ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the modern period, Africa’s relations with Asia go back many centuries. It discusses Africa’s relations with the three giants of Asia—India, China and Japan—and trace these within the wider context of Afro-Asianism generally. The economic and cultural contacts antedated the establishment of European rule either in Africa or in India. There was trade from very early times between India and the eastern seaboard of Africa, some of it through intermediaries from the Persian or Arabian Gulf. A number of factors helped Gandhism to win converts in Africa. One factor was Christian education, which had made a number of leaders in black Africa already favourably disposed towards strategies of non-violence. Ideologically there were some links between Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-alignment and Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violence. Curiously enough, while the first victims of a nuclear weapon were indeed a yellow people, the Japanese, the first non-white nuclear power was also a yellow nation, the Chinese.
