Introduction

Writing on the cusp of the new millennium, Jean-François Bayart correctly noted that, ‘More than ever, the discourse on Africa’s marginality is a nonsense’ (2000: 267). Understood from the perspective of the longue durée, there has been a continual flow of both ideas and goods between Africa, Europe, Asia, and later the Americas. Africa has never existed apart from world politics but has been unavoidably entangled in the ebb and flow of events and changing configurations of power. This recognition highlights the sterility of attempts to define a rigid relationship between Africa and a somehow separate international system. In practice, Africa cannot enjoy ‘a relationship’ with world politics because ‘Africa is in no sense extraneous to the world’; the two are organically intertwined (Bayart 2000: 234). To start any enquiry from the assumption of Africa’s marginality from world politics thus misses the point; the continent has in fact been dialectically linked, both shaping and being shaped by international processes and structures.