Author: Cobus van Staden
Dr. Cobus van Staden is an accomplished scholar, journalist, and think tank analyst with more than 20 years of experience in Africa and Asia. Previously, he was the senior China-Africa researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) in Johannesburg. Cobus completed his Ph.D. in Japanese studies and media studies at the University of Nagoya in Japan in 2008. He focused on comparisons of Chinese and Japanese public diplomacy in Africa during postdoctoral positions at the University of Stellenbosch and the SARCHI Chair on African Diplomacy and Foreign Policy at the University of Johannesburg before joining the Department of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2013. His academic research focused on media coverage of the China-Africa and Japan-Africa relationships, as well as the use of media in public diplomacy in the Global South.
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The Collectivity Question
Is unrelenting grimness more palatable if it is also instructive? Africa's current debt crisis will soon provide an answer. The continent's slide into debt distress due to the COVID-19 pandemic has been very revealing of Africa's position in the world. Despite ...
China, Climate Change and COVID-19 Will Force Africa to Re-Think Its Development Strategy
This week, different groups of experts weighed in on how China will handle its many distressed loans to Africa. They seem to agree that the process of renegotiating this debt will be long and messy, and that Chinese actors probably won't seize ...
StarTimes and DSTV Battle For Audiences in Africa’s Intensely Competitive Pay TV Market
One of the revealing aspects of Africa's pandemic-related downturn is that, while it's causing financial chaos across the continent this doesn't seem to be slowing the outside interest in certain African consumer sectors. Take TV, for example. For a long time, ...
COVID-19’s Unanticipated Outcomes
The recent announcement that Zambia will default on several of its Eurobond notes, and the indication from ratings agencies that several other African countries are in similar danger are just the latest indicators of how the economic crisis kicked off by the pandemic is impacting African economies. ...
Glimpses of Future China-Africa Engagement
For a while, I've been wondering about Chinese peacekeeping in Africa. Specifically, I was wondering where it went as a topic of discussion. A few years ago, every second China-Africa seminar seemed to focus on peacekeeping. Then attention moved to debt, and I assumed that Beijing was ...
The Long Journey to EurAfrica
Recently I've been trying to give my brain a break from marinading in China-Africa issues by reading the biologist Merlin Sheldrake's mind-bending new book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. He points out that scientists in ...
Learning From South Sudan
We recently featured an article in our daily newsletter by South China Morning Post correspondent Jevans Nyabiage about the rapid decline of Africa's oil sales to China. In 2007, China bought about a third of its oil from African countries. Today, this share has shrunk to about ...
Development and the Complications of Tech
Today's news presents a vivid, if sobering, glimpse into the complications of Chinese tech in Africa. The same company - Transsion - is both boosting African startups and allegedly allowing African consumers to be scammed. The discussion about the spread ...
Nigeria’s China Moment
The current anti-Chinese sentiment in Nigeria is a fascinating sign of the times, but I'm a it baffled about what it signals. I don't know enough about Nigerian society to be able to unpack it in detail. However, it seems like a symptom that China's narrative of ...
Nigeria’s Conversation About Chinese Debt
The first thing to say about the ongoing controversy about Chinese loans purportedly compromising Nigerian sovereignty is that it's based on a misreading of standard language found in loan contracts. Rather than stating that, in the case of a default, China will have the right to seize ...
The Country, the People, and the Debt
The news last week that South Africa has received a $4.3 billion loan from the IMF to help tide it over the COVID-19 crisis resulted in a revealing moment online. Rather than celebrating this lifeline to an economy that was already weak before the pandemic, ...
Excuse Me. Who Exactly is Mike Pompeo Referring to When He Talks About “The Free World?”
I'm afraid I've devolved into the kind of person who checks Twitter before even putting on my glasses in the morning. On good days it jolts me out of my lockdown torpor at least long enough to make coffee. On bad days it makes me want to ...