ABSTRACT
India’s re-engagement with Africa in its post-reform period has earned it a lot of attention. Together with China, India seems to have suddenly emerged as a major ‘competitor’ in Africa, bidding for important resource and infrastructure projects, launching new lines of credit and tariff cuts, expanding its diplomatic network, and increasing its military presence on the continent and across its shores. Different reports have thus emerged to describe India’s relations with Africa in great detail across different sub-regions and sectors, mostly from an economic angle.1 Most of these studies are empirically rich, but tend to club ‘the dragon and the elephant’ together, offering little space for the exploration of potential differences between the Chinese and Indian models of engagement with Africa.2
