It is hypocritical of Western states to be concerned about how China is approaching Africa given their history of exploitative relations with Africa, says Prof. Kwesi Kwaa Prah in this interview with Pambazuka News. Kwaa Prah also argues that its futile for Africans to be pointing fingers at the West or at China. “Africans have to organise their side of the story as best as they can in their own interests,” he says.

Pambazuka News: One of the articles in your forthcoming book deals with the earliest contact between China and Africa. Many people may not be familiar with that history. Could you explain it briefly?

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: It goes back to the early 15th century when the famous Chinese admiral Zheng He made seven epic journeys to various parts of the world including Asia and Africa between 1405 and 1433. During the course of these journeys he visited Africa. This was about 80 years before Columbus so it goes very far back. It is even suggested that some of the maps that Columbus used he borrowed or had antecedence in Chinese global maps of that period.

Pambazuka News: And how did that history progress into China’s relationship with Africa in terms of its engagement with newly independent African states of the 50s and 60s?

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: Well, there is a hiatus, an enormous hiatus, because of the distance and difficulty of communication and the colonial interlude which both China and Africa encountered. China went through a cycle which is not too different from the African cycle in terms of its encounter with the West and colonialism, from the period of the opium wars and the boxer rebellion, the period of about a half century which ended in 1902-03. And then there was the period before China become a republic in 1912; and the era of the warlords post 1912 to the beginnings of the Chinese revolution in the early 20s and then on from the early 20s to 1948 when China, in the words of Mao Tse Tsung, “stood up” in 1949.

Now after that China’s contact with the rest of the world especially Africa and Asia started in earnest. By the time of the Bandung conference in 1955 China’s beginnings of real contact with Africa was in the making and I’m talking about Africa proper, I’m talking about sub-saharan Africa, non-Arab Africa and that is because China’s relations with the Arab world were different and of an earlier period and so and so forth, but contact with Africa proper, black Africa or sub-Saharan Africa, starts in the late 50s in earnest and the rest is history.

Pambazuka News: So that’s a period spanning several hundred years and the question then arises in terms of how that influenced China’s current approach to Africa and policy as outlined in the January policy paper released by the Chinese government.

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: Yes, well, you’ll recall that there was a stage when Zhou Enlai arrived soon after or in the decade of African independence in the 1960s and visited East Africa and made the statement that Africa is “ripe for revolution”. China supported the African liberation movements but also in sharp rivalry with the Soviet Union and so the position China took often was not beyond consideration of its own tussles with the Soviet Union.

By and large China has been consistent in the sense that it has tried to help African states with infrastructure and at fairly low rates. This was particularly the case in the first two decades of independence before the cultural revolution in China itself. China did a lot to build roads and railways, to support African infrastructure and industrial plans, at a point in history when China itself was economically fairly weak.

Pambazuka News: Many have argued that the engagement with Africa in the 1950s and 1960s was more of an ideological outlook towards Africa, but that the current realities in an era of globalisation mean that China’s interest in Africa is solely commercially driven.

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: I wouldn’t put it in such polarised terms that at one pole it is ideological and at the other end of the scale its all economic. I think what one can say is that it was more preponderantly articulated and expressed in ideological terms in the earlier period. It had also economic dimensions but this was hardly pronounced. Now it is distinctly more pronounced as China tries to search for markets and also to search for raw materials, in this period that is.

Pambazuka News: So do you see that as a negative and positive engagement?

Well, I don’t see it in positive or negative terms in the way that lots of people want to discuss the issues at this present time. China wants to pursue policies that are in its best interests and what we have to do in Africa is also to trade and pursue polices that are in our own interests. It’s as simple as that – all states do that.

What I find a bit reprehensible is the tendency of certain Western voices to start making obstructionist [statements] or start raising concerns about China’s attempt to get into the African market because it is a bit hypocritical for Western states to be concerned about how China is approaching Africa when they have had centuries of relations with Africa starting with slavery for centuries and continuing to the present day with exploitation and cheating with subsidies which help the European economic community to ridiculous extents that a cow in the European community gets a subsidy of $2 a day and 60 percent of Africa doesn’t get that. So we ask ourselves what is this concern: It is not real concern, it is jealousy and rivalry about Chinese inroads into Africa.

That is not to excuse the way China is also approaching Africa. China is obviously also approaching Africa from its own interests or as it perceives its interests and some of this interest is not necessary in the interests of Africa. This is something that Africa has to work out. It is futile for Africans to be pointing fingers wether at the West or at China. Africans have to organise their side of the story as best as they can in their own interests.

Pambazuka News: How should Africa go about doing that? What are some of the policy responses that are needed on the African continent?

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: Well, for a start I don’t think Africa really has any chance of doing anything in this present world without unity. That is the bottom line. Africans have to unite. Africans divided as they are have no platform for bargaining with anybody. If Africa was united today it would be a world power, poor as it is, and it would be capable of dealing with China on its own terms or with the West on its own terms. Unity is the basic pre-requisite for African advancement and for Africa to be able to bargain with China or anybody else.

Pambazuka News: One of the articles in your book, authored by yourself, is entitled ‘Nationalism, Revolution and Economic Transformation in China: Any Lessons for Africa?’ What does China’s example offer for Africa?

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: Well, you have to read my book first, that is for a start.

Pambazuka News: Give us a taster?

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: Well, I think one of the things we have to learn is that advancement in our time must be home grown. Africans have to learn to pull themselves up by themselves, one. Two, this process has to be based on their own cultural pre-requisites. It is not possible to develop Africa grounded in languages like English, French or Portuguese or Arabic for that matter. Africans have to realise that the cultural base for development has to be their own. That is not to say they should not learn other languages, no, but they must make their languages the centre of all the development efforts that they make.

Pambazuka News: China has cultural agreements with 42 African countries and 65 cultural exchange programmes in Africa. It has offered scholarships to 10 000 students and seconded more than 400 Chinese professors to African universities. Much of your work has been in the field of language and culture so what would you say are some of the issues raised by China’s cultural involvement in Africa?

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: We still have to see a lot of this you know. These are projected plans, this is what they would want to do and it is very fresh. I don’t think it has left the drawing board yet and I don’t think the implementation is with us as of now. We will have to see. I would see we will have to just wait and see how it pans out and how it is implemented. It is to early day to make announcements about these plans.

Pambazuka News: When is the book due out and where can people get it from?

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: Well, I expect that the book should be out early next year, that is 2007. It should be available through the African Books Collective and bookshops in South Africa and also through the web. If you enter Casas you should be able to get the details.

• Interview conducted by Patrick Burnett, Fahamu

• Prof. Kwesi Kwaa Prah is director of The Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (Casas), which is based in Cape Town. Casas was established in 1997 as a Pan-African centre for creating research networks in Africa and its Diaspora. Professor Kwa Parah is the editor of a forthcoming book Afro-Chinese Relations: Past, Present and the Future. Visit for more information.