The New Scramble for Africa: Depopulation, Extraction, and the Fight for Fair Trade

Community Power · Economic Justice · African History & Culture

What “The Scramble” Was and What It Became

The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 divided the African continent among European powers with no input from African peoples. Overnight, arbitrary borders were drawn across kingdoms, ethnic territories, and trade routes that had existed for centuries — borders that persist today and continue to drive the conflicts they were designed to create, by separating peoples who belonged together and forcing together peoples who had distinct political orders.

What followed was a century of extraction: mineral wealth, agricultural land, labor, and bodies — with profits flowing to European capitals while African societies were deliberately kept from industrializing. Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) remains the essential text for understanding that African poverty is not a natural condition but an engineered one.

Formal colonialism ended. The structures it created did not. What scholars call neocolonialism — the continuation of economic extraction through financial mechanisms, trade agreements, and political leverage rather than direct military occupation — is the current form of the same project.

The New Mechanisms of Extraction

Land: Since the 2008 food and financial crises, wealthy nations and sovereign wealth funds have acquired nearly 60 million hectares of African farmland — an area larger than California, with Africa accounting for 70% of global investor demand for agricultural land. Ethiopia, South Sudan, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Democratic Republic of Congo have seen the largest transfers. Often, communities with customary land rights receive no compensation and no legal recognition; their displacement is simply not accounted for in the investment agreements signed by their governments. Customary tenure — land held and stewarded collectively under long-standing community authority rather than individual title — is treated by many of these agreements as if it were unclaimed, even where it has organized food production and settlement for generations.

Debt: African nations collectively owe over $1.1 trillion in external debt, a substantial portion of which was accumulated under structural adjustment conditions imposed by the IMF and World Bank during the 1980s and 1990s — conditions that required privatization of public assets, cuts to social services, and export-oriented agriculture rather than food sovereignty. Those debt treatments took over a decade to resolve, a delay economists point to as a driver of what became known as Africa’s “lost decade” of development. The pattern transferred wealth out of African economies at rates that exceed the foreign aid flowing in, and the debt burden continues to constrain sovereign decision-making on everything from healthcare to climate adaptation.

Trade: African raw materials — cocoa, coffee, lithium, cobalt, gold, coltan — leave the continent at commodity prices set by markets in New York, London, and Chicago. The refining, manufacturing, and branded value creation happen elsewhere. Africa produces roughly 70% of the world’s cocoa yet earns less than 5% of the profits generated across the global chocolate value chain. The gap between what African farmers receive and what consumers pay in wealthy countries represents a permanent, structural transfer of value. That gap is easy to forget in the routine of a daily coffee habit, brewed an ocean away from the farmers whose labor made it possible. Into that same gap, new development partners have stepped forward — China chief among them — reopening the debate over whether China’s growth strategy can save Africa from these same extractive patterns, or simply offer new terms for an old story.

The Depopulation Narrative: Who Is Afraid of African Fertility?

Africa is projected to be home to nearly one in four people on Earth by 2050 — a demographic shift that generates deep anxiety in some Western policy circles. The language of “overpopulation,” “demographic bomb,” and “migration crisis” circulates in Western media and policy debates as if the problem is that there are too many Africans rather than too few resources flowing equitably to African communities.

This framing has a long and ugly history. Malthusian population theory was used to justify colonial non-intervention during famines. Twentieth-century population control programs administered across the Global South — some involving documented coercive sterilization as a tool of population policy — drew significant Western funding under the banner of development aid, a history that continues to inform skepticism of externally designed population programs today.

The Ubuntu framework offers a corrective: every child born is potential. Communities with high birth rates, given access to education, healthcare, land, and self-determination, are communities of abundance — not problems to be managed. The panic about African population growth is inseparable from the panic about losing control over African resources. They are the same fear wearing different clothes.

The African Response: Sovereignty Movements and Fair Trade

Across the continent, communities and governments are naming what is happening and working to change it. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which began formal trading on January 1, 2021 as the world’s largest free trade area by number of member states, is designed to shift the terms of trade — moving value-added manufacturing onto the continent and reducing dependence on extractive commodity exports.

Zambia is a concrete, if costly, example of what confronting this debt architecture actually requires. In November 2020 it became the first African nation to default during the pandemic, missing a $42.5 million Eurobond payment as public debt reached 103.5% of GDP. It took more than three years of negotiation under the G20’s Common Framework before restructuring was implemented and the IMF released the financing needed to stabilize the economy. Debt-for-climate and debt-for-nature swaps, where creditors forgive debt in exchange for environmental commitments, have emerged as one partial remedy; Ghana’s president called for exactly this at COP27. None of this rewrites the underlying architecture, but it is evidence that African governments are actively renegotiating its terms rather than simply absorbing them.

Pan-African solidarity movements are reclaiming the political philosophy of Kwame Nkrumah and Thomas Sankara — both of whom named colonialism’s continuation in economic form and both of whom paid for that clarity with their political lives. Young Africans across the continent are demanding debt cancellation, renegotiation of extraction contracts, and the right to process their own resources before export.

Fair trade certification, while imperfect, has offered individual farming communities a modest premium and greater accountability — one peer-reviewed study of Fairtrade-certified cocoa households in Côte d’Ivoire found a 9% rise in consumption expenditure, higher still for the poorest households, though without a matching gain in food security. But structural fair trade — the kind that changes the terms by which African commodity prices are set and who captures the manufacturing surplus — requires political change, not certification labels.

What this looks like in practice varies by context, but the throughline is consistent: decisions made by the people who live with their consequences. Ubuntu Village’s own solar electrification work in Kenya and Uganda is a small-scale version of the same principle — households and local technicians, not an outside contractor, determine how the infrastructure gets built and maintained, and the partnership is structured so that knowledge and capacity stay in the community after any single project ends. It is not a solution to a trillion-dollar debt burden or a continent-wide land grab. But it is evidence that the alternative to extraction — communities directing their own resources, with partners who follow rather than lead — is not theoretical. It already exists, and it scales the way trust scales: relationship by relationship, not through a single dramatic intervention. That is slower than a headline grant or a foreign-led development scheme, and it produces less to point to in a single annual report. It is also the only version of partnership that leaves a community more capable, rather than more dependent, when the partner eventually leaves.

Ubuntu Village’s work in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria is rooted in understanding communities as the protagonists of their own development. External partnership means following the leadership of African communities — not bringing them into pre-determined programs designed elsewhere. That distinction is the difference between solidarity and charity, between fair trade and extraction with better branding.

“Whose hands grew this? Whose land was used? Whose labor made it possible? And where did the money go? Asking these questions about everything you consume is an act of solidarity — and the first step toward demanding something different.”

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Related Reading

• ‣ Colonialism and Global Health Policy
• ‣ Reparations and Healing: A Public Health Argument
• ‣ Between Healing and Resistance
• ‣ Where Your Support Goes: How Ubuntu Village Puts Partnership into Practice

If this changed how you look at your next cup of coffee or bar of chocolate, share it with someone who still thinks the Scramble ended in 1960.