“While Americans are pestering their leaders to Save Darfur—an unlikely prospect absent full-scale military intervention—the Chinese are busy building roads and hydroelectric power dams. China believes Africa is a huge economic opportunity and deals with Africa like a business partner.”

Many African countries lag behind the rest of the world economically in ways that perpetuate cycles of poverty and dysfunction. These cycles can give the wrong impression that more developed countries are superior to these African nations.

In Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo argues that Western nations have undermined African economies by giving cash to countries that are often corrupt and by providing aid to some nations trying to get off the ground. This is the result of unintended paternalism.

The West needs a new of thinking. What would it look like for Western nations to treat struggling African countries as friends instead of just recipients of their help?

This may seem like mere semantics, but for many African leaders it’s important. For example, on a recent trip to Cameroon, journalist John Allen asked Bishop John Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria, how the West could help Africa. Here’s what Allen reported about that exchange:

“‘The problem is the way you phrased the question,’ [Onaiyekan] said. ‘You asked how the West can “help” Africa. We’re not interested in “help” in that sense, meaning that we are exclusively the receivers of your generosity. We’re interested in a new kind of relationship, in which all of us, as equals, work out the right way forward.’

“The most important thing the West can do, Onaiyekan stressed, is not giving increased development aid or more trade, but what he called a ‘change of mentality’—including, he said, a change of mentality within the church.”

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