For decades, African leaders, from Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah to Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, made a simple argument to Europe and the industrialized world: No continent can sustainably develop while serving mainly as a supplier of raw materials and a consumer of finished goods.
That argument was long dismissed as ideological nostalgia from the independence era. African calls for beneficiation, industrialization, and value addition were portrayed as economically naïve or protectionist. The global division of labor, in which Africa exported commodities while richer economies drove manufacturing and technology, was treated as both natural and efficient.
When manufacturing shifted from Europe and North America to Asia, many African policymakers hoped industrial activity might finally expand on their continent, too. Instead, the hierarchy largely relocated. Africa continued exporting raw materials while the processing, financing, and technological learning moved elsewhere.
African leaders repeatedly warned that economies exporting low-value commodities while importing expensive manufactured goods would eventually hit structural limits — exposed to commodity cycles, foreign exchange instability, and external dependence. More importantly, such economies fail to build the industrial capabilities that generate lasting national wealth.
Europe had little reason to embrace that critique while it occupied the advantageous end of the system. But China’s industrial rise has changed the geometry of the global economy. Europe now confronts a version of the same vulnerability African states have warned about for generations.
Chinese firms dominate or threaten dominance across industries central to the next industrial era: batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles, refining, rare earth processing, and advanced industrial machinery. Europe now openly worries about deindustrialization, supply-chain fragility, and excessive dependence on external manufacturing ecosystems.
The language emerging from European leaders reflects that anxiety. Speaking in Nairobi last week, French President Emmanuel Macron warned against African ores being extracted on the continent only to be refined elsewhere, arguing that Africa can no longer remain merely a source of resource extraction.
Many Africans will understandably permit themselves a moment of schadenfreude. Europe’s newfound openness to African industrialization is not because dependency suddenly became morally objectionable, but because Europe increasingly fears dependency itself.
Still, schadenfreude is not a development strategy. Europe’s interests may have shifted, but Africa’s task is to ensure this moment produces structural gains rather than another extractive arrangement wrapped in updated rhetoric. The real question is whether African governments can negotiate agreements that allow more value to accrue on African soil.
That means Liberia should not remain simply an exporter of iron ore if pelletization can occur near Buchanan. Guinea should move beyond raw bauxite exports toward alumina refining. Zambia and DR Congo should deepen production beyond copper and cobalt concentrates into battery precursor materials and semi-fabricated products. Cocoa exporters should ship more butter, liquor, and powder rather than raw beans, while Kenyan tea and Ethiopian or Ugandan coffee should leave the continent branded and semi-processed rather than as bulk commodities.
African industrial policy should focus less on immediately replicating East Asian electronics manufacturing and more on steadily climbing value chains already rooted in African comparative advantages.
This does not require autarky or hostility toward either Europe or China. Nor does it require Africa to industrialize in isolation. Every successful industrial region in modern history, from Europe and the United States to East Asia and China, used protectionism, financing, and industrial policy to move up the value chain.
Africa now has leverage it has lacked for decades. Europe needs diversified industrial partnerships and alternative processing ecosystems outside overwhelming Chinese concentration. The entire world needs African minerals.
The real test of Europe’s seriousness is whether it is willing to support the conditions African industrialization requires: lower-cost capital, energy infrastructure, technology transfer, logistics systems, market access, and tolerance for active industrial policy.
The last major reconfiguration of the global economy entrenched Africa’s extractive role. China’s rise may now create the conditions for Africa to finally renegotiate it.
W. Gyude Moore is Liberia’s former minister of public works and currently a distinguished fellow at the Energy for Growth Hub.