In the past two decades, China has emerged as Africa’s biggest bilateral trading partner, its top five foreign direct investors, a significant contributor for development finance, and a contractor for infrastructure finance (Oqubay and Lin 2019). The study of how African agents have negotiated with or (re)defined institutions or entities in this relationship and how agents negotiate or utilize existing power structures to maintain or redefine existing settings has witnessed a surge in the past 20 years. The increase in literature on “African agency” offers not only a deeper understanding of the different ways that African actors use their various spaces of engagement to their advantage; it also has allowed researchers to more effectively locate, unpack, and outline such agency (Chipaike and Bischoff 2018; Chipaike and Bischoff 2019; Chipaike and Knowledge 2018; Chiyemura 2020; Corkin 2013; Cheru and Obi 2010; Gadzala 2015; Kragelund and Carmody 2016; Mohan and Lampert 2012; Mann 2023; Odoom 2019; Otele 2016). However, much of this literature categorizes African agency into general categories, such as state, nonstate, elite, and local agency. Although general categories prove useful for an initial understanding, they are limited in explaining the different ways that agency is carried out by different African actors within the state apparatus or among nonstate actors, their modalities, and their impact. Various actors within these large categories of state and nonstate actors exercise agency differently with different motivations, and they use different repertoires of action.
Folashadé Soulé (Tue,) studied this question.