A Second ‘Scramble For Africa’ Is Unfolding As Wars Tear Across The Continent

Africa is being pulled deeper into a web of wars and insurgencies just as the United States and China intensify a high-stakes competition for the continent’s minerals, infrastructure and political influence.

Renewed fighting in Ethiopia and South Sudan is adding to existing wars in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and the Sahel. At the same time, Washington and Beijing are backing competing infrastructure and mineral supply-chain projects across the continent, part of a broader competition that researchers have likened to another “scramble for Africa.”

“It is probably net neutral regarding great power competition [between China and the U.S.],” Joshua Meservey, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute specializing in African geopolitics and counterterrorism, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Beijing also requires security and stability for its commercial-first approach, though it has become adept at avoiding expending much diplomatic or military energy in dealing with the conflicts as it leaves that largely to others. The U.S. has fewer infrastructure projects and less trade with Africa so it has fewer vulnerabilities in that regard, but it has security cooperation arrangements all across the continent as well as other equities that are threatened by instability.”

The United States is trying to diversify critical-mineral transportation and supply chains through projects such as the Lobito Corridor, a U.S.-backed rail and infrastructure network designed to move copper and cobalt from Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo through Angola to the Atlantic Ocean, according to the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).

The DFC is providing a $553 million loan to rehabilitate more than 800 miles of railway for the project. It explicitly describes the investment as a way to diversify away from Chinese-controlled economic corridors and says the project could increase rail capacity from 400,000 metric tons annually to 4.6 million.

The United States is scrambling to build alternative mineral supply chains while China already controls many of the world’s critical-material chokepoints. China produced 99% of the world’s gallium, 82% of its natural graphite and tungsten, and 71% of its rare earths in 2024, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Beijing has increasingly used that dominance as leverage, restricting or banning exports of critical minerals including gallium, germanium, graphite, antimony, tungsten and multiple rare earths. The U.S. remained dependent on China for 67% of its consumption of rare-earth compounds and metals, 53% of antimony and 43% of graphite in the latest detailed USGS analysis.

China is advancing a major corridor in the opposite direction through the Tanzania-Zambia Railway, or TAZARA, connecting Zambia’s mineral-producing regions to Tanzania and the Indian Ocean.

TAZARA describes its Chinese-backed revitalization as a $1.4 billion capital investment program, the largest rehabilitation effort in the railway’s history, undertaken with China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, according to the Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority.