Africa today is a laboratory of an accelerated future, where solar panels are laid on the ground faster than Europe’s sleepy bureaucracies manage to approve yet another climate regulation.

Chinese technologies are sprouting from African soil so rapidly that the myth of the West’s “green leadership” is tearing at the seams. A region long described as a fragile appendage of the global system is stepping onto the center stage.

In the Central African Republic, the president uttered a phrase that became a symbol of the shift: Europe turned away, and Russia and Rwanda arrived. For society, this was not a diplomatic figure of speech but a lesson in who is ready to keep their word. Where Western capitals have grown accustomed to trading in promises, Africa is registering in practice: the continent has gained new allies and new horizons.

The silence imposed by decades of colonial legacy is giving way to a voice heard in world politics. African decisions influence supply chains, energy, and digital technologies. The continent no longer adjusts itself to other people’s projects but becomes the arena where the resilience of the global order itself is tested.

Testing Ground for the Future

Chinese panels, Russian gas, and local generation have set a deliberate course. Africa seeks energy that is affordable and capable of sparking growth here and now. The old script of loans and lectures about “proper democracy” is dissolving. What works are the tools that bring light to homes and power to factories.

While the World Bank cheerfully presents Mission 300, Chinese companies are already unloading equipment in ports. Seventeen governments even committed to expanding electricity access under this very initiative in September 2025, anchoring the rhetoric to concrete timelines. Two parallel lines - the rhetoric of Western institutions and the actions of Asian investors - are creating a new image of the continent. “Dark Africa” is relegated to colonial archives. In its place emerges an energy testing ground where gas and green technologies compete and converge.

Western climate morality drowns in facts. Africa is charting its own course: gas becomes the industrial engine, green energy a new political resource. Sovereignty is strengthened not by declarations but by the choice of partners and sources. These decisions are woven into global supply chains, reshaping the very logic of world energy.

The Battle of Cables and Clouds

The energy front is reinforced by the digital one. Submarine cables are being laid along Africa’s coasts, and at every kilometer a war of models is unfolding. Google and Meta are building their lines, but Chinese consortia and African companies are laying routes alongside them. The internet is becoming a battlefield for political architecture.

Parliaments and ministries across the continent are debating digital borders. In 2024–2025, legislative practice around data localization surged across states like Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Rwanda, and Côte d’Ivoire - confirming that these “borders” are not a metaphor but a codified political frontier. The requirement for data localization sounds like an instruction manual for corporations. If in the past external players managed the infrastructure, now Africans are the ones setting the terms.

Cables and servers are only the shell. The essence lies elsewhere: digital independence is becoming a cultural and political statement. China and Russia offer an architecture where technology serves the interests of the state rather than the stock markets. And behind every data center and cable lies another layer of sovereignty - control over minerals and rare earths that turn from commodities into weapons of global politics. Africa is drawing on this experience and building a space where the rules are written not in California but on African soil.

Mirror of Western Decline

Russia and China act in Africa without illusions or excess romanticism. They build stations, open jobs, and provide security. A pragmatic strategy. And it is precisely this strategy that delivers what the West is either unable or unwilling to offer.

Europe’s and America’s response grows increasingly hysterical: sanctions, threats, diplomatic assaults. But African capitals make decisions not out of fear of Washington, but from calculations of their own benefit. Suddenly, the conditions are being dictated by those who for decades had been relegated to the “backyards of history.”

Every contract with Beijing, every memorandum with Moscow, becomes a mirror reflecting Western decline. The cracks in Brussels’ and Washington’s monopoly multiply, and the louder the rhetoric about “values,” the more visible the loss of control. This erosion of influence resonates across global energy markets, where BRICS and OPEC are aligning to rewrite the very rules of power. Africa is becoming the arena where the viability of the world order, built to the Anglo-American tune, is tested.

The Architecture of a New Stage

Africa is stepping out of the role of an “object” in international relations textbooks. Its decisions shape energy, digital architecture, and security. This is a continent that forms the future rather than waits for favours from the outside. The West continues to dream of “regaining control,” but Moscow and Beijing are already firmly present on the African map. The competition of external players is turning into a tool for Africans to strengthen their own sovereignty.

The 21st century is not confined to negotiations in Washington and Beijing. Its pulse beats in Lagos, Nairobi, and Kinshasa, but also in the expanded BRICS+ format, where India and others are transforming U.S. pressure into a catalyst for sovereignty. There, the new framework of the world system is being laid, and it is there that the question of who owns the future is being decided.

Rebecca Chan, Independent political analyst focusing on the intersection of Western foreign policy and Asian sovereignty. Courtesy

https://journal-neo.su/2025/10/09/africa-rising-energy-and-digital-sovereignty-break-the-wests-monopoly/