An Afrocentric critique of China's security concerns in Africa: The cases of Mali and South Sudan

• Author: Makhura Benjamin Rapanyane,Florence R. Sethole
• Published date: 01 August 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2101
• Date: 01 August 2020

ACADEMIC PAPER

An Afrocentric critique of China's security concerns in Africa:

The cases of Mali and South Sudan

Makhura Benjamin Rapanyane | Florence R. Sethole

School of Social Sciences, University of

Limpopo, Polokwane, South Africa

Correspondence

Makhura Benjamin Rapanyane, School of

Social Sciences, University of Limpopo,

Polokwane, Limpopo, South Africa.

Email: makhurabenjamin2@gmail.com

China's security concerns in Africa has recently become a subject of much aca-

demic debate. Most of the academic studies on this subject have wrongly

assumed a continental standpoint, which does not take into contemplation the

distinctive national captivates of China toward each distinctive African State.

Such analytic discourse analysis were also heavily subjected to North [ern] angled

perspectives as expressed in either liberal or realist contextual lens, views, and

critics. Despite this, the Scholarly discourse on the security concerns of China

towards Mali and South Sudan have not been proportionately apprehended.

Based on the alternative Afrocentric perspective, this article seeks to employ Mali

and South Sudan as test cases to critique the Security Concerns of China toward

Mali and South Sudan. The central argument of this article is that, China's Secu-

rity Concerns towards Mali and South Sudan can best be understood when

located within the context of mineral resources complex. Methodologically, this

article is based on document review and interdisciplinary discourse analysis in

their comprehensive form.

1|INTRODUCTION

This article uses document analysis and Afrocentricity in order to

analyze China's security concerns towards Africa: cases of South

Sudan and Mali. This article analyses the Asian tiger (China)'s engage-

ment with both South Sudan and Mali in the context of the security

affairs. It is informative to note that this article relies on the facts

that China in the last decade has been involving herself in the secu-

rity affairs of Africa leading to a conclusive remark that the Asian

tiger has moved away from its police stance of non-intervention in

the internal affairs of other states (Smith, 2014). Of the significant

mainstream literature visited are Seyek (2013), The Newsroom

(2013), and Esterhuyse and Kane (2014) which argue that China's

involvement in the security affairs of the African civil war engulfed

countries is led by material gains in the form of acquiring both South

Sudan and Mali's natural resources. This article therefore seeks to

bring forth an alternative theoretical lens to analyze China's interna-

tional relations with South Sudan and Mali in order to advance an

Afrocentric perspective in the quest for DE colonial political thought

on the subject matter.

1.1 |Contextualizing the role of Afrocentricity

This article is ground rooted on Afrocentricity as the alternative lens bet-

ter espoused by Asante (1990, 2003). The option of Afrocentricity as the

alternative contextual theory for this article was enlightened by its func-

tional and cognitive elements. This theory seeks to locate the people of

the Africa and furnish them with grounding, orientation, and perspective

which does away with dislocating them and moving them to the margins

of knowledge production (Asante, 1990). Asante (2003) advocates that

the theory seeks to ensure that African people secure a center in knowl-

edge production and do away with viewing their culture and experiences

using Eurocentric perspectives and/conventional theories of Liberalism,

Marxism, Idealism, and Realism. Therefore, in a quest of breaking up the

dominance of Euro-American views dominated by Euro-American value

systems in knowledge production, this article introduces Afrocentricity

to decamp the hegemonized knowledge structure of international politi-

cal economy (Maserumule, 2015). Asante (1990, p. 172) argues that

Afrocentricity is “the study of ideas and events from the standpoint of

Africans as the key players rather than victims.”Therefore, in contextual-

izing this article using Afrocentricity, the authors of this article analyzed

Received: 8 May 2019 Revised: 20 June 2019 Accepted: 19 February 2020

DOI: 10.1002/pa.2101

J Public Affairs. 2020;20:e2101. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 1of8

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2101