The New Dark Age

Europe’s Clean Hands Fantasy in the New Scramble for Africa

The article under excavation, “In the new scramble for Africa’s resources, Europe tries to right old wrongs,” published by Politico Europe on November 24, 2025, presents itself as a straightforward piece of international reporting. At its surface level, the article narrates how the European Union—with Ursula von der Leyen as chief spokesperson—is attempting to reposition itself in Africa by modernizing the Lobito Corridor, a railway system first built by Belgium and Portugal to siphon minerals from the interior toward Atlantic export hubs. The reporting frames Europe’s renewed presence on the continent as a morally conscious alternative to China’s expansive footprint, emphasizing “mutual benefits,” “ethical partnerships,” and “value chain development.” It acknowledges African skepticism, cites a few NGO critiques, and suggests that the EU still struggles to turn its lofty promises into grounded change.

But beneath this journalistic scaffolding lies a dense ideological choreography. Politico begins by briefly recalling the colonial origins of the Lobito railway—rubber, ivory, minerals extracted under the boots of Europe’s imperial administrators—only to immediately reframe that same infrastructure as a potential vehicle for European redemption. The colonial railway is reborn as a “model initiative,” cleansed of its past through the application of Brussels’ new moral vocabulary. Europe, we are told, is not returning to Africa to extract but to atone, to “right old wrongs,” to engage in a “reset” with African countries celebrating fifty years of independence. The text performs this pivot quickly, the way a stage magician diverts the audience’s eyes just before the reveal.

Even without drawing on any outside context, the propaganda techniques surface clearly. The first is the moral reframing of continuity. Politico acknowledges history only as a backdrop, a somber prelude that allows Europe to appear enlightened in the present. The same extractive infrastructure is described now as a promising “lifeline” for sustainable development, as if the tracks themselves were not engineered for extraction but for some benevolent future partnership waiting patiently to be discovered. Brussels is cast as a penitent actor, struggling—not with its own long-standing interests—but with the burden of its own righteousness.

The second device is a soft erasure of power. The article speaks in the language of partnership: mutual benefits, shared prosperity, value chains built “together.” Nowhere in the narrative does the reader find clarity on who controls the financing, who sets the standards, who owns the corridors, or who ultimately profits from the movement of cobalt and copper down these rehabilitated colonial tracks. The structural asymmetry between Europe and the African nations it courts dissolves into a fog of technocratic goodwill.

China becomes the foil in this story—not because the article engages seriously with China’s actual role, but because it needs a contrast for Europe’s self-presentation. China “got there first,” securing mining rights “unhindered by historical baggage.” The implication is unsubtle: Europe is the actor encumbered by conscience, China the actor unburdened by morality. Africa here becomes the backdrop against which Europe and China perform a morality play about global leadership. African priorities appear mostly as lines spoken by secondary characters, quoted only to confirm or trouble Europe’s image.

African skepticism is acknowledged, but only in a carefully contained way. When a Congolese advocate states plainly, “I am not naïve, they are coming to make money,” Politico treats the statement not as a central truth but as a quality-control issue for Brussels, a public-relations wrinkle in need of ironing. African critique is thus transformed from a political indictment into a managerial challenge—problems of “perception,” of “implementation,” of “uncertainty,” rather than problems of exploitation or sovereignty.

Throughout the article, the language of extraction is sanitized. Cobalt and copper are framed not as resources whose exploitation has historically generated displacement and violence, but as essential ingredients in the green transition—neutralized commodities necessary for the functioning of Europe’s industries. Words like “supply chains” and “value addition” function as deodorants, masking the sweat and blood that historically accompanied the movement of these minerals across continents.

By the end, Politico’s narrative resolves into a familiar tableau: Europe as the hesitant but ethical suitor, Africa as the receptive terrain, China as the pragmatic rival. The contradictions—between rhetoric and material power, between past and present, between image and interest—are wrapped neatly into a story of European aspiration. What remains unexamined is the core dynamic: the railway still runs in the same direction. The narrative has changed; the structure has not.

The Mineral Lifeline: What Politico Leaves Out About Europe’s Dependence on Africa

To understand what the Politico article is really doing, we have to pull together the hard facts that sit behind its soft language. The piece on the Lobito Corridor tells us that the European Union and the United States are pouring money into a railway linking mineral-rich regions of Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola to the Atlantic port of Lobito, with Brussels signing a €116 million investment package under its Global Gateway program. It describes this as a “model initiative,” a way for Europe to “right old wrongs” and build “mutual benefits” with African partners. It notes that China “got there first” in securing access to African minerals, while the EU and the U.S. are scrambling to catch up. African NGOs are quoted warning that without concrete change on the ground, all this talk of “value addition” may just mean faster trains carrying raw minerals out of the continent.

All of that is true as far as it goes. But it leaves out the scale of the stakes. Africa is not just one more supplier in a global shopping list; it sits at the heart of the material basis of the so-called green and digital transitions. Studies cited by UN and African institutions show that the continent holds about 92 percent of global platinum reserves, 56 percent of cobalt, 54 percent of manganese, and 36 percent of chromium. Africa is also a dominant exporter of these minerals into global markets, feeding the factories that produce batteries, electric vehicles, wind turbines, and high-tech components. Without African cobalt, manganese, and platinum group metals, Europe’s industrial and energy plans simply do not function.

Official EU-related analysis is surprisingly frank about this dependency. The European Council on Foreign Relations notes that the Union is highly dependent on imports for critical raw materials and will “never be self-sufficient”. For several key inputs, Africa is already the main lifeline. The same briefing highlights that around 63 percent of EU aluminium imports come from Guinea, 41 percent of manganese imports from South Africa, and 35 percent of tantalum imports from the DRC. Separate official information shows that South Africa alone supplies a large majority of the EU’s platinum needs. In other words, when Brussels talks about “diversifying away from China,” it is not talking about becoming independent; it is talking about deepening and reorganizing its dependence on African land, resources, and labor.

This is where the Lobito Corridor fits into a larger architecture. The EU’s new Critical Raw Materials Act sets binding targets for 2030: at least 10 percent of the EU’s annual consumption of strategic raw materials should be mined in the EU, at least 15 percent recycled in the EU, and a large share processed domestically, while reliance on any single external supplier is capped. The Commission and its advisers are clear that raw materials for batteries, renewable energy, and defense will continue to come largely from abroad, but they want to control the terms of that dependency—who supplies, under what contracts, through which corridors.

To operationalize this, Brussels has been signing a web of so-called “strategic partnerships” with resource-rich African states. With Zambia and the DRC, it has launched a partnership on sustainable critical raw materials and the green energy value chain that explicitly links to the Lobito Corridor. With Namibia, it has an agreement on raw materials and green hydrogen. With South Africa, it has pledged to support “sustainable value chains” in minerals and metals. Each of these is presented as a win-win, but the structure is constant: the EU positions itself as the guaranteed buyer and standard-setter, while African countries are positioned as secure suppliers to feed Europe’s “economic security” and transition goals.

At the same time, African institutions are putting forward their own plans, which Politico largely brushes past. The African Union’s Africa’s Green Minerals Strategy insists that African countries must move beyond exporting raw ores and concentrates. It calls for building up regional processing, manufacturing, and industrial value chains, and for coordinating policies so that African states are not picked off one by one in bilateral deals. Policy platforms like the Trade and Environmental Sustainability Structured Discussions forum and research centers such as the Africa Policy Research Institute warn explicitly against Africa once again being reduced to “a raw material appendage” of wealthier powers, this time in the name of the green transition.

When you place these documents next to each other, a sharp contradiction emerges. On the African side, the baseline demand is for control over processing and industrialization—who adds value, who sets prices, who owns the plants. On the EU side, the main concern is securing steady flows of critical materials into European and allied supply chains, while shifting some refining to countries of origin to tick the “value addition” box. In many of Brussels’ own analyses of the Critical Raw Materials Act and Global Gateway, Africa is framed first and foremost as a supplier of unprocessed or semi-processed raw materials needed to keep Europe’s green and digital industries running. Civil-society reports from the Global South warn that, without deliberate corrective measures, the CRMA risks locking regions like Africa and Latin America into that supplier role as part of a new “green” division of labor.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. The scramble for African minerals is one front in a broader EU strategy that the Commission and its allies now frame through the language of “resilience.” Analyses of the EU’s strategic foresight and resource policy describe a doctrine that includes securing supply chains, hardening infrastructure, strengthening economic and financial “security,” and ramping up defense cooperation, especially in relation to Africa’s critical minerals. The same logic running through that doctrine—stabilize a shaky order by tightening control over energy, finance, technology, and borders—runs straight into the global minerals game.

In energy, this resilience has already meant replacing one dependency with another. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, EU imports of Russian pipeline gas collapsed. By 2023, International Energy Agency analysis and European data show that the United States became the EU’s single largest LNG supplier, accounting for roughly half of LNG imports, alongside increased pipeline deliveries from Norway and others. In mid-2025, the EU and the Trump administration agreed to a massive deal committing hundreds of billions of dollars to US energy purchases over three years, marketed as a step toward “energy security” and diversification. Europe remains structurally dependent on imported fuel; it has simply changed who it buys from and on what terms.

In finance, resilience has meant turning custody into a weapon. The Belgian-based clearinghouse Euroclear reported around €4.4 billion in 2023 interest income on frozen Russian assets, generating over a billion euro in Belgian tax receipts. EU institutions have decided that profits from such immobilized assets will be used to support Ukraine’s war and reconstruction, effectively transforming frozen reserves into a tributary stream for European policy. Officials and analysts openly discuss this as part of the EU’s “economic security” toolkit. Whatever one thinks of the war, the precedent is clear: access to the EU’s financial infrastructure is now explicitly conditioned on political alignment, and property rights for targeted states are contingent.

In the digital sphere, the gap between rhetoric and reality is just as wide. The Commission speaks of “digital sovereignty,” but parliamentary briefings and market studies show that US cloud giants—Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—control roughly two-thirds to 70 percent of the European cloud market. European providers account for a small and fragmented share. The Commission has launched Digital Markets Act investigations into major cloud providers, but for now the physical infrastructure—servers, data centers, and advanced chips—remains largely in foreign hands. Europe writes rules; others own the backbone.

The security dimension is not an afterthought. Strategic foresight material and related European Parliament research explicitly frame increased defense spending and deeper security integration as pillars of resilience. The EU is being told to arm up, invest in its military-industrial base, and align more tightly with NATO. Minerals, energy corridors, financial channels, and digital infrastructure are all drawn into a single picture in which “economic security” and “hard security” reinforce each other.

When we bring this back to Africa, the pattern sharpens. Brussels accepts that it will remain dependent on imports for energy, raw materials, and cloud infrastructure. Its answer is not to reduce the overall exploitation of resources, but to manage dependence through privileged access: strategic partnerships, Global Gateway corridors, standards and traceability requirements, and financial and security leverage. Africa’s green minerals, like its oil and gas before them, are treated as inputs into Europe’s resilience project—a project designed to stabilize a bloc facing crisis at home and competition abroad.

None of this has gone unnoticed in the Global South. In 2025, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing an International Day against Unilateral Coercive Measures, after years of campaigning by states such as Venezuela, which argue that sanctions and asset seizures violate international law and human rights. African and Latin American commentators increasingly describe Western raw-materials and climate policies as a new wave of “green colonialism,” pointing out that energy transitions in the North are being built on intensified extraction in the South. Civil-society organizations tracking EU “strategic projects” in Africa document displacement, forest loss, and limited benefits for local communities, warning that sustainability language often disguises continuity with older forms of plunder.

The Politico article gestures at this tension—it quotes African NGOs who say, bluntly, that Europeans are “coming to make money.” But without this wider factual landscape, the reader is left with the impression that Europe’s only problem is implementation: how to turn good intentions into practice. The fuller picture shows something different. Europe’s mineral hunger is not an accident; it is built into its energy, industrial, financial, and military strategies. Africa’s resources are not a side issue; they are central to a resilience doctrine written in Brussels and paid for, once again, with African land, labor, and life.

From “Ethical Partnership” to Hyper-Imperialism: Reading Lobito Through the Colonial Contradiction

If you read the Politico piece on its own terms, you meet a familiar character: Europe as the repentant elder, finally ready to atone for colonial plunder by bringing “ethical” investment and “mutual benefits” to Africa. The Lobito Corridor becomes a kind of redemption arc. Yes, the rail line was built to move ivory, rubber, and minerals out of the continent; but now, we are told, it will carry the green transition, local jobs, and shared prosperity. This is the surface story. Beneath it lies what we have to name: the colonial contradiction—the structural antagonism between a European bloc whose prosperity rests on external extraction, and African societies whose land, labor, and resources have been treated for centuries as inputs into someone else’s development.

Once we bring in the factual terrain from Section II, the mask slips. Europe is not rushing to Luanda because it discovered a late love for justice. It is moving because its own system is in trouble. This is the crisis of imperialism: an order built on cheap energy, secure trade routes, and captured markets now finds its pipelines blown up, its financial credibility questioned, its “sovereign” digital infrastructure rented from US tech monopolies. At the same time, the Global South is building alternative payment systems, denouncing unilateral coercive measures, and pushing for multipolar arrangements that dilute Western control. In that context, Africa’s mineral wealth is not a development opportunity; it is a lifeline for a crisis-ridden center trying to steady itself.

The official name for this survival plan is “resilience.” In our language, it is imperialist recalibration. Faced with declining hegemony, the imperial core does not suddenly become democratic or egalitarian; it rewires its plumbing. It reroutes gas flows from one source to another while keeping prices high and control centralized. It turns frozen assets into revenue streams. It wraps digital dependency in regulations and calls it sovereignty. And now, through corridors like Lobito, it seeks to rebuild the logistics of extraction under green and ethical branding. The form of domination changes; the function does not. This is recalibration, not repentance.

At the global level, this recalibration takes the shape of what we can call hyper-imperialism. In the old era, a handful of colonial powers carved the map into empires. Today, a Triad of advanced capitalist blocs coordinates through common rules, financial architectures, military alliances, and standards regimes. They do not always agree, but they share a basic project: keep control over the choke points of the world system—energy routes, financial rails, digital infrastructure, and critical raw materials. When the European Commission writes about securing supply chains and economic security, when it designs acts and corridors that lock in access to African minerals, it is giving administrative form to that hyper-imperial project. The Lobito Corridor is one more capillary in a larger arterial system that runs from African mines to European and North American factories, banks, and militaries.

This is why the language of “value addition” in the Politico piece is so slippery. On the African side, value addition means what it sounds like: build smelters, refineries, cathode and battery plants; own more of the chain; capture more of the wealth. On the European side, value addition often means something else: move just enough processing into the country of origin to secure access and tick the ESG box, while keeping the highest-value steps, intellectual property, and command functions in Europe or its close allies. That is neocolonial extractivism: the continuation of colonial extraction through formal sovereignty and development rhetoric, where the flag has changed but the flow of value has not. The Lobito Corridor becomes the physical embodiment of this logic—a high-speed conveyor belt that may yet leave African communities looking at the back of wagons loaded with someone else’s future.

The colonial contradiction is not just about who owns the ore underground. It is about who pays for Europe’s crisis management. When Euroclear siphons billions in interest from immobilized foreign assets and when European treasuries redirect that windfall into war and reconstruction, they are telling the world: our “rule-based order” includes the rule that your reserves are ours when we decide they are. When Brussels demands that African producers meet standards it writes, under penalty of losing access to the European market, it is saying: our crises, our climate targets, our industrial strategies come first; your sovereignty is negotiable. That is the colonial contradiction in twenty-first-century form: the insistence that the South must bear the costs of a North that refuses to confront its own mode of production.

At home, this same logic turns inward. The energy shock created by imperial games is not paid for by the boards of LNG majors or arms manufacturers; it is paid for by workers whose heating bills go up while factories close. The lawfare that normalizes asset seizure abroad erodes legal certainty for pensions and savings at home. The defence budgets that climb in the name of resilience squeeze public services and social protections. This is where technofascism comes into view: the fusion of monopoly capital, digital infrastructure, and security apparatus into a regime that manages the crisis not by surrendering power, but by tightening control—on speech, on movement, on access to basic goods. Hyper-imperialism abroad and technofascism at home are two faces of the same system, and Africa’s minerals are the fuel they both require.

For the global working class, the peasantry, and the colonized nations, this means the “ethical partner” story must be refused at its root. The point is not that Europe is uniquely evil while other powers are saints; it is that the structure of the current order forces every imperial center to hunt for external surpluses, and forces every dependent economy to choose between being bled by old masters or new ones. The only way out is not to bargain for a slightly better place in someone else’s supply chain, but to break the logic of hyper-imperialism itself: to reclaim control over land and resources, to build regional industries oriented to social needs rather than export quotas, and to knit those efforts into a multipolar framework that does not simply reproduce the same hierarchy with different flags.

Seen from that standpoint, the Politico article is not harmless reportage; it is ideological maintenance work. It invites us to believe that the colonial contradiction can be healed by the very forces that profit from it, that a bloc in crisis can rescue Africa while rescuing itself, that a system built on unequal exchange can be rendered “ethical” by adding a few training programs and ESG clauses. Our task is to refuse that story and tell another: that Africa’s minerals belong first to the peoples of Africa; that the resilience of an empire built on extraction is in direct contradiction with the resilience of those it extracts from; and that in the age of crisis, every new corridor, act, and partnership has to be read not only in kilotons and euros, but in terms of which side of the colonial line it strengthens.

From Extraction to Emancipation: Building the Frontline of Global Anti-Imperialist Solidarity

If Section III exposed the deep colonial contradiction—the fact that Europe’s survival strategy depends on tightening control over African resources—then Section IV must answer the essential political question: what do we do with this knowledge? The task is not abstract moral outrage. It is to build the power of those already resisting extraction, already organizing alternatives, already pushing against the machinery of hyper-imperialism from below. In this moment of imperial recalibration, movements across Africa and the Global North are not waiting for permission; they are already shaping the battlefield. Our job is to map these forces clearly and call others into motion.

The most immediate struggles come from the ground zero of extraction itself. In the DRC, Afrewatch has spent years documenting abuses in cobalt and copper mining, fighting for transparency and community-centered governance in a sector where both Chinese and Western firms treat people as expendable. Resource Matters, operating across the DRC and Belgium, has exposed opaque contracts, pushed for responsible procurement rules in Europe, and supported Congolese efforts to reclaim control of their resources. Across the continent, African civil society networks are tracking the EU’s “strategic projects,” highlighting displacement, forest destruction, and the false promise of sustainability. The African Union’s Africa’s Green Minerals Strategy (AGMS) represents an institutional front in this struggle: a demand for continental industrialization, regional value chains, and an end to the raw-export trap.

Parallel movements are emerging within Europe itself. Organizations like Counter Balance are challenging EU infrastructure financing when it reproduces extractive patterns. Environmental coalitions across Europe and Africa are pushing back against destructive green-transition projects that trample communities in the name of “strategic autonomy.” Research bodies such as the TESS Forum and Afripoli are building the intellectual and policy architecture for coordinated African bargaining, resisting the divide-and-extract model that Brussels prefers.

These struggles point toward the tactics that arise organically from the contradictions outlined in Sections II and III. First, there must be clear and unapologetic support for Africa’s industrialization demands. Workers, unions, and activists in the Global North can amplify AGMS proposals, push for real technology transfer, and fight EU trade rules that prevent African processing, battery manufacturing, and downstream industrial development. “Value addition” must mean factories, not just cleaner refineries feeding raw materials into European supply chains.

Second, civil society within Europe must confront the EU’s double standards head-on. The minerals deal with Rwanda—inked even as the Rwandan state profits from conflict in the eastern DRC—is not an abstraction but a concrete example of “ethical partnership” masking geopolitical maneuvering. Using the evidence in Section II, activists can pressure politicians, companies, and media institutions that enable such contradictions. Exposing hypocrisy weakens the legitimacy of Europe’s green-colonial narrative.

Third, we need union-to-union linkages between African miners and European industrial workers. Europe’s automobile, renewable energy, aviation, and tech sectors all run on African minerals. The workers in these industries share a material interest in breaking the race-to-the-bottom dynamics of global capitalism. Coordinated demands—for fair wages, safe working conditions, public ownership of supply chains, and African control over processing—can disrupt Europe’s attempt to secure cheap minerals under the guise of sustainability.

Fourth, we need popular education campaigns that make visible what capital hides: that every battery, every turbine, every microchip in Europe is rooted in African land, labor, and risk. When Northern workers see how their industries are chained to African dispossession, they can begin fighting for a transition that lifts both continents rather than deepening inequality. Knowledge is a weapon when it exposes the invisible scaffolding of empire.

Finally, the movements closest to the land—community organizations, environmental defenders, Indigenous authorities, and rural cooperatives—must be supported directly. They are on the frontlines resisting displacement, environmental damage, militarization, and unaccountable infrastructure projects along the Lobito Corridor and beyond. Their defense of territory is a defense of sovereignty itself.

The strategic orientation is clear. Our objective is not to reform Europe’s extractive posture, nor to convince Brussels to act benevolently. It is to build a global working-class coalition that delegitimizes and obstructs external control of African resources. Africans fighting for developmental sovereignty, miners demanding safety and wages, environmental defenders protecting land, and Northern workers confronting their own corporations—these forces together can rupture the “ethical” mask of Europe’s recalibrated imperialism.

The Lobito Corridor is a contest over minerals, but also over the future. Either Africa continues as the raw engine of Europe’s green transition, or the world’s working people seize this moment of imperial crisis to build a different order—one grounded in sovereignty, solidarity, and shared liberation. The corridor will move minerals; but movements can change the world.