have compromised Chinese overseas development plans (Pike 2017). In order to access natural resources, China has implemented a strategy using infrastructure projects to influence potential mining deals (Zhu 2014). Some of these major infrastructure projects include building roads, railway and ports across Africa. More than 80% of Rwanda’s main roads have been paved by Chinese companies, while the railroad network of Nigeria is being rebuilt by China. Chinese companies have also been upgrading the electrical grids and telephone systems of more than a dozen countries (ibid.). Often these infrastructure development projects contribute to establishing trade routes and links to neighbouring countries as well as to the rest of the continent. Consequently, host

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countries can improve their industries, import and export sectors as well as develop their economies. Thus, major infrastructure development is often considered a “mutual benefit” deal for giving Chinese companies access to natural resource sectors. In 2006 China released its first African policy paper which proposed cooperation based on “equality and mutual benefits” in several fields (Zhu 2014). In order to negate the claim that China is only interested in African resources, President Hu travelled to countries that are not resource-rich such as Senegal, Tanzania, Mali and Mauritius in 2009 (ibid.). By building schools and hospitals as well as other infrastructure projects in these countries, the Chinese government attempted “to improve China’s image abroad as a responsible and caring country” (ibid.: 33). In recent years, China’s efforts to improve its image abroad and particularly in Africa have been especially visible in its work on environmental protection. Ultimately, China provides an alternative development path for many African nations, says Zhu (2014); however, whether or not that model is good for the continent’s long-term growth needs to be questioned. China’s own growth path was unprecedented in terms of speed and scale. However, this also led to environmental destruction that the government is having to address on a major scale. Thus, while African countries embrace China’s investment and willingness to finance major infrastructure development, safeguarding the environment needs to be on the agenda at every step. This also means that China needs to either lead the way or play a greater leadership role in improving governance as a whole in its engagement with Africa, with particular emphasis on the environment. 2.2   China–Southeast Asia China–Southeast Asia relations are interesting to examine due to the historical relations between China and its neighbouring countries in the region. In the last few decades, Southeast Asia has become even more strategically significant to China for its national security concerns and economic interests (Glosny 2007; Zhu 2014). China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) established official relations in 1991; however, Zhu (2014) notes that the 1997 Asian financial crisis was to a large extent a turning point in cementing relations between the two sides. Since then, China has expanded its influence and investment in

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the region. In 2008 China surpassed the United States as ASEAN’s top trading partner (ibid.). China’s “going out” policy encouraged Chinese enterprises to invest heavily in neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia. China’s engagement with Southeast Asia is far-reaching and increasingly diverse. Trade between the two sides has risen tenfold, from “US$ 41 billion in 2000 to US$ 492 billion in 2015” according to Priyandita and Wijaya (2017). This economic relationship continues to grow, especially as one of the primary focuses of China’s BRI3 is Southeast Asia. BRI projects in this region include high-speed railway projects in Laos and Indonesia (connecting the cities of Jakarta and Bandung) as well as the development of hydropower plants in Cambodia (ibid.). While the investment and development opportunities from BRI projects are significant for the region, environmentalists have voiced concern regarding the environmental impact of BRI-funded infrastructure projects. For instance, complaints have been raised in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia concerning environmental destruction and droughts from hydropower projects on the Mekong River4 (ibid.). Similar to Africa, Southeast Asia is an important source of natural resources as well as investment opportunities. However, the importance of regional stability is also a factor, as most of China’s trade, including oil, passes through maritime Southeast Asia (Glosny 2007). Southeast Asian countries are thus strategically important to China as the region contains important shipping routes for the transportation of oil from countries in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America (Zhu 2014). In 2017, China’s state-owned refiner, CNPC, started receiving crude oil through a 1100 km pipeline connecting Myanmar with China. Planning for the pipeline started as early as 2009. The pipeline is used to transport oil to China from the Middle East and Africa as well as Myanmar itself (ibid.).

3 The BRI is a development strategy adopted by the Chinese government through which China wants to boost trade and stimulate economic growth across Asia and beyond. The initiative aims to strengthen infrastructure, trade and investment links between China and other regions. 4 The Mekong River is the twelfth longest river in the world and flows through China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Experts claim that proposed dam projects for the Mekong River as well as tributaries may threaten fish populations as well as alter the river’s hydrology system.

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Southeast Asian natural resources include oil, gas, copper, rubber, palm oil and timber (Turner and Wu 2011). Palm oil in particular is significant. China, the largest buyer of Indonesian palm oil behind India and the European Union (EU), imported 3.7 million tons of the product in 2017 (Rachman 2018). Indonesia exported a record 30 million tons of crude palm oil and its derivatives in 20175 and is the world’s largest producer of the product (ibid.). Initially planted in Asia around 1970, by 2011, palm oil exports had reached “30 million tonnes annually from Indonesia and 20 million tonnes from Malaysia”, both countries making up more than 80% of global palm oil exports (Hughes 2017). Environmental concerns have been raised due to palm oil plantations contributing to global deforestation. Because of this, Indonesia and Malaysia are currently in a trade spat with the EU, which is seeking to ban the import of palm oil used for biofuel by 2021 (Rachman 2018). Both Indonesia and Malaysia have criticised the ban as protectionist and designed to safeguard markets for European farmers. Thus, increased imports from China will help reduce reliance on European markets (ibid.). In addition to palm oil imports, China was also Indonesia’s third-largest foreign investor in 2017, with most investment going into smelters to refine minerals for export (ibid.). Moreover, China is also seeking to build Southeast Asia’s first high-speed railway on Indonesia’s main island of Java. The project has thus far been constrained by issues such as land acquisition. Similarly to China’s strategies in Africa, infrastructure projects are used as a means to further gain access to the regions’ natural resources. In both Africa and Southeast Asia, countries are seeking development opportunities, and investors who are willing to finance much-needed infrastructure projects such as the building of roads, ports, bridges, hospitals, schools, etc. Particularly in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam and the Philippines, China funds agricultural, hydropower, housing, railway and mining projects (Hodal 2012). Relations between China and Southeast Asia have not been without tension, however. Illegal timber trade in Laos in order to supply China’s construction industry and mining activities in Vietnam’s Central 5 “Production of palm oil, the world’s most widely used vegetable oil, and derivatives that go into making detergents, cosmetics and biofuel, is one of Indonesia’s most important industries, employing millions and bringing in billions of dollars in foreign currency through exports” (Rachman 2018).

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Highlands, especially for mining bauxite which is crucial for aluminium production and exported to China, has led to questions regarding China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and unsustainable resource management practices (Yeophantong 2015). In addition, Chinese financiers and companies have been involved in the development of around 220 large dams across the world, half of which are in Southeast Asia, according to the International Rivers organisation. Many dams involving Chinese investors have impacted local communities and ecosystems. In a report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Asian Institute of Technology in 2009, a warning was given regarding China’s plan to construct eight dams on the Mekong (some within China) which was said would “pose ‘a considerable threat’ to the river and its natural riches” (Turner and Wu 2011). Many of these dams have been constructed or are now part of BRI planning, illustrating China’s economic aspirations rather than its care for environmental protection or long-term impacts on countries downstream. For these reasons, it is important that different regions affected by China’s growing investment and environmental impact, such as Africa and Southeast Asia, work together on transregional concerns that will likely continue in the future.

3  Where All Sides Meet: The Illegal Wildlife Trade Crisis An area of interest within China’s environmental relations with Africa and Southeast Asia is the illegal wildlife trade. At present, China is a top consumer of a variety of wildlife products across the world. Rhino horn, ivory and pangolin scales in particular are some of the top wildlife products illegally traded in and exported to China from Africa. Record numbers of rhinos have been poached, bringing some rhino species towards the verge of extinction in some African6 and Asian7 regions. 6 Africa is home to two rhino species—the black and white rhino. Black rhinos are concentrated in South Africa, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. Their population size is approximately 5000–5400 and they are listed as critically endangered on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) list. White rhinos mainly occur in just four countries: South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Kenya and their population size is approximately 19,600–21,000. The white rhino is listed as near threatened. 7 Two Asian species (Javan and Sumatran rhino) are found in Southeast Asia. There are approximately 58–68 Javan individuals surviving in Ujung Kulon National Park in Java,

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South Africa, home to around 80% of the world’s last remaining rhinos, has borne the brunt of the poaching crisis. South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affairs (DEA) reported a record number of 1215 rhinos poached in 2014 and 1175 in 2015. While China is a top consumer of rhino horn, Vietnamese demand for rhino horn for traditional medicine spurred a sharp increase in rhino poaching in South Africa in 2013. The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) found Vietnamese government corruption to be a major contributing factor, as officials allowed free passage to select individuals transporting rhino horn (Rose 2015). While China is often viewed as the main perpetrator, the illegal wildlife trade crisis cuts across many borders and regions and thus requires transregional efforts to engage and put in measures to end the crisis. China is also considered the biggest ivory market globally, fuelled by a huge demand for carvings and other items made from ivory. Countries such as Kenya and Tanzania have been at the epicentre of the elephant poaching crisis. At least 20,000 African elephants were killed in 2013, averaging over 50 elephant deaths every single day, a historical record (Burgess 2014). In 2017, China officially banned the sale of all ivory in the country and has since taken a tough stance on wildlife trade and curbing the illegal trade within its borders. For this tough stance China is now becoming a leader in addressing ivory trade. Since China’s ban on ivory trade, Hong Kong has also put in measures to officially ban the trade in 2021. Contrary to the ivory ban, the Chinese government recently eased a 25-year ban on trading tiger bones and rhino horns, which on the face of it is a setback for wildlife conservation. An allowance has been put in place whereby products only from farmed rhinos and tigers can be sold under “special circumstances” for purposes such as scientific research, sales of cultural relics and “medical research or in healing” (Agence France-Presse 2018). Conservationists claim that it could lead to confusion among consumers as well as an expansion of markets for other illegal tiger bone and rhino horn products. The Southeast Asian region has also been greatly affected by illegal wildlife trade despite moves to tighten regulation and listing wildlife species on international endangered lists. Illegal wildlife trade in Southeast

Indonesia. Vietnam’s last Javan rhino was poached in 2010. Also there are fewer than 100 Sumatran individuals in the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. Both species are listed as critically endangered on the CITES list.

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Asia thrives in the “underground economy”, where wildlife products are illegally traded across borders (Contreras 2016: 148). The demand for wildlife products is primarily for food, traditional medicine and decoration (Rose 2015). There is also a high demand for live animals as exotic pets in Southeast Asia (principally birds, reptiles and amphibians)8 (Hughes 2017). Traditional medicine in Vietnam and China, however, represents a major threat to a huge array of species according to Hughes (2017), but especially for the pangolin, the most trafficked animal on the planet. Southeast Asia has also experienced hunting and poaching of wildlife. In Sabah, Malaysia, three critically endangered Borneo Pygmy elephants were poached for their ivory in 2017 after China’s announcement to ban domestic ivory trade. Due to lower population sizes of rhinos and elephants today, Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, Laos and Vietnam are mostly known as major transit routes for illegal wildlife trade transported from parts of Africa. Because of shared borders with China and regulatory weaknesses, Southeast Asian countries are found to be easily accessible for wildlife trade to take place. In Laos, ivory sales have increased dramatically due to lax enforcement of anti-ivory laws and lower prices; the number of shops selling ivory increased more than tenfold between 2013 and 2016. A report by Save the Elephant found that Chinese visitors buy 80% of the ivory on sale in Laos (Agence France-Presse 2017). Laos is a signatory to CITES which means ivory trafficking is a crime, but the Save the Elephants report said Laotian authorities barely enforce anti-ivory laws and “only one seizure has been made in the country since it joined the convention in 2004” (Agence France-Presse 2017). Additionally, transboundary wildlife trade presents numerous governance challenges; Southeast Asia’s continually expanding transportation infrastructure compounds the problem by facilitating trade (Rose 2015). This particular issue shows how an environmental problem connects different regions over vast geographical areas. Most illegal rhino horn and ivory stems from African countries and is transported through transit links in Southeast Asia for its end destination in China. While China has rightly been called upon to put an end to the demand for and use of wildlife products within its borders, there are many other role players 8 This market caused an endemic species in Bali, the “Bali starling”, to become nearly extinct (van Balen et al. 2000 in Contreras 2016).

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along the trafficking line that also need to be included in strategies and discussions to end the illegal trade. A transregional approach is thus needed where African governments are also engaging relevant Southeast Asian parties. 3.1   Engaging Africa and Southeast Asia Through Multiple Platforms The Chinese government has determined to cooperate with both Africa and Southeast Asia on environmental protection through multiple platforms including the FOCAC and the ASEAN forums. China has developed similar environmental policies and committed itself to action plans with both regions through these platforms. China has also signed bilateral agreements with particular countries. Multilateral Engagement—FOCAC and ASEAN Since the establishment of FOCAC, environmental concerns have assumed increasing importance on the agenda topic. From brief mentions in the first and second FOCAC conference (held in 2000 and 2003 respectively) to practical action plans by the fourth FOCAC in 2009, the environmental agenda has broadened. In the fifth FOCAC action plan (2012), under the heading of “Environmental Protection and Climate Change”, six statements were made regarding how the two sides would cooperate. This included establishing a consultation mechanism, enhancing capacity building in meteorological infrastructure and forest protection and management and scaling up assistance and training to Africa in desertification and ecological protection (Burgess 2015). Furthermore, other significant matters addressed included “climate change, environmental degradation, energy and resource security, major infectious diseases and massive natural disasters” (Herman 2017: 7). The increasing focus on the environment was again reflected in the sixth FOCAC ministerial meeting in Johannesburg in December 2015. The Johannesburg FOCAC Action Plan (2016–2018) was especially significant as it included ten environmental aims and, for the first time, cooperation mechanisms in tackling illegal wildlife trade. During the 2015 FOCAC conference, the two sides agreed that China will help to build capacity to protect Africa’s biodiversity as well as develop a “China-Africa Joint Research Centre” with cooperation in biodiversity protection, prevention of desertification and establishment of modern

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agricultural demonstration centres (FOCAC Action Plan 2015). The action plan also noted that China would introduce the “China-Africa Green Envoys Programme”. Similar to China’s FOCAC engagement in Africa, China established a strategic partnership with ASEAN on environmental concerns. In November 2007, at the 11th ASEAN-China Summit, then Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao proposed to set up the China-ASEAN Environmental Cooperation Centre and formulate cooperation strategy. This centre was eventually established in 2010 by China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection. Additionally, in 2009 China adopted the “ASEAN-China Strategy on Environmental Protection Cooperation 2009–2015”, setting goals, principles and six cooperation priority areas (CAEC, n.d.: 3). In the following years, the environmental action plan was updated, including the 2011–2013 and the 2014–2015 plans. Cooperation activities included high-level policy dialogues, the ASEAN-China Green Envoys Programme, ecological conservation, environmental industry and technology, and joint research, among others (CAEC, n.d.: 3). Most recently, China developed the 2016–2020 strategy, apparently in the context of the tremendous challenge posed by environmental degradation to global, economic and social development as well as the need for South–South cooperation for sustainable development (CAEC, n.d.: 1). Thus, the action plan attempts to enhance environmental cooperation at national, regional and international levels (ibid.). Activities included are biennial high-level policy dialogues, joint research projects, capacity building and technical exchange in environmental data, environmental impact assessments (EIAs), ecological conservation, sustainable cities, green development in industry and technology, and education and public awareness (CAEC, n.d.). Unlike the FOCAC environmental protection action plan points (which form part of the overall FOCAC action plan), the China-ASEAN environmental cooperation plan is comprehensive in terms of objectives and proposed activities for implementation. China’s first ASEAN environmental cooperation plan was formulated in 2009; since then, three other environmental cooperation action plans have been formulated and adopted. In terms of FOCAC, since 2009 environmental protection has been included as a specific point in FOCAC action plans; however, there is no similar environmental cooperation action plan as there is with ASEAN. However, there are similarities in the objectives of environmental cooperation between China, ASEAN and FOCAC, such as ecological conservation,

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climate change, joint research and training, technical exchanges and green development. Similar programmes also include the Green Envoys Programme,9 which was also officially launched in ASEAN countries in October 2011. This programme is yet to be established in Africa. In addition, in 2010, China’s environmental ministry established the ChinaASEAN Environmental Cooperation Centre; in Africa this process is yet to take place. A “Letter of Intent on the Establishment of a ChinaAfrica Environmental Cooperation Centre” was signed in Kenya in 2017 (Ndirangu 2017). There are also some interesting differences in policy plans, such as not including illegal wildlife trade and deforestation in the ASEAN plan. China is known to play a huge role in both these sectors in Southeast Asia. In addition, there is no mention in FOCAC of high-level policy dialogues on environmental protection, but as mentioned, the FOCAC action plans are not as comprehensive as the China-ASEAN environmental cooperation plans. A further difference is seen in the hosting of an ASEAN-China Environmental Cooperation Forum. The forum is focused on ASEANChina environmental issues of common concern, with the participation of policy makers, entrepreneurs, academics and experts from China, international organisations and NGOs. Since 2011, four forums have been held in China. It is interesting that all four forums have taken place in China rather than alternating with an ASEAN country. A similar environmental cooperation forum has not yet been held in Africa through the FOCAC platform. The Bilateral Environmental Approach In addition to multilateral engagement, bilateral approaches have also been used in order to address environmental impacts stemming from China’s engagement in Africa. For instance, China has signed Memorandums of Understandings (MoU) with two African countries on environmental protection—South Africa and Kenya. Wildlife protection in particular has become a key area of cooperation between China and affected countries of illegal wildlife poaching. South Africa and Kenya are greatly affected by poaching of rhinos and elephants, 9 The programme has three components, namely Green Innovation (capability building for government decision makers), Green Pioneer (awareness and education for youth) and Green Entrepreneur (establishment of partnership among enterprises for green development).

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respectively (Burgess 2015). South Africa and China signed the MoU on Co-operation in the field of Environmental Management in 2010. The main objective of the MoU was to promote co-operative efforts of environmental protection between the two countries. Further meetings took place between the environmental ministers of both countries in 2011 regarding the implementation of the MoU. This MoU, however, was not enough to curb the growing poaching crisis. In 2013, South Africa’s Minister Edna Molewa and China’s Minister of Environmental Affairs, Wang Yi, signed another MoU particularly aimed at curbing rhino poaching through co-operation in law enforcement, compliance with international conventions and other relevant legislation (Department of Environmental Affairs 2013). In Kenya, China has used a multi-pronged approach to address environmental issues. In 2014, the Kenyan and Chinese governments signed 15 agreements and MoUs to enhance bilateral cooperation (Monfreda 2014). Four of the agreements dealt directly with agriculture and the environment, “specifically: the provision of materials for wild animal protection; agricultural cooperation; forestry and ecological conservation; and crop molecular biology research” (ibid.). In addition to the agreements, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang also announced the Chinese government’s support of USD 10 million to wildlife protection and conservation in Africa and assistance in establishing an African Ecological and Wildlife Centre in Nairobi. The grant would enable the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) to acquire surveillance and nightvision equipment in order to help with an anti-poaching initiative (Nzwili 2014). Chinese actors have also been active in promoting environmental research. In September 2016, the Sino-Africa Joint Research Centre on environmental protection was opened at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) in Kenya. The centre was established in partnership between JKUAT and the Chinese Academy of Sciences and was fully funded by the Chinese government (Kamau 2016). Biodiversity conservation, natural products development, agriculture and microbiology are some of the main focus areas of the centre. China’s interests in Kenya go far beyond environmental cooperation as China considers Kenya one of its significant anchor states in Africa. “It is geographically strategic to become a commercial hub for East Africa and a doorway to countries in Central Africa”, notes Argut (2016). For that reason, many of the projects led by Chinese companies in Kenya are in the infrastructure sector, especially for improving trade links. Projects

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have included the expansion of the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport; the construction of the Nairobi–Thika superhighway and construction of a port at Lamu, part of the Lamu-Southern Sudan-Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET) project. China has also invested in sectors such as pharmaceuticals (Huawei), technology (ZTE Technologies) and the media (Patroba 2012; Argut 2016). China’s BRI project also includes Kenya. For instance, Chinese companies have already built the first phase of the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) connecting Mombasa with Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city. The second phase of construction, which will link Nairobi to Naivasha, is currently underway. Already, environmental impacts have been felt in Kenya from these projects. Part of the SGR is constructed through the Nairobi National Park, the only national park in a city in the world. Unlike China’s engagement with South Africa and Kenya, it was only as recently as 2018 that China entered into a formal MoU with a Southeast Asian nation on environmental management. China and Cambodia10 entered into an MoU on environmental protection with plans to improve urban waste water treatment. Due to operating factories releasing toxic water into rivers and lakes and urban waters being polluted, water pollution has become a major challenge for Cambodia. The MoU with China thus entails a project to supply wastewater treatment equipment that helps address this concern (Sotheary 2018). Scholars suggest that historically, ASEAN preferred to deal with other regional actors multilaterally rather than on an individual basis.11 A further reason for the difference in engagement could also be due to environmental concerns from Chinese engagement only recently becoming 10 Cambodia is an interesting case in its relations with China, as Cambodia became “a crucial diplomatic component in Beijing’s South China Sea strategy” (Hawksley 2018: 63). In the 2012 ASEAN forum, for the first time in ASEAN history, ministers failed to issue a joint statement on creating an agreed-upon negotiating position with China on the South China Sea, as Cambodia’s Hun Sen backed Beijing (Hawksley 2018). Since then China’s grip on Cambodia has only tightened. In 2017 Cambodia expelled a US navy unit that was involved in school and health projects for many years. In return, it was given billions of dollars from China to build a new sports stadium, airport and other project (Hawksley 2018). 11 “ASEAN has a policy of not interfering in the running of each country, has worked toward setting up a free trade area, declaring the region a nuclear-weapons-free-zone, and has an emphasis on quiet, non-argumentative diplomacy and consensual decision making” (Hawksley 2018: 61).

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more of a public concern in Southeast Asia, with multiple civil society organisations and public demonstrations against various China-related projects recently undertaken in countries such as Malaysia and Laos. In Africa, civil society and NGOs have taken on various campaigns since the early 2000s against Chinese projects that have had environmental impacts, resulting in a greater highlighting of issues. Campaigns ultimately led to African governments, as well as Chinese actors, being pressurised to take action against environmental transgressions. 3.2   Engaging in Environmental Governance from the Bottom-Up: Chinese NGOs Abroad Further approaches in China’s environmental engagement are also seen to a certain extent through the work of civil society groups and NGOs in particular. Chinese environmental NGOs who carry out conservation and other activities have been established in Kenya. China House is the first Chinese NGO to establish its organisation on the continent. It is also the first NGO to focus on China–Africa relations with the aim of helping Chinese companies forge positive connections with African communities (Li 2015). In 2014, the NGO was founded in Nairobi, Kenya, by a former journalist, Huang Hongxiang, who noticed that while Chinese businesses were doing well in China, their activities in Africa led to some tensions. For instance, labour and tax disputes were problematic as well as the impact on Africa’s environment (Xia 2017). The organisation therefore helps Chinese companies working in Africa by conducting research related to the problems affecting Chinese overseas investment such as operation management issues, labour conflicts and environmental impacts as well as providing services such as “project matching, pre-market research, strategy formulation and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) management” (Xia 2017). China House is also committed to reducing social and environmental impacts. Annually, China House organises trips for young Chinese people to visit wildlife conservation areas in Africa and participate in activities. In 2015, China House launched its “Engaging Chinese Against the Ivory Trade campaign”, and invited Chinese firms to participate in wildlife conservation and anti-ivory initiatives (Li 2015). The work of NGOs is of great importance, especially where governments are lacking. Often governments and relevant departments do not have the necessary capacity to address environmental impacts on

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the ground. NGOs play an important role between the grassroots level and those who make decisions on environmental policy. In the case of China House, this NGO is important in the China–Africa relationship as Chinese actors do not always understand local policy or environmental standards. China House, then, provides a platform not only to help Chinese actors adhere to environmental standards, but also to make them aware of the importance of environmental protection. In recent years, China’s environmental engagement at the grassroots level could also be seen by NGO engagement in countries in Southeast Asia. In 2015, a Chinese NGO, the Global Environmental Institute (GEI), teamed up with an alliance of Myanmar NGOs and the Blue Moon Foundation to provide small household solar panels and clean cook stoves to families in the village (Walker 2017). Other projects by the GEI also include partnerships with the Spring Foundation in providing training to villages in agroforestry, homestead planting, how to produce products for local markets, and accounting. The involvement of the GEI NGO in a rural part of Myanmar is unique as more and more communities are becoming vocal regarding Chinese-funded infrastructure projects that involve the extraction of natural resources such as timber (Walker 2017). Increasingly in Southeast Asian countries, local communities and citizens are raising their voices regarding environmental impacts and the lack of transparency by host governments and their deals with China for major projects. For example, in Myanmar, there has been major opposition and protests by citizens towards Chinese-built infrastructure projects. Major opposition to the building of the Myitsone dam on the Irrawaddy River led to the suspension of the project. The Chinese embassy in Yangon thus encouraged companies to pay more attention to their image and reach out to local communities. But efforts such as tree planting projects have done little to change people’s minds (Walker 2017). In light of growing political concerns in Myanmar, the work of GEI caught the attention of the Chinese government. Thus the government is now in partnership with GEI in order to deliver climate aid initiatives. China pledged USD 2.9 million worth of renewable energy products such as solar panels and clean cook stoves to Myanmar through its South–South Cooperation Fund for Climate Change (ibid.). Again, this example shows how NGOs have been used as channels in order to address environmental concerns as well as mediate between locals on the ground and Chinese actors. NGOs provide a platform for the Chinese government

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to implement environmental projects that they may not be able to do otherwise. There appear to be a few differences between Chinese NGOs operating in Southeast Asia and Africa. Because of the global attention on China’s impact on African wildlife, government and NGO initiatives were established in order to address the crisis. This was done by international and a few local Chinese NGOs. While China House has many operations, it also attempts to create awareness among Chinese people in Africa on not using African wildlife products. This type of work by a Chinese organisation has not yet been seen in Southeast Asia. In Southeast Asia it is mostly local NGOs in the region who undertake similar initiatives; however, no evidence of cooperation or partnerships with Chinese NGOs has been found. This could also be linked to security issues or the Chinese government preferring NGOs not to work in this region. Operations by Chinese NGOs are overseen by the government, so it may not be in their interest for NGOs to operate in the region. So far, only the GEI has undertaken work on renewable energy in Myanmar, but this work has now been included under the banner of the government’s climate change initiatives. In addition, most prevalent environmental concerns in Southeast Asia are around the issue and impact of infrastructure projects, often stemming from Chinese engagement; because of the political nature of these concerns, NGOs may be wary of engaging on these topics outside of China. Again, NGOs are strictly controlled in China and their work is overseen: NGOs may not want to get involved in seemingly controversial issues that may bring unwanted attention from the government and potentially stop them from operating. 3.3   Analysis of China’s Approach to Illegal Wildlife Trade in Africa and Southeast Asia Even though it is clear that China plays a major role in illegal wildlife trade in both regions, there are similarities and differences in the way in which the Chinese government has engaged Africa and Southeast Asia on the issue. Similarities include China undertaking initiatives through ASEAN and FOCAC. A MoU on combating wildlife trafficking was jointly signed between China and the ASEAN Wildlife Enforcement Network (ASEAN-WEN). In addition, China hosted a “China-ASEAN

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CITES Implementation Enforcement Session” and a “Special Investigation Meeting on ASEAN Wildlife Trafficking”. These initiatives are organised to improve information exchange and capacity building of law enforcement according to the State Forestry Administration of China (2014: 36). The ASEAN-WEN (Wildlife Enforcement Network) was officially launched in December 2005. It includes CITES authorities, customs and police working together to broaden inter-agency co-operation against wildlife crime. Cooperative agencies in ASEANWEN include Interpol, the World Customs Organisation, the CITES Secretariat and the ASEAN Secretariat (Comptom 2007). In 2007 China hosted a five-day exchange with law enforcement officers from Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Customs and environmental agencies joined the exchange (ibid.). The exchange was the first time ASEAN officials were invited to China to engage directly with their Chinese counterparts to discuss strategies. In 2012 in Nanning, China and ASEAN member countries’ officials met with Chinese officials to enhance collaboration between China’s National Inter-agency CITES Enforcement Coordination Group (NICE-CG) and ASEAN-WEN (TRAFFIC 2012). Over 60 wildlife law enforcement officials from the 10 ASEAN-WEN member countries; China and the US attended the meeting. In addition, other international organisations also participated, such as INTERPOL, TRAFFIC, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and Conservation International representatives. Recommendations for working together were made at the Nanning meeting, such as sharing information and broadening public awareness, capacity building and training as well as reducing the demand for illegal wildlife products (TRAFFIC 2012). In terms of multilateral engagement in Africa, in 2012, China held the “Africa Training Seminar on CITES Implementation and Wildlife Conservation”. More than 30 officials from African countries attended the seminar. Chinese companies involved in wildlife utilisation were mobilised to donate USD 200,000 to the African Elephant Conservation Fund run by China Wildlife Conservation Association (State Forestry Administration of China 2014: 35). As noted earlier, during the 2015 FOCAC ministerial summit, it was the first time wildlife trade was dealt with specifically at the level of FOCAC and included as a specific action

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point.12 According to TRAFFIC (2015), including wildlife trade in FOCAC illustrated “growing recognition of the impact of wildlife crime on broader issues such as rule of law, national security, rural livelihoods and economic development”. The inclusion of illegal wildlife trade in the action plan can partly be owed to the work of civil society actors and NGOs such as the WWF and TRAFFIC, who continuously engaged government officials on both the African and Chinese sides on these issues. WWF, for instance, produced research reports and policy documents for officials and policymakers on the severity of the problems and the need for it to be discussed during FOCAC meetings. Unlike in Southeast Asia, bilateral engagement has also taken place between China and African countries on illegal wildlife trade. It must be noted that the South African government engaged with Vietnam, China and Mozambique in MoUs aimed at curbing the scourge of rhino poaching through cooperation on transnational and regional levels. Lack of bilateral engagement on this issue between China and Southeast Asian countries further illustrates how China approaches particular environmental issues differently in the two regions. While China engages with the problem on a bilateral level and through establishing MoUs in Africa, with Southeast Asian countries this appears to be unnecessary. This difference illustrates China’s broader strategies and operations in Southeast Asia, appearing to prefer to cooperate on a multilateral platform. Primarily China has approached the issue by hosting wildlife forums and establishing action plans. Since Southeast Asian countries are major trade routes for transporting illegal wildlife products from Africa to China, more should be done with all three parties involved. It is important to address the issue on a transregional basis; perhaps African governments should be speaking directly to Southeast Asian governments. So far, only South Africa has an MoU with Vietnam; this is not enough: MoUs need to be concluded with other transit countries such as Laos, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia especially in terms of law enforcement when seizures are made. 12 “4.6.4 The two sides will strengthen cooperation in the area of wildlife protection, help African countries to improve the protection capabilities, build the capacity of environmental rangers, provide African countries with training opportunities on environmental and ecological conservation, explore the possibility of cooperating on wildlife protection demonstration projects and jointly fight against the illegal trade of fauna and flora products, especially addressing endangered species poaching on the African continent, in particular elephants and rhinos” (FOCAC 2015).

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Another reason for differences in China’s approach to this issue is the greater emphasis on addressing wildlife conservation in Africa, compared to Southeast Asia. In Africa and among the global conservation community, China has experienced an image problem over the last decade. Record numbers of wildlife species have been poached and are severely threatened, in particular “popular” species such as the African elephant and rhino species. After record numbers of rhinos and elephants were killed, the global conservation community reacted strongly in criticising China for their role in the crisis. This led to the Chinese government undertaking domestic and international actions in order to address the issue. Also, host governments such as South Africa and Kenya addressed the issue with China on an individual basis. Wildlife is not only important for ecosystems and biodiversity, but also for Africa’s tourism industry, which relies heavily on tourists being able to visit areas where wild animals live in their natural habitats in the continent. Therefore, the poaching crisis became a problem for conservationists as well as for African governments. This led to major campaigns by NGOs to stop the demand for illegal wildlife products in China. Subsequently, the Chinese government began to address the issue on multiple platforms—signing MoUs with the governments concerned, participating in international wildlife crime units, hosting wildlife forums with NGOs, other countries and international organisations, using FOCAC to make action plans, and donating funds to wildlife conservation in affected countries such as Kenya. In Southeast Asia, similar multilateral actions have been taken to address illegal wildlife trade, such as hosting wildlife forums, together with the ASEAN regional body; however, because less well-known wildlife species are trafficked to China from the region, the issue has not received the same amount of attention from the media and the global conservation community. As Hughes claims: “Whereas celebrities have campaigned for species that are targeted for status and ornamentation, such as elephant ivory, many other animals and plants have failed to get the attention needed to prevent over-exploitation. And a number are now facing extinction” (2017). In most cases, it is local NGOs within the Southeast Asia region that carry out conservation work in this area.

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4  Geopolitical Concerns: Further Analysis on Differences in China’s Approach to Environmental Concerns in Africa and Southeast Asia The way China approaches the illegal wildlife trade issue may also reflect its different priorities in Southeast Asia. While this chapter has noted similar environmental impacts in Africa and Southeast Asia as a result of Chinese engagement, China appears to have different priority areas in the latter region. For instance, emphasis is put on protecting its energy links and access to natural resources in the region such as palm oil, as well as protecting its dam projects along shared rivers and ensuring its territorial bases in the region. Thus, reasons for MoUs may be geostrategic, as well as to do with politics and economics. South Africa is often viewed as an important African role player to the international community and is seen as a transitory country to the rest of Africa; therefore good relations with South Africa need to be maintained. Also, South Africa joined the BRICS group in 2010 and therefore has a seemingly stronger connection to China. As far as Kenya is concerned, the country is important for the BRI and is also viewed as an important trade link to other states such as Uganda and Tanzania. Kenya is also known for prioritising environmental protection and being committed to conservation. Therefore, it is important for China to address concerns that are of significance to the people of such countries. As Power et al. note, “as a long term partner in Africa’s development and in response to global pressure, China needs to demonstrate an interest in addressing environmental impacts of its projects” (2012: 265). Thus, contrary to the perception that China only engages in Africa for its natural resources, the prioritisation of conservation, wildlife protection and recently renewable energy in Africa shows a more conscious and environmentally aware side of China. China’s approach to Southeast Asia is also linked geographically, such as in access to natural resources, maintaining territorial integrity and security. China’s national interests are embedded within its relations with the region; therefore, other issues and factors may take precedence. In Southeast Asia, the most pressing concerns appear to be the environmental and social impacts of major infrastructure projects such as dam building by Chinese actors. Protests have been held in different countries and local NGOs have also engaged their governments on the issues. Both Malaysia and Myanmar scaled back their engagement with

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China recently due to economic concerns and the environmental damage Chinese projects were causing. The building of major dams13 is also a pressing issue as the Southeast Asian region has more dams planned than any other part of the world (Hughes 2017). Though hydropower dams are viewed as clean sources of energy, environmental impacts are seen through a loss of biodiversity as well as fish stocks declining (ibid.). Therefore, in this region it appears to be more important for China to address this concern as some countries in the region are no longer only considering the economic benefits of projects. Marine environmental protection is also a much bigger concern in ASEAN countries as they are often transboundary in nature (Trajano et al. 2018). With regard to the South China Sea, ocean-related problems and the implications thereof are not limited to economic concerns, but also felt in terms of security (Trajano et al. 2018). In Southeast Asia, the seas are more important, as a majority of the countries in the region are island states or have long coast lines (Trajano et al. 2018). Thus marine environmental degradation creates a number of other problems for the region. These include “economic, food, health and environmental insecurities for communities that depend on the seas for survival” (Trajano et al. 2017: 14). These concerns are in contrast to China’s issues around securing and maintaining sovereignty over disputed marine territories. While countries such as the Philippines are fighting for the conservation of marine species in the South China Sea, China continues to disregard the issue in its pursuance for territory and securing trade links.14 Thus it seems that even though China has committed itself to cooperation with the regional body ASEAN on environmental protection, it continues to put its economic and territorial ambitions ahead of conservation concerns in the region.

13 “There are currently 78 dams planned for the Mekong Delta. If built, they are projected to reduce the number of migratory fish by 20% to 70% in the Mekong, in addition to flooding essential habitats and causing regional droughts. The Mekong has the highest freshwater diversity in the world, and the potential extinction of so many species represents a global catastrophe” (Hughes 2017). 14 Beyond territorial issues, the South China Sea region is also host to several environmentally related transboundary issues: “shipping, fishing and the movement of migratory and alien species”—involving multiple countries, as well as “the fact that the coastal systems of Southeast Asia are in a state of severe degradation” (Contreras 2016: 150).

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5  Conclusion Generally, China appears to invest more energy into environmental issues in Africa than Southeast Asia; however, the broader significance in the differences in China’s environmental approach to the regions stems from China’s overall strategies as well as its geostrategic ambitions. Through its policy plans with ASEAN, China appears to be doing a noteworthy job on addressing environmental concerns; however, in reality, issues related to China’s economic ambitions, access to resources and territorial security in regions such as the South China Sea, receive more attention. When countries use environmental protection as a reason for attempting to stop major Chinese projects, those concerns seem not to be prioritised over the potential economic benefits on the Chinese side. More and more, though, environmental concerns will be highlighted through the growing number of infrastructure projects in Southeast Asia, and China will need to be seen to be doing more on the ground in order to address them. On the other hand, in Africa, China appears to be addressing environmental concerns through different platforms and in practical ways. One of the major differences is the bilateral effort China has put into addressing illegal wildlife trade in Africa in comparison to Southeast Asia. Through bilateral engagement, it seems that much more effort, engagement and support have been given to individual countries affected by the problem. As noted earlier in the chapter, this seems to be due to South Africa and Kenya being important political and economic partners for China. Additionally, China has needed to redress the negative global perception that it is engaging with Africa purely for its natural resources. The same factors can, however, be linked to Southeast Asia, as countries in the region are important economic and political partners for China. Still, China’s need to secure its national interests appears to supersede environmental concerns in the region. Thus, it appears that China’s approach to environmental protection in Africa and Southeast Asia is shaped by a diversity of factors including not only the essential importance of protecting the environment, but also other geopolitical factors. While China prioritises its economic and security ambitions over environmental protection in Southeast Asia, it may need to stop and consider the long-term impacts of these ambitions. If biodiversity is increasingly lost and fish stocks depleted, what impact will this have on China’s access to natural resources in the future? Also, while

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it seems that China is investing more energy into environmental protection in Africa, the future impact on the environment of major projects like the BRI will need to be increasingly examined. Scholars have already suggested that ecological systems will be dramatically altered by the BRI. Furthermore, environmental concerns will increasingly have transregional impact; therefore, regions such as Africa and Southeast Asia also need to come together and find solutions to address mutual concerns.

References Agence France-Presse. 2017. “There’s No Law Enforcement”: Laos Has Become the World’s Fastest-Growing Ivory Market, Thanks to Chinese Demand, September 28. https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/2113282/theresno-law-enforcement-laos-has-become-worlds-fastest. Accessed 8 Aug 2018. ———. 2018. China Defends Decision to Ease Rhino, Tiger Parts Ban, October 30. https://ewn.co.za/2018/10/30/china-defends-decision-to-ease-rhinotiger-parts-ban. Accessed 5 Nov 2018. Argut, L. 2016. The Environmental Impact of China’s Activities in Africa: The Case of Kenya. Masters thesis, University of Nairobi. Bosshard, P. 2008. China’s Environmental Footprint in Africa. South African Institute of International Affairs. https://www.internationalrivers.org/sites/ default/files/attached-files/saiia_policy_briefing_508.pdf. Accessed 15 June 2018. Burgess, M. 2014. Is Increased Chinese Infrastructure Linked to Dwindling Numbers of African Wildlife? Centre for Chinese Studies, Commentary. http://www0.sun.ac.za/ccs/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/CCS_ Commentary_Chinese_infrastructure_wildlife_MB_2014.pdf. Accessed 12 Aug 2018. ———. 2015. Environmental Matters at FOCAC VI: More Than Just “Other Matters”. Centre for Chinese Studies, Commentary. http://www0.sun. ac.za/ccs/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/CCS_Commentary_FOCAC_ ENVIRO_MB_16NOV2015.pdf. Accessed 14 Apr 2018. Burgess, M., and H. Esterhuyse. 2015. Raising the Bar on Sustainable Development: Renewable Energy and Environmental Standards in FOCAC VI [Online]. Centre for Chinese Studies, Policy Briefing 7. http://www.ccs. org.za/?cat=88. Accessed 14 Apr 2018. Comptom, J. 2007. China Hosts ASEAN to Close Net on Wildlife Crime, TRAFFIC, September 14. http://www.traffic.org/home/2007/9/14/chinahosts-asean-to-close-net-on-wildlife-crime.html. Accessed 9 July 2018.

192  M. BURGESS Contreras, A. 2016. Transboundary Environmental Politics in Southeast Asia: Issues, Responses and Challenges. In Routledge Handbook of the Environment in Southeast Asia, ed. P. Hirsch, 147–156. Oxon: Routledge. Department of Environmental Affairs. 2013. Update on Rhino Poaching and Signing of MoU Between South Africa and the People’s Republic of China. https://www.environment.gov.za/mediarelease/updaterhinopoaching_signingmoubetween_sa_china. Accessed 1 June 2018. Eisenman, J. 2007. China’s Post-Cold War Strategy in Africa: Examining Beijing’s Methods and Objectives. In China and the Developing World: Beijing’s Strategy for the Twenty-First Century, ed. J. Eisenman, E. Heginbotham, and D. Mitchell, 29–59. New York: M.E. Sharpe. FOCAC. 2015. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation Johannesburg Action Plan. https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/t1323159.shtml. Accessed 12 Mar 2018. Glosny, M. 2007. Stabilising the Backyard: Recent Developments in China’s Policy Toward Southeast Asia. In China and the Developing World: Beijing’s Strategy for the Twenty-First Century, ed. J. Eisenman, E. Heginbotham, and D. Mitchell, 150–188. New York: M.E. Sharpe. Hawksley, H. 2018. Asian Waters: The Struggle Over the South China Sea and the Strategy of Chinese Expansion. London: Duckworth Overlook. Herman, F. 2017. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation: Towards a Path of Regime Formation in Environmental Conservation. Africa Review 10 (1): 101–121. Hodal, K. 2012. China Invests in South-East Asia for Trade, Food, Energy and Resources. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/22/chinasouth-east-asia-influence. Accessed 28 Aug 2018. Hughes, A. 2017. Even as More New Species Are Found, Southeast Asia Is in the Grip of a Biodiversity Crisis. The Conversation, January 5. https://theconversation.com/even-as-more-new-species-are-found-southeast-asia-is-inthe-grip-of-a-biodiversity-crisis-67700. Accessed 28 June 2018. International Institute for Environment and Development. 2015. The Dragon and the Giraffe: China in African Forests, IIED Briefing. http://pubs.iied. org/pdfs/17302IIED.pdf. Accessed 7 Aug 2018. Kamau, J. (2016). China and Kenya Partner on Study of Environment. The Star, September 28. https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2016/09/28/china-andkenya-partner-on-study-of-environment_c1427541. Accessed 12 Feb 2014. Li, H. 2015. China House, an Initiative to Help Chinese in Africa Integrate Better. South China Morning Post, March 14. http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1735859/china-house-initiative-help-chinese-africa-integrate-better. Accessed 14 Feb 2018. Ministry of Environmental Protection of China. n.d. ASEAN-China Strategy on Environmental Cooperation: 2016–2020. http://environment.asean.org/

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wp-content/uploads/2017/02/ASEAN-China-Strategy-on-EnvironmentalCooperation-2016-2020.pdf. Accessed 27 Mar 2018. Mol, A. 2011. China’s Ascent and Africa’s Environment. Global Environmental Change 21: 785–794. Monfreda, C. 2014. Kenya and China Sign Bilateral Agreements on Environment, IISD. http://sdg.iisd.org/news/kenya-and-china-sign-bilateral-agreements-on-environment/. Accessed 12 Feb 2014. Ndirangu, W. 2017. Kenya Signs a Statement of Intent Between Africa Governments and China. Kenya News Agency. http://kenyanewsagency. go.ke/en/?p=120209. Accessed 12 Feb 2018. Nzwili, F. 2014. China Pledges $10 Million in Support of Wildlife Conservation in Africa. http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2014/05/13/china-pledges-10-million-in-support-of-wildlife-conservation-in-africa/. Accessed 12 Feb 2014. Patroba, H. 2012. China in Kenya: Addressing Counterfeit Goods and Construction Sector Imbalances, SAIIA. Occasional Paper 110. Pike, L. 2017. Will China’s New Silk Road be Green? The Third Pole.Net. https://www.thethirdpole.net/en/2017/05/30/will-chinas-new-silk-roadbe-green/. Accessed 22 July 2018. Power, M., G. Mohan, and M. Tan-Mullins. 2012. China’s Resource Diplomacy in Africa: Powering Development? New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Priyandita, G., and T. Wijaya. 2017. China’s Southeast Asia Gambit. The Diplomat, May 31. https://thediplomat.com/2017/05/chinas-southeast-asiagambit/. Accessed 23 Mar 2018. Rachman, A. 2018. China Opens Door to More Indonesian Palm Oil as EU Seeks Import Ban. Wall Street Journal, May 7. https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-opens-door-to-more-indonesian-palm-oil-as-eu-seeks-importban-1525694510. Accessed 28 Aug 2018. Rose, B. 2015. Southeast Asia’s Illicit Wildlife Trade: International Cooperation Necessary to Find Solution. East by Southeast, May 16. http://www.eastbysoutheast.com/southeast-asias-illicit-wildlife-trade-international-cooperation-necessary-to-find-solution/. Accessed 7 July 2018. Shinn, D. 2016. The Environmental Impact of China’s Investment in Africa. Cornell International Law Journal 49: 25–67. Sotheary, P. 2018. China Signs Environment Pacts—With Cambodia. Khmer Times, July 5. https://www.khmertimeskh.com/50508266/china-signs-environment-pacts/. Accessed 6 July 2018. State Forestry Administration of China. 2014. China in Action: Protecting Wildlife and Combating Illegal Trade. http://english.forestry.gov.cn/ uploads/Information_Services/Latest_Publication/China_in_Action.pdf. Accessed 9 July 2018.

194  M. BURGESS TRAFFIC. 2012. China and ASEAN States Join Hands to Curb Illegal Wildlife Trade. http://www.traffic.org/home/2012/7/2/china-and-asean-states-joinhands-to-curb-illegal-wildlife-t.html. Accessed 3 July 2018. ———. 2015. China and Africa Summit Agrees to Enhance Joint Efforts Against Illegal Trade of Fauna and Flora. http://www.traffic.org/ home/2015/12/8/china-and-africa-summit-agrees-to-enhance-joint-effortsagai.html. Accessed 3 July 2018. Trajano, J., L. Gong, M. Sembiring, and R. Astuti. 2017. Marine Environmental Protection in the South China Sea: Challenges and Prospects Part I. RSIS. https://think-asia.org/bitstream/handle/11540/8256/MEP-Insight-1_11Dec-2017_final_TN.pdf?sequence=1. Accessed 15 Sept 2018. ———. 2018. Marine Environmental Protection in the South China Sea: Challenges and Prospects: Part 2. RSIS, https://www.rsis.edu.sg/wp-content/ uploads/2018/02/MEP-Insight-2-19-February.pdf. Accessed 15 Sept 2018. Turner, J., and A. Wu. 2011. Step Lightly: China’s Ecological Impact on Southeast Asia. Wilson Centre, July 7. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/ step-lightly-chinas-ecological-impact-southeast-asia. Accessed 21 Mar 2018. Walker, B. 2017. China’s Climate Aid Flows into Myanmar. China Dialogue, March 28. https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/9701China-s-climate-aid-flows-into-Myanmar. Accessed 5 Mar 2018. Xia, Y. 2017. Public Diplomacy Platform. Chinafrica, http://www.chinafrica. cn/Business/201701/t20170111_800085167.html. Accessed 13 Feb 2018. Yeophantong, P. 2015. Assessing Local Responses to Chinese-Backed Resource Development Projects. The Journal of Territorial and Maritime Studies 2 (2): 95–110. Zhu, Z. 2014. China’s New Diplomacy: Rationale, Strategies and Significance. Surrey: Ashgate.

PART III

Embedding Transregionalisation

CHAPTER 10

Seeing Like Scholars: Whose Exile? Making a Life, at Home and Abroad Mamadou Diawara

1  Introduction Now more than ever, the topic of migration is a focus of academic study. This article will not attempt to give an exhaustive history of the subject. Instead, I will offer a brief overview of its history in the Sahel. Historians and ethnologists seized on this topic very early on. In 1956, Jean Rouch studied Nigerian migrants travelling towards the Gold Coast. Recent work has followed in the footsteps of earlier predecessors (Manchuelle 1997), such as Gary-Tounkara’s (2014) study of sailors from Africa, particularly Senegal, seeking work on the coasts of the United States. Interest in the topic exploded during les trente glorieuses, France’s post-World War II boom decades, when France once again turned to the manpower of the colonies in order to reconstruct the “motherland”. Migrants came from the four corners of the Empire to work on French building sites and urban development projects (Cooper 1996; Timera 2000, 2010, 2014; Gary-Tounkara 2008). Dynamics amongst the inhabitants of various colonies, operative since the end of M. Diawara (*)  Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Anthony and U. Ruppert (eds.), Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7_10

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the nineteenth century, now intensified considerably. These dynamics concerned not only migration towards France, but also from one colony to another, a particularly prominent tendency amongst migrants from the Sahel and especially French Sudan, Senegal, Mauritania, Niger and Upper Volta (Rouch 1956; Manchuelle 1997; Timera 2014; Whitehouse 2009, 2012, 2013). The 1970s saw both increased flows of migration and the tightening of regulations around it, particularly in France. Correspondingly, this period marked the beginning of a flood of new studies of migration (Quiminal 1991; Daum 1992, 1998; Daum and Timera 1995; Timera 1996, 2014; Lavigne-Delville 1991; Schmitz 2006a, b, 2007, 2008). These fascinating studies conceptualised the history of internal as well as external migration (Manchuelle 1997; Chastanet 1999). Particularly close attention has been given to the conditions in the country of origin which lead to emigration, as well as conditions in the host country. Many of these focused on Africa (Bredeloup 1989), whilst others looked elsewhere (Daum 1998; Ebin 1990, 1996; Diouf 2000; Stoller 2002; Timera 2010; Canut and Sow 2014). Contributions have also been made by those most affected by the topic: the migrants themselves. Whether first or second generation, their writings have marked the debate (Ndongo 1976a, b; Timera 2010, 2014; Gary-Tounkara 2003, 2008, 2014). The moral economy of migration and the African economy have been discussed (Steiner 2002), but the debate is dominated by the lived experience of migration, and attempts to answer the question: How do we build a life, in our own country or elsewhere? Across many of these studies, the notion of exile emerges. Michael Lambert (2002) even uses the term in the title of his book, Longing for Exile. All these studies deal either with internal migration within Africa, or with pathways from Africa to destinations in Europe or the United States. As Paulo Gaibazzi (2015) points out, we can distinguish between two types of studies. The first type, which makes up the vast majority, concentrates on mobility. The second group, consisting of more recent studies, conceptualises sedentariness, the practice of remaining (Jónsson 2007, 2008, 2010; Gaibazzi 2015). In both cases, a fertile tension develops between the country, town or village of origin, and the destination. I will focus on the destination of Asia, and specifically Southeast Asia. To be sure, the lived experience in the country of origin—whether in a village or not—and the experience of staying abroad elsewhere matter. But

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my analysis is particularly concerned with the migrant’s lived experience between the two places, Southeast Asia and the country of origin. What interests me is this liminal space, which structurally unites the two places such that they almost become one. The aim of this text is to show how activity and life in the liminal space excludes the possibility of exile, or at least limits its importance in structuring the society of these actors we simply call “migrants”. When we agree that they are something other than simple “migrants”, we rapidly realise that exile has little place here. To that end, this study concentrates on the stories and lived experiences of the actors in question. It takes their own words into account. At the same time, it reflects on the analyses of the researchers who observe them. The fertile tension between the two perspectives merits attention. How do the academics analyse the lived experience of the subjects they observe? How and why does such a striking contrast arise between what the researchers say, and the lived experience of their subjects of study? I will show that the researcher looks at migrants in a manner almost indistinguishable from the way in which the State looks at peasants, as brilliantly analysed by James C. Scott in his book Seeing Like a State (1998) which inspired this article’s title. This article will first consider the perspective of researchers who use exile as their central analytical category. It will then confront the reality revealed by the discourses and practices of the actors being studied. Finally, I will examine the logic of these actors, who knit together two worlds and experience both, vividly, as their own. This will demonstrate that inhabitants of a host country appropriate it and, by necessity, make it their own. They thus participate in the production of locality, in Arjun Appadurai’s sense of the term (1995).

2   “Longing for Exile” The notion of exile is presented very inconsistently in analyses of migration in West African societies. It is possible to distinguish between two trends, divided along linguistic lines: one group is made up of Francophones, whilst the second consists of Anglophone analysts. Let us first consider the works of Sylvie Bredeloup (2007: 130) and Mahamet Timera (particularly 2001 and 2014). Bredeloup, discussing migrants from the Senegal Valley, makes brief use of the term “exile”, situating it in the past. She draws attention to the value placed on exile in the Pulaar epics of Samba Guéladio Diégui or

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El Hadj Umar Tall and equates fergo with political exile. These tales from faraway lands remind migrants of the deeds of their ancestors and inspire them to rise to the challenge of the migratory undertaking. Nevertheless, it seems pertinent to ask whether fergo truly signifies exile, or whether it in fact is closer to a classic strategic withdrawal. In fact, none of the heroes retreated alone. History contains multitudes of heroes or strategists who, in order to achieve a decisive victory, put distance between themselves and the enemy in order to consolidate their positions, arm themselves and attack at the right moment. This political, often selfimposed retreat, modelled in these cases on the Prophet Muhammad’s jihad, is very different from the experiences of less influential, ordinary people. Why should we speak of “exile” when considering fergo, or when studying the migratory undertaking which is at question in this article? Timera uses the term “exile” in various contexts. The first experience where he evokes the notion of exile is the “search for a path in exile”. The second is the fear of “dying far away”, which is considered synonymous with exile (Timera 2014: 21, 42). The third has two variations: either the migrant chooses self-imposed exile, or the State banishes him or her as a fugitive. In the latter case, the State’s actions make the new land indistinguishable from the exile (ibid.: 37, 42). This was the case for the migrants who defied the ban on leaving Mali under the socialist regime, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s (Gary-Tounkara 2008). Gaibazzi (2015), studying Gambian migrants in the Upper Senegal River Valley, sometimes translates the term tuɳa as exile, in accordance with Makan Dantioko’s dictionary (2003). Gaibazzi does not offer an explanation for his choice. However, neither he nor Bredeloup gives a central place to the notion of exile in the migratory undertaking—and Timera even less so. How and why does exile find itself at the heart of the work of Michael C. Lambert (2002) and Bruce Whitehouse (2012)? Michael Lambert (2002) gives the term “exile” pride of place, even going so far as to include it in the title of his book. He explains this choice in the introduction, which offers a detailed analysis of life in Madégane, in the Senegalese region of Casamance. He notes (with my emphasis): […] And finally, most people I spoke with had migration in their minds. They were, as I now understand it, preoccupied by a longing for exile: deeply held faith that a better life could be found in another place. Migration, which has been thrust upon these people by the tumultuous transformation of

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West Africa in the 20th century, had come to represent the promise of material stability, economic security, and social prestige. (xix)

The author waits until the conclusion of his book, before remarking: “In Magédane itself in the past thirty years this enthrallment with goods and cash has fueled a longing for exile and directed and defined the movement of its population into urban areas” (ibid.: 167) (my emphasis). Lambert describes the local reality in Magédane and in Sénégal (see, for example, Chapter 7). He highlights numerous relevant local expressions. However, it must be noted that none of those expressions is either closely or loosely synonymous with “exile”. No local term leads to the notion of exile. The author does not force a comparison. Why, then, should we argue with the use of the term “exile”, when we know what the author means to say? According to the dictionary, exile is synonymous with disgrace, and recalls the notion of being banished for political reasons. A familiar example from history is the famous case of Cicero. What does it teach us? Paul Briot (1968: 405), a talented Latinist, tells us that in March of 58 BC, Cicero simply left Rome. He thus preempted the final vote on Claudius’ bill: … [which] sentenced to exile any man who ordered the execution of a Roman citizen without a court hearing … [Cicero’s] letters express a profound despondency: he is heartbroken, he finds himself stricken by an immense sense of grief … Worry and anxiety eat away at him … he sheds copious tears … Finally, on numerous occasions, the exiled individual makes it known that he could end this existence which has become far too painful …. (my emphasis)

In exile, Cicero suffered from melancholy. The modern analysis of migration as exile is very far removed from these pains and sorrows which exile provoked for him. Nothing says that the notion of exile, as evoked by Lambert, leads to this reaction, although similar pathologies can appear amongst migrants. Exile is a type of sanction inflicted upon an individual by an external authority. Timera (2014: 30) describes exile as an “extreme punishment” which is externally imposed, notably by national governments. Exile is personal. In contrast, the act of emigrating, and the decision to do so, goes beyond the level of the individual, although it is the individual who actually relocates. We should remember that the decision, which emerges from family strategies, is sometimes taken collectively.

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The choice of the term “exile” is hardly accidental. The crossings can be disconcerting, risky and dangerous. It is important to systematically explore the discourse developed by the migrants themselves, following the example of Bruce Whitehouse (2012). Whitehouse makes a remarkable effort to use his interlocutors’ texts in the field. Like Lambert, the author refers to exile in the subheading of his work. His choice is underpinned by a common phrase in Bambara-speaking circles, which I will now interpret with respect to the translation he has chosen, namely, “exile”. Tunga tɛ dabe don, ng’a bɛ dennyuman don. Whitehouse translates this Bambara proverb as “exile knows no dignity, but it knows a good person” (2012: 88–89 for the English version). Two points are worth conceptualising: the translation of tunga as “exile”, and the translation of dennyuman as “good person”. How can the equation of tunga and exile be justified? The author proposes two terms, “foreign land” and “alien space”. Tunga does indeed refer to the faraway, the unknown, the foreign, the exterior, the outside, the bush, the “elsewhere” (see also Spittler 1989, 1998; Timera 2014: 31). Of course, it can become an exile for those who fail, or even perish (see also Petit 2002; Timera 2014: 42). The term tunga is common to both Soninke and Bambara. In Soninke (tuɲa) there also exists a second term which is closer to the notion of exile, jooroye. This word is applied to those who have left for good, without sending anything back or communicating any news (Fieldwork Interview, March 2014). Nobody knows their whereabouts, and they have disappeared forever. It seems somewhat extreme to reduce the notion of tunga to exile, for all those who are abroad are not exiled. We must remember what exile really means. In addition, we must remember that many migrants develop strategies for being present in their country of origin, as Whitehouse (2012) shows in the case of villagers in Togotala. Whitehouse (2012: 89) translates dennyuman briefly as good person. Too briefly, some might say. Arguably, he should have given an in-depth description of his search for a translation, as he did for danbe. How good is this good person, one wishes to ask? The author responds to this question in a commentary which is more appropriate than the translation: “… all that matters is one’s individual accomplishment and successes” (see also Gaibazzi 2012: 231). So, what is a dennyuman? Today, this phrase (Exile knows no dignity) is thrown in migrants’ faces by the griots, poets who were once close followers of the first warriors

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(Diawara 1990: 38–44; 1996). Today, these warriors are in some sense replaced by migrants, the cavaliers of the twenty-first century. Sylvie Bredeloup (2007: 129–132) aptly recalls the role of these lyric poets in migration within the Sahel (see also Manchuelle and Masseaut 2004; Timera 2014: 34). The songs and speeches of Soninko lyric poets are always divided into two parts. The first is called the kuunyi janmu, reminders of the past, which are addressed to every individual with notable ancestors, irrespective of his or her own merits. The griots address these individuals with tales of their ancestors’ deeds and acts, their intangible heritage. This is followed by a second part, called nyangollu, or in Bambara, kɛwale. These recount only the individual’s own achievements (Diawara 1990: 84). This tradition says to migrants: it is up to you to carve out your own path, to do something for your descendants to inherit, which will bring them glory and will act as a challenge to them in turn. Your single-handed success, your prowess, in your new country matters. Dennyuman is one who has success abroad. When the lyric poet addresses you with a description of your own deeds and acts, he effectively erases those of your ancestors, and so challenges you! It is up to each individual, male or female, to become a deserving child (den). You must become this /den//nyuman/to be worthy in the eyes of the world. Like a hero, you must take command of your own destiny. Duty requires you to be more than a “good person”. This permanent challenge is the sword of Damocles hanging over migrants’ heads. It is part of the driving force which motivates them. Translating dennyuman as good person erases this dimension of the phrase, which is an essential part of their migratory experience. The faraway land (tunga) throws down a challenge for the disembarking Sahelian, because it demands point-blank that he gives everything he is capable of. It is no longer a question of being content with one’s genealogy, however brilliant it may be, and showing off the heritage common to your whole tribe. You must create, achieve your own results. Paulo Gaibazzi (2012: 231) clearly observes this in his field studies. Let us return to the authors whose usage of the term exile we discussed earlier. Some may argue that there exists a softened definition of “exile”, borrowed from the literature of exile. In that context, the term is synonymous with a change of residence, whether by choice or otherwise, which gives rise to “a feeling or impression of uprootedness”

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(Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales, authors translation). But if this is true, if it is such a stale cliché, why refer to it as an essential analytical concept? Why should we give as much space to a literary tradition as we give to the perspective of migrants themselves? Below, we will examine migrants’ experiences which are at odds with the use of exile as a central analytical category.

3  The Resources of Migration To quote Hein De Haas (2008: 6–7): “Migration does not take place in a social, cultural, political, and institutional void”. Citing Åkesson (2004), Gunvor Jónsson comments, “Migration and economic consideration are always socially embedded and culturally informed”. Paulo Gaibazzi adds, on the basis of his fieldwork experience in Upper Gambia (2012: 232, my emphasis): “Social capital is a crucial factor in reducing the costs of emigration, especially during the initial stages of migration when resources and connections have to be mobilised to sponsor travel”. Jónsson (2008: 13–15), following these first two authors, concentrates on a major survey of numerous studies of migration. Particular attention is paid to an economic and neo-classical analysis of the imbalance between the country of origin and the destination country, thus erasing the importance of social and cultural factors which shape the migratory undertaking—yet it is these factors which constitute the resources I will now explore. In the Sahel, emigration depends on long-standing resources, which are mobilised by actors in Asia and elsewhere, whether consciously or not. A thick history of migration feeds the oral tradition, and oral and written literatures. These have already been learnt in the home, before the great departure, in the form of tales sung, played, danced, chanted or simply recited. Many of them are then transported—in the past, on cassettes, and now in electronic formats. This history dates back to periods as long ago as the end of the kingdom of Wagadu, which led to waves of migration. We will examine this first. 3.1   Distant History We would not claim to draw a direct link between the structure of the medieval town of Kumbi Saleh and the behaviour of twenty-first-century merchants. However, we cannot ignore the history that has taken place

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in the land of Sahelian migrants and traders in question. The fact that these people remain fundamentally affected by their heritage is hardly surprising. So what is this heritage? When Kumbi, the capital of Wagadu, was at its zenith (between the fourth and eleventh centuries), al-Bakri wrote a detailed description of the city (1859: 382 onwards). It consisted of two districts: one for the king and native residents, and another for traders, Arabs and Berbers. Between the two districts were wells full of pleasant water, fields of vegetables and homes. Six miles away was the king’s town, Al-Ghaba, “the forest, the grove” (al-Bakri 1859: 382). Already at this time, merchants were part of the Sahel’s landscape. The kingdom’s aristocracy traded with foreigners, who arrived from the North bringing with them not only their goods and the pack animals who carried them, but also their habits and customs. Their religion, Islam, then little known and not practised in the Sahel, ended up gaining followers. It is significant that professional migrants and traders who came from North Africa settled, did business and flourished in peace. Those who did the same, following peaceful conversion, would later become the local merchants and educated class and devote themselves to this occupation, locally and further afield. This process of putting down roots is a prerequisite for the tolerance, respect and distance which allow any group to do business freely as a minority. Such communities, which François Manchuelle (1997: 27–28) called “trading colonies”, are well-known under various names: Wangara in the Songhai Empire; Jula in the kingdoms descended from Mali; and Yarse in the kingdom of Yatenga. Several examples demonstrate this ancient trading tradition (Levtzion and Hopkins 2000: 77–78, 81, 107), including: Kumbi Saleh, capital of the Empire of Wagadu in the heart of the Sahel during the Middle Ages; Ghîarou, source of the best gold in the land (al-Bakri 1859: 385 onwards); Gunjuru and Silla, city-states in the Upper Senegal Valley whose activity is reported by al-Bakri (1859); and Barisa and Yaresna, described by Al-Idrisi. Another example is Niani, capital of the Mali Empire, described by Ibn Battuta in 1352. The zongo—districts for foreign merchants in Kumasi, Accra and elsewhere in Ghana—are part of the same tradition. The end of the Kingdom of Wagadu occurred in the eleventh century and is told to us in the form of a legend. This depicts a massive flight from the land following a devastating drought, which had been provoked by the death of the naja nigricolis (biida), a serpent which had previously guaranteed the kingdom’s prosperity (Monteil 1953).

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This serpent was beheaded by an aggrieved fiancé, Mamadi Seheduxote, who refused to allow his betrothed to become the serpent’s victim. The annual ritual ceremony of sacrificing the most beautiful girl in the land to the serpent was suspended and then cancelled for ever. As it died, the snake cursed the land, and it was afflicted with a seven-year drought. From that time onwards, people migrated across the Sahel and beyond, particularly towards the South. This enduring legend suggests that the Sahel’s history is intimately associated with emigration, travel and the drought which to this day characterises life in the Sahel. This explains the presence of Muslim migrants, not only in the areas which are most heavily influenced by the old Mali and Songhai Empires, but also much further south. These southern outposts are the doing of Mande populations, who are heirs to this world I have just described. These migrants moved as far as Ghana (Wilks 1961), Northern Côte d’Ivoire (Person 1968, 1972, 1975), Benin (Farias 1995, 1996, 1999), Sierra Leone and Liberia (Jackson 1977, 1989). 3.2   Muslim Enclaves in the South and Recent History In his work on Ghana, Ivor Wilks (1961, 1975) described the “Northern factor”, a concept which refers to the powerful leverage of Muslim traders from the North. He emphasises the role of Mande migrants, heirs to the trading tradition of the great empires (Wagadu, Mali and Songhai), in establishing Muslim districts, called zongo, in Northern Ghana. He gives the specific examples of two zongo, Bole and Tafo, founded by Mande migrants in the areas which are now Gonja and Ashanti, long before the Anglo-Ashanti War of 1874. Kwame Arhin (1970) also refers to zongo built after the war, on the border of Ashanti land, by groups of Hausa, Jula or Dagomba. In the Hausa language, zongo refers to the place of a transporter or the place where travellers live (Schildkrout 1978: 67). These merchants engage in transport and trade, particularly of gold or kola nuts, and transform the country’s townscape (Aniegye 2011: 6–17). There are zongo all over Ghana. They have been established by Fulani, Yoruba, Mossi, Dagomba or Mande traders in locations such as Accra, Tamale (Hausa Zongo, Mossi Zongo, and Sabon Gida; see Aniegye 2011: 2), Kumasi (see Schildkrout 1978), Tudu, Sabon Zongo and

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South Labadi (Aniegye 2011: 5–6). This tradition of a district specifically for entrepreneurs persists. These migrants are entrepreneurs par excellence; wherever they find themselves, they can orientate themselves as soon as they identify the two key compass points of the market and the mosque. Whitehouse (2012: 137–138) very carefully describes the suffering endured by West African migrants in Brazzaville, which deserves some attention. I will explain the notion of tunga, and put it into perspective, before analysing the condition which prevails over it. For villagers, tunga, the unknown, knows no national borders. For those in the Malian interior, tunga includes Bamako or any other town where they go to sell their labour by undertaking work they would not normally do at home. In what he calls Brazzaville’s “stranger code”, Whitehouse shows how migrants are forced to keep a low profile. Of course, all this can be explained by the dictum, “exile knows no dignity”. The foreigner is so conditioned by this reality that he is all the more ready to submit to all other abuses (144). However, this raises two obvious observations. These abuses do not push the foreigner to leave the country; on the contrary, he adapts to them and stays put, ever the entrepreneur, waiting for success. The evocative title of François Manchuelle’s Willing Migrants (1997) speaks volumes. Furthermore, the abuses endured by migrants are certainly humiliating and costly, but have we considered what is endured by citizens at the hands of those same corrupt agents of the State, notably in the Congo? The justifications given in the case of citizens are certainly different, but the abuse is not only incontestable, but recurrent. Despite the arbitrariness, foreigners who speak good French and adopt terms like “adventure” or “adventurers” totally ignore the concept of exile. This is not by chance. We will return to this question.

4  The Production of Locality, or “A Young Man’s Homeland Is Wherever He Finds Success” There are a huge number of studies of migrants’ host countries. Migrants head towards countries and cities at the heart of the capitalist system. How do these new arrivals make their way through this turbulent world in a context devoted to cosmopolitanism? How do they carve out a niche for themselves, and find their place, their locality?

208  M. DIAWARA [For] me, personally, a man has no home. A man has no home. When you manage to settle somewhere, where you can work, where you can sleep, where you have your family, that’s already your home! That’s already your home. (Barou in Whitehouse 2012: 217, my emphasis)

These words are echoed by another, equally eloquent phrase from the village: “A young man’s homeland is wherever he finds success”. How often this phrase is heard! It is used, like a balm, to soothe the hearts of parents lamenting the absence of a son or daughter. When Barou, a spare parts trader from Brazzaville, justifies his absence from his country of origin, and therefore also his presence in his new home, this phrase is like a leitmotif from which he draws deep encouragement. The ultimate aim is to make this new land his home, to conquer it through work. Of course, at the moment of arrival, the new land is as foreign to the young immigrant as it is to his family waiting back home in the Sahel. To begin with, Soninke relatives who speak of their kin abroad do so in the abstract. In Soninke, people speak of Haranci, Konko, Bankoku and Siini for France, Congo, Bangkok and China. These names are general and fairly neutral. The story of Marije Nyaare, who lives in a Southeast Asian metropolis, brings this to life. He quotes his neighbours in Bamako, who said of him: “Look at the son of the S. family who lives at the end of the earth!” Diɲe dan means the end of the earth, the place beyond which there is nothing. For them, Southeast Asia and the metropolis where he lives, fall into this category: “The land which is further than far away, the land which is nowhere”, to borrow Jean Rouch’s fine expression in La Chasse au Lion à l’arc (1965). Once the migrant finds success in the new land, and brings over his wife and his family, people talk more and more about this place. People will eventually call it “so-and-so’s country”—in this instance, “Nyaare’s country”—as if to say he has made it his own. The ultimate aim is achieved: parts of home are replicated faraway. The faraway place remains faraway, but the migrant makes it his own. It becomes less foreign. Without having read Appadurai (1995), they produce a locality, which is the ultimate goal of expanding abroad, to an “elsewhere” which must become a part of oneself. Actors from West Africa shape the surrounding context, which is largely characterised by globalisation, and make it their own, notably in Southeast Asia. Appadurai calls this the global production of locality, and evokes his concept of ethnoscape (1995: 212).

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Migrants thus generate niches in various forms. Certain niches lend themselves to analysis: “tradespeople”, “stone-people” and secondgeneration businessmen. The first two names come from the migrants themselves, for in this Southeast Asian metropolis there are two distinct West African communities in the city centre. The first, trade brokers, live in the neighbourhood to the East; the second, traders of precious and semi-precious stones, live in the Southwest.

5  Trading Posts and Tradespeople The “tradespeople” are long-distance brokers who act as intermediaries for African traders who come to make purchases in Asia, or who place orders on their behalf. A good example of this strategy can be found amongst African entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia. They initially arrive from places like Mali, Guinea or Gambia. But in the meantime, they make a stopover—and sometimes their fortune—in Central or West Africa. Central Africa is a major stopover point on the way to Asia. During these stopovers, they form trading posts. These posts take the form of a shop which is kept well-stocked with goods sent by the trader resident in Asia, and are manned on their behalf by correspondents, who are generally from the same country or even the same family. The entrepreneur based in Southeast Asia, a broker in all types of trade, carves himself out one niche in Asia, and one (or several) in Africa, which he knows well, but where he no longer lives permanently. During the period when he has lived and worked there, the entrepreneur has produced the “socio-material infrastructure” which is indispensable for his business affairs. He has an address book filled with contacts in all sorts of fields: economic, political, security and social. Of course, this also includes individuals in such strategically chosen sectors as visas, passports and customs. Urry (2003) includes the transport sector as part of this infrastructure. This is at the heart of business, and migrants must invest time in this field, finding out not only which routes are well-constructed, but above all which are passable, taking into account tacit agreements with customs authorities or local security agents. De Bruijn et al. (2001: 72) rightly note the significance of the vast social network which underpins this infrastructure in the Sahel. The two authors note the role of kinship, close relations, hosts and many others who play the role of messengers in trade. Gaibazzi (2015: 13) completes the list by adding both the family

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and the age cohort, which are ways of categorising people, resources and activities across space. With this African infrastructure behind them, these Sahelian entrepreneurs invest in goods produced in Southeast Asia. These brokers capitalise on an incontestable competitive advantage: from the mid-1980s to the end of the 1990s, they were the only people in direct contact with the source; the only ones who knew the local customs, trade habits and language. Gregor Dobler (2008) has studied the niche occupied by Chinese migrants in Africa, and here another emerges by the same process. In this instance, it is open to Africans who open trading posts selling products from Thailand, Indonesia or China. Two localities, and a third in the country of origin: these are the places created by my interlocutors in Southeast Asia. When they leave Asia to travel to Africa, they do not necessarily go to their land of origin, but to one of the multiple trading posts they oversee. In Brazzaville, Whitehouse (2012: 62) observes this type of trader who is directly resupplied from Bangkok, Jakarta and Hong Kong. Their businesses are based on these trading posts. This term—trading posts—is worth considering more closely. In their studies of relations between China and Africa, Bertoncello et al. (2009: 107) rightly evoke the notion of an emporium, that is to say, a trading post. The emporium, in classical antiquity, was a commercial trading post in a port founded by foreigners, whether linked to the hinterland or not. I will gladly borrow Braudel’s definition of a trading post (1990), as used by the three aforementioned authors—with two small caveats. Firstly, the territory covered interests me less than the people involved. Secondly, the trading posts I am discussing are on dry land, in towns or in the bush, not on the coast—or they can even take the form of a single person, who may move around. I am centrally concerned with the constitution of commercial bases, however small, to serve as way-stations for economic actors of a particular trading post. Bertoncello and Bredeloup propose a good description of African businessmen who, like the first colonisers, “form new bridgeheads of sub-Saharan African migration” (2006: 98). I would like to concentrate on Bertoncello and Bredeloup’s conceptualisation of trading posts, and to reflect on two essential points. First, I will characterise trading posts from earlier historical periods. I will then introduce another comparative dimension, which will take us from the Mediterranean to the banks of the Indian Ocean, the ancient crucible of Afro-Asian interaction.

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François Manchuelle (1997) describes the scars from the ancient history of Sahelian traders on the edges of the Sahara. These traders sometimes acted simply as intermediaries on their own soil, on behalf of their counterparts from the Levant and the Maghreb, but they also spearheaded their own campaign, beginning in the area which is now the triangular border between Mali, Mauritania and Senegal. These are the men who, as trailblazers through the bush, or even forest, set off and founded these strongholds. The process, far from being a product of chance, is perfectly deliberate, as is evidenced by the vocabulary they use to talk about it. For Soninke migrants and their society, any soil they tread (other than their own) is considered the bush, gunne. It’s up to the migrant to transform it into his home, to make it his own (Gaibazzi 2015). From the 1980s, the Arabian Gulf Emirates acted as a trading post between Africa, the Arab world and Asia (Bertoncello et al. 2009: 107). During the same period, traders from the Sahel settled in Southeast Asia (Thailand and Indonesia), whilst waiting to enter China. As a stop-over on the journey, Dubai was essential, for three reasons: the opportunity to trade there; the cost of tickets; and the ease of obtaining travel permits. Bertoncello et al. write the following pertinent lines on this topic (my emphasis): For these … immigrants, who mostly come from Mali and Guinea, the journey to Asia is closely tied to the sale of precious and semi-precious stones. In the 1970s, these men had the chance, at one point or another in their professional life, to transport stones to Thailand – mainly rubies, but also emeralds, sapphires and tanzanite – all of which destined to be transformed in stone-working centres before being sold there or in Europe. These trades led them to seek more secure markets in the region, which would allow them to boost their skills in imports and exports. In Bangkok, where industry was booming at the end of the 1980s, they started local factories manufacturing t-shirts, pagnes and cosmetic products for African markets. (ibid.)

These “stone people” happily mix with “tradespeople” and long-distance brokers.

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6  Long-Distance Brokers Lots of Malians, Burkinabe, Senegalese, Gambians, Guineans and many others live in Thailand, Indonesia and China, and travel to Madagascar, Central and Eastern Africa in search of precious or semi-precious stones. Their situations fall into three possible categories. First, there those who, like Jamera Fade Suxuna, live with their family in Asia. They focus on travelling in those parts of the world where they lived for a long time, before they decided to settle in Asia. They go to seek stones in these lands—notably Madagascar, the DRC and Tanzania—and in doing so, they renew ties with their associates on the ground, tapping into the “socio-material infrastructure” discussed above, with its wide network (Urry 2007: 13; Gaibazzi 2015: 12–13; De Bruijn et al. 2001: 72). They are not strangers there—quite the contrary! Their associates have already sourced merchandise for them before they arrive from “Asia”. They fly in from Southeast Asia, negotiate a price for the stones, pay the bill and catch a flight back. The second possible scenario concerns traders like Kone, whose family has lived in Bamako since they left Brazzaville. Having lived for decades in Brazzaville, he is now settled in a Southeast Asian capital where he works as a broker. He has bought merchandise of all sorts for clients in Central and West Africa. For him, there is no difference between these two parts of the continent, since he lived in Central Africa for as long as he did in his country of origin. He moves easily between Asia, where he lives, and these various parts of Africa, where he does business. The third possible set-up is exemplified by the case of Suwan, who lives with a wife in Southeast Asia and travels between there and Central and East Africa. He also supports another, larger section of his family in Nigeria—his first wife and their children. When he travels between Asia and Africa, he is always at home, because he has family in both places. In all three examples, these local cosmopolitans come from Mali. All are of Soninke origin and they maintain this language by speaking it with one another. However, in the home, most Central and West African traders are Kikongo speakers in the Congo, Hausa speakers in Nigeria or Swahili speakers in East Africa and the Eastern Congo. Originally from Mali, but not formally educated, they are mostly Anglophone. Their individual journeys have left deep marks on these men. Spending time with these men, it is not uncommon to see them carry several passports at once—which is often legal, under the law of

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their respective countries. It is also not surprising to see them speaking Soninke or Lingala, and then immediately switching to English; for example, if they are naming different floors of a building or dictating a telephone number. I ended up doing the same thing myself, since it is useless to speak in French (just as it is in the village). These men’s life paths show how they have escaped the colonial and post-colonial logic which supposes that it is possible to impose one “official” language and one nationality on each individual. Their multilingualism, like that of Sahelians, is reminiscent of how comfortable the Mourides are with the language of their host countries (Diouf 2000: 693).

7  Second-Generation Businessmen Over time, the two aforementioned groups give rise to a third: second-generation businessmen, born abroad. This group is even more interesting to analyse. In Southeast Asia, we met some such individuals, who came from the DRC. Fowuru, the son of migrants who were originally from the Malian part of Gajaaga, states: My parents come from Tafsirga, in Mali. But I was born in Lubumbashi in the DRC. I arrived here in 1994. I worked as an intermediary (broker) between Africans and Thais. But during this time I met people from Zaïre. They brought me the stones to sell, and I helped them with Chinese clients. Since I spoke their language and I was a broker, the Chinese man asked me if I wouldn’t like to do the stone trades myself. I said why not! He gave me $40,000 and we got going. It’s like Asia opened our eyes. I was born and raised in Lubumbashi in the Congo. I had no idea about gold or stones. The Congolese are not very good at this business. As soon as they have a bit of money, they buy themselves a car, they drink some alcohol, they live. A Soninke knows how to make do with little and wait for long-term results. In the Congo I have their identification documents. So it’s easy for me to get around. I speak their languages, I know the system. When the Westerners pay a bribe of $1,000 to the head of the mining zone, I outbid them by paying $3,000 instead.

214  M. DIAWARA In the past, in Congo, I had no idea about mines and the treasures of the land. It’s Asia which allowed me to get informed and that’s why I say it’s Asia which opens our eyes. That’s the difference between the migrant’s life here and in Central Africa, for example. (Interview, 05/02/2014: 52; my emphasis)

Fowuru demonstrates the strength of local cosmopolitans, the third group in my typology. For them, Southeast Asia is where they live, but their country is the DRC or Mali. For these speakers of Kikongo, Lingala, Swahili, Soninke, English, French and Thai, “country” is not an abstract concept. His family lives in Southeast Asia, and he does business there. But without the Congo, where he lives with some of his kin, and without his business partners in the mines and beyond, everything would fall apart. He goes there very often, in search of stones and business deals. In addition, there is the country of origin, which remains important, but not really essential, due to his business relationships in the mining sector. Those who still live there remain his relatives and allies, but business must come first. The migrant looks to Lubumbashi rather than Bamako. All three of these types of migrants demonstrate adaptability. Migrants’ great versatility has been and continues to be the subject of debate, particularly in the case of the Mourides. Much of this is reminiscent of analyses of the Mourides by Diouf (2000) and Ebin (1996), who make very similar arguments. In an interview with Victoria Ebin, one Mouride migrant says: “Our homeland [in Western Senegal] is built on sand, and like the sand, we are blown everywhere… Nowadays, you can go to the ends of the earth and see a Mouride wearing a wool cap with a pom-pom selling something to somebody” (ibid.: 96). Senegal could easily be replaced with the Western Sahel, apart from the religious dimension. Mahamet Timera (2001: 44) quotes an expression which is popular with migrants, comparing them to birds. He reports one especially elegant turn of phrase from a landlord in Bamako: “The Soninké is like the partridge, he may well fly far from his nest, but he always returns” (my emphasis). Another common metaphor is trees, though Bruce Whitehouse (2012: 211, 218) prefers to compare West African migrants to nautical vessels. He demonstrates the fundamental importance of vocabulary surrounding the relationship between people and their country. He recommends the term mooring, which recalls migrants’ need to put down anchor in the place where they settle, to forge a link

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between the particular place where they live and their “collective and individual identity”. Once again, we see the use of maritime metaphor. This more or less echoes the earlier reflections of the sociologist John Urry (2003, 2007), who uses the notion of mooring as a concept in migratory studies. Paulo Gaibazzi (2015: 12), following Urry, aptly compares Sabi, in the Upper Gambia, to a mooring. Sabi is everything at once: “a commercial crossroads, a reserve of manpower, and the home of an international diaspora”. People put down anchor there, since it is at the centre of the “circulation of people and resources”. To recap: migrants make their host countries their own by starting families. The term “niche” goes beyond economic activity, although this is their raison d’être. It goes beyond geography, and of course it includes the social domain or socio-material infrastructure (Urry 2007). It is this social infrastructure which allows those individuals, who are called “migrants” for the sake of simplicity, to detach themselves from the country of origin without actually cutting the umbilical cord, if we are tempted to see it in these terms. Of course, this goes beyond notions of diaspora and of atavistic attachment to one’s country. One must make one’s own country, beyond the “motherland” in the primary sense of the term. The migrant makes a new home wherever he moors. He is responsible for convincing people in his country of origin of this fact. In recognition, they will call the new land by the name of the individual to whom they owe their knowledge of it, calling it “so-and-so’s land”. So how should we respond to those who cling to the notion of exile? The response comes from Galin Tihanov who states that “exile … is a romantic cultural construct … Romanticism is … the foundational metanarrative of border crossing and exile in modernity” (2015: 150, 155; my emphasis). The appeal to this concept therefore reveals a certain modern romanticism. Does this explain why this term flourishes amongst specialists in the field of migration studies? Let’s return to the way in which niches and lands are created abroad. These comfortably join with the country of origin. Two spaces emerge, as Mahamet Timera writes (2014: 42). The “interior”, the country, and the “exterior”, the series of niches which migrants create for themselves, cut across one another, and sometimes blend into one another through the actors who form them. They are an integral part of common space, which profoundly restructures the community’s relationship to abroad, and to their own country. Depending on the circumstances,

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this space may grow, shrink and even disintegrate. This is even more true of Schnapper’s “emotional community” (1994), mentioned by Timera (2014: 42), which follows the ebb and flow of emotions or business relationships maintained by the actors in the two spaces—which, it is worth repeating, are not clearly distinct from one another. It is not a question of atavistic attachment. Where is the homeland of Suxuna, an octogenarian who has been settled in a Southeast Asian metropolis with his wife since 1985? In 1952, he recalls, he left his small village and worked as a young migrant in Kayes and Bamako, returning home regularly for the rainy season. Periods in Dakar and Abidjan were followed by time spent in Sierra Leone and Guinea, where he actively participated in the diamond fever of the 1960s. At the end of this glorious time, which was interrupted by Guinea’s revolutionary period, and after a few brief stays in Bamako, Suxuna ended up in Central Africa. He got married in Kenya, and his wife stayed there with the children. In the 1980s he assiduously visited Zambia’s diamond mines, before ending up as a merchant—no longer in Belgium or Switzerland, his traditional base since the 1960s, but in Asia. The proximity of precious and semiprecious stone markets to this land explains why. Since then, a community has formed of Sahelians together with some Guineans and Gambians; this community remains there to this day. Suxuna’s eldest son is in Kenya, his second son is in Tanzania and his daughter, the youngest of his three children, is in France. Each one of them now has their own family. Suxuna speaks Swahili with his wife, who never learned her husband’s language. He speaks English, the language of business, but does not write in any language. His daughter hardly speaks any Soninke, the language of her father. Living in France, she mostly speaks French. None of Suxuna’s children knows their father’s land; and for Suxuna, who originates from a Francophone country (Mali), French is a foreign language. When he needs to dictate a phone number, for example, he uses English. There can be no question of an atavistic attachment for this man, who sees Mali as his country. But what does that have to do, in concrete terms, with the land of his childhood?

8  Beyond the Trading Post The example of Suxuna recalls Whitehouse’s analysis (2012: 218–219), who rightly contests the idea that the migrant’s gaze naturally turns towards their fatherland. This would arise precisely from this atavism

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which I have dismissed. The structure of trading posts, and the way in which this structure is implemented, is a defence against this idea of a gaze constantly turned towards the country of origin. So what can we say when migrants liberate themselves from the trading post, and reinforce this with their passports? It is useful to bear in mind various examples from the three types of niche discussed above. The niches, although they may be called trading posts and relate to particular goods or mines, do not only concern material things. A trading post is not just a depot. It concerns families and social relationships, without which the trading post does not exist. Like the network which underpins it, it is buttressed by people, by social relationships. Once again, immigration is not constructed on virgin territory, and nor are business relations. Beyond the fixed trading post and beyond geography, today’s migrants build upon the triptych of the passport, the social network, and the various trading posts which have been formed or are yet to be created. Armed with a passport, the key to their infrastructure, they travel the world and do business, irrespective of their initial point of departure. The passport protects them and guarantees them the mobility which trade entails. In this form, the trading post is almost virtual, but it cannot be reduced to a single travel document or a single individual. This should not be confused with romantic notions of the mobility of the individual, which are often celebrated in this time of globalisation. Marc Augé (2009: 7) usefully draws our attention towards this very real intersection. He criticises “hypermodern mobility”, which he sees as a product of globalisation. Tihanov (2015: 155) attacks this individualism, which is a product of liberalism, and recommends separating it from the notion of exile. He writes that we must “deromanticise” and “de-liberalise” the notion of exile. In place of this unbridled individualism, a product of liberalism, he prefers to emphasise the power of networks. The individual is inscribed within solidarities of which he is also the product. This individual acts and lives in ways which transcend national borders. He is different in essence from many others who cross borders. Sahelian business people in France and the United States especially, whom I met in Asia, are cut from this cloth. Their strategies go beyond the limits of fixed trading posts, they break the chains of geography, and they therefore do more business. They are not in exile. So why is this thesis of exile so persistent? On closer inspection, it is intellectuals who are attached to the idea, not migrants. This is just as

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true for the concept of diaspora as it is for exile. Whitehouse (2012: 219) advises specialists of transnational networks to let go of the idea that people have atavistic attachments to particular places. In addition, he rightly warns against the generalised use of the concept of diaspora. I make the same argument regarding the use of exile in anthropological and sociological literature on Africa. Exile is a creation of romantic intellectuals who fall in love with the migratory experience; it has hardly any relationship to the lived experiences of the actors in question. This idiosyncrasy is a consequence of a syndrome based on the idea of an organic link between identity and land, the individual and the soil. In the migrants’ transnational existence, this link is continually broken. We, the scholars, must also break it.

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CHAPTER 11

Afro-Asian Solidarities to Afrasian Spaces and Identities: Exploring the Limits of Afrasia Yoon Jung Park

1  Introduction My daughter, now 17, started referring to herself as Blasian (Black + Asian) several years ago. Born at the Aga Khan Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya in 2001 to a Korean-American mother (me) and an African-American father, she spent the first eight and a half years of her life in Africa (Nairobi and then Johannesburg) before we moved (back) to the US in 2010. Given these complexities of race, ethnicity, birthplace, and homes in multiple countries, we have had regular household discussions about racial, ethnic, national, and cultural identities. Some of our earliest chats, starting when she was about three or four years old, were spurred by her questions: “Mommy, Daddy is brown and

Y. J. Park (*)  Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected] China Africa Research Initiative, School of Advanced International Studies, JHU, Washington, DC, USA © The Author(s) 2020 R. Anthony and U. Ruppert (eds.), Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7_11

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I’m brown. What colour are you?” or “Mommy, am I Coloured1? All the girls at school said that I was Coloured”. This latter question about Coloured identity in South Africa came up on several occasions as her primary school classmates tried to understand and classify her in terms that they understood. In each of these conversations, which took place several times over several years, I tried to explain that while we lived in South Africa, we were American and in the US, the term Coloured did not exist (anymore2), so, no, she was not Coloured. As the years passed and I was able to add layers to my (still simplified) responses based on what I thought she would comprehend, I explained that Coloureds in South Africa were, indeed, racially mixed like her, but that the “mixing” had taken place over several generations; that Coloureds had, over the years, established their own unique culture. They had their own history and most Coloureds spoke Afrikaans. In other words, I tried to explain that both the term and the identity were unique to South Africa—historically embedded and culturally and linguistically specific. These excluded her. Our move to the US generated another set of questions about racial identity. When we first went to register her for school, Montgomery County Schools (in Maryland) required that everyone answer questions about racial identity. By some fluke, the computer form that we were using allowed us to only select one box.3 In other words, we had to decide—in that moment—if our child was going to be Black/ African-American or Asian (according to the school district). After a brief explosion, during which I yelled about the fact that even the US census permitted people to select “all that apply”, I explained the situation to my daughter and told her that she could make the decision. I followed up by indicating that hopefully, at some later stage, we would be able to correct her school registration to include whichever option had to be left off the form that day. She thought about it for a minute, then softly said, 1 Coloured was (and remains) an official racial classification used in South Africa and refers to a group of people who are historically mixed race. 2 In the mid-nineteenth century, “Coloured” was used to refer to Black or African Americans; it went out of fashion in the 1960s during and after the civil right era, when African Americans (re)claimed “Black” as the chosen term for their identity, as in “Black Power” or “Black is Beautiful”. 3 According to the forms available online, we should have been able to tick “all that apply” (Montgomery County Public Schools 2009).

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“Well, I was born in Africa and I’m American, so African-American”. Perfectly logical. Fast-forward several years: she came home from high school and announced that she was Blasian. My husband and I just stared at one another. Was Blasian a thing? I did some research and learned that this term has been around since at least the early 2000s.4 Since 2012 people had been writing to many of the standard dictionaries suggesting that Blasian be added. Myra S. Washington recently published a book entitled “Blasian Invasion” (2017), in which she theorises the media hype around Blasian celebrities. So, it would appear that my daughter now sits in the company of celebrities who also claim this identity, including Tiger Woods, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Kimora Lee Simmons, and Hines Ward. The complexities of raising a mixed-race child were partly behind our decision to move back to the US after nearly 17 years in Africa (closer to 18 for my husband). We realised that while race problems continue to afflict American society, we also knew that there were many more resources in the US to help us address these issues. For my part (perhaps naively), I also felt that we would be more familiar with the terrain of US race discussions. Also, as she has matured, my daughter, instead of having to explain that she’s not Coloured, grew comfortable (and empowered) enough to embrace her mixed racial identity with this new moniker. Part of her growing comfort and confidence has to do with her peer community and her environment, as she moves in the company of other young mixed-race people in a space and time that is much more open and accepting of fluid and diverse ethnic, racial, gendered, and sexual identities.5 The US, despite its many flaws and its current (lack of) national leadership, provides a wealth of resources for confused parents of mixed-race children. The US cultural climate, despite the deep racial and political fissures, allows—in some select spaces—for Blasianness as well as other identity options. There is space here for these conversations. In Africa and in most of Asia, however, such options are currently more limited. While there is a long history of engagements and 4 A search revealed that the term has been around since at least 2004 and uses Tiger Woods as an example of a Black Asian person (Urban Dictionary, n.d.). 5 To be sure, there are many parts of the US where the space for open embrace of mixed and more fluid ethnic, racial, and gender identities does not exist, where children and adults are persecuted for who they are; we happen to be fortunate enough to live in a more accepting, diverse, cosmopolitan part of the US.

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entanglements between Asia and Africa, I remain dubious about efforts to capture all of these under the umbrella of Afrasian. Terms such as Blasian or Afrasian are ultimately about conceptualising “Black + Asian” or “Africa + Asian”, but these present a myriad of concerns. First, what do we do with Whiteness and the West? Are these terms meant, specifically, to ignore or otherwise obliterate them? Secondly, what do we do about the unevenness and inequalities between the two sides of these equations? When notions like Afrasian are used interchangeably with conceptualisations of the Global South, China’s position in particular is increasingly contested. Thirdly, current Asia-African ties seem to be based solely on economic factors. All sides openly admit that today’s “win-win” formulations are not the ideologically based brothers-in-arms love fests of the 1960s and 70s. Are economic considerations of trade and investment reasonably solid bases for lasting Afro-Asian ties? Lastly, can concepts like Afrasia address disunity—conflicts, competition, or ruptures—between Africa and Asia? While the conceptualisations of Afrasia and Afrasian spaces trouble me, if we are to embrace and adopt them I propose that (1) we should shift the focus from macro-level analyses of states—and investments, trade, military, and political engagements—to the meso- and microlevels of societies, of cultural engagements, and of people-to-people relationships to find them, and (2) we must take the lead from Africans and Asians. They must become not only the subjects of theorisations, but also the voices that we hear and follow.

2   Afro-Asian Solidarities—A Long History Journalists and scholars have written more about Chinese (and more broadly Asian) engagements in Africa in the last decade than in the entire preceding century.6 Unfortunately not enough of this literature is historicised.7 Most write about China–Africa as a phenomenon of the twenty-first century, with some referencing Chinese engagements on the African continent beginning 6 Whereas there were only a handful of books on China and Africa prior to 2005, now monographs, edited book, and special journals issues on China–Africa now fill bookshelves. Amb. David Shinn started a list of literature on China–Africa in 2006; this list now fills 265 pages (2018). 7 See Phillip Snow (1988), Karen L. Harris (2014), Jamie Monson (2009), and Tu T. Huynh (2008) among others.

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with African independence struggles of the 1950s through the 1970s. By now, however, many recognise that there is a much longer history. I believe it is crucial to understand these histories if we are to fully appreciate current relations between Africa and Asia and attempt to theorise the present; at the same time, it is important to not overly romanticise past connections, but to read them in context. Those of us working on China–Africa relations are familiar with official Chinese narratives of the beginnings of Chinese–African engagements; these often start with the voyages of the admiral eunuch Zheng He of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), who set sail with over 28,000 sailors in 300 junks and dozens of accompanying smaller vessels. What the Chinese state would like audiences to take away from this particular narrative is that the Chinese came, traded, and left again; that there was never any attempt at colonisation. Vijay Prashad (2001) documents numerous other instances of Black/African-Asian encounters—in the Americas and in Africa. He notes that prior to Vasco de Gama and the arrival of European ships in Africa (1498), the Indian Ocean teemed with activity and trade between Arab, Asian, and African worlds, especially from the eighth century onwards. Prashad also mentions the Bajuni of the Swahili coast of what is now Kenya, explaining that they might be evidence of the first intimate relations between Swahili and Chinese on the African continent (based on Levathes 1995 in Prashad 2001: 7). Others have theorised that the Malagasy can be traced to intermarriages between locals and Indonesian immigrants who first landed in Eastern Africa early in the first millennium C.E. (Ehreht 1998 in Prashad 2001: 7). In terms of linguistic influences, Swahili (a Bantu language) contains extensive vocabulary and rhythms from both Arabic and Gujarati. Black/African encounters with Asians also took place in Asia and in the Americas. Prashad, for example, writes of South Asian workers who jumped ship in the eighteenth century in Salem, Massachusetts to take refuge with the black community there. He documents Frederick Douglass’ defence of Chinese coolie labourers in the nineteenth century and interactions between the Black Panthers with the Red Guard and Brown Berets of the mid-twentieth century (2001: x). There are numerous other such encounters, but two episodes/eras stand out as having continued reverberations today. These include the overlapping of African slave and Asian coolie labour during the colonial period, and the Afro-Asian solidarity movements preceding and building up to the Bandung conference of 1955. It is vital that conceptualisations of

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Afrasia, Afrasian spaces, transregionalism, South–South linkages and the Global South address these complicated pasts without the nostalgia of rose-coloured glasses. 2.1   Brotherhoods of Unfree Labour: African and Asian Alliance Building Prashad traces the beginnings of the international struggle against imperialism to 1919, when disbanded troops of West Indian regiments in Cardiff, Glasgow, and Liverpool were joined by Chinese, Indian, African, and Arab dockworkers; angry and well-organised, they fought back against metropolitan racism (2001: 85). Their struggles moved from the United Kingdom to Trinidad and eventually branched out to cooks and house servants on other Caribbean island nations. Prashad, arguing for the concept of polyculturalism, writes that it exists “most vividly among the poor and working class, among people who are forced to live among one another and who ultimately work together toward freedom. And it was a shared bitter servitude that would bring numbers of Asian and African people together around the world” (2001: 71). He argues that social contacts between Asians and Africans on the islands of the Caribbean took place despite the best efforts of white plantation owners to segregate them from one another. He also points to the Rastafarian movement, the use of ganja, techniques and vocabulary of agricultural work, grammatical structures, foodways, and the numbers game, as further evidence of cultural overlaps and borrowings from several heritages. We do not have a great deal of written evidence of the types of bonds that existed between Africans and Asians labouring together in early African colonial periods, but Li Anshan’s seminal work (2012), based on Chinese archival research, which covers the early period of overseas Chinese contacts with and in Africa through 1911, indicates that there were many more Chinese forced labourers and indentured workers in Africa than previously thought. They worked side-by-side with African workers building colonial railways and ports and labouring in agricultural fields (ibid.). Li also alludes to shared hardships and joint acts of rebellion (ibid.). Around the globe and throughout the colonial period, Afro-Asian solidarities were formed in response to, and against, White/Western domination; in other words, as Prashad poignantly stated, “The modern odyssey of the Africans and the Asians in the Caribbean and in southern Africa is enframed within the political economy of imperialism” (2001: 95).

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2.2   Anti-imperialist Movements, the Bandung Conference, and Afro-Asian Solidarities Africans and Asians shared similar experiences as unfree labour for white men; at various moments, they came together to fight their common enemy—the white imperialist oppressors. However, these Afro-Asian solidarities were not without their share of complexities and, at times, internal contradictions. 2.3   Ethiopia and Japan Prashad argues that two events preceding Bandung stand out. The first took place on 29 February 1896 when Ethiopian leader Ras Makonnen outsmarted Italian troops and ultimately prevented Ethiopia’s colonialisation. Prashad writes, “This was the first major defeat of a modern European power at the hands of the dusky people of the world and its memory travels across the generations” (2001: 28). The second event, also military, involved the Japanese. When they defeated the Russians at Port Arthur, they raised their stature in the eyes of other Asians and Africans around the globe. Ethiopia and Japan, as the only two non-Western colonial nations to have defeated white powers in military battles, became symbols of Afro-Asian military anti-racism (Prashad 2001: 28). The two countries established close ties and, in fact, the Ethiopian constitution of 1931 was modelled after the Japanese constitution of 1889 (op. cit.: 29). Trade ties followed, eliciting strong reactions from Europeans: “This is what the white man does not like…A coloured nation trading with another at their expense. This is intolerable!” (Padmore 1935: 157 as cited in Prashad 2001: 29). What Prashad (2001: 32–34) also points out, however, is that Black/ Africans’ and Asians’ admiration for Ethiopia and Japan tended to overlook the imperial ambitions of leaders in both countries. Despite widespread recognition of Japanese military ventures in the region and their expansionism into Asia, Africans and African-Americans differentiated between Japanese colonialism and Western expansion and racism. Only a few dared to argue that Japan was not interested in human welfare, but there were, without a doubt, complexities and complications in the construction of a global Afro-Asian solidarity movement.

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2.4   Gandhi’s Troubled Legacy One recent revisionist history tackles the legacy of Gandhi. Mahatma Gandhi is often revered as a freedom fighter, with a mythical, largerthan-life reputation among the oppressed and lovers of freedom and justice. Many people do not realise, however, that Gandhi’s activism started in South Africa during his twenty years there (1893–1914); fewer, still, know of his racist and classist learnings. According to Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed (2015), Gandhi worked to keep the Indian struggle “separate from that of Africans and coloureds even though the latter were also denied political rights on the basis of colour and could also lay claim to being British subjects” (in Biswas 2015). Gandhi’s political strategies—fighting to repeal unjust laws or freedom of movement or trade—were, in fact, based on an exclusivist Indian identity, cut off from Africans. Further, they argue, his attitudes paralleled those of whites in the early years; in other words, he was indifferent to the plight of indentured Indians, believed that state power should remain in white hands, and called black Africans “Kaffirs”8 (as cited in Biswas 2015). This new history reveals the complexities of creating heroes and remembering our pasts (see Agbakoba, current volume). 2.5   Black Maoism to Bandung Prashad writes that in the US, the Black Panthers were inspired by Chinese Communism, especially Mao’s radical critique of imperialism. He quotes Amy Myematsu saying: “Yellow power and black power must be two independently powerful joint forces within the Third World revolution to free all exploited and oppressed people of colour” (1969: 4 as cited in Prashad 2001: 136), as well as Richard Aoki who argued, “If you are a person of colour, there’s no way for you to go except to be part of the Black liberation struggle” (in Ho 2000: 330–331 as cited in Prashad 2001: 138). In fact, intellectuals of the Afro-Asian world found immense political, moral, and intellectual resources in the tradition of Marxism and Communism. In the US, the call to arms of Black Maoism was powerful:

8 A

highly derogatory term used in South Africa; the equivalent of “nigger” in the US.

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Black Maoism was enabled by the strong anti-racist position taken by Mao’s China; Mao offered a strong statement in favor of the Black liberation movement to call on all workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals, enlightened elements of the bourgeoisie, and other enlightened personages of all colours in the world, white, black, yellow, brown, etc., to unite to oppose the racial discrimination practiced by US imperialism and to support the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination. (Scrham 1972: 412 as cited in Prashad 2001: 142)

During the onrush of anti-colonial national liberation, African and Asian leaders spoke in glowing terms of their need to cooperate. In late 1946, Nehru wrote to six East African leaders in solidarity with their struggles, offered to have African students study in Indian universities and technical institutes, and offered economic and political resources towards African independence. In 1949, Chinese communists also attempted to solidify their relationship with Africa; a decade later they offered technical assistance, cooperative market arrangements, and military training. In 1955, representatives from 29 African and Asian nations met in Bandung. There, anti-colonial heritage and suspicion of neo-colonialism became the principal ethic for unity. In 1964 China articulated its Eight Principles of Aid, and in 1965, in Nyerere’s welcome to Zhou En Lai, he noted that both China and Africa were on a joint Long March against poverty, economic backwardness, and neo-colonialism. This era birthed an Afro-Asian solidarity in a moment of anti-imperialist, anti-Western activism. 2.6   China’s Anti-African Protests Unfortunately, the sentiments that grounded the international brotherhoods built by these political leaders were not always shared by people back home. This became evident when the first groups of African university students arrived in China in the early 1960s and experienced racialised backlash from their Chinese classmates and Chinese officials. In nearly all of these instances, conflicts began with anger about relations between African male students and Chinese women both on and off campus. Protests erupted again in the mid-1970s and in 1989. Of the events of the 1960s, Sullivan wrote, “Chinese authorities and students perceived the African students’ behaviour to be immoral and, thus, culturally inferior to the Chinese… Such cultural conflicts reflect

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how ‘black and dark-skinned Third World citizens have to run the gauntlet of racial prejudice in China and other East Asian countries’” (1994: 441). Sullivan also explains that Zhou En Lai’s visits to Africa from 1963 to 1964 and the subsequent expenditure of USD 2 billion in loans, food shipments, and aid in Africa in a gesture of solidarity were not appreciated by China’s people (ibid.: 443). Tensions between the African students and their hosts worsened and resulted in violent conflicts and protests by the Africans. Eventually, 96 of the original 118 African students had returned to Africa by April 1962 (ibid.). The anti-African student protests of Nanjing in 1989 are the most well-known, but Sullivan writes that these large protests were preceded by others starting in the mid-1970s after the revival of China’s African scholarship programmes and took place not only in Nanjing but also in the cities of Wuhan, Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin (ibid.). Lan explains that scholars who have written about the Nanjing protests have various interpretations: some regard them as evidence of anti-black racism in China, others consider the incidents as linked to nationalism, increasing social inequality, and students’ democracy struggles (2015: 7). Suffice to say that the path towards building Afro-Asian solidarities or Afrasian spaces has not been smooth, and while Nanjing may have represented a step backward for China, several African countries have also experienced missteps in the treatment of Asians in their midst.

3   Asians in Africa: Settlers, Privileged Minorities, Non-Whites, and Comrades While there have been many efforts to build Black/African-Asian communities of solidarity, only a few African countries have also been host to small communities of Asians going back to the colonial period. These nations have not always treated these Asian minorities as their own. Anti-Asian discrimination has been justified and explained in different ways. The Asian communities themselves were not monolithic, and their positions within their adopted societies varied and shifted over time. In his explanation of the positionality of the Ugandan Asians and their 1972 expulsion by Idi Amin, Mahmood Mamdani argues that one of the principle differences was between settler and non-settler Africa countries. He wrote, In this [20th] century, the Asian minority in Africa has been sprinkled through several countries, but the nature of the Asian question is not

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the same everywhere. The main difference has been between settler and non-settler colonies. In settler colonies, like South Africa or Kenya or Algeria, immigrants from imperialist countries monopolised the middleman’s function. In non-settler colonies, like Uganda or Tanganyika, this function was carried out by immigrants from other colonies. While Asians were amongst the victims of colonial rule in settler colonies, this could not be said without qualification in a non-settler colony like Uganda. (1993: 94)

In this section of the paper, I briefly describe the expulsion of Asians from Uganda and the historical treatment of Chinese South Africans to try to complicate notions of Afrasia with episodes of African-Asian disunity. 3.1   Idi Amin’s Expulsion of Uganda’s Asian Population In August 1972, Idi Amin, the former president of Uganda, decided, based on a dream that he had one night, that all those who were not (Black/African) Ugandan should leave the country. He then proceeded to put his words into action, addressing the army and proclaiming that Ugandan Asians had 90 days to get their financial affairs in order (transferring their business interests to Ugandan nominees) and leave the country. While Asian families scrambled, many of them taking refuge at the British High Commission, many (Black/African) Ugandans celebrated, lining the streets daily to chant, “Go home Bangladeshi! Go home Bangladeshi!” (Asiimwe 2012: 32). Why? Asiimwe put it simply: “[C]olonial Uganda had strongly favoured Asians … aspiring Ugandan entrepreneurs9 … faced many odds” (Asiimwe 2012: 32). Until independence in 1962, there was an unwritten but well understood hierarchy in Uganda’s social order: Europeans were at the top, Asians second, and Africans at the bottom. Asiimwe refers to the social order as “British apartheid”, arguing that these policies did not start in South Africa or the US but in Great Britain (2012: 33). Mamdani (1993) explains, however, that social and economic divisions were more complex and nuanced, with small minorities of Asians and Africans benefiting from the dispossession of the rest. But 9 The author does not qualify her use of “Ugandans” but she clearly excludes all Ugandans who are not Black/Africa.

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the essence of the expulsion was the inequality between (some) Ugandan Asians and the vast majority of Black/African Ugandans. The Ugandan Asian question was about citizenship as well as race/ ethnicity and privilege. The new constitution stated that people who were not already Ugandan at independence in October 1962 would have two years to either become citizens of the new Uganda or adopt the status of British-protected persons with British passports. At the time, many Asians applied for British citizenship but remained in Uganda. Several years later, the 1969 British Patriot’s Act, which required Commonwealth passport holders to get visas to enter Britain, raised the question of Ugandan Asian citizenship yet again. The then President Milton Obote asked, “How do we deal with all these Asians?” (in Asiimwe 2012: 34). Britian’s Patriot Act stimulated Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania to pass their own Immigration Acts. Mamdani argues that to truly understand the backdrop of the expulsion, we need to go back to 1952 and the politics of affirmative action, which, as he explains it, favoured certain Africans over others. Those who benefited, according to Mamdani, “were the minority who had ascended the ladders of trade, civil service, and political office” (1993: 94). He goes on to say, “During this episode, affirmative action did not dismantle the privileges associated with European bureaucrats and Asian businessmen; it [merely] … changed the composition of the privileged minority…[and] actually deepened class differences amongst the African population” (ibid.). These same affirmative action policies impacted the Asian minority, already divided by class, similarly: the Indian bourgeoisie, already privileged, profited far more than any other group from the affirmative action programmes of the 1960s (ibid.). Mamdani argues that by the time of the Amin coup in 1971, affirmative action “had turned into a cruel joke for the majority population of Uganda” where frustration about “political corruption” and “Asian exploitation” and the partnership between Asian capitalists and African bureaucrats was running high (1993: 95). Amin, argues Mamdani, “spoke the language of nationalism” (ibid.). He concludes that it was the expulsion of 1972, and not independence a decade earlier, that brought about the first real institutional change in Uganda.

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3.2   Chinese South African Communities from the 1880s Through the Post-apartheid Era As I have written extensively about Chinese South Africans and their struggles to be recognised as respectable South African citizens elsewhere (see Park 2010, 2012, 2017a, b), I will limit myself to outlining the main contours of the struggles of this small community. While evidence of the presence of Chinese people in what is today South Africa goes back to the establishment of a refreshment station on the Cape by the Dutch East Indian Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) in the 1650s (Yap and Man 1996), as well as Chinese coolie labour in small and large numbers throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the history of the tiny community of Chinese South Africans began with small numbers of free Chinese migrants who likely stowed aboard Africa-bound ships from China and Southeast Asia. South Africa’s main draw at the time was gold; small numbers of young Chinese men who thought they could make their fortunes digging for gold began to trickle into South Africa in the late 1880s. Instead, what they encountered in South Africa was a steady stream of discrimination. Chinese were prohibited from obtaining digging licences as these were reserved for whites only. They were also subjected to residential restrictions, pass laws and travel restrictions, occupational controls, and later anti-immigration laws. Living conditions were so bad that when they learned that mining recruiters were headed to Guangzhou, they sent letters home warning family members and fellow villagers not to move to Namfeechow (the Cantonese name for South Africa); so successful were their warnings that mining recruiters were forced Northward to find Chinese workers willing to sign up to work on the Rand. It is one of the great ironies of South African history that while free Chinese migrants were prohibited from mining for gold on their own in the late nineteenth century, South Africa’s largest mining houses successfully lobbied to import Chinese labour to their mines in the early part of the twentieth century. The “Chinese experiment” of importing Chinese mineworkers to the Rand was short-lived (1904–1910) but reverberated in British politics (bringing down the Liberal Party of the day) and well into the future, foreshadowing race-based apartheid policies to come (for more see Huynh 2008; Park 2012). Of the 63,695 Chinese who were

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imported to South Africa, nearly all were sent back to China—about one out of every twenty in coffins, having succumbed to disease or accidental death in the mines or mining compounds (Yap and Man 1996: 117–118). Fears about the miners wandering around the Witwatersrand during their off-days, as well as fears about newly freed Indian labourers, provided the impetus for more restrictive legislation and policies during the South Africa’s colonial period. These included the colour bar, which designated and reserved the best paid, above-ground, skilled mining jobs for “whites only”, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1904), which essentially barred any new migration from China. It is worth noting that South Africa’s Chinese Exclusion Act was the last in a series of laws applied specifically to the Chinese in a number of former British colonies; others include Australia (1855), New Zealand (1881), the US (1882), and Canada (1885) (Harris 2014). Apartheid (1949–1994) slowed any chance of upward mobility as Chinese were officially classified as non-white, together with Black Africans, Coloureds, and Indians. The Chinese were subjected to all apartheid laws, but the one that gave bureaucrats the most difficulty was the Group Areas Act. Simply put, there were too few Chinese to justify the expense of creating separate Chinese schools, hospitals, and neighbourhoods; as a result, the fate of Chinese people was often left to the whim of the white bureaucrat in charge. In terms of residence, Chinese were the first to integrate in white areas, but only after being subjected to the humiliation of getting written permissions from their white neighbours indicating that they could live next door. Gradually, however, as the smallest and most inconspicuous of South Africa’s non-white communities, the Chinese gained concessions and privileges. Starting with white parochial and private schools, Chinese South Africans began to move into white South Africa as early as the mid-1950 s. With the arrival of the Chinese from Taiwan, there were additional privileges and concessions; however, it must be noted that until the last days of apartheid, they were—legally—in the same boat as Black, Coloured, and Indian South Africans. In the 1980s, as South Africa’s apartheid government—constrained by anti-apartheid divestment and economic blockades—looked for new trade and investment partners, they found willing allies in Taiwan, Chile, and Israel. Taiwanese investors, wooed by generous investment incentives, began flocking to South Africa in large numbers. Most were persuaded to start textile factories in and near the homeland areas of the

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country, in order to create jobs for black South Africans and prevent blacks from migrating into the cities where they might become politicised. Taiwanese nationals, citizens of a country with most-favoured nation status, were granted exemptions from some apartheid laws and allowed to apply for dual citizenship.10 Some Chinese South Africans, aware of the inability of most South Africans to tell them apart, would simply say that they were Taiwanese to gain access to white privileges and whites-only spaces. When apartheid ended, the concessions and privileges that had been earlier afforded to the Chinese (sometimes because they were mistakenly identified as Japanese or Taiwanese) backfired when they argued to be included in the nation’s affirmative action policies. Those opposed to including the Chinese argued that they might have been disadvantaged by apartheid laws but never so much as Black South Africans. In the mid-2000s, the Chinese Association of South Africa took their own government to court seeking clarification of their inclusion (or exclusion) from the Employment Equity Act and the Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment Act—the two pieces of legislation that made up affirmative action in the country. In June 2008 the High Court of Pretoria declared that the Chinese South Africans were, indeed, previously legally disadvantaged and should, therefore, benefit from affirmative action policies. This news, however, coming on the heels of some of the worst xenophobic violence in the nation’s post-apartheid history and after the arrival of the Taiwanese industrialists and a decade of new immigration from China (which had expanded the population of ethnic Chinese in the country from 12,000 to well over 350,000), was greeted with much public ambivalence. These are but two examples of the absence of African-Asian solidarity and of active anti-Asian sentiment. Can Asians living in Africa ever really fit in? Can they become African? Can they become Afrasian in the sense that my daughter now identifies as Blasian? These are questions of citizenship but also about identity and social acceptance. One might argue that the ultimate indicator of social acceptance is romantic love across national/colour lines, and we are seeing increasing numbers of

10 In an earlier period of South Africa’s history, the Japanese were granted similar exemptions from racialised discriminatory laws; they became known as “Honorary Whites”, a moniker that is sometimes misused to also refer to the Chinese.

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African-Asian (especially Chinese) couples on both continents. This next section looks to these relationships for evidence of Afrasia.

4  Relationships Between Africans and Asians: Partners in Business and in Love? The emergence of Afrasian spaces and deeper Afrasian ties will be seen most likely in relationships between people, not in narratives and hyperbole of state actors. In this section, I will look briefly at analyses and commentary about intimate relations between Africans and Chinese and at a friendship and business relationship between two fictional characters in order to ask whether these sorts of more intimate ties might point to the possibilities of a future Afrasia. 4.1   Africans and Chinese in Intimate Relationships As more Chinese move to Africa and more Africans move to China, we are seeing evidence of African-Chinese romantic ties as well as small but growing numbers of African-Chinese children. The largest numbers can be found in Guangzhou, China, which has become home to thousands of Africans from across the continent. According to Shanshan Lan, Guangzhou became a popular destination for both international migrants—including large numbers of African traders—and internal migrants from rural and inland China because it was one of the first cities to benefit from China’s open-door policy. This convergence, she argues, “created the ideal milieu for daily interactions between Chinese women and African men” (2015: 2). Even as far back as 2013, one article estimated that there were some 400 African-Chinese families in Guangzhou (Yeebo 2013).11 Many of these families have now produced scores of mixed-race children. Marsh wrote that these children were an “unexpected return: the mainland’s first mixed-race generation with blood from a distant continent and the right to be Chinese” (2014). The existence of these mixed marriages and children does not necessarily indicate that all is well in China, however. Many romances were terminated before marriage because of the racial prejudice of the Chinese 11 Marsh’s (2014) article indicated that one of her interviewees, Ojukwu Emmanuel, had recently formed the Nigerian-Chinese Family Forum, comprised of 200 mixed-race couples and their offspring.

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woman’s family to her African boyfriend. According to Marsh’s research, Chinese prejudice is normally based on three things: traditional aesthetic values, ignorance of African culture and society, and language issues (2014). Officials have also been targeting African traders in Guangzhou since before the Beijing Olympics of 2008. While racialisation of black Africans in Guangzhou has increased traders’ vulnerability to a range of state controls (of immigration, mobility, and economic activity), and the Chinese hukou system12 similarly disadvantages migrant Chinese from rural areas, the African men and Chinese women of Lan’s study have adopted innovative transnational business and family strategies to cope with structural constraints (2015: 2–3). Current transnational flows of ideas, goods, and people privilege some and disadvantage others. Spatial and social mobilities remain governed by state apparatuses and are mediated by unequal power relations (Lan 2015: 3). Lan’s research, focuses on “two relatively disadvantaged groups: migrant women from less developed areas in China, and Nigerian traders operating business at the margin of Chinese law… [both] share similar structural marginalisation in urban China due to their non-hukou or non-citizenship status and their categorisation as the ‘floating population’ by the Chinese state” (ibid.). In 2013 China’s central government passed the draconian Exit-Entry Administration Law, requiring, among other things, that Africans must return to their home countries to renew their visas (instead of just crossing the border into Hong Kong or Macau). Authorities also began refusing or cancelling visas for no given reason. With inhospitable laws and a slowing economy, many Africans have left Guangzhou. Marsh describes the Huiling Integrated Kindergarten in Baiyun, Guangzhou. Amina Magasasa, a five-year-old with a Chinese mother and a Malian father, speaks both Putonghua and English. In her class of 30, there are Uighur Muslims, Chinese, children of African migrants, and two other Afro-Chinese students. Marsh writes, “Guangzhou’s Afro-Chinese children – a living legacy of an economic dream” are still young; and some of Guangzhou’s youth are growing up with a “new, 12 Hukou is a Chinese government system of household registration started in the Mao era. It is a sort of internal passport system in which access to public services, including education, healthcare, and other social services is limited to the birthplace of the holder. This effectively limits rural hukou holders who have migrated to the cities of China from social services.

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multi-ethnic concept of being Chinese” (2014). But with the increasing restrictions on foreigners, where will they find their safe Afrasian spaces? African states and African citizens seem to share Chinese concerns about these mixed marriages and their children. The Ugandan press has published numerous public concerns about relationships between Chinese men and Ugandan women, including worries that Chinese men were only marrying Ugandan women in order to gain citizenship (and thereby carry on with their business ventures without visa issues) (NTV 2016). As recently as November 2017, a number of people claimed that at least twenty children had been fathered (and later abandoned) by Chinese men; all of these claims came from one specific area, and all of the men were ostensibly employees of Sinohydro Construction Company (Daily Nation 2017). One local clan chief is preparing to file a formal complaint against Sinohydro. Sinohydro’s local partner, the Uganda Electricity Generation Co. Ltd., claims that the women involved, both married and single, were willingly trading sex for money, resulting in the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, as well as increased rates of domestic violence and divorce (ibid.). However, not all portrayals of mixed marriages in Africa have been negative. One blog from 2014 features an ethnic Chinese woman from Malaysia married to a Nigerian man. CGTN Africa, a subsidiary of China’s CCTV, has produced a number of short documentaries featuring (seemingly) successful marriages between African men and Chinese women, and in one case, and African woman and a Chinese man. As yet there has been no significant academic research on African-Asian marriages and children in Africa, but one novel has made a friendship and business relationship between a Congolese man and a Chinese man central to its plot, which I discuss in the following section. 4.2   Isookanga and Zhang Xia in Bofane’s “Congo, Inc.” Duncan Yoon’s recent work exploring new literature of Chinese–African encounters focuses on In Koli Jean Bofane’s 2014 novel Congo, Inc. The novel’s main relationship centres on Isookanga, a half-Pygmy from rural Congo, and Zhang Xia, a Chinese national stranded in the Congo by an unscrupulous Chinese businessman. While the relationship between Isookanga and Zhang Xia is fictional, the portrayal of their relationship and Yoon’s analysis both support my argument about the importance of relationships, shared struggles, and affective ties to any understanding of

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the development of an Afrasia or Global South. Yoon writes, for example, that their sustained collaboration—a business venture in which they sell local-sourced bottled water by branding it as Swiss (and therefore a Western luxury item)—“captures Sino-Congolese relations’ multifaceted nature: it articulates how reducing the dynamic to large state-to-state interactions or economic transactions between multinational corporations risks missing how individuals relate to each other” (2018: 9). Yoon points out that this may be the first African novel in which a Chinese character is integral to the plot’s action and is explicitly engaged in the rise of China’s economic presence in Africa (op.cit.: 6). He also points out that this novel shifts the Western axis of the typical postcolonial African novel to a specifically horizontal axis (between Africa and Asia), which “estranges” or otherwise removes the European coloniser, except as a useful “brand”. He argues that this purposeful rendering of the former coloniser, especially Belgium, and more generally Europe and the US, as a minor element that one can purchase (“buying Europe”) locally, but which is, perhaps, manufactured in China and then imported either directly or from Dubai (thereby “bypassing Europe”), creates a new type of Global South novel and a new form of southern globalisation (2018: 8, 25). Relative to the numbers of Chinese and other Asians in Africa and Africans in China and other Asian countries, accounts of African-Asian marriages are still limited. As with most early mixed relationships, there appears to be a good deal of anxiety, concern, and even outright animosity about those that exist. We have witnessed examples of xenophobia in both regions; however, as these relationships become more common, sentiments appear to be gradually changing. Perhaps here, in these relationships where Africans and Asians create affective ties as they conduct business and, perhaps, fall in love, we may begin to see glimpses of Afrasia.

5  Conclusion Since around 2010, we have seen a number of efforts to broaden discussions around China–Africa to include other Asian countries and actors. There have been at least three broad initiatives. One of these is led by Scarlett Cornelissen of Stellenbosch University in South Africa and Yoichi Mine of Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan and has culminated in a first publication (Mine and Cornelissen 2017). A second

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is a collaboration of several African institutions and the Leiden-based International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS) and the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS). Their preliminary efforts led to the creation of an African Association of Asian Studies (A-ASiA) in 2012; Lloyd Amoah has been leading this effort from the African side, with the A-Asia second international conference hosted in Dar es Salaam in September of 2018. The third of these is the Frankfurt-based AFRASO, also known as the Frankfurt Inter-Centre-Programme on new AfricanAsian Interactions, based at Goethe University. AFRASO has published its first book (Graf and Hashim 2017); this current volume is the second. While these three initiatives each have distinct elements, they all aim to enlarge and deepen the scope of the study of Africa–Asia relations. It is AFRASO, however, that re-introduced the concepts of Afrasia and Afrasian spaces which “on the one hand mark emerging transregional spaces of interaction” and on the other hand “provide a heuristics for coming to terms with the reordering of transregional relations in an increasingly multipolar world” (AFRASO, n.d.) and which is the topic of this chapter. Afrasia and Afrasian have made it into the titles of at least two other publications: Gaurav Desai’s Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) and Afrasia: A Tale of Two Continents, by Ali Mazrui and Seifudein Adeam (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2013). What I have attempted to do in this paper is to problematise these conceptualisations and point out the complexities. One of the principal concerns about Afrasia is the erasure of Whiteness and the West. Historically Afro-Asian solidarities were built upon their anti-racist, anti-imperialist stances to counter the dominance of the White/West. As argued so effectively by Jamie Monson in her 2014 think piece, to discuss “China and Africa” in isolation is to ignore the (big, White/ Western) elephant in the room. Monson reminds us that in Africa, Chinese are seen through earlier racialised experiences of Western colonisation. African and Chinese (and by extension, all other Asians) are, she argues, “constructed in a field of racial positions that include Whiteness” (2013: 3); however, “Whiteness seems to disappear as a category analytically despite its omnipresence” (2013: 6). We must ensure that our usage of terms like Afrasian and Blasian does not normalise or “unmark” Whiteness (ibid.); in other words, we cannot make “African” and “Asian” in binary opposition while making Whiteness (conflated with

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the “West”) invisible (Monson 2013: 11). The world today is, indeed, multipolar. With Europe in crisis and an American leader who cares little for the rest of the world, Africa and Asia have strengthened economic and political ties, but to attempt to conceptualise their ever-strengthening and deepening ties in isolation from the rest and to ignore the ways in which these histories are entangled with the West is, in my view, hazardous. My second concern with the concept of Afrasia has to do with China. China’s continued global rise as a significant economic power and (potential) global political leader diminishes its continued claim to “developing country” status. China’s recent economic slowdown notwithstanding, China has become a more confident and more assertive global power. China is no longer on the same footing as African countries as a developing country. It cannot pretend to negotiate with African nations as a still-oppressed, poor, developing nation. All are sovereign nations, yes. But in terms of economic position and sheer size, the power differentials are undeniable. Much of the analysis around China–Africa and Africa–Asia ties is often expanded to notions of South–South and the Global South, but can China still be considered a member of any sort of South alliance? Thirdly, while earlier Afro-Asian solidarities were based on ideological grounds, primarily of an anti-Western, anti-imperialist position, they were also concerned with building relations on more egalitarian grounds. The principles of Bandung, for example, were political self-determination, mutual respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, and equality. While China frames its encounters with Africa as a “win-win” proposition for all parties, they are also unapologetically commercial in nature. I ask: are these sufficiently strong enough to sustain Afrasian ties into the future? Finally, Afro-Asian alliances have been and continue to be hindered by fissures based on both race and class. While there are numerous historical examples of Afro-Asian solidarities, we can also find many episodes of disunity and evidence of racial discrimination. Recently we have witnessed numerous missteps on the part of various Chinese actors, including government officials at various levels as well as regular citizens, as they enact racist policies or make racist comments against Africans in China. These sorts of blatantly anti-Black/African acts/statements will continue to work against any potential Afrasian unity.

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If we look for possible examples of Afrasian spaces, of a post-colonial, Global South without the interference, intervention, or influence of the West, we might find them in interpersonal relations, in more intimate settings, between people. Duncan Yoon, in his analysis of Congo, Inc., raises the possibilities of a southern globalisation. If we are to see more organic formations of Afrasian ties, we should look not at the macro, but at meso- and micro-levels of engagements—at flows of people and their relations. It is here, at the interpersonal level, that Afrasia might be interpreted and given substance—filled out, if you will— as people establish affective ties, learn to understand (or sometimes misunderstand) one another through “broken” tongues and sometimes poor translations. In the US, Blasian as a concept is still not well known, but it is becoming increasingly legible and visible, especially in popular media culture. Washington explains that “Blasian is an intentional identity”— one that has been chosen deliberately and explicitly eliminating/leaving out Whiteness (2017: 10). She states that “Research on mixed-race people highlights the need for racially mixed people to label themselves as a response to being labelled by others” and in this vein, Blasian was constructed as part of a self-identification strategy (2017: 7, my italics). Washington’s formulation of Blasian as a concept that can “trouble the logic of existing US racial classifications without establishing their own” and “explode the narrow boundaries of authenticity around racialised categories” which can serve to “deconstruct normative instantiations of identity” (2017: 120) is potentially powerful. As compared to the beginnings of Blasian as a concept, Afrasian does not refer specifically to Black/African and Asian mixed-race persons, but rather an entire realm of engagement. Further, Afrasia, as I understand it, has been revived and reconceived by a mostly white European team of researchers. Whether Afrasian might become a term that can push forward our thinking about relations between Africa and Asia in new, critical directions is yet to be seen. If Afrasian is adopted and used more broadly, it would require greater acceptance among both Africans and Asians. While applauding the valuable work of AFRASO, IIAS, ICAS, and other European- and US-based and Western-led research centres, it is essential that we open up spaces, create opportunities, and find ways to support research from Africa and Asia, by Africans and Asians. We must allow for African and Asian voices to rise to the top. These should not simply

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be spaces and subjects that we13 study and attempt to theorise. These growing fields—like many others—should be filled by African and Asian researchers who lead the way as we search for new narratives, new framings, and new understandings of the ties that bind them and the spaces they construct and embody. Afrasian realities and Afrasian spaces are possible. But we must ensure that they are historicised, inclusive of moments of rupture and discontinuity; contextualised; and embraced by both Africans and Asians, not merely imposed on them by the White/Western parties. Afrasia has the potential to become a useful way to conceptualise and theorise the multiple ways in which Africa and Asia engage one another, but it is vital that we avoid inscribing any particular understanding of what the term represents. Its value lies in its ambiguities and fluidity of the possibilities contained within.

References AFRASO. n.d. http://www.afraso.org/en/content/research-programme. Accessed 12 Aug 2018. Asiimwe, A. 2012. Why Idi Amin Expelled the Asians. New African, 32–35. Biswas, S. 2015. Was Mahatma Gandhi a Racist? BBC News, September 17. www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-34265882. Accessed 10 Aug 2018. Daily Nation. 2017. Ugandan Women Stranded with Babies Fathered by Chinese, November 23. www.nation.co.ke/news/africa/Ugandan-womenstranded-with-babies-fathered-by-Chinese/1066-4199410-108r0oe/index. html. Accessed 3 June 2018. Desai, A., and G. Vahed. 2015. The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Graf, A., and A. Hashim (eds.). 2017. African-Asian Encounters: New Cooperations and New Dependencies. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Harris, K.L. 2014. Paper Trail: Chasing the Chinese in the Cape (1904–1933). Kronos 40 (1): 133–153. Huynh, T.T. 2008. Loathing and Love: Postcard Representations of Indentured Chinese Labourers in South Africa’s Reconstruction, 1904–10. Safundi 9 (4): 395–425. 13 As a Korean-born American who has lived nearly half of my life outside of the US (in Korea, Mexico, Costa Rica, Kenya, and South Africa), my own positionality has been constantly shifting. While I hope that my sensibilities are with the Global South, I must acknowledge that I have had numerous advantages—of a Western upbringing and a Western education—so I count myself in this formulation of “we”.

246  Y. J. PARK Lan, S. 2015. Transnational Business and Family Strategies Among Chinese/ Nigerian Couples in Guangzhou and Lagos. Asian Anthropology 14 (2): 133–149. Li, A. 2012. A History of Overseas Chinese in Africa to 1911. New York: Diasporic Africa Press. Mamdani, M. 1993. The Uganda Asian Expulsion Twenty Years After. Economic and Political Weekly 28 (3/4): 93–96. Marsh, J. 2014. Afro-Chinese Marriages Boom in Guangzhou: But Will It Be ‘Til Death Do Us Part’? South China Morning Post Magazine, July 2. www. scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1521076/afro-chinese-marriages-boom-guangzhou-will-it-be-til-death. Accessed 12 Aug 2018. Mine, Y., and S. Cornelissen (eds.). 2017. Migration and Agency in a Globalizing World: Afro-Asian Encounters. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Monson, J. 2009. Africa’s Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2013. Historicizing Difference: Construction of Race Identity in ChinaAfrica Relations. Presented at Making Sense of the China-Africa Relationship: Theoretical Approaches and the Politics of Knowledge Conference, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, November 18 and 19. http://china-africa.ssrc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Monson-Final.pdf. Accessed 12 Aug 2018. Montgomery County Public Schools. 2009. Race and Ethnicity Identification Form. https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/schools/ damascushs/guidance/Race%20and%20Ethnicity%20Form.pdf. Accessed 12 Aug 2018. NTV Uganda. 2016. Chinese Nationals Increasingly Marrying Ugandan Women in a Bid to Gain Citizenship. YouTube, November 21. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=8ilr3loNfm0. Accessed 12 Aug 2018. Park, Y.J. 2010. Boundaries, Borders and Borderland Constructions: Chinese in Contemporary South Africa and the Region. African Studies 69 (30): 457–479. ———. 2012. Living In-Between: The Chinese in South Africa. Migration Information Source, January 4. www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?id=875. Accessed 12 Aug 2018. ———. 2017a. Liminal Spaces: Chinese “Settlers” in the Borderlands of Southern Africa. In Migration and Agency in a Globalizing World: AfroAsian Encounters, ed. Y. Mine and S. Cornelissen, 91–113. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017b. The Politics of Chineseness in South Africa: From Apartheid to 2015. In Contemporary Chinese Diasporas, ed. M. Zhou, 29–51. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Prashad, V. 2001. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting. Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. Boston: Beacon Press. Shinn, David. 2018. China and Africa: Bibliography. SCRIBD. https://www. scribd.com/document/385387432/China-and-Africa-Bibliography. Accessed 8 Dec 2018. Snow, P. 1988. The Star Raft: China’s Encounter with Africa. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Sullivan, M.J. 1994. The 1988–89 Nanjing Anti-African Protests: Racial Nationalism or National Racism? China Quarterly 138: 438–457. Urban Dictionary. n.d. Blasian. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define. php?term=blasian. Accessed 3 June 18. Washington, M.S. 2017. Blasian Invasion: Racial Mixing in the Celebrity Industrial Complex. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Yap, M., and D.L. Man. 1996. Colour, Confusion and Concessions: The History of the Chinese in South Africa. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Yeebo, Y. 2013. In China, Mixed Marriages Can Be a Labour of Love. Christian Science Monitor, September 21. www.csmonitor.com/World/2013/0921/ In-China-mixed-marriages-can-be-a-labour-of-love. Accessed 12 Aug 2018. Yoon, D. 2018. Toward the Global South Novel: Africa, China, and Bofane’s Congo Inc. Unpublished Paper Presented at the 5th International Chinese in Africa/Africans in China Conference, China-Africa in Global Comparative Perspective. Brussels: Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), June 28–30.

CHAPTER 12

Scale and Agency in China’s Belt and Road Initiative: The Case of Kenya Ross Anthony

1  Introduction A key characteristic of the BRI—China’s trans-national infrastructural development programme—is its vast scale and the way in which it is represented. At the broadest level, the BRI is expressed through a series of visual and discursive representations, including the dissemination of visual maps, lists of countries involved, projects and attendant financing earmarked. Such circulations manifest in the form of repetition in Chinese institutional arenas (government, academia, schools, companies, etc.) and function as the central topic of virtually every international forum which China hosts. In the last few years, the concept has also gained increased traction abroad, particularly in international media, within foreign governments, business and academic circles. At this metalevel, the BRI seeks to produce a Sinocentric global imaginary in the form of a smooth, interconnected series of linear and nodal infrastructures branching around the world.

R. Anthony (*)  Department of Modern Foreign Languages, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa © The Author(s) 2020 R. Anthony and U. Ruppert (eds.), Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7_12

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Insofar as the BRI is interpreted in this, way, there is a tendency to gloss over the vast heterogeneity of the project—not only at the level of the nation-state, but also in terms of the vast array of ethnic and ecological niches through which the projects run. When we turn our attention more towards the specific implementation of projects, this view of the BRI changes significantly. Firstly, many BRI projects are in actual fact national development plan projects, conceived by host states, often long before the inception of the BRI. Thus, what may appear as a Chineseorientated BRI projects from the meta-vantage point, are locally conceived of as national projects which bring on board a number of donors and implementers, of which Chinese institutions are but one—albeit a significant—contributor. Given the kinds of large-scale transformations these projects incur at the local level, including issues of ethnic grievance, corruption and ecological and livelihood loss, it is significant to note that such problems are framed as local political problems whose solutions emerge through engaging local political and economic elites. In this context, the agency of China and the BRI is eclipsed by issues of the host state. Drawing on the case of LAPSSET corridor in East Africa, a BRI project undertaken by China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) for the Government of Kenya, this chapter highlights some of the disconnects between examining the BRI from above and from below. The example seeks to highlight not only the need to analytically reconceptualise the BRI at different scales, but also to function as a case study with which other BRI case studies can be compared and contrast in the interests of building up a more detailed composite picture which complicates the top-down representation of the initiative.

2  The Sino-centric Perspective China’s BRI incorporates large swathes of the developing world. The main focus is on linear connective infrastructure—roads, rail, ports, airports, oil and gas pipelines, telecommunication networks and underwater cables—but also the development of an array of other projects, including energy plants, power grids, utility stations, extractive and manufacturing industries, industrial parks, processing zones, tourism, information technology, biotechnology and alternative energy. The project will also include “soft infrastructure”, including developing free trade agreements, bilateral investment treaties and the liberalisation of market sectors for foreign investment. China also plans to train over 20,000

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“connectivity professionals” over the next five years to ensure adequate talent to sustain the BRI (Blanchard and Flint 2017: 227). Some of the major projects stated thus far, include new and up-graded railway lines, roads, and new oil and gas pipelines connecting Russia and Central Asia to China; a railway connecting Kunming in Southwest China to Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar and Singapore; railway developments across India and Bangladesh to Myanmar, a line between coastal Pakistan and China’s Western Xinjiang region; a railway line through Iran to Turkey and a number of ports along the coasts of South and Southeast Asia, East Africa and Southern Europe. The cost of the initiative is estimated at around USD 1 trillion. Since its inception in 2013, the scope of the project has continued to balloon. Initially, projects were limited to China’s Western regions and neighbouring regions, such as Central Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia. Over time, a number of other countries and regions have been integrated into the plan, including Europe, New Zealand and even the Arctic. In 2018, Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, officially invited all Latin American and Caribbean countries to join the project (Reuters 2018a)—a formal advance on an earlier 2015 proclamation from the International Department of the Communist Party Central Committee and the National Development and Reform Commission that the BRI project was “open” to all nations (Chen 2015). There was originally some ambiguity regarding Africa’s role in the BRI, with some maps including East Africa as a key point, others not. However, Kenya has recently cemented its role in the project with president Uhuru Kenyatta acknowledging “being part” of it, heralding it as offering a “paradigm shift” for Africa. Additionally, he was one of the delegates from 130 countries which attended Beijing’s summit-level Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in May 2017 (Xin 2017). Beijing has mobilised substantial political, economic and symbolic resources to actualise its vision. Financially, it has launched the USD 40 billion Silk Road fund1 to help finance projects, while other initiatives, such as the AIIB and the New Development Bank, will also contribute to projects. China’s large policy banks, such as the Export-Import Bank of China (Exim Bank) and China Development Bank (CDB) will also aid in BRI projects. It will also include private Chinese investment 1 The fund’s shareholders include the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, China Investment Corporation, the Export-Import Bank of China and China Development Bank.

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conglomerates, such as HNA Group, which has pledged to invest USD 3.2 billion (Ho 2018). Chinese infrastructure companies will be at the heart of the vision, with vast array of SOEs, including, but not limited to, Sinohydro; CCCC (and its subsidiaries, such as China Road and Bridge Constructions Group); China Railway Construction Group; China Harbour Engineering, China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO). The project will also draw on Provincial SOEs, such as Fujian Province’s China Wu Yi, Hubei’s Gezhouba; Chongqing International Construction Corporation and Jiangxi International, Shanghai Construction Group and many others. Large private Chinese companies, such as Hutchison Port Holdings and ZTE telecommunications will most likely also be involved, as well as a number of smaller outfits. Related industries, such as those involved with cement, steel and copper production also stand to benefit. Politically, China has been in full swing in terms of both promoting the project domestically and abroad. This is underscored through the diplomatic work of foreign delegations visiting Beijing and vice versa and the work of Chinese embassies abroad facilitating consultation, MOUs and the signing of contracts. The symbolic centrepiece, thus far, has been the Belt and Road Forum for International Co-operation, held in May 2017 in Beijing, pulling in 29 heads of states and representatives from over 130 countries and 70 international organisations. This has been supplemented by a large number of dialogues, workshops and academic conferences both domestically and abroad. BRI-themed speeches proliferate in domestically as well as by visiting delegations and diplomats abroad. The BRI is promoted heavily on Chinese media outlets, such as China Daily, People’s Daily, PLA Daily, Communist Youth League, China National Radio, Xinhua and CCTV. Foreign experts are solicited frequently by Chinese media to comment on the BRI. A plethora of maps, detailing its overland and maritime routes have been circulated. There are even BRI Sesame Street-style children’s videos, as well as BRI-themed children’s bedtime stories, aimed at foreign audiences (Koetse 2017).

3  The Collaborative Perspective While from this perspective, the BRI appears as a properly Sino-centric project, in other respects, it portrays itself as a collaborative project. In China’s State Council’s outline of the project, it:

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advocates tolerance among civilisations, respects the paths and modes of development chosen by different countries and supports dialogues among different civilisations on the principles of seeking common ground while shelving differences and drawing on each other’s strengths, so that all countries can coexist in peace for common prosperity. (State Council of the People’s Republic of China 2015)

While in Xi Jinping’s inaugural speech, he states that China has: no intention to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, export our own social system and model of development, or impose our own will on others. In pursuing the Belt and Road Initiative, we will not resort to outdated geopolitical manoeuvring … what we hope to create is a big family of harmonious co-existence. (China Daily 2017)

These statements are not solely political rhetoric in which China discursively constructs an eager, collaborative other, thinly papering over its dominant agency in the project. While there may be some truth to this, the fact is that a large number of the projects listed under the BRI existed prior to the inception of the initiative and were conceived by non-Chinese actors. As Griffiths has highlighted, numerous BRI projects lock “into national development plans drafted and approved by individual countries, or groups of countries” (2017: 16), some of which have been in existence for decades. For instance, the idea of creating a railway line running through Bangladesh, connecting the two parts of India, was discussed with both countries in both 1974 and 1998; developing a rail link between India’s Northeastern states with the Bangladeshi port of Chittagong began in 1996 and work has continued sporadically since (ibid.: 151). Pakistan conceived of and put forward to China the idea of an economic and energy corridor linking China and Pakistan, as well as upgrades to the Karakorum Highway which links the two countries (ibid.: 141). The BRI railway project through Southeast Asia builds upon the Masterplan on ASEAN Connectivity (MPAC), initiated in 2010. Indonesia’s Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway was in the pipeline since before 2010 and was initially planned to be constructed by Japanese companies. The LAPSSET infrastructure corridor, a key project of the African leg of the project, was originally conceived in 1975. One of the key infrastructure projects constituting the BRI initiative in Kenya, the SGR, was initiated several years before Xi Jinping announced

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the BRI: in 2011 the government of Kenya and China Bridge and Road Corporation signed a Memorandum of Understanding to construct the railway between Mombasa and Nairobi. Furthermore, Chinese companies and donor institutions will collaborate with a host of other actors in terms of implementation. With regards to certain cross-border projects, one of the countries may prefer one bidder, while the other country prefers another (as is the case of the Malaysia-Singapore railway line, where it has been asserted that Malaysia prefers a Chinese company while Singapore prefers a Japanese company) (Geopolitical Monitor 2017). Additionally, recipient countries of BRI projects draw on a host of funding institutions and construction expertise. For instance, Russia’s Moscow-Kazan high-speed railway consists of China agreeing to invest USD 5.2 billion in the project, with German’s Siemens putting up USD 2 billion for equipment and rolling stock (Griffiths 2017: 87). The Amu coal-fired power station, as part of Kenya’s LAPSSET project, was awarded to a consortium of Kenyan private companies (Gulf Energy and Centrum Investments) and Chinese companies (Sichuan Electric Power Design and Consulting Company, a subsidiary of Power China) and will be financed by the Government of Kenya, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and South Africa’s Standard Bank (of which ICBC owns a 20% stake). Additionally, the BRI initiative explicitly emphasises the project’s rational as dovetailing with the existing global market economy. China’s State Council states that the initiative “will abide by market rules and international norms, give play to the decisive role of the market in resource allocation and the primary role of enterprises” (Sate Council of the People’s Republic of China 2015). Thus, Chinese institutions do not have monopoly on the financing of these projects. The Beijing-led AIIB, which is a major donor for BRI projects, includes as participants most of the G20 countries, as well as a number of developing world countries, including Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Africa, with a total of 57 countries as founding members. Private financial institutions will be involved too. For instance, the CDB will make available up to USD 1.59 billion dollars to UK’s Standard Charted to fund projects in countries which have BRI projects (Reuters 2018b); Chinese conglomerate HNA Group will solicit investors from Southeast Asian partners (Ho 2018). Given this, the BRI initiative, while functioning on the one hand as a Sino-centric geopolitical representation, on the other hand is constituted through the quilting together of a host of independent national

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development projects. If we consider that most BRI projects stem from host states and had been in the pipeline for many years prior to the BRI, and that these host states shoulder the disruptive transformations they engender, a key question is why the BRI exists at all? None of the insinuated hidden agendas of the BRI—such as being a masterplan to assist Beijing shedding surplus capacity (Zhang 2017) or functioning as a long-term geostrategic project (Wang 2016)—explain why such measures have to be pressed into a formal, global institutional structure such as BRI. Rather, they could just as easily be carried out— perhaps more effectively be carried out—sans the pomp and grandeur of the trans-national BRI banner. In this sense, the act of naming it, of rendering it through narrative and representation as a coherent entity, suggests Chinese attempts at developing a Beijing-orientated global imaginary of development. Arturo Escobar, drawing on the post-World War II Euro-American narrative of alleviating ‘Third World’ poverty states: “Development relies on setting up the world as a picture, so that the whole can be grasped in some orderly fashion as forming a structure or system” (1995: 56). This is reiterated in Blanchard and Flint account of the BRI insofar as it is: a set of transformative projects that are the product of actions that require representations and narratives to justify and explain those actions to limit dissent and gain consensus across a variety of audiences. (2017: 232)

While even a few years back, Beijing took a modest stand in this regard, insisting on its developing world status and not serving as model for anyone but itself, more recently—particularly following the 19th Party Congress in 2017—China’s approach has become more assertive, with president Xi Jinping stating that the Chinese model has “blazed a new trail for other developing countries to achieve modernisation”, providing a new option for other countries and nations who want to “speed up their development” and that by the middle of the twenty-first century, China will be “a global leader in terms of comprehensive national power and international influence” (Glaser and Funaiole 2017). From this perspective, it is tempting to view the BRI blueprint as a properly Chinese invention—a vast spatial imaginary which aids in rendering a particular image of the world. However, at the same time, the constituent parts of this imaginary are not Chinese at all, but rather a plethora of home-grown national development plans, many of which

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existed prior to the BRI and which draw on a host of multinational stakeholders. What the BRI initiative has done then, is to essentially gather these disparate projects and woven them, discursively and otherwise, into the surface phenomenon of a coherent global plan. Where previously these elements are disparate and unconnected, they are suddenly rendered legible and unified with new meaning. Slavoj Zizek, writing on ideology, argues that when a new configuration of previously unconnected elements are aligned in a novel, composite way, they “quilt” together to create a “master signifier”, “by means of which they become parts of the structured network of meaning” (2008: 95–96). In a similar vein, the BRI is essentially a master signifier which stitches together a heterogeneity of elements and presents them as seemingly singular project. This accounts, for instance, for the incredible flexibility and fuzziness of the project, the way it adds and subtracts elements, while maintaining its coherency. The naming itself, over such vast spaces, hatched in Beijing (one cannot speak of BRI without speaking of China), offers a global imaginary with Beijing’s stamp on it, even though it is not entirely of Beijing’s doing. It is instructive that the historical imaginary upon which Beijing draws to articulate its vision, is the historical Silk Road, referenced ever since the BRI inaugural speech by Xi Jinping in Kazakhstan in 2013. The “road” and “route” of this historical entity were never singular, either spatially or in terms of the agents which motivated them. What did exist, during the Han Dynasty period (206 BC–220 AD), was a hotchpotch of various branching routes, accumulatively some 75,000 km, many of which arose from the “bottom up”, so to speak, with groups such as Bactrians, Syrians, Jews, Arabs, Persians, Turkmen, Arabs, Sogdians, Armenians and others, trading goods which, over time, eventually linked up to make the greater trade routes we know today, between Greco Bactria and China. As Millward claims, “These people, though often depicted by outsiders as barbarians, were in fact prime historical movers and promoters of silk-road exchanges—‘proto-globalizers’ as well as conquerors” (2013: 22). Certainly, large powers, such as the Roman Empire and the Chinese empires such as the Han and the Tang, through use of diplomacy and sometimes force, secured various parts of the routes and held them under their influence. However, despite the fact that the Silk Road is often associated as Chinese, that Chinese goods played an important role in its functioning and that, at times, Chinese political and military power influenced the functioning of the route, the Silk Road

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never belonged to the Chinese or any other political entity. Rather its agency was distributed over an aggregate of polities. If then, like its Silk Road predecessor, the BRI consists of a composite of different actors, then it is important that at some point in the analysis, attention must shift from the question of Chinese agency, to that of national, host state agency. This is particularly important when we consider the proportion of analysis devoted to Chines actors regarding the BRI, as opposed to the countries in which the projects are taking place. In this dominant narrative, China is frequently rendered as the active partner, while recipient countries tend to passively receive the infrastructure in question. From a more localised view however, the state’s drive to provide local development and the narrative which structures this, is the primary locus through which projects take place. In this inversion of agency, China becomes one actor—albeit an important one—among many actors, drawn in by host states to actualise their plans. The role of host-state agency has implications when we consider that infrastructure development has a deeply transformative effect politically, economically and ecologically in the locales where it is implemented. Additionally, it is an important dimension of self-consciously modernising state narratives, in which access can play a role in shaping participatory attitudes towards citizenship (Anand 2011; Von Schnitzler 2008). Decisions as to where infrastructure is implemented, as opposed to where it is not implemented, have an inherent political dimension, a phenomenon exacerbated in ethnically heterogeneous states where issues of political favouritism come to the fore. While dominant state narratives take broader transformation into account, such accounts are almost exclusively focused on positive outcomes (i.e. increased connectivity, mobility, economic growth and development). However, the array of impacts is far wider than this, with many of the actual transformations either incalculable or glossed over in the interests of pro-development narratives. One such aspect is the period preceding and during the implementation of projects—a phase in which a variety of social forces are mobilised, to promote or resist the project; to fight for community inclusion or exclusion, and so forth. It is often during this intense period of transformation that land is appropriated, tenders are awarded, routes are negotiated, stakeholders come on board, land speculators engage, political entities take positions, new discourses of corruption emerge and livelihoods are re-orientated. Large-scale projects have a tendency to become a metonym for how the state works as a whole, insofar as such

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projects highlight where state interests lie, exacerbate lines of political patronage through which projects are promoted and the state’s willingness to maintain infrastructures when they break down. Within the present context of the BRI, many of the existing projects are situated within this highly transformative stage, in which projects are being announced, or implemented. Thus, the current analyses is different to what it may be in a decade or so in the future, in which longer-terms assessments can be made to determine how effective any particular project has been. In the following section, which examines Kenya’s LAPSSET infrastructure project and specifically the Lamu port construction, I describe some of the impacts which the project is having on local communities. In doing so, I highlight how the mobilisation of local communities and their concerns are directed towards local and national political elites. At this domestic level of analysis, the role of China recedes into the background.

4  The Case of LAPSSET Lamu county, a major site of the LAPSSET construction project, consists of an island archipelago and swathe of mainland which stretches 100 km up to the coastal border with Somalia. Since the fourteenth century, Lamu was an impotant coastal trading centre and home to a number of different ethnic groups, such as the Swahili, Bajuni, Sanye and Boni. As part of the pre-modern Indian Ocean trading circuit, the region had historical influences including that of the Portuguese, Omani, Indian and even Chinese. China’s famous Ming Dynasty voyages, carried out by admiral Zheng He, allegedly visited Lamu; on the neighbouring island of Pate, one can still find bits of Chinese porcelain within agricultural fields and even in the alleyways of the town; there is even a “Chinese” family on the island, which claim direct decadence from Chinese sailors. Lamu’s highly productive mangrove and coral ecosystems, providing an abundance of marine life, are a major basis of livelihoods in the region. Tourism is an important part of the economy, with Lamu town listed as a United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) world heritage site. Along with the vast, barren swathes of Northern Kenya, Lamu and other Northern coastal regions are classic peripheral zones, comprising of an ethnic heterogeneity and poorly integrated into the rest of the country.

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LAPSSET is a regional project which has existed as an idea since the mid-1970s. While still in its infancy, upon completion the estimated USD 24 billion project envisions a 32 berth port at Lamu, with interregional highway, railway and oil pipeline connections extending from Lamu to the neighboring capitals of Juba and Addis Ababa. Additional features include three international airports (at Lamu, Isiolo and Lake Turkana) each accompanied by resort cities. The multipurpose High Grand Falls dam, scheduled to be built along the Tana River, is also part of the project. In the short term, as part of the LAPSSET “urgent plan”, the first three berths are currently being constructed at Manda Bay, roughly 5 km North of Lamu Island. Dredging commenced in October 2016, with the first berth to be completed in 2018, and the second and third berths in 2020. The issue of who will operate the port is still under consideration. Construction is being carried out by CCCC, who won the tender over Chinese competitor, China Wu Yi, at a cost of USD 689 million, which includes land reclamation and dredging (to a docking depth of 17.5 meters). To what degree China will be involved in its overall manifestation is unclear, as the project will still take decades to manifest. Certainly, at present, CCCC is constructing the first three berths of the Lamu port, although the funding comes directly from the Government of Kenya (China’s Exim Bank declined to offer funding for the project due to security concerns). In tandem with the port, is the construction of the Lamu coal power station, said to be the largest in East Africa, and currently being developed 21 km North of Lamu Town. The power generated will be transmitted to Nairobi via a 520 km, 400 Kilovolt transmission line. As there is no coal in the Lamu area, in the interim, it will be sourced primarily from South Africa and shipped to Lamu. This will occur in tandem with the development of the Mui coal basin in Kenya’s Kitui county, which will be mined by Fenxi Industry Mining Company, of Shanxi Province, China, in conjunction with Kenya’s Great Lakes Corporation, which plans to invest USD 500 million in exploration and production. The feasibility of transporting the coal from the Mui Basin to Lamu is being considered. 4.1   Political Mobilisation Within key areas of the LAPSSET project, such as Isiolo and Lamu, a major effect of the project has been around the issue of land.

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The mainland regions which have been purchased from locals in order to build the developments have been the least problematic. Many of the landowners, who live on the adjacent Pate Island, but use the mainland for growing mangoes, cassava, maize, cashew nuts and coconuts, have been happy to give up their land as the compensation they are being paid—an alleged KSh 800,000 per acre by the Amu company—is a substantial amount (Praxides 2018). There were even some allegations of people moving onto the land illegally and setting up rudimentary living quarters, in order to qualify for compensation. One problem, however, has to do with broader land speculation in the area, brought on by what Elliot refers to as “Economies of Anticipation” (Elliott 2016), driven by speculators from commercial centres such as Nairobi and Mombasa who are betting on rising land prices as the LAPSSET project grows. Within Lamu, waterfront land along the coast of Manda island has skyrocketed in recent years. In these areas, purchasers have, in some cases, found that the land has been sold several times over, with two or more owners having title deeds to the same portion of land. The National Land Commission (NLC) recently announced it will revoke 117 title deeds acquired under dubious circumstances in the Shella Kipungani catchment area, as they encroach on a protected area (Mwakio 2017). Land speculation has been compounded by the fact that many of Lamu’s residents do not have land tenure. Traditionally, families inherited property and solved adjudication matters through local imams. In some cases, people who have lived on a plot of land for generations, suddenly find out that title deeds for the land have been secured by outside parties. During fieldwork, I met one man whose mother rented out a portion of her four acres of land on Pate Island to an elderly man, only to find that the tenant had recently gone to the court to secure the entire property for himself. His mother now finds herself as a tenant on her own land. The man has now rented out the land to natural gas prospectors, as there have been recent finds of natural gas on the island. This often occurs in instances where poor, often illiterate farmers, are outwitted by more worldly prospectors with a better understanding of shifts in property law. The Lamu county government is addressing the title deed process, issuing 4000 title deeds in 2016 and intending to issue another 10,000 more. Since 2013, the government has initiated a drive to provide over 60,000 title deeds to residents of coastal areas (Mbugua 2016). In the Boni region, which borders on Somalia, the government has attempted to issue block title deeds, which have been rejected by locals who insist

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on individual title deeds (Praxides 2016a). Different branches of government are sometimes at loggerheads with each other. In 2016, the country government halted a land distribution survey being carried out by the NLC, on the ground they had not been consulted. However, over 2000 squatters in Manda have criticised the county move, arguing that certain county officials were doing this so as to buy time to move in their own squatters onto the land, and use them as proxies to lay claim to certain pieces of land (Nema 2016). The general anxiety over land is reflective of a much broader issue endemic to Kenyan politics, namely that political parties tend to be affiliated with dominant ethnic groups and privilege those groups when in power (Wrong 2009). This friction was most dramatically highlighted during the 2007–2008 political crises, in which a contested election between Raila Odinga (representing the Party of National Unity, and more broadly, the Luo ethnic group) and Mwai Kibaki (representing the Orange Democratic Movement and of the majority Kikuyu ethnic group), set off a series of deadly riots which primarily pitched Luo and Kalenjin ethnic groups against Kikuyu. Coastal regions—along with ethnic groups in the North of Kenya—whose ethnic groups have much smaller demographics, have long felt under-represented and maligned within this political structure, leading to secessionist groups such as Mombasa Republican Council, which has sought for coastal regions to break away from Kenya proper (the group is officially banned). With growing prospects of economic opportunity around the LAPSSET project, there have been renewed fears in regions such as Lamu that “outside” groups, through vehicles of political patronage, will increasingly swamp opportunities for locals. Anxieties around land have been compounded by narratives among locals that Lamu will be flooded by “uplanders”, primarily referring to Kikuyu from the central highland region, many of which currently affiliate with president Uhuru Kenyatta’s Jubilee coalition party In discussions with local farmers and fishermen with regards to future employment on LAPSSET projects, several times I was informed that promises of employment going to Lamu locals was a lie—rather, the bulk of the jobs would go to people from the central highlands. This observation is reiterated in a Saferworld report, which states: Many of those we interviewed noted the common narrative among Lamu’s ‘indigenous’ people: first the Kikuyu arrived, then they took the land, then

262  R. ANTHONY they took the jobs, and then they took the political posts. The Kikuyu and other settlers, one interviewee told us, ‘want it all’: by virtue of constituency boundaries, solidarity and block voting across the settler population, ‘they’ now have the position of deputy-governor, one of the county’s two MPs, and a disproportionate share of seats in the County Assembly. (Nyagah et al. 2017: 7)

Such fears have been fueled, in part, by past events, such as in the 1960s, when former president, Jomo Kenyatta, initiated a settlement scheme for landless highlanders to move to Mpeketoni, situated on the Lamu mainland. The bulk of the settlers, Kikuyu (the ethnic group from which Jomo Kenyatta himself came), were awarded title deeds to land historically belonging to communities such as the Mijikenda, Bajuni, Sanye, Boni and Swahili. Over time, migration of uplanders has altered the demographics, with the bulk of Lamu’s population now within the mainland farming area, a shift away from the traditional centre of Lamu town. Today, over 50,000 settlers in the area have converted surrounding land into farmland, including cash crops such as maize, cassava, cotton and bananas. Lamu is currently the only county is Kenya where nearly 50% of the population is “non-indigenous” (Nyagah et al. 2017: 5). This political landscape has also fed into a more recent, and dramatic form of political resistance, in the form of the Islamic militant group, Al-Shabaab, which has staged a number of intermittent attacks within Lamu county since 2011. Following Kenyan forces entering Somalia in 2011 to uproot Islamic militancy, Al-Shabaab recruitment has flourished within the coastal region of Kenya, leading to a number of kidnappings, bombings and mass executions within the Lamu region. The Kenyan Defense forces have responded with a heavy military presence, with accusations of extra juridical killings. One way in which residents have framed the conflict, is through the discourse of land-grabbing by up-landers, facilitated by corrupt politicians. It is no coincidence that Mpektoni is one of the most targeted regions in the conflict, with the deadliest attack in June 2014, in which 65 people were murdered in al-Shabaab orchestrated attacks in and around the town. Following the attack, a video entitled “Reclaiming Muslim lands under Kenyan Occupation”, was released in Swahili and English and included footage of radical Kenyan Imams from the coast preaching about land in Mpeketoni stolen by “disbelievers” (ibid.: 2).

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In addition to land speculation, has been the issue of corruption inherent in the infrastructure projects and its relationship to patronage politics. The coal-fired power station, in particular, has been mired in controversy since its inception. Given Lamu’s isolated and relatively in-tact environment, critics have been puzzled by its location. The proposed rationale is that the port and associated industrialisation will, in the future, require high energy demands. However, at present, Kenya has no developed coal reserves. Recently, coal deposits have been identified in the Mui Basin. Developing a railway line between the basin and Lamu—some 350 km in length—would take an estimated five to ten years to build (Nordman 2017). Furthermore, the plant will need an estimated 400 km transmission line built to connect it with Nairobi. The plant has entered into a fixed purchasing agreement with Kenya Power at an annual cost of KSh 37 billion (which means that these annual costs must be paid to the provider whether they produce electricity or not), a burden which will be carried by taxpayers (Business Daily 2018). These factors suggest both the timing and location of the plant make little economic sense. Such factors have contributed, both in Lamu and nationally, to accusations of corruption. The tender process was awarded to a consortium whose local component is Centum investment—a major shareholder of which is Chris Kirubi, one of Kenya’s wealthiest men and historically close to Kenya’s political elites. Kirubi has been part of President Kenyatta’s trips in pursuit of business and investment in South Africa, China and the United States (Juma 2014). The fact that Centum had little experience in electricity production and that it was the highest bidder in the tender process has exacerbated suspicions. Furthermore, the plant has been heavily criticised on environmental grounds. Broadly speaking, its development tends to go against the grain of Kenya’s recent investments in national-scale low carbon alternative energy sources (wind and geothermal) and local renewables such as wind and solar. Additionally, Kenya is a signatory to the Paris climate change accord and has committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30% in the next 13 years (Dalla Longa and Zwaan 2017: 1559). Environmental Secretary at the Kenyan Environmental Ministry, Akinyi Kaudia, officials from the European Union and Nobel prize winner Joseph Stieglitz have all voiced concerns over the project (Rowell 2018).

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4.2   Ecological Mobilisation Lamu is a biodiversity hotspot, which hosts a number of keystone species such as mangrove forests (the largest in Kenya), sea grass and corals with a number of endangered aquatic species, including sea turtles, dugongs, dolphins and coral. The varied marine habitats provide the primary livelihood for Lamu’s island-dwelling communities, with coral reefs providing diverse habitats for finfish and invertebrates (such as lobster and sea cucumber). Lamu’s coral reefs—consisting of over 150 different coral species—harbour the most biodiversity of all of Kenya’s coastal ecosystems, supporting giant sea anemone, lobsters, turtles, parrotfish, crown of thorns starfish, moray eels, damselfishes, cardinal fish and scorpionfish. Its isolation and low population have contributed to the relative lack of environmental degradation. Mangroves provide the base of many marine food webs, serving as nurseries for many coral reefs and fish species, housing numerous species of fish, crabs, shrimp and molluscs and serve as important breeding sites for a number of migratory birds. Additionally, mangroves trap sediments, thus stabilising coastlines and protecting reefs and seagrass meadows. In addition to serving as important fishing grounds for local communities, mangrove wood is used as timber (the main source of construction material in the area), firewood and charcoal; mangrove poles are exported to the Middle East and Somalia. At present, increased mangrove cutting, with no replantation, as well as clearing for coastal development programmes, is leading to depleted reserves, with the subsequent result of increased shoreline erosion. The mainland, of which 33.9% is still forested, includes unique coastal, closed-canopy forests, located primarily in the Dodori and Boni reserves, which contain mammals such as buffalo, coastal topi, African wild dog, Aider’s duiker, baboons, wild pigs, hippos and the endangered rumped-back elephant shrew (Environmental Sensitivity Atlas of Lamu County 2017: 7). Despite this biodiversity, certain species have declined precipitously in recent years. For instance, elephant populations in the forest reserves, in the 1970s, were around 30,000, while today, there are only a few hundred left, primarily due to poaching (ibid.: 7). The direct impact of the port development has been the clearing of several kilometres of shoreline, which has seen the destruction of both the coral reef and mangrove forests in that region; the dredging process has led to greatly increased silt deposits, which have an effect of marine life and have made fishing in the area obsolete. Community use of forests

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(fruit and wild vegetable collection; herbal medicine, beekeeping, construction materials, fuel) is threatened by increased population (and subsequent conversion of forest land to pasture), and land clearance for development projects. This can be seen, for instance, in Kipini forest, where agricultural expansion has fragmented the forest block significantly (ibid.: 13). Increased agriculture has led to the drying and salination of wetland areas. The Lamu Port is being constructed at the head of the Mkanda channel which connects the Lamu Island region to other parts of the archipelago, such as Pate, Kiwayuu and Ndau Islands. The channel is the sole rout utilised by traders, fishermen, school children, tourists and the community travelling from island to island and to Lamu town for government and social services. Once the port is complete, the channel will be entirely cut off. As most vessels are not equipped to travel on the open seas, the only route between Lamu and Pate islands, will, in the future, be segmented between sea travel and a road which will connect Lamu Island to the port area. LAPSSET authorities have taken precautions in construction, such as setting up silk curtains around construction areas to prevent sediment spreading, the provision of deep-sea fishing gear for fishermen who will lose their current livelihoods, as well as purchasing land off locals and re-settling them. Additionally, fish storage facilities and a fish industrial park will be set up (LAPSSET 2017). With regards to the coalfired power station, the main concern focuses on the issue of toxic pollution from coal, dust and ash, which petitioners feel are not adequately dealt with in the Environmental Impact Assessment. These pollutants disperse into the atmosphere, rain, groundwater and seawater and can have adverse effects on biota and people. Additionally, there are broader concerns in terms of carbon emissions and implications for rising sea levels. The total estimated emissions of the plant will equal the total current omissions of Kenya’s entire energy sector (Obdura 2017). These issues have been taken up in the form of the NGO Save Lamu, and other community actors, which have taken various government agencies to court in cases related to both the port and coal station. With regards to the port, these actors are not against its development per se, but rather are concerned with the government’s lack of consultation in the development of the port. In 2012, Mohammed Ali Baadi, of the Lamu Environmental Protection and Conservation, together with Save Lamu and other community members, took the matter to court on the grounds that the Government of Kenya had not carried out an adequate

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environmental impact assessment, had failed to address impending land issues, or imitate a mitigation and conservation plan of the area involving affected communities (Save Lamu 2012). In 2018, the High Court ruled in their favour, stating that the 4600 fishermen affected by the developments must be compensated KSh 1.76 billion and that the Environmental Impact Assessment was flawed, ordering it to be returned to the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) for further action in accordance with the judgement. The government was also ordered to pay all costs of the petitioners (Lwanga 2018). With regard to the coal-fired power station, petitioners have not been as successful. Unlike the port, in which civil society groups merely wanted implementation to be done in a manner which took into account environmental sustainability and local livelihoods, the coal station, they argued, should not be built at all. Save Lamu petitioned the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) not to grant the power station a licence to operate on the grounds that it poses severe health threats, as well as jeopardising the heritage, environment and marine system of the region. However, in 2017, the ERC overruled the complaint, opening the way for the construction of the plant. Lamu stakeholders have also encountered problems with local government. Several meetings between local stakeholders have either been cancelled at the last minute, their venues re-located to out of the way places, or have been broken up by the police. In 2017, Country Commissioner Kanyiri alleged that anti-coal plant activists were being used as agents by “enemies of development” (Medium 2017). Head of the Save Lamu alliance, Walid Ahmed Ali, a vociferous critic of the plant, was briefly detained by police in Nairobi and accused of being the perpetrator of the 2014 Mpeketoni attacks,2 exclaiming after his release: “Now if you stand up against anything, they call you Al Shabaab” (Wesangula 2016). Up until 2017, Issa Timamy, who was part of Raila Odinga’s National Super Alliance Party, was the governor of Lamu. Timamy has had a history of resisting fast-track implementation of the Lamu Port and Coal powered station, as did, at times, Odinga (Cornel 2017). When, for instance, the NLC attempted to allocate some 28,000 hectares of land for the LAPSSET project, Timamy opposed the move on the grounds that the local government was not consulted (Beja 2016). He also pushed

2 Personal

communication.

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aggressively for fishermen to be compensated from the loss of livelihood due to the port construction (Praxides 2017), insisting that 75% of job opportunities at the port be reserved for county youth, initiating training programmes for youth who would be working at the port (Praxides 2016b) and demanding the national government ensure that the county receives a specific amount of the revenues coming from the port (Kiplang’at 2015). In 2017, Timamy was ousted in by Fahim Twaha, of Kenyatta’s Jubilee alliance; it remains to be seen how his stance towards the developments play out.

5  Conclusion In the case study above—a local instance of the broader BRI initiative— it is clear that individual projects such as the Lamu development are having a significant influence regarding local issues of land ownership and speculation, terrorism, local politics, local livelihoods and environmental degradation. What emerges in the case study is that these shifts, and responses to them, are most frequently framed in terms of the Kenyan state, both locally and nationally, rather than in terms of Chinese investment. The LAPSSET project, and the broader Kenya Vision 2030, are essentially Kenyan national development projects, of which China is one of several contributors. Thus, the kinds of problems which arise from these developments are first and foremost, problems of domestic statecraft and governance. Mosely and Watson (2016), for instance, drawing on the work of James C. Scott, argue that the LAPSSET project seeks to simplify and standardise complex and “illegible” local social practices (456). The authors argue that East African projects in this vein, rather than manifesting the kind of enclave capitalism witnessed with regards to multi-national extractive industries (Ferguson 2005), rather resemble the kind of twentieth century top-heavy state projects examined in Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998). While these projects tend to engage in Public–Private partnerships, drawing on a host of donors and implementers from Asia, Europe and United States—a modification to the Scott’s earlier paradigm—they are still, ultimately state-driven projects. While the description above points to both problems and responses very much couched within local political paradigms, a key question is: what is China’s role in all of this? In many respects, this analysis reiterates a growing trend within the literature on China–Africa relations which offers resistance to the

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narrative of “power differentials, competition, tension and conflict between disempowered African locals and (at least economically) powerful Chinese” (Giese 2014: 3). In Gadzala’s edited volume, Africa and China (2015), a variety of African case studies are drawn upon to portray an overall situation in which African governments are the key actors in terms of the China–Africa engagement.3 In a wide ranging analysis, which includes the petroleum sectors in Angola and Nigeria, the Ethiopian telecommunication sector and anti-Chinese rhetoric in Zambia, the contributions all point towards local political elites, incredibly deft at extracting from Chinese and other actors, the likes of enrichment, political legitimacy and social control. Chinese actors often have to plug their operations into complex political, economic and domestic contexts. African actors draw on the Chinese presence to harness their own interests, which range from callous calculation to the broadening of civil society. What struck me during my fieldwork in Lamu was how little the role of Chinese impact played in terms of community struggle. In interviews conducted with civil society groups, NGO’s and other members of the public, the bulk of the ire was aimed at domestic elites (local or national politicians), opportunistic businessmen and certain ethnic groups. One NGO I met which is fighting the project did not know that different Chinese companies were involved in the two different projects (the power station and the harbour). Some locals I spoke inter-changeably about the “Chinese” and “Japanese” (there are no Japanese business interests involved in LAPSSET), and no one I spoke to ever mentioned the BRI. Local actors tend to neither engage with the Chinese companies involved, nor the Chinese embassy, citing that they are difficult to approach; there was only one case I came across in which a network of NGOs, 350.org, had attempted to contact the Chinese embassy regarding the ecological and community effects of the project. While companies such as CCCC have invested more in CSR recently, particularly in the case of the SGR, which has included the sponsoring of school building, providing training programmes for local workers and demonstrating noted environmental concern in the construction of the line, 3 This Afro-centric work has been foreshadowed by research on the Chinese engagement in the African oil industry, with authors such as Corkin (2016) and De Soros arguing how Chinese companies, among others, are subject to a very powerful and economically savvy elites who are clearly in the driving seat.

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in many respects, Chinese companies have a “hands off” approach. CCCC officials interviewed, repeatedly asserted that their job is merely to construct what has been mandated by the Kenyan government and to abide by local laws. This sentiment was backed up in conversations with Kenyan liaison officers involved in the projects, who agreed that, for the most part, Chinese construction firms obey mandates given to them. These observations have implications when analysing the BRI, given the tendency to situate China as the nerve-centre of agency in the projects it is engaged in across the world. While at the level of global representation, China’s role in the BRI is paramount, as the scale shifts towards the implementation of actual projects, the role of local states and local communities become far more central than the role of China. In one sense, it is undeniable that the BRI is a Chinese-centred project, insofar as the country has been instrumental in the conception, promotion, facilitation, funding and implementation of the project. On the other hand, the project draws on a number of pre-existing national-level development plans, collaborates with numerous multi-national infrastructure companies, as well as a host of private, government and multilateral investment sources. When zooming in even further—that is to say, towards the sites where development is underway—issues of a political, ecological and social nature are couched as domestic political questions, rather than critiques of the BRI. Given the kind of social upheaval which mega-infrastructure poses, this phenomenon perhaps suits Beijing, given its long-standing soft power offensive which pitches its international engagement in the Global South as a global good. But irrespective of how this plays out for China, the very nature of the BRI, insofar as it assists in the actualisation of national development plans across the world, entails that a central dimension of the analysis must focus on host states and their local contexts. This paradigm shift, from China as key actor to China as a peripheral one, is a conceptual step which needs to be taken into consideration when analysing the BRI. While this chapter has focused on the case of Kenya, it is likely that similarities may also be found in other countries which are involved in the BRI. In this vein, Chinese agency at the highest level—namely the global blueprint of the project—is replaced by the agency of recipient nation-states and their ability to extend control over the ethnic, economic, ecological and political spaces through which these projects run.

270  R. ANTHONY Acknowledgments   The author would like to thank the Social Science Research Council’s (SSRC) Inter-Asia Fellowship, which supported the research for this article.

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CHAPTER 13

Afterword Ross Anthony and Uta Ruppert

Transregionalisation as an analytical perspective focusing on the developments between diverse regions of the Global South emphasises the complexity and inconsistency of cross-regional linkages and flows. An appropriate interdisciplinary approach towards interactions and connections within the Global South—that is to say, between, regions, states, governments, institutions and various social and individual actors— brings the scalar character of these processes of transfer to the fore. Like other perspectives of “trans” instants of exchange between localities, transregionalisation questions “the given” of contours and containment of structures, orders, and relations—be they “real” in a material sense or “imagined” in a cultural sense—and stresses their spatial, and concurrently, scalar dimensions. Globalisation in a conventional economic sense, global governance in a mainstream political understanding, and transnationalisation from a social and cultural perspective, constitute as much the frame for the ongoing transregionalisation(s) as the respective R. Anthony (*)  Department of Modern Foreign Languages, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa U. Ruppert  Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Anthony and U. Ruppert (eds.), Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7_13

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regional, national and local processes do. The contributions to this book point towards movements, shifts and intersections between and across all these dimensions. Accordingly, this volume has taken an inclusive approach, with chapters ranging from large-scale state and multi-lateral institutional analyses, all the way to cultural production and localised migration experiences. The inclusion of such a wide array of analytical and experiential lenses is intentional. While there is a trend within the social sciences and humanities to focus increasingly on various forms of exchange and circulation which exist outside of, or in an antagonistic relationship to fixed territorial identities, it is nevertheless an empirical fact that such dynamics exist in tandem with these more dominant state narratives and imaginaries. In fact, some of the most interesting work in these fields articulates, in one way or another, the interface between these large-scale structures and the often unpredictable social and cultural dynamics which are partially contained by them. In this volume, this can be seen, for instance, in Diawara’s work, insofar as migrants don’t conform to national sentiments of belonging; in Anthony’s work on how the BRI is experienced very differently at the global, national and local levels; and in Park’s work on how preconceived racial identities fail to accommodate lived experience. Nevertheless, it is equally important that the dynamics of dominant, large-scale state/economic forces be critically examined in and of themselves. These entities, given their power, tend to dominate discourses of transregionalism and transregionalisation. From BRICS “South–South” solidarity, to the China–Africa “win-win” paradigm, these institutions function, in part, as branding exercises: namely, the transregional relationships they forward are portrayed as unambiguously positive in nature. While there are certainly aspects of these relationships that promise “development” (trade, industrialisation, etc., touched on in this volume by Burgess and Bodomo/Che), such aspects can obviously not come to stand in for the totality of the engagement. Samuleson and Taylor, for instance, highlight some of the problematic facets of these exchanges, namely that they are embedded in broader capitalist networks globally, are responsible for accelerated climate change, and embody the “accumulation by dispossession” of a new, global neoliberal class. Thus, dominant representations of transregionalism—in their narrow, institutionoriented sense—must be taken seriously in terms of the ­ legitimating power of their claims—and the wide extent to which they are

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effective—as much as they must be subject to rigorous criticism in terms of the discrepancy between what they do and what they say. This is particularly evident in discourse to do with the Global South. Contemporary Africa-Asia discourses differ from the original Bandung narrative insofar as questions of social justice are, at best, of less importance. The first wave of South-South collaboration, from the mid-1950s to the 1980s, can be characterised as a struggle against the (post-) colonial division of labour, corresponding economic dependencies and attendant claims for social justice, as well as economic and political self-determination of the Southern regions and countries. The second wave of South-South solidarity, however, takes place within what can be described as a neoliberal context, ushered in through Western-imposed structural adjustment reforms, and, more recently, through the engagement of increasingly market-orientated emerging powers. With regard to global scales, today’s African-Asian transregional interactions refer primarily to modes and models of effective development in the sense of successful integration into globalisation (see Adem, Agbakoba and Anthony in this volume). Alternatives to capitalist globalisation are discussed in terms of more equal regional cooperation between states, governments and institutions, but not in terms of reformulating economic policy. The extent to which they contribute towards greater fairness and provide better options is still contested (see Taylor versus Bodomo/Che). Emancipatory claims which aim at social transformation—the political horizon of the former South-South discourse—are barely part of today’s debates. However, when focusing on the roles of social actors in the field—a perspective which is frequently overlooked in current research agendas concerning the Global South—the picture changes dramatically. This is evident in the chapters by Schulze-Engler and Mageza-Barthel/Ruppert, in which connected critique of the solidarity frame puts emphasis on transnational norms in which transnational civil society groups have been struggling for decades. Since the end of the Cold War, these struggles provide an important alternative definition—in contrast to state-driven processes of internationalisation and economy driven globalisation—of what constitutes transnationalisation. Though current routes of transregionalisation build upon this basis rhetorically, claims and struggles for social justice are largely perfunctory. People-to-people interactions, predominantly in the form of migrant mobility, is another facet of transregionalisation, which commonly

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challenges the “solidarity” narrative. While economic and political structures, institutions and other forms of power relations form the broader context of these movements, they nevertheless cannot account for the totality of the phenomenon. The chapters by Diawara, Park and Samuleson highlight, in their discussions of translocal movements of peoples, ideas and objects, how such dynamics initiate a plethora of hybrid identities which form and inform transregional experiences and realities. The “trans” dimensions cannot be accounted for by simply relying on the structural reasons of migration itself. Important to detect in this context is Park’s warning not to overwrite the voices from the South. Regardless of whether we believe in epistemic privileges or not, epistemologies result from knowledge economies—and it might not be by chance that most “trans” perspectives (transnational movements, transcultural encounters, translocalities and the like) have been conceptualised in the Global North, while they are often enough contested from the Global South. Insofar as the “trans” paradigm facilitates fluidity, ambiguity and openness of analytical conceptualisation, it allows for opportunities to avoid weighing against the bounded and fixed structures of all kinds of intersecting social inequalities. After decades of unsolved North–South conflicts and uncontested Northern (economic) hegemony, it seems more pertinent to focus on the nuanced realities of lived experiences as opposed to re-hashing the deadlock of allegedly dated antagonisms. This may partially explain the recent popularity of “trans” perspectives in critical Western research, whereby the analyses of “trans” processes situates the powerful re-thinking of notions and conceptualisations of territory and imagination within the Southern context (Park, Samuleson, Schulze-Engler in this volume). We hope to have contributed to developing a certain analytical productivity in this volume, insofar as conflicting paradigms are brought into inter-disciplinary conversation with the seemingly contradictory processes of transregional dynamism. We have taken dominant narratives of transregionalisation seriously, not only in terms of critique, but also in the sense that they play a role in subject formation, shaping the way we “see” the world and imagine the various ways in which its constituent parts engage with each other. If these narratives, and their counterparts, do not easily speak to each other, then this awkwardness is, as a matter of necessity, reflected in this volume. Such incommensurability, while negating a seamless whole, nevertheless highlights the analytical chasms which

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exist in dealing with transregionalisations between two of the world’s largest land masses. In presenting this disparity across the chapters, the authors wish to highlight the productive nature in traversing these different worldviews, insofar as they point towards a more complex reality in which numerous discourses intersect, be it at the level of the subject, community, institution, nation-state or region.

Index

A Abe, Shinzo, 55 Addis Ababa, 64, 259 affirmative action, 234, 237 Afghanistan, 254 Afrasia, 226, 228, 233, 238, 241–245 Afrasian entanglements, 120, 128, 129, 132, 133, 226 Afrasian imaginaries, 128, 129, 136 Africa, 1, 2, 5–8, 10–12, 19–25, 29–37, 42–45, 47, 49–51, 54–58, 61–74, 79, 81–83, 86, 89, 90, 99, 105, 106, 108–112, 117– 120, 124, 127, 128, 132–134, 145, 149, 152, 154, 160, 161, 168–174, 178–180, 182, 184–188, 190, 191, 197, 198, 209–212, 218, 223, 225–228, 231, 232, 237, 238, 240–245, 251 Africa-Asia, 2, 4–6, 8–11, 13, 64, 125, 142, 143, 242, 243, 277

African Development Bank (ADB), 31, 35, 69 African National Congress (ANC), 156 African National Congress Women’s League (ANC WL), 156 “Africa Rising”, 6, 19, 23, 29, 30, 32 Africa’s Asian Options (AFRASO), 98, 119, 144, 242, 244 Afrikaans, 224 Afro-Asian, 9, 20, 23, 112, 118, 120, 123, 126, 128, 130, 135, 210, 226–232, 239, 242, 243 Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO), 118, 119, 124 Afro-Asian Writers’ Association (AAWA), 9, 118–126, 129 Afro-Asian Writers’ Union (AAWU), 124, 125 aid. See development assistance Ali, Walid Ahmed, 266

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. Anthony and U. Ruppert (eds.), Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7

281

282  Index All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF), 145, 146, 153, 154, 157, 158 alliances, 2, 64, 89, 106, 110, 148, 158, 183, 243, 266, 267 Al-Shabaab, 262 Americas, 227 Amharic, 53 Amin, Idi, 232, 233 Angola, 33, 69, 71, 268 Anshan, Li, 228 Anthropocene, 9, 10, 98–103, 105, 106, 109, 111 anti-colonial, 29, 81, 87, 91, 99, 112, 118–121, 123, 124, 126–129, 132, 133, 135, 231 anti-immigration laws, 235 anti-imperialist, 68, 119, 159, 231, 242, 243 Apartheid, 87, 102, 103, 112, 147, 148, 235–237 Arabic, 80, 119, 122, 227 Arabs, 205, 256 Armenians, 256 ASEAN Wildlife Enforcement Network (ASEAN-WEN), 184, 185 Asia, 1, 2, 5, 6, 19, 20, 26, 31, 73, 79, 84, 85, 90, 99, 117–120, 124, 125, 128, 129, 132, 160, 172, 198, 204, 209–212, 214, 216, 217, 226, 227, 229, 241, 244, 267 Asian-African, 118, 126 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), 69, 251, 254 Aso, Taro, 55 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 10, 168, 171, 172, 178, 179, 181, 184, 185, 187, 189, 190 Azikiwe, Nnamdi, 82

B Bactrian, 256 Bajuni, 227, 258, 262 Bandung, 12, 99, 114, 135, 172, 231, 243, 277 Bandung Conference, 8, 64, 119, 227, 229 Bandung spirit, 118–121 Bangladesh, 251, 253 Belgium, 88, 89, 216, 241 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), 12, 13, 69, 73, 172, 174, 181, 188, 191, 249–258, 267–269, 276 bilateral agreements, 168 biodiversity, 177, 180, 187, 189, 190, 264 black, 105–107, 121, 129, 132, 133, 224, 227, 231, 232, 236, 237 black liberation, 230, 231 Black Panthers, 227, 230 Blasian, 223, 225, 226, 242, 244 Bloom, Kevin, 99, 109, 111–113 Bodhidarma, 45 Bofane, Koli Jean In, 240 Boni, 258, 260, 262, 264 Bose, Subha, 81, 117 Botswana, 32, 91 Brautigam, Deborah, 98, 105, 145 Bredeloup, Silvie, 198–200, 203, 210 BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), 5, 6, 19, 23, 26–28, 30, 31, 33, 36, 69, 148, 159, 188, 276 Britain, 46, 79, 82, 87, 88, 90, 135, 233, 234 Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment Act, 237 brotherhood, 68, 72, 231. See also comrades Brown Berets, 227 Buddhism, 44, 45 Bulawayo, NoViolet, 105, 107

Index

C Cambodia, 172, 173, 181, 251 Cameroon, 170 Cape Noir, 103, 105, 110, 113 Cape Town, 98, 99, 102, 104, 151 Caribbean, 228, 251 Central Asia, 251 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 98, 106, 108 Chan, Stephen, 100, 101, 111, 112 Chile, 236 China, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 26, 28–30, 32, 34, 35, 44, 45, 61–74, 85, 91, 92, 97, 101, 103, 105, 107– 111, 120, 122, 123, 129–131, 142–149, 151, 152, 154, 155, 157–160, 167–174, 178–191, 208, 210–212, 226, 231, 232, 235–239, 241, 243, 249–259, 263, 267, 269 China Communications Construction Company (CCCC), 250, 252, 259, 268, 269 China Development Bank (CDB), 251, 254 China House, 182–184 “China-in-Africa”, 98–102, 104, 105, 107–111, 113 China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), 66, 70, 170, 172 Chinese Exclusion Act (1904), 236 Chittagong, 253 Christian, 45, 80 Christianity, 45 Churchill, Winston, 87 Cicero, 201 citizenship, 118, 149, 234, 237, 239, 240, 257 civil society, 2, 3, 9, 10, 13, 20, 141–143, 145, 148–151, 154, 155, 158–161, 182, 186, 266, 268, 277

  283

Cold Harbour (Black South-Easter), 101, 103 Cold War, 3, 6, 21, 43, 54, 64, 71, 82, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 277 colonialism, 6, 8, 20, 30, 46, 47, 50, 51, 64, 88, 90, 118, 120, 127, 141, 229 Coloured, 102, 224, 225, 229, 230, 236 Commodity Price Index (CPI), 34 Commodore Perry, 42 Commonwealth, 234 Communism, 65, 230 comrades, 68, 232 conditionalities, 7, 66–68, 72 Confucianism, 44, 45, 48, 53 Congo, 7, 83, 88, 208, 212–214, 240 Congo, Inc, 240, 244 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), 185 Coolie, 90 Coolie labor, 227, 235 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), 182, 268 cosmopolitanism, 118, 207 Cost Insurance and Freight (CIF), 84 D Darwin, Charles, 51 De Gama, Vasco, 227 de-industrialisation, 24, 30 democracy, 48, 86, 89, 232 Department of Environmental Affairs (DEA) (South Africa), 180 dependency, 23, 33, 57, 92, 159 development, 2–5, 125, 142, 168, 172, 179 developmental state, 8, 89–91 development assistance, 5, 64, 65, 68

284  Index discrimination, 134, 161, 231, 232, 235, 243 disunity, 29, 226, 233, 243 Dodori, 264 domestication, 44, 47, 48, 50, 53 Dutch East Indian Company, 235 E East Africa, 4, 110, 126, 129, 133, 134, 180, 212, 250, 251, 259 East African literature, 9, 118, 119, 128, 129, 132, 135 Egypt, 64, 80, 151, 154 Enlai, Zhou, 231, 232 environmental cooperation plan, 178, 179 equality, 8–10, 66, 72, 81, 146, 147, 151, 155, 171, 243 Equatorial Guinea, 170 Ethiopia, 50, 53, 64, 229, 254 Europe, 4–6, 21, 28, 47, 65, 72, 73, 80, 126, 127, 198, 241, 243, 251, 267 European Union (EU), 44, 63, 173, 263 exile, 11, 12, 198–204, 207, 215, 217, 218 Export-Import Bank of China (Exim Bank), 251 expulsion (of Asians), 232–234 F Far East, 89, 91, 92 feminism, 142, 145, 146, 154, 161 Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), 62, 63, 73 foreign investment, 29, 61–63, 74, 250 fortune cookie, 107, 108 Forum for China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), 10, 64, 97, 151,

152, 154, 168, 169, 178, 179, 184–187 FOCAC Action Plan, 178, 179 French, Howard, 35, 46, 92, 106, 119, 122, 197, 198, 207, 213, 214, 216 Fukuzawa, Yukichi, 42–45, 49, 50, 57 G Gabon, 170 Gaibazzi, Paulo, 198, 200, 202–204, 209, 211, 212, 215 Gandhi, Mahatma, 81, 82, 87, 91, 93, 230 Gary-Tounkara, Daouda, 197, 198, 200 gender, 5, 142–144, 146, 147, 149, 151, 152, 154–161, 225 gender politics, 10, 142–146, 148, 149, 152, 155, 156, 160, 161 Geopolitical, 71, 97, 100, 101, 105, 107–110, 113, 114, 168, 190, 253, 254 German, 46, 47, 132, 254 Ghana, 33, 58, 72, 83, 89, 142, 205, 206 Ghosh, Amitav, 98–100, 102, 108, 112 Gilroy, Paul, 135 Glissant, Edouard, 127 Global Environmental Institute (GEI), 183 global growth companies, 65, 69, 70, 72 globalisation, 1, 2, 6–9, 61–63, 65, 69, 71, 74, 108, 127, 147, 149, 208, 217, 241, 244, 275, 277 Global South, 2, 9, 70, 98, 100, 102, 104, 106, 113, 119, 121, 123, 127, 145, 147, 226, 228, 241, 243–245, 269, 275, 277, 278. See also South-South

Index

gold, 23, 33, 205, 206, 213, 235 Gramsci, Antonio, 20 Greater China, 70. See also One-China policy Greek, 7, 80 Group Areas Act, 236 Guangzhou, 73, 235, 238, 239 H Halaf al-Barbari, 80 Han Dynasty, 256 Hausa, 206, 212 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC), 25 Hermes Trismegistos, 80 He, Zheng, 64, 99, 227, 258 High Grand Falls dam, 259 Hindu, 80 Hinduism, 87 Hofmeyr, Isabel, 100, 112, 118 Hong Kong, 70, 89, 210, 239 Hongxiang, Huang, 182 hukou, 239 human rights, 7, 71, 73, 99, 146 I identitarian, 87, 90, 91, 93 identity, 4, 44, 56, 82, 87, 93, 118, 119, 128, 132, 134, 136, 218, 223–225, 230, 237, 276, 278 Idris, 80 illegal wildlife trade, 168, 174, 179, 184, 186–188, 190 imaginaries, 2, 4, 8, 11, 13, 132, 249, 255, 256, 276 in-between space, 12 indentured laborers, 228 India, 1, 4–8, 26, 28, 29, 32, 34, 44, 62, 64, 65, 73, 74, 79–87, 89, 91, 93, 120, 128, 129, 132, 133, 173, 251, 253

  285

India-Africa Forum Summit, 86 Indian Ocean, 6, 101, 102, 112, 117, 118, 129, 132, 210, 227, 258 Indonesia, 8, 119, 168, 172, 173, 185, 186, 210–212, 253 industrialists, 237 infrastructure, 5, 7, 12, 25, 31, 32, 47, 62, 64–66, 71, 73, 109, 168, 170–173, 180, 183, 184, 188, 190, 209, 210, 215, 217, 249, 250, 252, 253, 257, 258, 263, 269 intermarriages, 227 internationalism, 136 Iran, 251 Irokawa, Daikichi, 42, 52 Islamic, 80, 262 Israel, 236 ivory, 174, 182, 187 J Japan, 1, 5, 7, 27, 42–58, 62, 65, 229, 241 Jews, 256 Jiabao, Wen, 178 Jinping, Xi, 253, 255, 256 jitsugaku, 7, 43 Jónsson, Gunvor, 198, 204 jooroye, 202 Juba, 259 Jula, 205, 206 K Kahora, Billy, 129–131 Kalenjin, 261 kangaku, 43, 57 Kant, Immanuel, 48 Karakorum Highway, 253 Kenya, 12, 128–131, 179–182, 187, 188, 190, 216, 223, 227, 233, 234, 245, 250, 251, 253, 254, 258, 259, 261–265, 269

286  Index Kenyatta, Uhuru, 251, 261 Kenya Vision 2030, 267 Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), 180 Keqiang, Li, 180 Kibaki, Mwai, 261 Kikuyu, 261, 262 Korea, 1, 5, 44, 124, 131, 245 Kumar, Sanjay, 86 Kumbi, 205 Kunming, 251 Kuwabara, Takeo, 45, 46, 52 Kwani?, 129, 130 L Labour, 23, 25, 33, 100, 102, 104, 108, 120, 182, 207, 229, 235, 277 Lake Turkana, 259 Lambert, Michael C., 198, 200–202 Lamu, 12, 13, 181, 258–268 Lamu-Southern Sudan-Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET), 181, 250, 253, 254, 258–261, 265–268 land-grabbing, 262 land tenure, 260 Laos, 172, 173, 182, 186 Latin, 7 Latin America, 20, 125, 172 Lebanese, 84 Lenin, V.I., 51 liberal, 20, 48, 49, 84, 90, 235 List, Friedrich, 51 locality, 12, 105, 199, 208, 210, 275 Lotus, 119–123, 125, 129 Lotus Literary Prize, 119, 125 Lumumba, Patrice, 88, 89 Luo, 261

M Malaysia, 89, 168, 173, 182, 185, 186, 188, 240, 254 Mamdani, Mahmood, 232–234 Manchuelle, François, 197, 198, 203, 205, 207, 211 Manda Bay, 259 Maoism, 230, 231 Mazrui, Ali A., 41, 42, 47, 51, 52, 56, 119, 242 Meeran, Zinaid, 104 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), 179–181, 184, 186–188, 254 Middle East, 5, 35, 66, 72, 172, 264 migrant, 4, 11, 12, 149, 197–211, 213–218, 235, 238, 239, 276, 277 migration, 11, 12, 118, 156, 158, 197–201, 203, 204, 210, 215, 236, 262, 276, 278 Milton, John, 51 Ming Dynasty, 101, 227, 258 mining, 72, 170, 173, 174, 213, 214, 235, 236 mixed race, 224, 238 Miyazawa, Keiichi, 55 Mkanda channel, 265 mobility, 2, 11, 12, 134, 198, 217, 236, 239, 257, 277 Modi, Narendra, 86 Mombasa, 181, 254, 260, 261 monotheism, 45 Monson, Jamie, 64, 226, 242, 243 mooring, 214, 215 Mozambique, 170, 186 Mui coal basin, 259 Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI), 25

Index

multipolar, 108, 117, 242, 243 Muslims, 8, 80, 206, 239, 262 Mwangi, Evan, 126–128 Myanmar, 172, 173, 183, 184, 188, 251 N Nairobi, 97, 142, 146, 180–182, 223, 254, 259, 260, 263, 266 Nanjing, 232 nationalism, 4, 29, 81, 82, 89, 93, 119, 127, 129, 132, 148, 232, 234 nationalist, 21, 82 national liberation, 231 nativist, 91 nativist identitarian, 87, 88, 93 nativist illiberality, 88–90, 93 Ndau Islands, 265 Nehru, Jawaharlal (Pandit), 81, 82, 231 neo-colonialism, 64, 68, 159, 231 neo-patrimonial, 21, 24, 32 New Delhi, 74, 86 New Development Bank (NDB), 69, 251 Newton, Isaac, 51 New Zealand, 236, 251 Ngugi, Mukoma wa, 119, 127, 129 Nicol, Mike, 101–103 Nigeria, 7, 8, 79–87, 89, 91–93, 131, 132, 170, 212, 268 Nkrumah, Kwame, 58, 89 Non-aligned Movement (NAM), 82, 83, 118, 120, 122 Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs)., 9, 105, 145, 149, 167, 179, 182–184, 186–188, 268 North America, 47

  287

O Occidentalism, 28, 50 Odinga, Raila, 261, 266 Ojike, Mbonu, 82 Omani, 258 One-China policy, 67, 159 Owour, Yvonne, 129 oyatoi gaikokujin, 47 P Pakistan, 251, 253 paradigm shift, 7, 61, 65, 66, 69, 70, 72, 251, 269 pass laws, 235 passport, 209, 212, 217, 234, 239 Pate Island, 260, 265 Persians, 256 Philippines, 168, 173, 185, 189 plastic, 101, 104–110, 113 poaching, 103, 106, 113, 152, 179, 180, 186, 187, 264 policy, 7, 10, 31, 34, 83, 86, 88, 89, 92, 125, 153, 157, 168, 169, 171, 172, 178, 179, 181, 183, 186, 190, 238, 251, 277 political recycling, 54–56 polyculturalism, 228 polytheism, 45 Poplak, Richard, 109, 111–113 Portuguese, 102, 258 Postcolonial, 121 Power Play, 101, 103 pragmatism, 90 Prashad, Vijay, 113, 227–231 pre-colonial, 8, 47, 80 prejudice, 232, 238, 239 Protestant ethic, 47 Protestantism, 46 protests, 183, 188, 231, 232

288  Index R race, 106, 225, 234, 235, 243 racial, 223 raw materials, 20, 65, 79, 92, 109, 169 Red Guard, 227 regiments, 228 Republic of Congo, 170 Rhino horn, 174 rights, 32, 51, 55, 81, 86, 125, 128, 131, 143, 145, 146, 200, 230 roads, 12, 36, 109–114, 170, 173, 250, 251, 265 Rodney, Walter, 23 Roman Empire, 256 Russia, 26, 125, 251, 254 S Sahel, 197, 198, 203–206, 208, 209, 211, 214. See also Sahelian Sahelian, 203, 205, 210, 211, 213, 216, 217 Saigo, Takamori, 55 Sanusi, Mallam Sanusi Lamido, 30 Sanye, 258, 262 scale, 2, 24, 30, 97, 98, 100, 111, 148, 150, 151, 153, 161, 171, 174, 249, 250, 269, 277 Selassie, Haile, 50 “Selling World Power”, 129, 130 Shakespeare, William, 51 Shintoism, 45 Siddis, 132 Silk Road, 110, 256, 257 Silk Road Fund (SRF), 69, 251 Singapore, 89, 91, 185, 251, 254 Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), 65, 69 Smith, Adam, 45, 48, 51

socio-material infrastructure, 209, 212, 215 Sogdians, 256 solidarity, 6, 8, 9, 36, 86, 99, 100, 106, 108, 109, 112, 113, 118, 122, 123, 125–128, 130–133, 135, 159, 161, 217, 228, 229, 231, 232, 237, 242, 243, 262, 277, 278 enchanted solidarity, 119, 121, 125 solidarity movements, 12, 227, 229 Somalia, 258, 260, 262, 264 Soninke, 202, 208, 211–214, 216. See also Soninké Soninké, 214 South Africa, 11, 12, 26, 28, 62, 64, 87, 110, 112, 126, 142–149, 151, 152, 156–161, 170, 179, 181, 186–188, 190, 224, 230, 233, 235–237, 241, 245, 254, 259, 263 South China Sea, 11, 104, 168, 181, 189, 190 Southeast Asia, 10, 168, 169, 171– 174, 179, 182–184, 186–191, 198, 199, 208–214, 235, 251, 253 South Korea, 91, 92, 124 South-South, 3, 5, 9, 11, 35, 36, 68, 83, 118, 120, 127, 143, 152, 156, 158–161, 228, 243, 277 cooperation, 10, 100, 143, 145, 159, 178, 183 solidarity, 8, 10, 28, 122, 141, 143, 160, 161, 276, 277 space, 4, 22, 25, 26, 32, 101, 105, 108, 127, 145, 158, 167, 204, 210, 215, 216, 225, 237, 242, 244, 245, 256, 269 liminal space, 199 space-making, 3, 10, 11

Index

“third spaces”, 12 Stalinism, 82, 123 State Forestry Administration of China, 185 struggle, 13, 81, 86, 87, 91, 103, 118–120, 122–124, 129, 133, 141, 147, 227, 228, 230–232, 235, 240, 268, 277 Suzuki, Shosan, 48 swadeshi, 87 Swahili, 4, 133, 212, 214, 216, 227, 258, 262 swaraj, 87 Syrians, 256 Szentes, Tamás, 22 T Taiwan, 67, 168, 236 Taiwanese, 236, 237 Tana River, 259 Tanuki Ichiban, 104 Tanzania, 64, 112, 132, 133, 171, 188, 212, 216, 234 Taoist philosophical principles, 90 Tazara railway, 64, 112 territory, 79, 189, 210, 217, 278 Thailand, 172, 185, 186, 210–212, 251 The Magic of Saida, 132, 134 things, 29, 32, 49, 55, 58, 65, 68, 90, 101, 105–107, 109, 111, 157, 213, 217, 239 Third World, 26, 27, 84, 99, 230, 232, 255 ties, 4, 8, 30, 31, 36, 82, 127, 143, 149, 153, 155–158, 212, 226, 229, 238, 240, 241, 243–245 Tihanov, Galin, 215, 217 Timera, Mahamet, 197–203, 214–216 Tokugawa, 43

  289

traders, 2, 73, 110, 133, 148, 149, 205, 206, 209, 211, 212, 238, 239, 265 trading posts, 209–211, 217 transcultural, 135, 136, 278 transition, 9, 35, 47, 54, 90, 126, 146, 148 transnationalisation, 1, 9–11, 143, 144, 160, 275, 277 transnationalism, 144 transregionalisation, 1–3, 5, 8–11, 13, 144, 159, 160, 275–279 transregionalism, 2, 4, 10, 228, 276 tunga, 202, 203, 207 Turkey, 65, 251 Turkmen, 256 U Uganda, 12, 124, 126, 188, 233, 234 Ugandan, 126, 232–234, 240 Underdevelopment, 22, 23, 25, 30, 32–34, 57, 92 United Nations Commission on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 62 United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), 19, 30 United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), 258 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 174 United Nations World Women’s Conference, 142 United States (US), 4, 7, 28, 44, 46, 47, 66, 71, 123, 172, 181, 185, 197, 198, 223–225, 230, 231, 233, 244, 245, 263, 267 Urry, John, 103, 209, 212, 215

290  Index V Vassanji, M.G., 126, 129, 132, 134 Vatican, 7 Victimological, 119, 120, 124 Vietnam, 124, 168, 172, 173, 186, 251 W Wagadu, 204–206 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 62, 63 Washington, Myra S., 225, 244 wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ, 120, 122, 126, 128 Watt, James, 45, 51 Weber, Max, 46 West, 27, 28, 43, 48, 62, 64, 68, 70, 72, 79, 80, 92, 102, 106, 108, 111, 113, 127, 226, 244 Western, 12, 51, 57, 67, 69, 88, 99, 242 Westernisation; soft Westernisation, 7, 45, 49, 57 West Indian, 228 Westminster, 82 Westphalia, 47 Whitehouse, Bruce, 198, 200, 202, 207, 208, 210, 214, 216, 218 whites, 87, 88, 112, 228–231, 235–237, 244

whiteness, 242 wildlife, 4, 174, 179, 180, 182, 184–188 Wilks, Ivor, 206 Wizard of the Crow, 129 women’s movements, 142, 143, 146–151, 161 women’s organisations, 10, 143, 145, 149, 150, 153–155, 158, 159 World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 149, 152, 186 Writers‘ association X Xinjiang, 251 Y Yarse, Ivor, 205 Yew, Lee Kuan, 91 yin and yang, 90 Yi, Wang, 180, 251 Yoon, Duncan, 2, 121, 240, 244 Z Zambia, 64, 112, 170, 216, 268 Zimbabwe, 71, 170 zongo, 205, 206