Africa’s move from raw material exports toward mineral value addition: Historical background and implications

Abstract

Abstract

For the last 500 years, the West has mapped Africa as a source of raw materials, disrupted vibrant African value addition, and arrogated itself as the place where industrial revolutions (value addition) happen. This strategy is clearly traceable from the transatlantic slave trade, continuing through European colonialism, to the current critical raw materials (CRMs) framing necessary for its digital and climate tech dominance. African countries have realized that continuing to export materials raw is an unsustainable path of dependency. Emphasis is now on value addition, which is the norm in everyday life, rendered informal, marginal, even illegal under colonialism and never revisited, recentered, and formalized after independence. This article takes minerals as an example of indigenous value addition and how the transatlantic slave trade and colonial rule destroyed it and inserted in its place extractive infrastructures of CRMs export that have remained intact since independence. The last half of the essay switches to Africa’s pivot to value addition, zeroing in on Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as case studies, focusing on chrome, cobalt, and lithium. These minerals constitute the basis for the electric vehicle, smartphone, lithium-ion battery, semiconductor, and other electronic manufacturing to supply the newly created African Continental Free Trade Area, an internal market of 1.3 billion people. The article ends with a discussion of four major challenges to value addition—energy, finance, markets, and skills—and how Africa is meeting and could meet them. The reader is invited to consider the implications of a world order in which Africa is no longer exporting its materials raw, but becomes the center of global manufacturing, adding value to its own materials.

Graphical abstract