The plurality of relations between India and Africa
Through The Rainy Season, Stephen Ellis invites us to look beyond simplistic visions of the African continent and explore its complexity.
This meeting will provide an opportunity to analyse these legacies and interconnections, with contributions from Pooja Jain-Gregoire and Didier Nativel:
• Africa and Asia: rethinking shared heritages and futures based on the work of Stephen Ellis (Pooja Jain-Gregoire)
• Stephen Ellis, an invitation to think about the complexity of historical legacies (Didier Nativel)
Africa is playing a more important role than ever in world affairs. Yet the most common images of Africa in the minds of Westerners remain those of poverty, famine and violent conflict. But while these problems are real, that doesn't mean they always will be. On the contrary, as Stephen Ellis explains in Rainy Season, we need to rethink Africa's place in time if we are to understand it in all its complexity - it is a region where growth and prosperity coexist with failing states. This exciting and accessible book, written by one of Africa's leading scholars, presents the wide range of political, economic and social foundations that make Africa what it is today.
Ellis is careful not to position himself in the futile debate between optimistic Afros and pessimistic Afros. The forty-nine diverse nations that make up sub-Saharan Africa are neither doomed to failure nor doomed to success.
In assessing the challenges of African sovereignty, Ellis is under no illusion that governments will suddenly become more benevolent and less corrupt. Yet he does see great dynamism in recent technological and economic developments. The proliferation of mobile phones has single-handedly bridged previous infrastructure gaps, African retail markets are integrating and the banking sector is expanding. Chinese companies and emerging Western powers are investing more than ever in this still land-rich region, and globalisation offers opportunities for enormous economic change for the growing population of one billion Africans, actively engaged in shaping the future of their continent.
This highly readable study is an indispensable guide to understanding how money, power and development are shaping Africa's future.
Stephen Ellis borrows his title from a poem by Simon Mpondo, who describes how, when the rains arrive in his native Cameroon, causing the maize to bloom, the swallow to migrate and the spider to weave its web, the signs people read in these movements are always ambiguous. Ultimately, the omens offered by nature at the start of the rainy season are uncertain, and tell us more about the season that has just passed than about the one to come.
Poojah Jain-Grégoire, Research Fellow at the Asia Centre. Her research focuses on Indian foreign policy, development partnerships, global governance, climate change and international aid. She teaches international development at Sciences Po Paris.
Didier Nativel is a historian specialising in the urban and cultural history of Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is director of the CESSMA laboratory (Centre d'études en sciences sociales sur les mondes africains, américains et asiatiques), which is supervised by Université Paris Cité, the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement and Inalco, and is professor of African and Indian Ocean history at Université Paris Cité.
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