Preface and Acknowledgements
This publication project took off in 2018 when some 80 scholars from all around the world convened in Leiden, the Netherlands, to share their research on the variety of encounters taking place on African soil as a consequence of flows of people, goods, and investments towards Africa, which have greatly increased and diversified over recent decades. We discussed new actors and developments and the historicity of many current linkages between Africa and the rest of the world, as well as questions of agency and power in shaping encounters between Africans and others in Africa today. The many interesting case studies presented at the conference and our subsequent lively debates stimulated us to begin preparing an edited volume to capture this current mobility towards Africa, its diverse manifestations, and its consequences.
At that time, we could not have imagined that in the course of this book project the world would drastically change, in the sense that early in 2020 much global mobility came to a sudden standstill with the outbreak of COVID-19. It is clear that this pandemic has influenced global flows towards Africa to a large degree, not least because African countries started quite early on to place restrictions on the arrival of travellers from Europe and other severely affected regions of the world.1
At this moment, it is rather difficult to see what COVID-19 has meant to, for instance, actual global economic activity in Africa. Among other important questions are the following: What are the consequences of the reduced flow of remittances back home now that many Africans in the diaspora have lost their jobs as a consequence of anti-COVID-19 measures? Are new and/or intensified long-distance connections between Africans in Africa and the rest of the world evolving now that personal encounters have become difficult? In our academic environment, the increased use of virtual meeting platforms for teaching, workshops, and conferences has made it easier to create a ‘global classroom’ and to have African colleagues at the conference table; however, it is also clear that many Africans have difficulties in accessing affordable and high-quality internet connections, and thus they risk remaining isolated from, and invisible in, such new forms of global encounter. Interestingly, as one of our colleagues pointed out, in Africa the global COVID-19 outbreak has contributed to the further demystification particularly of the former colonising powers, which appear to be unable to effectively deal with the pandemic in their own countries—in this way, supporting ongoing calls among Africans to further delink from Europe and to turn to Asia instead.2 So-called vaccine diplomacy, as currently deployed by China, Russia, and India,3 is an interesting endeavour in this respect; its results will of course depend on whether these global powers are able to live up to their promises—a challenge that is also faced by the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) programme of the World Health Organization.
The foregoing points to the fact that developments related to the pandemic are currently profoundly shaping and re-shaping connections between Africa(ns) and the rest of the world and will most probably continue to do so beyond the acute COVID-19 period. We have been unable to include analysis of these developments in the present volume, but we are convinced that the reflections and methodological approach as laid out in the Introduction, and the many-sided analyses in the subsequent chapters, will be of great value for further research on global encounters in Africa under COVID-19 and beyond.
We would like to thank all the contributors to this volume for their dedication to this project while also having to adapt to living and working under COVID-19 rules and restrictions. Further thanks go to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript. Ruadhan Hayes did an invaluable job in copy-editing the texts, while the editorial teams at the ASCL and Brill further helped in preparing the publication. Thanks also to AEGIS, the African Studies Centre Leiden, the Leiden University Fund, and the AFRASO programme of Goethe University Frankfurt for their financial contributions to the conference ‘Destination Africa: Contemporary Africa as a Global Meeting Point’.
The editors
January 20212