In this interview, Gustavo de Carvalho, program head (acting): African governance and diplomacy, South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), discusses at length aspects of Africa’s developments in the context of shifting geopolitics, its relationships with external countries, and expected roles in the emerging multipolar world. Gustavo de Carvalho further underlines important issues relating to transparency in agreements, financing initiatives, and current development priorities shaping Africa’s future. Here are the interview excerpts:
Is Africa undergoing the “second political re-awakening,” and how would you explain Africans’ perceptions and attitudes toward the emerging multipolar world?
Gustavo de Carvalho: We should be careful not to overstate novelty. African states exercised real agency during the Cold War, too, from Bandung to the Non-Aligned Movement. What has actually shifted is the structure of the international system around the continent. The unipolar moment has faded, the menu of partners has widened, and a generation of policymakers under fifty operates without the inhibitions of either the Cold War or the immediate post-Cold War period. African publics, however, are more pragmatic than multipolar rhetoric assumes. Afrobarometer’s surveys across more than thirty countries consistently show citizens evaluating external partners on tangible outcomes such as infrastructure, jobs, and security, rather than on civilizational narratives. China is generally associated with positive economic influence, the United States retains the strongest pull as a development model, and Russia, despite a louder political profile, registers a smaller and more geographically concentrated footprint. Multipolarity is not a destination Africans are arriving at. It is a working environment that creates more options and more risks at once.
Do you think it is appropriate to use the term “neo-colonialism” referring to activities of foreign players in Africa? By the way, who are the neo-colonizers in your view?
Gustavo de Carvalho: The term has analytical value when used carefully and loses it when deployed selectively against whichever power one wishes to embarrass. Nkrumah’s 1965 formulation was precise: political independence accompanied by continued external control over economic and political life. The honest test is whether contemporary patterns reproduce that asymmetry, irrespective of the capital from which they originate. The structural picture is well documented. Africa still exports primary commodities and imports manufactured goods. Intra-African trade hovers around fifteen per cent of total trade, well below Asian or European levels. African sovereigns pay a measurable risk premium on debt that exceeds what fundamentals alone justify. Applied consistently, the lens directs attention to opaque resource-for-infrastructure contracts, security-for-mineral bargains, debt agreements with confidentiality clauses, and aid architectures that bypass African institutions. That description fits legacy French commercial arrangements in francophone Africa, Chinese mining concessions in the DRC, Russian-linked gold extraction in the Central African Republic and Sudan, Gulf-backed port and farmland deals along the Red Sea, and Western corporate practices that have not always met the standards their governments preach. Naming a single neocolonizer tells us more about the speaker’s politics than about the structure.
How would you interpret current engagement of foreign players in Africa? Do you also think there is geopolitical competition and rivalry among them there?
Gustavo de Carvalho: Competition is real and intensifying, and the proliferation of Africa-plus-one summits is the clearest indicator. Russia has held two summits, in Sochi in 2019 and St. Petersburg in 2023. The EU, Turkey, Japan, India, the United States, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE all host their own variants. Trade figures give a more honest sense of weight than diplomatic theater. China-Africa trade reached around 280 billion dollars in 2023, United States-Africa trade sits in the 60 to 70 billion range, and Russia-Africa trade is roughly 24 billion, heavily concentrated in grain, fertilizer, and arms. Describing the continent as a chessboard, however, understates how African states themselves are shaping these dynamics, sometimes through skillful diversification and sometimes through security bargains that entail longer-term costs. The Sahel illustrates the latter starkly. Between 2020 and 2023, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger expelled French forces, downgraded their relationships with ECOWAS and the UN stabilization mission, and welcomed Russian security contractors. ACLED data shows civilian fatalities from political violence rising rather than falling across the same period. Substituting providers without strengthening domestic institutions does not produce sovereignty. It changes the terms of dependence.
Do you think much depends on African leaders and its people (African solutions to African problems) to work toward long-term, sustainable development?
Gustavo de Carvalho: The principle is correct, and it is regularly weaponized in two unhelpful directions. External actors invoke it to justify withdrawing from responsibilities they continue to hold, particularly over financial flows and arms transfers that pass through their own jurisdictions. Some African leaders invoke it to deflect legitimate scrutiny of governance failings, repression, or corruption. Genuine African agency requires more than rhetoric. The AU’s operating budget remains modest in absolute terms, and external partners still cover a significant share of programmatic activities, which shapes what gets funded. The African Standby Force, conceived in 2003, remains only partially operational more than two decades on. The African Continental Free Trade Area, in force since 2021, has rolled out more slowly than drafters hoped because the political will to lower national barriers lags the speeches. Long-term development depends on African leaders financing more of their own security and development priorities, on publics holding them accountable, and on a clearer-eyed view of what foreign forces can deliver. Whether the actors are Russian-linked contractors in the Sahel and Central African Republic, Western counter-terrorism deployments, or others, external security providers tend to address symptoms while leaving the political and economic drivers of insecurity intact.
Often described as a continent with huge, untapped natural resources and large human capital (1.5 billion), what then specifically do African leaders expect from Europe, China, Russia, and the United States?
Gustavo de Carvalho: Expectations differ across the three relationships, and that differentiation is itself a marker of agency. From China, leaders expect infrastructure financing, sustained commodity demand, and a partnership that does not condition itself on domestic governance reforms. FOCAC commitments have delivered visible results in ports, railways, and power generation, though Beijing itself has shifted toward smaller, more selective lending since around 2018. From Russia, expectations are narrower because the economic footprint is so. Moscow’s offer is political backing in multilateral forums, arms transfers, grain and fertilizer supply, civilian nuclear cooperation in a handful of cases, and security partnerships, including those involving private military formations. The record of those security arrangements in the Central African Republic, Mali, Sudan, and Mozambique deserves a sober assessment on its own terms because the human and political costs are documented and uneven. From the United States, leaders look for market access through instruments such as AGOA, whose post-2025 future has generated significant uncertainty, alongside private capital, technology partnerships, and a posture that treats the continent as more than a counter-terrorism theater. The priorities across all three relationships are essentially the same: transparency in the terms of agreements, arrangements that preserve future policy space, and partnerships that build domestic productive capacity rather than substitute for it. The continent’s leverage in this multipolar moment is real, but it is not permanent. It will be squandered if used to rotate among external dependencies rather than reduce them.
