Quick Take: The Changing Role of Africa in Global Politics

It's easy to call the state of continental Africa a mess. There have even been headlines and front-page articles discussing the idea of "giving up on Africa," and that phrase itself has left the lips of friends and acquaintances of mine, spoken casually even. Of course, the implications of such a view are deep and enormously complicated, but sidestepping the logistics of what giving up on an entire portion of the world's people would entail, what remains at the root is a sentiment built upon two truths.

The first is a notion that the non-African world, mostly the West but also China, is essential and inextricably tied to the campaign of "uplifting" Africa's capital and cultural contributions and development, and that despite its intentions is finding mounting difficulty in doing so. This campaign is fueled by several ultimate goals stretching from that of the altruistic (human rights, economic and political independence) to that of self-interest (channeling the wealth of African resources for corporate gain, politicizing regions of Africa in the never-ending culture wars between, say, America and China). Both ends and every shade in between exists in the various ways America, Europe and China has acted upon the people and their factioned civil groups, and it is difficult to discern how these corporate, government and other institutional forces have met their goals and whether or not those goals are shared by the peoples themselves (after all, and like everywhere else on the planet, different groups of different people have contradictory views of an ideal society). But for the purpose of this Quick Take, which may receive amplified attention at a later date for a later post, it is impractical to apply a gaze more critical than this. At any rate, this first notion leads strikingly to the next latent view held in the phrase we're considering...

Which is that, in all of this, to "give up" on Africa in the sense we as laypeople not engaged in African policy think means to disengage from the selection of interferences we have had on their entire system through colonialism and in the modern forms of colonialism, of which there are many. A history of imperialistic expansion by the West into Africa, and by China in more recent times following similar patterns, installed a presence by each of them that has never diminished, to bolster each's respective economies, that in one way or another has affected and impeded the development of African countries on their own terms. And for development to occur on their own terms is problematic for those with investments there. An emergence of Africa based on their longstanding traditions of kinship formation, political structuring, and sociological posturing, like the emergence of the Middle East, in the global economy as well as in global politics, presents to the West and to China an alternative to our understood ways of conducting business and transforming natural resources into capital and individual wealth, and by virtue of our still-active hand in their development has only cost us. This is, in the end, absolutely undeniable and virtually impossible to stop. The only way we can lessen or stop the leaking of our investments is to keep our curious and overprotective hands from their transforming, and burgeoning, population and economies. Enabling their own development of infrastructure, allowing them to utilize communications technologies towards advancing political and civil solidarity (not homogeneity, which is a pitfall for any nation), and halting the grabs by corporations of their natural resources for exportation are ways to "give up" on Africa that will not only help their development, but help provide greater equity between people all over the globe.