India and China in Africa: Rivalry or catching up?

Abstract

The South-South cooperation has been experiencing a second youth with the deepening of Sino-Africa and Indo-Africa relations. In order to secure an important part of the Black continent’s enormous natural resources, China and India have pledged to build mutual beneficial partnerships with Africa. In the process, both Asian growing economies are infusing the continent with capital, infrastructure and jobs. If the two Asian drivers’ safaris in Africa mark the resurgence of Africa in international affairs after more than a decade of negligence by its traditional Western partners, the emerging South-South partnership being forged by both countries brand themselves as ‘win-win’ as compared to Western countries relationship with Africa. More, the Indian version, while refuting the idea of being engaged in a strategic rivalry with Beijing, stresses even more to distance itself from the Chinese type that is accused to be solely replicating the old colonial paradigm of the scramble of Africa’s raw material resources. This paper assesses the veracity of this assumption by confronting the Indian’s project main features to their Chinese counterpart through a cross-examination of key dimensions of both countries’ African project and highlights significant similarities as well as notable differences between these two approaches. Key words: Rivalry, competition strategic partnership, south-south cooperation, China-Africa, India- Africa.