Themes
- China’s changing role in Southern Africa, including historical support for liberation movements, economic development assistance and diplomacy, and China’s contemporary increased investment and activity. Accompanying this have been new forms of cultural and demographic circulation, especially in the southern DRC, Zambia and other Southern African countries where Chinese have settled as well as invested economically, and where Chinese medicine, food, architecture and work practices have now found a sometimes controversial place, as well as Malawi and Tanzania and other countries where thriving Chinese trading communities have developed;
- The Indian Ocean World and Southern Africa, inclusive of Swahili and Arab influences, and Madagascar and India, including shifts in the way India interacted with Africa: first through ancient long distance trade routes, then as a source of migrant labour and business enterprises under British colonialism, then as a non-aligned nation, and now as a more contemporary India, which is ‘competing’ with China economically and in other spheres. Malawi, Tanzania and Mozambique, among others, have been part of India’s cultural and economic sphere for centuries, exchanging ideas, texts and technologies, as well as peoples and commodities;
- Brazil’s relationships with Southern Africa, focusing on its increasing weight in the world economy, including its links with Portugal and the lusophone African countries, with a Portuguese-centred reconsideration of the Southern African region’s pre/colonial history of exploration, missionary activity, trade and colonisation, and decolonisation and war; as well as current religious movements and forms of cultural, economic, political and demographic circulation across the lusophone world;
- Russia, as the most debatable member of the BRICS, still represents a nation with a long history of interaction with Southern Africa, including support for liberation movements, as well as examples of technical cooperation and demographic circulation and networks still active today;
- South Africa and other emerging southern African economies: Angola, Mozambique, Zambia, Botswana, in addition to regional organisations and corporate linkages, especially South Africa’s hegemony over construction and consumer goods in much of the region (think: the ubiquitous South African shopping mall), as well as long-standing white-settler labour issues common throughout the region and further forms of cultural, economic, political and demographic circulation and networks, not neglecting South Africa’s past history of overt/covert attacks on liberation movements in Namibia, Angola, Botswana and other Southern African countries, and today its leading role in constitutional reform, as well as literature and publishing.
