The global rise of China in the post-2000 era and the strengthening of other regional hegemons has seen Africa being courted by various powers for alignment and realignment. Since the birth of the continental body, the African Union has struggled to develop into a formidable union in the form of the European Union or a strong sub-continent economy like India and China.
Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, Pan-African Dreams. Buy the issue here.
Recent developments in global great power politics have come with complex challenges and opportunities for the African continent. The unipolar era of 1991-post 2014 saw Africa being taken as an object of global politics that only waited to be tutored by the global West. The unipolar world refers to the global geopolitical order that dominated the world since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, leaving the US as the single dominant superpower. Previously, from the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Soviet Union, the US and the Soviet Union rivalled each other as the two dominant superpowers in a bi-polar order. The fall of the bi-polar world saw Africa only looking to the West, hence, even the modelling and transformation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to the African Union (AU) followed and in some cases attempted to mimic the European Union (EU) model. Political and economic leaders in Africa only thought that salvation would come from following in the footsteps of the West. The West, however, abused its influence against long-term African interests of sustainable development and peace as shown by supporting destabilizations against leaders seen as unfriendly to the West as was the case with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) invasion of Libya, sanctions on Zimbabwe and proxy war against the Union of Islamic Courts in Somalia. Africa, therefore, became a perpetual land of poverty and strife...
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