This article by Navid Farnia delves into the ongoing struggle for national liberation on the African continent in the context of deepening relations with China and the challenges posed to the western-dominated world order by multipolarity.
By Navid Farnia
On December 29, 2023, South Africa filed a lawsuit against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in which it alleged the Zionist regime was committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. South Africa asserted that Israel’s acts are genocidal in nature because they constitute a systematic effort to annihilate a “substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group.” The lawsuit also accused the Zionists of intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, universities, places of worship, museums, historic monuments, and places where “the sick and wounded are collected.” It highlighted the “close connection” between the genocide and the leveling of civilian infrastructure.
The United States, in response to South Africa’s historic legal initiative, firmly backed the Zionist regime. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken derided South Africa’s genocide charge as “meritless.” In February 2024, moreover, U.S. Congressmembers introduced a bill calling on President Joseph Biden to initiate a comprehensive review of U.S.-South African relations. South Africa, the proposed U.S.-South Africa Bilateral Relations Review Act (H.R. 7256) states, has a history of cooperating with what the U.S. has deemed “malign actors,” including Hamas and Iran. H.R. 7256 adds that South Africa’s deepening ties with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Russian Federation also warrant further scrutiny. According to the bill, the foreign policy actions of South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), have “long ceased to reflect its stated stance of nonalignment, and now directly favor the PRC, the Russian Federation, and Hamas, a known proxy of Iran, and thereby undermine United States national security and foreign policy interests.”
While it remains to be seen whether Congress will pass H.R. 7256, the bill’s content is nonetheless revealing for its commitment to maintaining the white world order. As a sovereign nation, South Africa theoretically has the right to choose with whom it cultivates relations and supports on the international level. U.S. officials however made it a point to excoriate South Africa for confronting colonial domination in Palestine and engaging in a foreign policy that they deem to oppose United States interests. By including China, Russia, and Iran in a document inspired by South Africa’s solidarity with Palestine, U.S. officials registered their hostility to and fear of multipolarity. The bill laments the potential loss of South Africa from the U.S. imperial orbit and implies the need to exact a preemptive punishment against a country that successfully toppled a white minority-ruled apartheid regime three decades ago.[1]
U.S. officials seek to penalize South Africa for exercising autonomy in such a way that challenges the colonial and neocolonial practices of the West. Yet, the congressional bill is historically significant for this very reason. H.R. 7256 explicitly links the active anti-colonial struggle in Palestine with attempts by South Africa to break from neocolonialism in order to practice true self-determination. From the U.S.’s perspective, both forms of anti-imperialist resistance are illegal and sanctionable.
Despite the bill’s racially loaded nature, however, its conclusions are not unfounded. Multipolarity presents a significant challenge to U.S. imperialism in two interrelated ways. First, it effectively means that the United States now has formidable global rivals, particularly China. Second, U.S. officials recognize that Third World states have greater leverage and maneuverability in a multipolar world. China’s blossoming relationship with Africa, a decades-long process, epitomizes how multipolarity empowers both the U.S.’s global rivals and the subjugated states of the Third World. Together, these developments pose an existential crisis for the states that police and benefit from the white world order.
China’s emergence has irrevocably disrupted the colonial and neocolonial models established by Europe and the United States. Having experienced imperialist exploitation itself, China has pursued an “equal partnership based on mutual benefit” with Africa and has supported Africa’s agenda in international forums, explains Siphamandla Zondi.[2] But China’s history alone is not enough to create a different dynamic on the world market. The country’s economic growth in recent decades, coupled with the United States’ stagnation, gave rise to a multipolar order in which Third World countries no longer feel compelled to abide by Western diktats. China’s emergence, Zondi adds, “threatens the very structure of global power as we have known it since the fifteenth century.”[3]
Given their shared histories as victims of imperialist extraction and exploitation, African countries and China have likewise developed a shared history of anti-imperialist struggle and thus, of material interests. China’s relations with African countries continue to exemplify a model committed to mutual development and fair exchange. The mutual prosperity cultivated by projects like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—a global infrastructure development project launched by the Chinese government that now includes more than 150 countries and encompasses over 60 percent of the world’s population—highlight how South-South relations aim to overturn centuries of European and U.S. imperialist domination. In a section of the bill devoted specifically to China, H.R. 7256 conspicuously bemoans South Africa’s participation in the BRI, which has been called “the largest infrastructure and development project in human history.” The Belt and Road Initiative and the development of BRICS, an organization involving several of the most prosperous Third World countries, are among the new multilateral mechanisms that are upending the white world order. BRICS, like the BRI, fosters South-South economic and geopolitical coordination. Washington accordingly deems the BRI and BRICS as threats to U.S. interests, and by extension, to U.S. national security.
The alarm at South Africa’s actions thus embodies a greater fear around the U.S.’s declining influence in the world system. Since the Soviet Union’s collapse, the countries of the Third World had little choice than to engage with the United States, the world’s lone remaining superpower. Those relations reflected a perpetual and growing inequality that brought the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America into increasing debt and dependency. Accelerated economic growth in the United States depended upon crippling underdevelopment and even de-development in the Third World. Yet, China’s rapid economic ascension and increasing global assertiveness has ushered in the demise of unipolarity and as such, presents a major challenge to U.S. imperialism.
Imperialism indeed contains the very contradictions leading to its demise. Imperial domination may have empowered the West at the expense of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, but it also historically led to the convergence of interests in the Third World. Europe and the United States actively facilitated China’s underdevelopment just as they did across the African continent. While European powers met at the Berlin Conference in 1884-1885 to partition Africa, they established “spheres of influence” in China during the early twentieth century. The United States advocated for an “open door policy” in China that was akin to the Congo Free State, a European colonial imposition in Africa. In both the Congo and China, Western powers developed free trade zones to subordinate markets, undermine nascent indigenous industries, and maximize the extraction and export of natural resources through coerced labor.
This model endured even after Europe’s colonial empires collapsed. Africa’s economic subjugation to the West has continued since independence. Many African countries, cash-strapped and unable to engage in substantive nation-building at independence, resorted to procuring conditioned loans from international financial institutions controlled by the West. African countries, as with other countries across the Third World, were forced to implement Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) in exchange for receiving loans from institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The economic reforms stipulated by SAPs aimed to cultivate measures that would attract foreign investment, including devaluation of national currency, public spending cuts on such sectors as education and health care, privatization of previously nationalized industries, economic deregulation, and slashing state subsidies like food and fuel, among other conditions. SAPs entrenched a neocolonial relationship between Africa and the West and have thereby facilitated Africa’s continued underdevelopment. Colonialism, structural adjustment, and the resistance against these processes historically drove Africa and China toward a convergence of interests.[4]
China’s role in Africa departs from the imperialist model set and practiced by the West for centuries. While Western development is rooted in the underdevelopment of Africa and the rest of the world, China has demonstrated a mutually developmentalist relationship with Africa. The Africa-China partnership manifests in multiple economic and sociopolitical collaborations. In a 2000 conference involving African and Chinese delegates, the convening parties established the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). FOCAC calls for mutual nonaggression, noninterference in countries’ internal affairs, and respect for national sovereignty. It also paved the way for the formation of the Belt and Road Initiative. As a global infrastructure development project, the BRI congeals well with African interests. Beyond infrastructure, the BRI can also serve the interests of African countries through industrialization, growth of the energy sector, enhancement of the ocean economy, finance, and in the building of special economic zones. The gains from the BRI in turn compliment Africa’s Agenda 2063, which endeavors to reindustrialize the continental economy, diversify national economies, improve infrastructure and connectivity, and transfer technology and skills development.[5] The mutual development aspirations also filter into broader international arrangements, such as BRICS, which as of 2024, includes the African nations of South Africa, Ethiopia, and Egypt, along with China, Russia, Brazil, India, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. Other African countries, including Algeria and Senegal, have also applied to join BRICS.
China has contributed to socioeconomic development in Africa, which has likewise wrought significant returns for China. Between 2000 and 2020, the Chinese helped build over 100,000 kilometers in roads and railways, 130 medical facilities, over 170 schools, around a thousand bridges, almost a hundred ports, over eight power facilities, and forty-five sports venues. Since 2017, China has imported services from Africa at rate that grows by 20 percent annually, thereby creating almost 400,000 jobs on the continent per year. The Mombasa-Nairobi railway project in Kenya also created almost 50,000 jobs for local communities. As of 2022, China had been Africa’s largest trade partner for fourteen consecutive years, a relationship which benefits both regions.
By contrast, the United States and its European allies continue to exploit Africa in neocolonial relationships defined by one-sidedness, underdevelopment, and militarism. The United States enjoys close relations with Rwanda, which routinely foments instability on the continent, including in Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Rwanda’s destabilizing actions help the West to more cheaply access DRC’s massive mineral reserves.
The Biden government also recently designated Kenya as a “major non-NATO ally” given the latter’s willingness to lead a U.S.-backed military occupation force into Haiti. In effect, the budding U.S.-Kenya relationship directly reflects the latter’s willingness to take on an unpopular invasion of another Third World country. Kenya’s courtship with the United States may however, cause tensions with China over Taiwan since the latter is another “major non-NATO ally” of the United States. Kenyan President William Ruto could adopt the U.S.’s position on Taiwan at the expense of his country’s materially constructive partnership with China. The warming of U.S.-Kenyan relations likewise coincides with President Ruto’s efforts to impose deeply unpopular IMF-directed austerity measures in Kenya. The resulting nationwide protests against the Ruto government signify yet another crack in the neocolonial order. Rwanda and Kenya exemplify how neocolonial stooges in the Third World play a primary role in preserving U.S. and European imperial domination.
For these reasons, the United States and its allies continue in their attempts to disrupt China-Africa relations, which are based on mutual respect for sovereignty and on national, continental, and global development. In late 2023, the governments of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger announced the formation of a new alliance to counteract foreign influence in their territories. This came at the same time that the Nigerien government ousted French troops from the country. Niger has since held talks with China, Russia, and Iran. After catching wind of these talks, the United States sent a delegation to Niger, which houses the largest U.S. drone base in the world. Soon after the visit, Niger announced it would cease all military cooperation with the United States and called on U.S. troops to leave the country. “Niger regrets the intention of the American delegation to deny the sovereign Nigerien people the right to choose their partners and types of partnerships capable of truly helping them fight against terrorism,” said Nigerien government spokesperson Amadou Abdramane. U.S. Representative Mike Rogers later captured the alarm felt by Washington given the changing dynamics in Africa. “At the end of the day, it is critical for the U.S. to have a [military] footprint on the continent,” he said. “Africa is of vital strategic importance to the United States. We can’t let China or Russia become the preferred security or business partner.”
African countries that cultivate stronger ties with China risk upsetting and facing penalties from Western countries. Yet, multipolarity has neutralized the United States and its allies’ ability to coerce Third World countries into compliance. H.R. 7256 demonstrates the panic emanating from Washington, particularly since the bill lumps together South Africa’s relations with an array of the U.S.’s major adversaries, ranging from China and Russia to Iran and Palestine.
U.S. officials understand that the liberation of Palestine is a major marker for the direction of the world order and Africa’s place in it. South Africa’s ICJ case both represents a major stand in the push of the world’s progressive forces and illustrates that the U.S.’s ability to pressure Third World countries into supporting imperialist wars is waning. Kenya’s move in the opposite direction indicates that U.S. imperialism nevertheless persists as a major regressive force that cannot be underestimated. Indeed, both South Africa and Kenya remain contested grounds. South Africa’s recent elections and the decision of the ANC to form a coalition government with the white settler-ruled Democratic Alliance (DA) party signals political and economic regression. The DA has held political power in South Africa’s Western Cape province since 2009. Many party members and leaders have supported increasing the Cape’s autonomy and even pushed for “independence” from South Africa, rather than living under Black majority rule. The ANC’s declining domestic support, rooted in the country’s struggling economy, favors those in Washington who lambasted the ANC for its pro-Palestine position. Conversely, the protests in Kenya signal that the people are fed up with President Ruto and his western-backed neoliberal policies.
The electoral processes in Kenya and South Africa should serve as cautionary tales that show how accommodation to reactionary forces is often self-defeating. Only resistance can inextricably break a country’s shackles from imperialism in all its forms. Kenya, Niger, and Palestine highlight how popular and armed struggles are uncompromising in their efforts to wash away the old structures of power. This reality, along with the emergence of countries like China, have accelerated imperialism’s preexisting crises in dealing with resistance into a multivalent and irreconcilable contradiction. Thus, the global forces of reaction and counterrevolution can try to preserve the white world order, but they are daily demonstrating new failures at the hands of anti-imperialist resistance.
Navid Farnia is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Wayne State University. His research broadly explores the relationship between racial oppression in the United States and U.S. imperialism. He is currently working on a book manuscript, National Liberation in an Imperialist World: Race, Counterrevolution, and the United States, which examines how the United States responded to national liberation movements both within and beyond its borders during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
Featured Photograph: A map of the provinces of South Africa, in Chinese (20 June 2007).
Notes
[1] Notably, the United States and Israel were the last two countries in the world to maintain support for South Africa’s apartheid regime before it collapsed in 1994.
[2] Siphamandla Zondi, “The Rise of China, the Rise of Africa: A Convergence of Emergence and Implications for Africa’s International Diplomacy,” in Africa-China Partnerships and Relations, ed. Kwesi Prah and Vusi Gumede (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2018), 19.
[3] Ibid., 22.
[4] Kwesi Prah and Vusi Gumede, “Introduction,” in Africa-China Partnerships and Relations, ed. Kwesi Prah and Vusi Gumede (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2018), 2.
[5] Anil Sooklal, Thokozani Simelane, and Jaimal Anand, “Introduction,” in Belt and Road Initiative: Alternative Development Path for Africa, ed. Thokozani Simelane and Lavhelesani Managa (Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa, 2018), 3-4.
