The New Scramble for Africa: China, Russia, and the West in 2026

Africa is no longer a passive recipient of foreign interest — it is the arena where 21st-century great power competition is being decided.

The original Scramble for Africa, formalised at the 1884 Berlin Conference, took less than two decades to partition an entire continent among European powers. Today’s competition is less cartographic but no less consequential. It is being fought across port concessions, military basing agreements, debt instruments, and diplomatic votes in multilateral institutions. The actors have multiplied. The stakes — for Africa’s sovereignty, development, and strategic autonomy — are higher than they have been in generations.

This piece is the first in a 30-day series examining the forces shaping Africa and the world. There is no better place to begin than the question that underlies almost every other: who wants what from Africa, and what are Africans doing about it?

China: Infrastructure as Influence

China’s engagement with Africa over the past two decades has been staggering in scale. Through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its predecessor frameworks, Beijing has financed ports in Djibouti and Tanzania, railways in Ethiopia and Kenya, highways across the continent, and power infrastructure from Nigeria to Zambia. Between 2013 and 2023, Chinese companies signed contracts in Africa worth more than $700 billion under the BRI ^[1]. By 2024, two-way China-Africa trade had surpassed $290 billion, cementing China’s status as the continent’s largest bilateral trading partner ^[2]. At the 2024 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC-9), President Xi Jinping reaffirmed China’s position as Africa’s largest bilateral creditor and announced a fresh resource package of over $50 billion ^[3].

But the story that matters more is the strategic one. China does not build roads in Africa out of altruism. It builds them because infrastructure creates economic dependency, because debt creates diplomatic leverage, and because presence creates influence. The Djibouti naval base — China’s first overseas military installation — is a template, not an anomaly.

None of this makes China simply a villain in Africa’s story. By February 2025, 53 out of 54 African countries had signed BRI memoranda of understanding with China — a figure that reflects genuine demand, not coercion ^[4]. The honest assessment: China has offered genuine infrastructure at genuine cost. African nations collectively went from receiving nearly $30 billion in Chinese loans between 2010 and 2014 to paying out $22 billion between 2020 and 2024 — a swing of $52 billion ^[5]. The question is not whether to engage with China, but how to negotiate terms that serve African development rather than simply Chinese strategic interests.

Russia: The Security Vacuum Play

Russia’s approach to Africa is different in character and ambition. Where China builds, Russia secures — inserting itself into the security vacuums that chronic instability and Western disengagement have created.

Following Wagner’s official withdrawal from Mali on June 6, 2025, Russia’s Ministry of Defense deployed Africa Corps — a fully state-controlled paramilitary force — to continue operations ^[6]. In Mali, Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Sudan, and Libya, Russian-linked forces have traded security provision for mineral access, political influence, and the removal of French and Western military presences.

The substance of what Russia delivers has been far more questionable. RAND Corporation research found that fatalities linked to Islamist groups were at record highs across Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso in the first half of 2024 — even as Africa Corps claimed security gains ^[7]. A 2025 Georgetown Journal of International Affairs analysis concluded that Russia helps juntas “stay in power and appear strong, but it hasn’t solved the deeper security problems” ^[8]. Security without development is a holding position, not a partnership.

The West: Partnership Rhetoric, Implementation Deficit

The Western engagement with Africa — primarily through the United States, European Union, France, and the United Kingdom — contains genuine goods and genuine contradictions in roughly equal measure.

France’s Françafrique — the system of political, military, and economic patronage that kept former colonies in managed dependency — is only now, under the pressure of popular revolt and coup governments, beginning to unravel. The United States has retreated from continent-wide engagement under the current administration, leaving a vacuum that AGOA reviews, aid cuts, and reduced diplomatic attention have widened. The EU continues to pursue trade agreements designed primarily to serve European economic interests, while its migration policies have made African mobility increasingly difficult.

The fundamental Western problem in Africa is a credibility gap. When Western governments condemn Russian interventionism while maintaining their own military bases, or lecture on debt sustainability while their own financial institutions loaded African nations with extractive loans, African publics and governments notice. The soft power that Western democratic governance once carried has been eroded — not primarily by Chinese or Russian messaging, but by Western inconsistency.

Africa’s Leverage: More Than Anyone Admits

Sub-Saharan Africa holds approximately 30 percent of the world’s proven critical mineral reserves — including cobalt, lithium, manganese, platinum, and the rare earths that the global clean energy transition depends on ^[9]. The Democratic Republic of the Congo alone accounts for over 70 percent of global cobalt output and roughly half the world’s proven cobalt reserves ^[10]. Global revenues from copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium are projected to total $16 trillion over the next 25 years; Sub-Saharan Africa stands to capture over $2 trillion of that figure ^[11].

Africa’s population currently stands at roughly 1.55 billion and is projected to reach nearly 2.5 billion by 2050, at which point more than one in four people on Earth will be African ^[12]. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), now operational, creates a single market projected to grow to 1.7 billion people and $6.7 trillion in consumer and business spending by 2030^[13]. And Africa commands 54 votes in the UN General Assembly.

Pan-African agency — the capacity to play competing powers against each other while building genuine regional integration — is not a fantasy. It is a project. And it is, slowly, being built.

What to Watch in 2026

Mineral negotiations. How African governments renegotiate mining contracts — particularly for cobalt in the DRC and lithium in Zimbabwe and Namibia — will signal whether resource sovereignty is rhetoric or reality.

The Sahel stabilisation question. Whether Russia-aligned juntas in Mali and Burkina Faso can deliver meaningful security improvements will test the viability of the Russian model.

AGOA renewal. The terms of AGOA’s renewal will signal US trade intentions toward Africa in a critical bilateral relationship.

AU institutional reform. Whether the African Union can finance itself without donor dependency — particularly through the 0.2% import levy — will determine how seriously we should take continental agency claims.

The new scramble is real. But so is Africa’s capacity to shape its outcome. The story of this competition will be written not only in Beijing, Moscow, and Brussels — but in Abuja, Addis Ababa, Nairobi, and the capitals of a continent that has learned, across centuries of foreign interest, how to survive the attention of great powers. The question now is whether survival is enough — or whether this generation of African leaders will finally convert that attention into genuine transformation.

REFERENCES

[1] China-Global South Project (2024). Five Key Chinese Belt and Road Projects in Africa. https://chinaglobalsouth.com/2024/09/01/five-key-chinese-belt-and-road-projects-in-africa/

[2] World Economic Forum (2024). Understanding Evolving China-Africa Economic Relations. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/06/why-strong-regional-value-chains-will-be-vital-to-the-next-chapter-of-china-and-africas-economic-relationship/

[3] Center for Global Development (2025). Channeling the FOCAC 2024 Financing Pledge. https://www.cgdev.org/publication/channeling-focac-2024-financing-pledge-time-global-turmoil

[4] The Republic Nigeria (2025). Is China’s BRI in Africa a Development Catalyst or Debt Trap?. https://rpublc.com/africa-2/china-belt-and-road-initiative-africa/

[5] Africa Defense Forum (2026). China Ramps Up Debt Collection. https://adf-magazine.com/2026/02/china-ramps-up-debt-collection/

[6] Africanews (2025). Russia Expands Military Footprint in Sahel with Africa Corps. https://www.africanews.com/2025/07/24/russia-expands-military-footprint-in-sahel-with-shift-from-wagner-to-state-controlled-afri/

[7] RAND Corporation (2025). The Wagner Group Is Leaving Mali. But Russian Mercenaries Aren’t Going Anywhere. https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2025/06/the-wagner-group-is-leaving-mali-but-russian-mercenaries.html

[8] Georgetown Journal of International Affairs (2025). Russia in Africa: Private Military Proxies in the Sahel. https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2025/03/24/russia-in-africa-private-military-proxies-in-the-sahel/

[9] IMF (2024). Digging for Opportunity: Harnessing Sub-Saharan Africa’s Wealth in Critical Minerals. https://www.imf.org/en/news/articles/2024/04/29/cf-harnessing-sub-saharan-africas-critical-mineral-wealth

[10] Brookings Institution (2025). Africa’s Strategic Positioning in the Critical Minerals Race. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/africas-strategic-positioning-in-the-global-green-revolution-and-critical-minerals-race/

[11] IMF Regional Economic Outlook – Sub-Saharan Africa (2024). Analytical Note: Critical Minerals. https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/REO/AFR/2024/April/English/MineralsNote.ashx

[12] UNECA (2024). As Africa’s Population Crosses 1.5 Billion, the Demographic Window Is Opening. https://www.uneca.org/stories/(blog)-as-africa%E2%80%99s-population-crosses-1.5-billion,-the-demographic-window-is-opening-getting

[13] World Economic Forum (2024). Understanding Evolving China-Africa Economic Relations [AfCFTA data]. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/06/why-strong-regional-value-chains-will-be-vital-to-the-next-chapter-of-china-and-africas-economic-relationship/