Author: Cobus van Staden

The recent visit of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Africa came at a time when the US relationship with the continent is decidedly mixed. The wrangles about whether U.S. forces in Africa will be reduced and the political fallout from the administration’s expanded restrictions ...

Overwhelmed by the coronavirus panic, US President Donald Trump’s impeachment folderol, and the chaotic Iowa Democratic caucuses, few took notice of the Trump administration’s announcement that it will expand its controversial 2017 travel restrictions to six more countries, including four in Africa. It is a politically expedient ...

What a snapshot of this moment in foreign policy: as China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi embarks this week on his annual tour of African countries, the Pentagon is publicly disagreeing with U.S. President Trump about exactly which Iranian sites might be targeted ...

One of the reasons the China-Africa relationship is interesting is because even though it keeps expanding into new areas, some of this momentum is also driven by the long history between the two sides. Tracking China-Africa relations is ...

This week saw the launch of the newest phase of Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway (SGR,) connecting the port in Mombasa to the Rift Valley town of Naivasha. The Mombasa-Naivasha section of the SGR cost $1.5 billion. It connects to the initial phase, between Nairobi and Mombasa, ...

In the history of China-Africa relations, 2019 may come to be known as the year of the mobile phone. It was a year when phones took on an outsized commercial and political importance. Selling its Tecno phones in Africa carried Transsion, a relatively ...

This week we interviewed Miriam Driessen for an upcoming episode of the China in Africa Podcast about her fascinating new book Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia. Driessen is an anthropologist and spent years interviewing the Chinese workers employed on massive ...

China’s ambassador to South Africa, Lin Songtian, helmed a characteristically shoot-from-the-hip session at a recent conference on China’s impact on African industrialization at the University of Johannesburg. Lin accused Western countries of misrepresenting Chinese financing to the continent as a trap, continuing: “Sometimes

There’s a real disconnect at TICAD7 this year. This gap isn’t between Japan and Africa. Rather it’s between the experience of being inside TICAD and how it’s represented in the media. The dominant outside narrative is that TICAD is all about China – in

In the future, when we look back on the 2010s, we might well identify it as the decade when tech became irreversibly entangled with geopolitics. It was the decade of Wikileaks, Edward Snowden, and Facebook-driven election interference. It is also the ...