Rethinking Africa’s Agency - Scott Timcke

Cyril Ramophosa's meeting with Donald Trump provides an opportunity to reflect on what Africans can achieve in this churning global order. 

Claims about America’s declining hegemony have become widespread in the 21st century. However, it is notable when the US executive branch repeatedly says it will cease to be a dependable partner in security or commerce. The present administration appears intent on dismantling the international rules-based order, generating significant uncertainty for markets and states alike.

No hegemonic power is poised to take over. Although diversification and de-dollarization are occurring to some extent, the dollar’s position as the primary reserve currency remains secure due to strong network effects. 

Even so, the world may never be the same again. These are some of the initial conditions for thinking about what Africans can and wish to accomplish in the next decade in international governance.

Asserting Africa’s Place in the World

To assert their place in the world, Africans must first develop a good theory to understand the root causes of the multitude of changes reshaping the international system. A random collection of observations or personification cannot substitute for a thorough understanding of perceived problems and responses, as well as their historical and material causes.

For example, some US strategists directly connect China’s trade surplus to its military expansion. They argue that trade surpluses generate substantial revenue that China channels into enhancing its military capabilities and acquiring advanced technologies. 

From the US national security perspective, preventing the financing of a military rival takes precedence over domestic economic concerns, even if this approach necessitates absorbing significant price shocks and their resulting political and economic consequences. While African observers may not agree with that logic, to discount it would be ill advised.

The next challenge for African countries is converting sustained intellectual thought into multidimensional, proactive foreign policy that can advance strategic interests amid this uncertainty. In part this involves actively retiring tired tropes and stale rhetoric; such limited thinking cannot address the current moment. It also requires gaining more knowledge about the world by sponsoring field studies of foreign countries. All good foreign policy is built from good anthropology.

Additionally, Africa must continue to strengthen its continental institutions. While effective high-level consensus-building, planning, and agenda-setting has utility, more important is reasonable coordination to increase continental collective negotiation with trading partners. Without it, African countries risk being picked apart, repeating prior patterns of divide and rule.

Lastly, there is value in Africans committing to a ‘known rules’ international system. Without predictable, consistent frameworks for engagement, meaningful participation becomes more difficult, market making nearly impossible. Obviously power exists. As the adage goes ‘God is too far, and the United States too close’. Nevertheless Africans should not normalize ‘might makes right’. The continent’s terrible experience with imposed hierarchies demonstrates how grave injustices are perpetuated.

Navigating Power

The last chance Africans had a window of opportunity to think at this scale and depth was in the 1950s and 1960s, when its intellectuals debated between choices like decoupling or dependent development by design. Those heated debates took place within Cold War calculations, which more often than not undermined African agency, setting the continent up for its despotic era in the 1980s. All of this is to say that the stakes in this conjuncture are incredibly high.

Even so, it is hard to credibly speak about African agency when so many ‘leaders for life’ occupy center stage. In addition to enforced term limits at all levels of government and public administration, a free civic space for critique and intellectual tempering is a prerequisite for African agency in international fora. Other freedoms are essential too. 

Ultimately, the question of African agency is too important to be left to African agencies alone. What I mean by this is that the source of agency rests with citizens and the people themselves. What are their aspirations? What freedoms do they want to consolidate? What freedoms do they wish to extend? What material conditions are needed to realise these ambitions? African agency emerges not from institutions or political offices, but from the collective voice, determination, and dreams of African peoples themselves, who remain the authors of their continent’s future.