{"id":12955,"date":"2014-03-06T04:38:45","date_gmt":"2014-03-06T04:38:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/africa-in-process-of-returning-as-subject-of\/"},"modified":"2014-03-06T04:37:53","modified_gmt":"2014-03-06T04:37:53","slug":"africa-in-process-of-returning-as-subject-of","status":"publish","type":"opinion","link":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/opinion\/africa-in-process-of-returning-as-subject-of\/","title":{"rendered":"Africa in Process of Returning As Subject of History"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/figure>\n

{African slaves working at a sugarcane plantation in USA. African people were first treated by the slave trade as mere commodities, necessary for economic growth elsewhere}<\/p>\n

{{Earlier this month, the trial of Pascal Simbikangwa, accused of complicity in the genocide in Rwanda, in which 800,000 people were killed between April and July 1994, began in Paris.}}<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, mass killings in Africa continue. In South Sudan, Africa\u2019s newest state, massacres of civilians are still taking place, particularly around the city of Bor.<\/p>\n

And French military intervention in the Central African Republic has not put an end to severe inter-communal violence there.<\/p>\n

Yet, paradoxically, even as such episodes continue to occur in Africa, perhaps on a larger scale than anywhere else in the world, the continent has also become a beacon of hope. <\/p>\n

Indeed, the perpetuation of extreme violence contrasts starkly with Africa\u2019s favorable demographic profile, and its economic \u2013 and even political and social \u2013 progress in recent years.<\/p>\n

One way to think about this paradox is in terms of the closing of a four-century-long parenthesis. Since the seventeenth-century, Africa has been mainly an object of history. Its people were first treated by the slave trade as mere commodities, necessary for economic growth elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Then colonial powers carved up the continent artificially and arbitrarily, masking their greed behind noble-sounding goals: theirs was a \u201ccivilizing\u201d mission.<\/p>\n

Later, during the first half of the twentieth century, Africa offered the blood of its inhabitants, and then recourse to its territories, to a European continent in the throes of two world wars. <\/p>\n

And, in the second half of the twentieth century, after a brutal anti-colonial struggle, Africa\u2019s newly independent countries became proxy battlegrounds in the Cold War.<\/p>\n

Today, by contrast, Africa is in the process of returning as a subject of history. With more than one billion inhabitants, representing 18% of the world\u2019s population, Africa is regaining the place it occupied at the beginning of the sixteenth century.<\/p>\n

Then, with 100 million people, it represented 20% of the world\u2019s population. By the middle of the nineteenth century, after more than 200 years of colonialism and slavery, Africa\u2019s population had fallen to 95 million \u2013 just 9% of the world total \u2013 whereas other continents had experienced a large population increase over the same period.<\/p>\n

Economically, Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced a decade of 5-6% average annual GDP growth. In Tanzania, growth this year should be around 7%. <\/p>\n

At a time when the major emerging economies \u2013 with the exception of China \u2013 are facing a sharp slowdown, Africa, with its untapped energy resources and precious raw materials, including rare earth minerals, has naturally become a focus of investors\u2019 attention.<\/p>\n

But, though Africa can be described as the continent of hope, it is unlikely to become the \u201cNew Asia\u201d \u2013 that is, a long-term dynamo of global growth \u2013 for a combination of cultural, political, geopolitical, and perhaps psychological reasons.<\/p>\n

Asia has experienced the historical continuity of great empires. China is the best illustration of this phenomenon. It is a reemerging power, not an emerging one, a decisive factor that explains Chinese confidence.<\/p>\n

Asia\u2019s long history of rivalry and competition among its various powers has also been an important factor in its recent economic success. <\/p>\n

The dynamic of competition and emulation among China, Japan, and South Korea has not existed in peacefully reconciled post-WWII Europe; there is nothing like it in Africa, either.<\/p>\n

Nigeria is not Africa\u2019s equivalent of what China is for Asia. And post-apartheid South Africa, for all its progress, has not fulfilled the expectations placed on it, and remains unlikely to become the continent\u2019s gendarme.<\/p>\n

Colonialism and the slave trade constituted a historical rupture for Africa. Beyond the human toll \u2013 including 10-15 million direct victims \u2013 absolute subjugation begot a unique loss of confidence. <\/p>\n

Who today can name Africa\u2019s great empires and kingdoms? Who knows where the worlds\u2019 gold came from before its discovery in Latin America in the sixteenth century?<\/p>\n

Africa must find the confidence it desperately needs in the way others look at it. The problem is that others are abysmally ignorant about the continent\u2019s pre-colonial past. One may criticize the cynicism of the Chinese, but it is China that has contributed more than any other country to the transformation of Africa\u2019s self-image.<\/p>\n

Today, it is Africans themselves who hold their continent\u2019s future in their hands. And, as Africa returns as a subject, rather than an object, of world history, it appears to embody all the fears and hopes of humanity.<\/p>\n

Everything is there in extreme form: desertification, mass movements of populations, and, yes, genocidal violence \u2013 but also the hope for new forms of economic growth, if not new modes of governance.<\/p>\n

{Author is a professor at L\u2019Institut d\u2019\u00e9tudes politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), is Senior Adviser at The French Institute for International Affairs (IFRI). <\/p>\n

He is currently a visiting professor at King\u2019s College London.<\/p>\n

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2014.
\nwww.project-syndicate.org}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

{African slaves working at a sugarcane plantation in USA. African people were first treated by the slave trade as mere commodities, necessary for economic growth elsewhere} {{Earlier this month, the trial of Pascal Simbikangwa, accused of complicity in the genocide in Rwanda, in which 800,000 people were killed between April and July 1994, began in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2000050756,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"archived_slugs":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[75],"byline":[2308],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-12955","opinion","type-opinion","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinions","tag-homenews","byline-dominique-moisi-phd"],"bylines":[{"id":2308,"name":"Dominique Moisi (PHD)","slug":"dominique-moisi-phd","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null,"twitter_handle":""}],"contributors":[{"id":2308,"name":"Dominique Moisi (PHD)","slug":"dominique-moisi-phd","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null,"twitter_handle":""}],"featured_image":{"id":2000050756,"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton12955.jpg","alt":"","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","width":0,"height":0,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton12955.jpg","width":1,"height":1},"medium":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton12955.jpg","width":1,"height":1},"medium_large":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton12955.jpg","width":1,"height":1},"large":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton12955.jpg","width":1,"height":1},"full":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton12955.jpg","width":0,"height":0}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/opinion\/12955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/opinion"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/opinion"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/opinion\/12955\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2000050756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12955"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=12955"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=12955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}