Cover photo: Nigeria, Lagos, September 2025. Street scene at Computer Village in Lagos, a major hub for the mobile phone and electronics trade. ©Taiwo Arifayan
Lagos—At 7:30 a.m., the light rail hums above the gridlock, gliding through the haze of exhaust and early heat. Built by the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) and financed through Chinese loans, the sleek blue carriages slice across a skyline in motion—a symbol of local ambition shaped by foreign hands.
Below, yellow buses strain under the city’s weight; hawkers weave through stalled traffic with trays of bread and fruit. Overhead, billboards for Tecno and Infinix—Chinese brands born in Shenzhen—flash promises of speed, connection, and modernity. In Lagos, progress moves to a rhythm co-written in Beijing—a rhythm that has brought both opportunity and unease, linking prosperity with new forms of dependence and control.
Inside a packed carriage, Damilare Asiwaju, 27, a young banker, scrolls through Boomplay —Africa’s answer to TikTok—on his Huawei phone: “Sometimes I feel like everywhere I turn, it says Made in China,” he says, smiling. “Go to Computer Village—wall-to-wall Chinese phones. Almost every household has one because they are cheaper, and they last.”
He laughs before adding, “Sometimes Nigerian-made products even get sold with a ‘Made in China’ tag—just so people will buy them.”
For Damilare, China is not an abstraction but a presence—tangible, immediate, everywhere. The train he rides, the device in his hand, the skyline beyond his window: each tells a story of cooperation and control.
“There is work, yes,” he says. “Chinese companies hire Nigerians, and that means something in a country where jobs are scarce. But the welfare? The pay? They know people are desperate. They can offer little and still find workers.”
His frustration captures a broader ambivalence shared across the continent. From Nairobi’s expressways to Addis Ababa’s light rail, China’s investments promise transformation— faster transport, stronger connections, and long-awaited infrastructure. For many, these projects bring tangible opportunity, linking cities and creating jobs where none existed. Yet they also carry hidden costs: mounting debts, opaque contracts, and an influence that extends well beyond economics. Critics warn that Africa’s growth, once again, risks being financed on someone else’s terms.
In Lagos, progress moves to a rhythm co-written in Beijing—a rhythm that has brought both opportunity and unease, linking prosperity with new forms of dependence and control.
– Gaia Guatri
Influence and dependency increasingly flow through fiber cables and surveillance networks as much as through cranes and concrete. Across countries such as Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Ethiopia, “Safe City” programs built by Chinese firms like Huawei have integrated monitoring systems and facial-recognition technologies into state infrastructure—tools that connect and control at once; raising fears of shrinking civic space and democratic backsliding.
In Lagos, as in many other capitals across Africa, these tensions play out in daily life. Chinese-built infrastructure and digital platforms do more than move goods and data: they shape how people work, spend, and dream. Analysts note that Huawei and ZTE now anchor much of Nigeria’s telecom infrastructure, expanding affordable digital access while embedding Chinese technology deep into the country’s communication networks. These partnerships, while helping millions connect also created a new kind of dependence—one where connectivity and control coexist. Progress here carries its own price.
Yet within this imbalance, new forms of creativity and self-determination are emerging. Across Africa’s cities, a generation of entrepreneurs, engineers, activists, and digital creators is turning borrowed tools into engines of their own making.
“We use what we have,” Damilare says, glancing at his phone. “If the tools come from China, we still use them our way.”
In the rhythms of Lagos’ morning rush, echoes of an old story return in new form: railways, contracts, and dreams written in someone else’s language, negotiated in someone else’s currency. Yet, within those same spaces—in every deal signed, app downloaded, or paycheck earned—new forms of adaptation and reinvention take root. Africans are not merely responding to globalization; they are rewriting it from within, insisting that progress must also mean participation.
What is unfolding in Lagos is not only the story of Africa’s future but of the world’s. The choices made here—over infrastructure, technology, and labor—will define how globalization is rewritten: who builds it, who profits from it, and who carries its weight.
Beyond the “New Colonialism” Label
In Western headlines, China is often cast as Africa’s new colonizer. The phrase lands heavy, evoking ghosts of empire—and fears of debt traps, exploitation, and lost sovereignty. But behind the rhetoric, the comparison doesn’t quite hold.
Colonialism was conquest: racial domination, territorial control, and the violent dismantling of local economies. European empires ruled through force, plundered resources, and erased agency. China’s engagement looks different. It arrives not with gunboats but with contracts—loans, railways, data centers, industrial parks. The ambitions are strategic, yes, but the methods are transactional, not territorial.
“Calling China’s engagement ‘colonialism’ is analytically wrong—and it trivializes the scale of violence Europeans inflicted under empire,” says Eric Olander, editor of the China–Global South Project.
African scholars and experts have long argued that the colonial metaphor says more about Western guilt than African reality. Alexander Demissie, co-founder of the China Africa Advisory, describes the relationship as one of mutual calculation rather than domination.
“I never subscribed to the idea of calling it neo-colonialism,” he says. “Decision-makers in African countries are not seeing it that way. They see opportunities. This is part of a power shift—African states using China to pursue their own development.”
For many Africans, the issue is less about who holds power than about how that power is used.
“They’re not taking our land with armies,” says Damilare. “They just want to do business, make money, and grow. The question is whether our leaders use it well.”
Carlos Lopes, former head of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, has long argued that China’s presence is not the problem—governance is. Yet governance and foreign influence are rarely distinct forces. China’s model of engagement—built on speed, elite-to-elite negotiations, and opaque financing—often interacts with weak institutions in ways that both exploit and entrench them. Still, Lopes’ point remains vital: Africa’s challenge lies less in dependency itself than in the nature of that dependency. Without strong local vision and coherent industrial strategies, foreign investment risks reinforcing the same extractive model that has kept African economies reliant on raw commodities for decades. In practice, governance and external power feed into one another—and unless African states strengthen accountability and long-term planning in favor of their people, even well-intentioned partnerships risk reproducing the very inequalities they seek to overcome.
Numbers tell a conflicted story. The African Development Bank has warned that opaque, resource-backed loans—common in countries like Angola, Ghana, and the DRC—have deepened debt and strained financial stability; shrinking capacities for investment in health, education, and other essential services. At South Africa’s Institute for Global Dialogue, researchers focused on African diplomacy, governance, and agency. Faith Mabera, amongst others in the Institute, has argued that the real test of such partnerships lies in local capacity: how effectively governments negotiate and how persistently citizens demand accountability.
Such accountability often rises from below. Zambian activists campaign for transparency in mining, while Kenyan protests forced the government to cap railway fares. These movements demonstrate that Africans are not passive recipients of Chinese power: by contesting, negotiating, and resisting, they are shaping the terms of cooperation from the ground up.
Yet the story is not uniform. In Zimbabwe, Farai Maguwu, director of the Centre for Natural Resource Governance, believes his country’s ruling elite “shopped for a new colonial master” when ties with the West collapsed. “There was no illusion—China replaced Britain,” he says. “The problem isn’t China itself, but leaders trading away sovereignty while citizens bear the cost.”
Across the continent, versions of this tension play out in different forms—moments where opportunity meets dependency, and where governance determines which side prevails.
Zimbabwe’s experience highlights how outcomes hinge less on China’s ambitions than on the choices of African governments—i.e. how easily the promise of partnership can slip into patterns of dependency when accountability falters. What’s unfolding across the continent is not a replay of empire but a struggle over autonomy: a tug-of-war between governments seeking capital, citizens demanding accountability, and a global power eager to rewrite the rules of influence. Beneath the headlines lies a web of contested bargains: China providing capital and infrastructure, African leaders deciding how to deploy it, and citizens pushing back when the costs outweigh the benefits. Whether this engagement deepens dependency or drives development depends less on Beijing’s intentions than on the strength of African governance and the power of publics to hold them accountable.
The Scale of the Footprint
To understand what this struggle over autonomy looks like in practice, it helps to trace the scale and texture of China’s growing presence on the ground—the trade flows, investments, and shifting dependencies that shape Africa’s economic and technological future.
Two-way trade between Africa and China reached $295 billion in 2024, cementing Beijing’s role as the continent’s top trading partner for the fifteenth consecutive year. Yet the imbalance remains stark: Africa continues to export raw materials like oil, copper, and cobalt, while importing manufactured goods and technology. The profits and skilled jobs largely stay abroad, leaving African industries struggling to climb global value chains.
This asymmetry is not new. It rests on economic foundations laid during European colonialism, when Africa was integrated into the global economy as a supplier of raw materials and a consumer of finished goods. China’s engagement, while different in form and rhetoric, often operates within that inherited structure, sometimes reproducing its inequalities even as it promises prosperity, hope, and development.
Since the early 2000s, Chinese financing has transformed Africa’s infrastructure: building railways across savannas, ports that link inland mines to global markets, and, increasingly, data centers and renewable energy hubs. The Belt and Road Initiative, once synonymous with mega-projects, is shifting toward what Beijing calls “small is beautiful” investments: digital corridors, logistics parks, and green energy.
“From the early 2000s, China’s engagement was about oil, minerals, and big infrastructure,” notes Sanusha Naidu, senior research fellow at the Institute for Global Dialogue. “Today it has shifted to renewable energy, digital projects, and data connectivity.”
That footprint, however, is uneven. A handful of countries—such as South Africa, Nigeria, Angola, Egypt, and the DRC—dominate China–Africa trade flows. In 2021, the five countries accounted for more than half of all trade between China and the continent.
“It would be naïve to think that all 54 African countries could equally benefit,” says Demissie. Power and profit are distributed as unequally as the roads and ports that connect them—infrastructures built for extraction, not equality, now repurposed for a global economy that still runs on the hierarchies it inherited.
And China itself is far from a single actor. State-owned giants dominate railways and energy projects; private firms like Huawei and Transsion shape the continent’s digital ecosystem, wiring cities and powering millions of smartphones. Meanwhile, thousands of smaller Chinese traders and entrepreneurs run shops, factories, and repair businesses; weaving an informal economy that escapes official statistics. As analyst Priyanka Mogul, Communications Officer of Business & Human Rights Resource Centre notes, “That could change if host governments strengthened disclosure rules for foreign investment.”
For Munashe Masiyiwa, a 25-year-old activist in Harare, this footprint feels more extractive than empowering. Working with Zimbabwe’s Centre for Natural Resource Governance, he has documented how Chinese mining projects displace communities and pollute rivers while political elites profit from kickbacks.
“They exploit weak institutions,” he says. “Corruption is punished in China, but here it’s rewarded—and ordinary people pay the price.”
In Lagos, Damilare sees the same paradox daily. “People trust Chinese goods — but it also shows how dependent we’ve become.” Recently, he visited a friend working at a Chinese truck company and was struck by what he saw—dozens of Nigerian workers side by side with a handful of Chinese engineers. “It’s not like before,” he says, “now most of the workforce is local.”
A decade ago, Chinese workers numbered in the hundreds of thousands across Africa; today, that figure has dropped sharply, with most projects now staffed by Africans. But Damilare’s story points to something larger: China’s footprint in Africa is no longer defined by cranes and concrete, but by code, cables, and connectivity. From fiber networks to payment platforms, Beijing is exporting not just infrastructure but influence—redrawing Africa’s technological map and, with it, the continent’s geopolitical future.
Political and Technological Capital
For Beijing, Africa is more than a marketplace—it’s a political capital. Every summit, handshake, and ribbon-cutting ceremony forms part of a long game for influence: dozens of votes in international institutions and the symbolic weight of being the heart of the world.
As analyst Olander notes, “Africa matters to China not because of what’s in the ground, but because of what it represents.”
This strategy plays out through high-level summits and headline projects that strengthen elite-to-elite ties. Unlike Western aid, often bound by governance or human rights conditions, China’s approach is pragmatic and top-down—less focused on shaping public opinion than on ensuring those in power stay receptive.
“It’s not just about votes in the UN anymore,” says Demissie. “China has to listen to Egypt, to Ethiopia—before it was only South Africa. Now more countries have a voice, and that changes everything.”
Demissie’s insight captures a subtle geopolitical shift. Africa’s role in Beijing’s worldview has outgrown its old image as a bloc of friendly votes. It now lies at the heart of the emerging architecture of global power: BRICS, the African Union’s new seat at the G20, and regional alliances shaping trade and technology. China’s aim is not merely to secure influence, but to cultivate long-term partnerships with governments capable of projecting regional power and legitimacy. By courting countries such as Ethiopia and Egypt, Beijing is building the political foundations of a multipolar order—one rooted in infrastructure, data, and access rather than ideology.
What began as a diplomatic strategy has quietly become a technological one. Huawei now controls around 70 % of Africa’s 4G backbone and leads 5G expansion in more than 30 markets, embedding its systems deep into national networks. On the consumer side, Transsion’s brands—Tecno, itel, and Infinix—hold over 40 % of Africa’s smartphone market, outselling Apple and Samsung combined. And while Chinese fintech platforms like Alipay and WeChat Pay are entering African economies through local partnerships, their reach—still limited but growing—signals Beijing’s ambition to shape not only the tools of communication, but also the standards governing digital exchange.
Among Damilare’s peers, the debate over these changes is constant. “Some [friends] are scared China will one day buy over Nigeria and influence the future of Africa,” he says. “They joke we’ll all be forced to become citizens of China because of the heavy presence here.”
Concerns are not abstract—evidence is present. Chinese surveillance technology has been exported to governments in Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Ethiopia, raising fears of democratic backsliding. In Ethiopia, leaked documents from Geedge Networks in 2023 showed that Chinese experts helped authorities block YouTube and Twitter during nationwide protests. Human Rights Watch has also reported that Huawei and ZTE supplied surveillance tools later used to monitor opposition figures.
“The political stakes are as serious as the technological ones,” warns Munashe.
“When China’s investments collude with elites, they reinforce the same systems of exclusion we’ve been fighting for decades. Without accountability, technology deepens repression instead of dismantling it,” he adds.
His words echo an old story told in a new language—one where foreign capital and local power converge to reproduce dependency under the guise of digital connectivity. Power is no longer bound to territories and militaries; now traveling through code, contracts, and cables.
Transparency, then, becomes the real frontier. Deals negotiated behind closed doors—in ministries, embassies, and corporate boardrooms—shape the lives of millions, yet few citizens ever see their terms. As governments tie infrastructure, data, and resources to Beijing’s orbit, the benefits remain concentrated among elites, while ordinary people are largely left out. Without oversight, Africa’s digital future risks reproducing the same extractive logic it seeks to escape. For Priyanka, this underscores the urgency of implementing “mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence legislation”, to protect communities, demand transparency, and ensure accountability.
Challenges on the Ground
As Africa’s political alliances deepen and its digital foundations harden, the impact of its relationship with China is increasingly visible in cities, workplaces, and homes—but so are the tensions.
“Africa must take ownership of its own development. It cannot outsource it. Governments need to invest in their own negotiators and policymakers—otherwise, concessions turn into losses.”
– Sanusha Naidu
Between 2013 and 2020, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre recorded 679 allegations of human rights abuses linked to Chinese business conduct abroad, many of them in Africa. In its 2023 update, the Centre reported 102 new allegations between 2021 and 2022 in Africa, with the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe among the hardest hit. The sectors most affected—mining, fossil fuels, construction, and agriculture—are the same industries driving Africa’s development, and often, its deepest inequalities.
In Zimbabwe, rights and environmental advocate Maguwu says some Chinese mining operations “look more like they are on the side of organized crime than investment.”
After more than a decade of activity, many companies “have not built even a single kilometer of road or a health facility for nearby communities.” He sees a broader pattern: “They come to take, not to build. Communities are left with dust and poisoned rivers, while elites sign deals that serve their own pockets.”
Munashe echoes the frustration. “Our dams, our land, our water—they are sacrificed. Communities are pushed aside for mining projects, rivers are poisoned, and leaders get richer. This is the everyday cost of Chinese investment when institutions are too weak to defend citizens.”
Such frustrations point to a deeper issue: the weakness, and at times the unwillingness, of the institutions meant to regulate foreign investment. Where governments enforce their own rules, as Ethiopia did by restricting Chinese ownership in retail, backlash has been limited. But in countries that opened their markets fully, such as Zambia or Angola, resentment has deepened. Analysts trace the problem to fragile governance: states that lack the capacity to scrutinize contracts, enforce labor laws, or demand accountability. Deals are struck behind closed doors; watchdogs are underfunded; parliaments sidelined.
Maguwu goes further, accusing local elites of complicity: “They work in partnership with politicians. This is why the government stays silent while atrocities unfold.”
South African analyst Naidu is equally blunt: “Africa must take ownership of its own development. It cannot outsource it. Governments need to invest in their own negotiators and policymakers—otherwise, concessions turn into losses.”
Yet across the continent, resistance is mounting. Zambian activists demand transparency in mining contracts. Kenyan protesters have forced fare caps on a Chinese-built railway. Ugandan civil society groups are challenging hydropower projects. Citizens are not passive; they contest, reshape, and sometimes halt deals. Whether that energy can translate into durable reform remains the real test.
The challenge now is not only about power, but capacity. Without stronger institutions, transparent governance, and a clearer grasp of China’s evolving strategies, African nations risk reproducing old dependencies under new names. Yet the landscape is shifting: younger generations, more informed publics, and regional coalitions are demanding fairer partnerships and greater accountability. The outcome will not hinge on resistance alone, but on whether these demands can evolve into policy, expertise, and vision—shaping a partnership that reflects Africa’s agency as much as China’s ambition.
The Next Chapter
The China-Africa story is not one of simple domination but an emerging case-study for globalization’s future—the critical question being whether human autonomy or capital will have the final say. China-in-Africa may not neatly echo the violence and plunder of European colonialism but it indeed raises concerns about the very spirit and future of the continent nevertheless. Chinese capital has brought visible transformation: new railways, ports, and digital platforms; yet it has also incurred opaque debts, scarred landscapes, and fragile dependencies. With the world’s youngest population, Africa stands at a crossroads: it can turn this engagement into a springboard for renewal or slide deeper into a cycle of extraction and imbalance.
Naidu underscores the demographic tension: “By 2040, Africa will have the youngest population in the world—under 30. Combine that with aging elites clinging to power, and you have a powder keg unless opportunity expands.” Climate change, she warns, will only deepen that divide.
In Zimbabwe, Maguwu offers a different kind of warning: “I don’t want to see a generation that believes leaving the country is an achievement,” he says. “You can’t expect the dying to build the future. The young must be co-authors of the one they want.”
For him, the challenge is not only resisting exploitation but cultivating citizens who can hold power accountable, managing Africa’s wealth for its own people.
Munashe puts it simply: “A nation runs on two things—wisdom from the old and energy from the young.” The danger, he says, is when wisdom hardens into corruption and energy drains into migration. If those forces diverge, the continent’s future will be bartered away. But if they converge, Africa’s partnership with China could become more than dependency—a platform for a self-defined path.
“The real challenge is capacity,” adds Demissie. “If African governments fail to invest in expertise, the relationship will always tilt toward Beijing. But if they build knowledge and negotiate on their own terms, it can become a genuine partnership.”
In Lagos, stuck in evening traffic on a road built by Chinese engineers, Damilare scrolls through his Tecno phone. The city hums with life—vendors shouting, buses inching forward, the skyline lit with promise and exhaustion. “China will shape Nigeria… it already does,” he says quietly.“The question is whether we, young Africans, can help shape that changing future.”
He turns back to the window as the city opens before him, sunlight breaking over the skyline —another day of work ahead, and with it, the possibility of shaping a different future. For Africa’s young generation, the question is no longer whether China will shape their world, but whether they can shape it on their own terms.
Gaia Guatri
Gaia Guatri is an independent photojournalist and documentarian specializing in gender inequality, migration, and social justice, with a background in anthropology and international relations. She reports across Europe, China, and Southeast Asia. She collaborates with global media outlets like The Copenhagen Post, Weave News, and Pangyao Magazine to amplify local voices and bring human-centred stories to international audiences.
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