Seminar: The Dragon Ensnared in the African Jungle? Reflections on the Dark Fallout from the Chinese Presence in Ghana’s Retail Markets and Small-Scale Mines
In the town of Obuasi in the Ashanti Region, which is (in)famous globally for its small- and large-scale gold mining, Chinese miners who were engaged in illegal small-scale mining allegedly shot and killed two Ghanaian nationals. In this same region, which is the heartland of the ancient Asante Kingdom, Ghana’s police reportedly shot and killed a sixteen-year-old Chinese boy from Heilongjiang Province in 2012. The latter event led to a formal diplomatic protest from China directed at the Ghanaian authorities. It followed on the heels of a massive protest earlier in 2012 in the Central Business District of Accra, Ghana’s capital, when shop owners, petty traders and the like expressed their umbrage at the very visible Chinese presence in the retail sector that is legally reserved for Ghanaians.
Given that Ghana has the longest (and one of the strongest) diplomatic ties with China among African countries south of the Sahara, these events demonstrate the turbulent phase that Africa-China relations have entered. This seminar will attempt to offer perspectives on the cause(s), course, nature and emerging effects of these tensions and discuss what policy makers in Africa and China can and should do to dissipate, if not fully contain, this nascent turbulence.
This is an African Today seminar.
Speaker
Lloyd G. Adu Amoah is an assistant professor at Ashesi University College, Berekuso, Ghana and the founder of the think-tank Strategy3 in Accra. He has a PhD from Wuhan University and is fluent in Mandarin. His research interests are multidisciplinary: public policy formation and development in developing polities; Africa-BRICS relations; public administration; and philosophy. His work has appeared in Administrative Theory and Praxis, Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Journal of African Affairs and the Ghana Policy Journal, among others. As a freelance journalist and photographer, he has published on Africa-China relations in the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) Focus on Africa magazine, Jeune Afrique’s The Africa Report, and Third World Network’s African Agenda magazine. Dr Amoah is a fellow of the International Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS), Accra, Ghana, the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) and the African Studies Centre (ASC).
Date, time and location
11 July 2013
15.30 - 17.00
Pieter de la Courtgebouw / Faculty of Social Sciences, Wassenaarseweg 52, 2333 AK Leiden
Room 3A06
Registration
Posted on 29 May 2013, last modified on 31 May 2013