The Africa-China relationship: challenges and opportunities

The dramatic growth in the relationship between Africa and China is one of the great stories of the twenty-first century, part of the profound transformations taking place in the global political economy. It has been greeted with excitement, consternation, and confusion. To its cheerleaders, it represents the enduring partnership between Africa and China, spawned by the historical affinities of struggles against Western imperialism and humanistic aspirations for development. To its critics, it is reminiscent of European colonisation a century earlier, in which Africa serves as a cheap source of raw materials, a lucrative export market for Chinese manufactured goods, and an outlet for its surplus capital. Rather than a development partner, some see China as Africa's biggest development competitor, whose explosive growth and insatiable quest for global markets threatens Africa's industrialisation and competitiveness. This paper examines the factors behind the development of Africa-China relations, especially its economic magnitude, and the challenges and opportunities it offers both regions.     

The Struggle for Human Rights in Africa

This article seeks to explore the recent changes that have occurred in Africa’s human rights landscape. It argues that struggles for, recognition of, and the practice of human rights have grown and expanded in recent years in the midst of continuing challenges and widespread human rights violations by both state and civil society actors. The complex and contradictory tapestry and trajectory of human rights is analyzed in the shifting contexts of democratization, globalization, regionalization, and militarization, which collectively have structured African political economies since the 1990s. The question of human rights discourse in Africa is also examined by revisiting some of the debates about the generations and hierarchy of rights. Furthermore, the article looks at the role of the state and society in developing or undermining human rights norms.     

Rewriting the African diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic

This essay argues that despite the growing popularity of diasporastudies, our understanding of the African diaspora remains limitedby both the conceptual difficulties of defining what we meanby the diaspora in general, and the African diaspora in particular,and the analytical tendency to privilege the Atlantic, or ratherthe Anglophone, indeed the American branch of the African diaspora.It begins by trying to explore the various conceptions of theAfrican diaspora, foregrounded by a critique of Paul Gilroy'sinfluential text, The Black Atlantic. This is followed by discussionsof what the author considers to be the four dominant dimensionsof the global African diasporas, namely, the intra-Africa, IndianOcean, Mediterranean, and Atlantic diasporas. Finally, the essayexamines the emergence of the new global African diasporas.     

Manufacturing and consuming knowledge

The article examines the problems facing African scholars and publishers, in the context of rapid developments in information technology and a deepening economic gulf between industrialised and Third World countries. Many of these problems, and conventional responses to them from libraries, publishers, and donors, are themselves a legacy of colonial relations, the most significant of which is the deepening dependence on Western forms of knowledge and systems to validate all forms of intellectual activity. Questioning the terms 'information-rich' and 'information-poor', the author stresses the need for Africans to develop the means to generate, value, and disseminate their own forms of knowledge.