African nations that have been supplying oil, copper, iron ore and bauxite to feed China’s supercharged growth have suddenly woken from a dream.
China is slowing and trying to shift to a consumer-driven model that will inevitably depend less on African raw materials, and commodity prices are tumbling as a result. Further, some international investors, spooked by the prospect of rising US interest rates, have lost their appetite for emerging markets.
“The past decade has been very benign for Africa,” says Paul Collier, an Oxford economist, “but that’s over.” The period began, he says, with debt relief, before “commodity prices went through the roof”. In the 10 years to 2014, trade between Africa and China increased 20-fold to more than $200bn.