Plying her trade selling technology solutions to countries such as Ghana, South African mobile commerce entrepreneur Thabiso Moerane is retracing — in cyberspace — some of the most ancient African trade routes that usually conjure romantic images of camel caravans crossing the Sahara. Today, as countries such as Mauritius and Kenya position themselves as hyper-tech service and creativehubs, intra-African trade and the continent’s trade abroad has moved rapidly to embrace Fifth-Wave innovation.
The most ancient trade routes hugged the Mediterranean coast or followed the course of Africa’s great waterways, in particular the Great Lakes and the Nile, Congo, Niger, Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers. It is commonly held that the Amazigh, the Berbers who are a Maghreb people of mixed Arab, African, Phoenician and Gothic descent, were the first to take camel trains southwards across the wastes of the Sahara, to trade with West African miners for their much-prized gold, copper and salt — though the ancient Egyptians and Nubians probably secured these materials via a more southerly route, abandoned by the 9th Century, that ran from Khargato, west of the Nile via to Takedda (today Azelik in Niger, an important uranium-mining centre) to what is today Gao on the Niger River, and beyond.
Arab sea-traders in their dhows did not venture past the Moroccan coast, but an intrepid Libyan named Hanno the Navigator — after whom a lunar crater is named — was the first to map the west coast of Africa on a remarkable 5th or 6th Century sea voyage with a fleet of 60 ships in attempts to control the “Guinean” gold trade that certainly took him as far as Senegal. {“CE” stands for Common Era, an alternative name for the Christian “Anno Domini”) According to some modern historians this might have been much further, to within sight of the volcano of Mount Cameroon (Hanno likely fudged the details to protect his route from Greek and Roman competitors).
In the ancient souks and oases, barter was dominant well into the Medieval period. Exchange currency was gradually introduced, from the cowrie shells that remained legal tender into the 19th Century in kingdoms as diverse as Mali and Kongo to the wearable manila bronze and copper bracelet money of West Africa, and finally the minted gold coins of the Axumite Empire, which once controlled both coasts of the Red Sea, its currency circulating as far afield as Asia and Europe from 270 CE until the empire’s decline in the 7th Century CE.
Axum traded spices, ivory, ebony and animal shells with Egypt, Greece, Rome and as far away as Persia and India, and imported textiles, precious metal objects, wine and olive oil. Far to the south, the Karanga of Great Zimbabwe, who were traders, sailors and builders of granite cities from 1000 to 1600, traded the gold they fashioned for glass and porcelain from as far away as China.
The smelting of iron — which not only provided superior Iron Age tools but formed the basis of the rise of Medieval African kingdoms using iron and later steel weaponry — may date as early as 3000 BCE (Before Common Era) in Central Africa. If true, that would be centuries ahead of iron-working anywhere else in the world. In addition, north-western Tanzania boasts a site with evidence of the first carbon-steel smelting, dating back 2000 years, while the Xhosa of the Eastern Cape were smelting iron at least a century before the Japanese.
Medieval trading empires
Kingdoms armed with iron and steel enabled control and taxation of Medieval camel trains, bearing gold, salt and increasingly also ivory, incense, kola nuts, indigo dye, kente cloth and other African products, and the counter-trade in Asian silk (from which kente cloth was made), glass, ceramics, precious stones and spices. Today, that great cycle continues, driven by the likes of businessman Perious Mundia whose Zambian company designs smartphones, which are built and sold in China.
The Empire of Wagadu (Ghana, 300 CE — 1100) established control over the gold and salt trade by the use of iron arms. Both might and trade made King Musa I (c. 1280 — c. 1337) of the Malian empire the wealthiest man in history (his inflation-adjusted net worth was about US$400-billion compared to John D. Rockefeller’s US$340-billion).
Trade also transmitted ideas, ideologies and customs, so just as the Amazigh brought the Arabic language, Islamic religion and shariah law to West Africa, so the Axumites brought Christianity and its cultural and legal values inland into Ethiopia.
Pliny the Elder claimed that Hanno had made it all the way around the Cape to Arabia, but this is dubious. When Henry the Navigator of Portugal died in 1460, his fleets had only reached as far as the Canary Islands, and 28 years later, Bartolomeu Dias proved it was possible to round the Cape — yetthe oldest proven chart of the entire African coastline is to be found on a Chinese Ming dynasty map produced in about 1390. The Chinese circumnavigation of the world a century before Magellan brought elephants, ostriches, leopards, giraffe and parrots to China.
When the Portuguese traded with the Empire of Benin in the 12th to 15th Centuries, they acknowledged a sophisticated African polity with a university, a standing army, a dedicated and literate bureaucracy, defensive ramparts that stretched 16 000km — four times longer than the Great Wall of China — and great art such as the 1300CE Yoruba “Ife Sculptures” of that were unsurpassed globally in their skill.
Trade turned brutal with the dawn of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade of the 16thto 19th Centuries that saw European ships trading weapons, ammunition, alcohol, and textiles in exchange for captives taken in inter-kingdom wars or inter-tribal raids. Finally, the terrible advent from 1885 of the Maafa (“Disaster” in Kiswahili), the scramble for Africa, saw the last of the African empires, all but Ethiopia, destroyed, with a British task force burning and looting Benin City of its artworks in 1897. The colonial era did see the building of African railroads, but as their footprint today more than a century later makes plain, they were primarily designed to strip the continent of its raw produce and minerals and ship them straight out of the ports to Europe.
The Africa Rising phenomenon
With the coming of independence for most African states between 1960 and 1975, Africa’s ancient trade routes werereviveda modern form — with Lebanese and Indian descendants of the ancient Phoenicians and Mughals pioneering external trade. But it was the end of the Cold War and the rise of China that in recent years lead traders, investors and economists to applaud the continent that bucked the global economic contraction, with six out of 10 of the top-growing economies in the 2000s being African, and The Economist famously headlining “Africa Rising” in 2011 because of a huge commodities boom that was driven by the long commodities-hungry super-cycle of the Chinese.
But although that boom is now over, World Bank chief economist for Africa, Francisco Ferreira argued at a summit of African finance ministers and central bankers in Washington DC in Aprilthat the Africa Rising phenomenon would outlive the bust: “Africa can successfully find its own path to economic development,” he said, citing the fact that 47 of the 49 Sub-Saharan African countries continued to grow, despite the recession, with four of them growing above 8%.
Ferreira predicted that average growth in Africa would slow to 4%, significantly down from its peak growth rates of 6,4% in 2002–08, basing his view on the steadily shrinking revenues attained by the continent’s major producers of oil, gold and natural gas: the dramatic halving of oil prices since June 2014 is expected to toughen terms of trade for African countries other than the 18 for whom oil is their leading expert earner (together representing 12% of African GDP), because the prices of 36 other commodities — including natural gas, gold, iron ore, coffee, cocoa and rubber — are also linked to the falling oil price.
One positive effect, according to Venter Labuschagne, KPMG Africa’s head of customs and trade, is that all these oil-dependent economies now had a strong incentive to diversify. And the continent today is viewed far more positively than it was a decade ago. In large part the optimism, according to Labuschagne, is driven by high expectations for the imminent establishment of Africa’s answer to the European Union — the Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA), which will embrace 26 countries of Central, East, North and southern Africa, with a combined population of some 625-million people and a GDP of almost $1-trillion.
The new free trade zone is expected to give a boost to intra-African trade and speeding regional integration of transport nodes from point-of-production to point-of-export. Ferreira urged that the winning combination would see regional integration buttressed by progressive government policies harnessing Africa’s population growth by upskilling new urbanites and improving their productivity. The ultimate objective of the TFTA, via infrastructural instruments such as joint transport, power, and ICT planning, is to create a Cape-to-Cairo zone that allows for duty-free passage of goods and services originating in member countries: the visaless passage of business operators across its borders.
Investors have been quick on the uptake, Labuschagne said: “African companies are now, second only to Western Europe, the biggest investor in Africa, accounting for 22% of greenfield investment on the continent. This and recent comments by leaders in the zone suggests that the TFTA will break from IMF and World Bank free-trade orthodoxy by allowing its member states to invest heavily in tariff-shielded manufacturing sectors to ensure that Africa in future beneficiates its raw materials, and so exports more finished goods — unlike West Africa’s ECOWAS, which under its EU trade agreement continues to export mostly raw product. But trade finance would have to be extended to meet the current demand of up to $350-billion.”
By 2012, imports from China totaled $65-billion, overwhelmingly of manufactured goods, then chemicals, then raw materials and machinery, with small amounts of fuel, food and beverages. Exports to China stood at $59-billion, primarily in manufactured goods, followed by machinery and raw materials, then massive shipments of fuel, with a tiny amount of food and beverages.
By 2013, the IMF reported that over the previous decade, “gradual liberalisation of the Chinese economy and unprecedented high growth in China and sub-Saharan African [SSA] economies were accompanied by an average 30% annual growth in trade between China and SSA. Overall, SSA has maintained a slight trade deficit with China, with fewer than half of its countries, notably Angola, the Republic of Congo, the DRC, Zambia, and Equatorial Guinea, having a trade surplus with China.”
In July 2015, the World Economic Forum rated Rwanda the continent’s most efficient and business-friendly government, ranking the small nation seventh world-wide — ahead of Malaysia, Switzerland and Luxemburg — with Mauritius rated 26thglobally and South Africa 32nd. Angolan analyst Paula Roque warned that Chinese investment in the wake of July’s market crash could in future come with “harsher and more intrusive terms” for Africa, but said that the experience so far of economies such as Mozambique’s were success stories, even if those gains in both market and political liberalisation must be assiduously guarded by Africans themselves.
Africa’s special relationship with China
The African Diaspora in China itself has become entrenched. Nothing proves that as clearly as the rise in Afro-Chinese marriages in the special economic zone of Guangzhou, reported last year by The South China Morning Post, covering Nigerian Eman Okonkwo’s wedding to Jennifer Tsang: “In Guangzhou, weddings like this take place every day. There are no official figures on Afro-Chinese marriages, but visit any trading warehouse in the city and you will see scores of mixed-race couples running wholesale shops, their coffee-coloured, hair-braided children racing through the corridors.” One Afro-Chinese youngster, Lou Jing, then 20, caused a sensation in 2009, appearing on a Chinese imitation of American Idols.
A district of Guangzhou settled predominantly by male African migrant workers, nicknamed Little Africa by the Chinese press, is home to as many as 200 000 Africans, mostly Nigerian, Malian and Guinean, but also Angolan, Burkinabé, Somali and others. Their presence increased in the wake of the 1997 Asian economic crisis after Africans abandoned their trading posts in Thailand and Indonesia for the great profits to be made by exporting cut-price Chinese goods back home, contributing to the whopping $198-billion trade peak between China and Africa in 2012.
But it would be a mistake to think all African traders in Guangzhou are hawkers of low-end goods. Professor Adams Bodomo, of Ghana, in a survey for his 2012 book Africans in China found that 40% of migrants had tertiary education. Marsh interviewed AmadouIssa, 34, who had arrived in China in 2004 with only $300 to his name; today, with his Chinese wife, Issa is a wealthy exporter of construction materials back to Africa, lives in a $800 000 apartment in the city’s smartest district, drives a $64 000 car, and boasts about stuffing suitcases with millions of dollars of profit from his sales in Africa.
As in ancient days, Africa’s trade with China brings more than just goods, but also skills and ideas, as evidenced by Senegalese footballer Youssou Ousagna, who relocated to Sichuan in 2005 after being scouted by Chengdu Tiancheng FC (fluent in Mandarin, he too would marry a Chinese wife), or Nigerian Pat Chukwuonye Chike, who moonlights as hip-hop artist Dibaocha Sky, or his compatriot Pastor Daniel Michael-Mbawike, who founded the Pentecostal Royal Victory Church in Hong Kong.
One of the most colourful African characters in Guangzhou is Nigerian Ojukwu Emmanuel, 42, who since arriving in 2007 has built a political profile as elected head of the Nigerian expatriate community and calls himself “the President of Africa in China”. Professor Bodomo argued as early as 2010 that within a century, the Afro-Chinese population would be large enough to demand recognition as an official ethnicity — but Emmanuel, who also married a Chinese woman, is campaigning for such recognition from the authorities now. He knows that back in Africa, where perhaps 1-million Chinese migrants have settled according to University of Johannesburg migration expert Yoon Jung Park — 350 000 of them in South Africa and 259 000 in Angola alone — the expat communities closely watch how China treats the Diaspora of their African host countries.
Although much Chinese business in Africa involves massive mining and infrastructural projects, Ethiopian Emeritus Professor Fantu Cheru of the Nordic Africa Institute notes that many Chinese who immigrate to work on such mega-projects stay on as entrepreneurs. But in addition to the stereotypical traders are creative enterprises such as Chinese Diaspora-owned Majority Entertainment, established in Los Angeles in the late 1990s but relocated to Johannesburg in 2004, which makes films and TV programming for the Chinese mainland market — and in turn these movies of African life drive further interest among adventurous Chinese in migrating to the continent to make their fortunes.
With supertankers, jet aircraft and cybernauts now plying trade routes in place of dhows, cows and dromedaries, with 79% of the 60 000km of the Trans-African Highway now complete, with the Tripartite Free Trade Area almost a reality and regional integration well underway, Africa has come a long way towards repositioning itself no longer as a mere raw materials exporter, but as an efficient transnational zone of manufactured goods, high-end skills and leading-edge ideas.
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