In Europe, it's time for Africa

Africa has literally the floor in this historic Swedish city, home to one of Europe's oldest universities. Over 1,500 scholars, experts and historians have descended here to dissect the meaning of the "African resurgence" and the contours of engagement of traditional and emerging powers with the resource-rich continent.

Impassioned intellectual discussions have blended with singing, dancing and photo exhibitions to conjure up a veritable festival of Africa, its emergence on the world stage and the intensified competition for the continent's resources, markets and friendship.

Organised by The Nordic Africa Institute (NAI), the five-day European Conference on African Studies (ECAS-4) that began earlier this week has as its master theme: "African engagement: On whose terms". It seeks to "look into how the world can study and engage with a resurgent Africa on the basis of mutual respect."

"The idea is to emancipate the discourse on Africa from the colonial mindset," said Dr Fantu Cheru, research director, NAI, and the author of The Rise of China and India in Africa. "The research has always been designed in the North and executed in the South. Rarely has there been a joint effort to set up a research agenda and produce knowledge," said Cheru.

"I think it has to do with the quality of the research and the interest in Africa as such," said Carin Norberg, NAI's director.

Barely 40-minute in local train from Stockholm, the picture postcard-pretty town of a little over 150,000 people has been swamped by Africa specialists, replacing students who form most of the floating population of this medieval town. Virtually all hotel rooms are sold out, with many participants staying in nearby Stockholm.

African thinkers such as Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Valentin Mudimbe, Karin Barber, Thandika Mkandawire, Rita Abrahmsen, Dismas Masolo and John Lonsdale are among the more prominent participants in this conference addressing issues like the nature of African scholarship and the foray by emerging powers like India, China, Brazil and Russia in Africa. The BRIC countries' total trade with Africa has surpassed $166 billion compared.

In his keynote lecture entitled, "The Struggle to Convert Nationalism to Pan-Africanism", Prof. Issa G. Shivji provided an intellectually provocative account of how the West tried to construct its own narrative of the West and the Rest, leading to an impoverishment of Africa. "The West constructed its own story and the story of the rest. It is a story of plunder, privation, invasion and destruction; it is a story of permanent wars and passing peace," he said.

It's not just an intellectual feast, but a celebration of African resurgence - Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to grow at the rate of 5.5 per cent this year and 6 per cent in 2012, according to the IMF - with rock bands like Makadem of Kenya hitting all the right notes.

Besides, two photo exhibitions - "The river, the road and the journey's end" and "Africa/has/the/floor," give viewers a glimpse of a pulsating, vibrating continent that is attracting an unprecedented global attention and is at the centre of a new great game for influence in the continent. The conference note explains a complex interplay of factors that has put Africa, once a victim of colonialism and now a target of various neo-colonial impulses, back into the global spotlight.

"Between 1990 and 2005, in more than 42 African countries peaceful and democratic changes of government took place through competitive multiparty elections, notwithstanding more recent setbacks in Kenya, Zimbabwe and Gabon," says the note.

"On the economic front, Africa emerged as one of the world's fastest-growing regions in the wake of a boom in the international commodities market, despite the recent global financial crisis," the note says.