Introduction

Initially, the idea for this book was to answer the question: What is China doing in Africa? During my previous 10 years’ research into China’s economic development (Ciochetto, 2005, 2011, 2014), I had not encountered any mention of Africa but constantly came across articles in the Western media criticising China’s behaviour in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). When I began to investigate China’s presence in this region after 2000, I realised the bigger story was what the West had been doing there for centuries, and especially since 1945. I also came to understand the dynamics of US influence on the policies of the World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) — the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs) — and how detrimental those combined influences have been on SSA. The underlying assumption of the book is that the US dominates the WB and IMF as it does the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and that these multilateral organisations act as US government proxies (Meltzer, 2000; Touissant, 2014). As most Organization for Economic Corporation and Development (OECD) countries and bilateral lenders tend to fall in line with American policies, this group, along with Western multinational corporations and the international financial sector, has been clustered together under the term ‘the Washington Consensus’ (Williamson, 2004)…