I first stepped onto African soil in 1978.

I was 16 years old.

I arrived in Addis Ababa aboard a flight that had originated in Beijing. I had boarded in Bombay, and among the passengers were approximately 50 Chinese advisers, all dressed in the distinctive Mao-style clothing of the era.

When we landed, the Cold War was waiting for us on the tarmac.

Cuban troops were guarding the airport, while Soviet military aircraft operated overhead in support of Ethiopia during the war then raging in the Horn of Africa.

I could not have understood it fully at 16, but I was witnessing something that would become a recurring theme throughout much of my life: foreign powers competing for influence in Africa.

Forty-eight years later, they still are.

The Soviet Union is gone. China has transformed from the country represented by those Mao-clad advisers into a global economic power. African countries themselves have undergone enormous political, demographic, technological, and economic change.

And I have had the privilege of watching much of that transformation from the ground.

Over the decades, my work has taken me across Africa in security, training, government capacity building, energy, and commercial assignments. I have worked with African soldiers and senior military officers, government officials and diplomats, businessmen and laborers. I have lived and worked in Francophone and Anglophone countries, in capitals and remote areas, from military training centers to oil and gas operations.

What those 48 years have convinced me of is this:

America needs a fundamentally different relationship with Africa.

The donor-recipient model that characterized much of the post-colonial era has reached the limits of its usefulness.

The future should be built around something much more ambitious:

American-African partnership.

I Have Watched China Show Up

One of the constants I have observed over those decades has been China’s presence.

China understood early that relationships in Africa could be built not merely through diplomacy but through physical and commercial presence.

Roads were built. Railways were developed. Power infrastructure appeared. Government buildings went up. Chinese companies entered mining, petroleum, telecommunications, construction, and other sectors.

I have seen those projects firsthand.

While managing the U.S. Department of State’s African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance program at the Prytanée Militaire in Bembèrèkè, northern Benin, I watched a Chinese company construct a new paved highway through the region.

It was badly needed infrastructure.

I also personally watched large ruts appear in sections of the new pavement within weeks as commercial trucks began using the road.

That experience stayed with me.

In Cameroon, I observed problems with railway equipment and passenger cars that appeared to deteriorate remarkably quickly after entering service. Not long after I left the country in 2016, Cameroon suffered the terrible Eséka railway disaster.

I would not attribute that tragedy to Chinese construction or equipment without evidence establishing such a connection. Nor would I extrapolate from the infrastructure problems I personally witnessed to characterize all Chinese construction across an enormous continent.

But those experiences taught me something important.

Completing a project and creating sustainable infrastructure are not necessarily the same thing.

Quality matters.

Maintenance matters.

Training matters.

Accountability matters.

And the ability of the host country to operate and sustain what has been built matters enormously.

Yet Americans would make a serious strategic mistake if we allowed criticism of individual Chinese projects to obscure the larger lesson.

China showed up.

And it kept showing up.

Seeing China’s Presence From the Inside

Years later, I saw that engagement from another perspective when I worked as an embedded security adviser supporting a Chinese National Petroleum Corporation oil-and-gas exploration operation in Niger.

Our camp was deep in the Sahara, approximately 60 kilometers south of the Algerian border.

It was an extraordinarily remote environment, yet the operation was connected to a substantial Chinese corporate and residential presence in Niamey.

Experiences like that helped me understand that China’s engagement with Africa was never simply about building isolated projects.

It was about establishing presence.

Workers arrived. Businesses followed. Shops and restaurants appeared. In some capitals, recognizable Chinese commercial communities developed around these activities.

Whether one agrees with Beijing’s policies or not, its persistence deserves serious study.

China understood that influence comes from relationships maintained over decades.

It comes from commerce.

It comes from investment.

It comes from infrastructure.

Most importantly, it comes from being there.

That is a lesson America should learn.

But it does not mean America should imitate China’s model.

America Should Offer Something Different

I have also spent years working on the American side of engagement with Africa.

I have trained African military personnel and worked alongside African officers preparing for peacekeeping missions. I have managed U.S.-supported capacity-building programs and worked with government officials, diplomats, security organizations, and private companies.

I have seen what American engagement can accomplish.

There is tremendous respect in many places for American education, technology, military professionalism, entrepreneurship, innovation, and business.

But America’s relationship with Africa has too often been organized around a vocabulary that belongs to another era:

Aid.

Assistance.

Beneficiaries.

Donors.

Recipients.

Developing countries.

Those programs have done enormous good, and humanitarian and development assistance will continue to have an important role.

But assistance should be a tool—not the definition of the relationship.

Africa does not need another patron.

It needs partners.

Africa Is Not a Charity Case

One of the most persistent mistakes outsiders make is talking about Africa primarily in terms of its problems.

Poverty.

Conflict.

Disease.

Corruption.

Terrorism.

Migration.

Food insecurity.

Those problems are real. I have encountered many of them personally.

But after 48 years of involvement with the continent, that is not primarily what I see when I look at Africa.

I see opportunity.

I see enormous natural resources.

I see hundreds of millions of young people who want education, employment, entrepreneurship, and a better future.

I see growing cities that need electricity, water, housing, transportation, communications, healthcare, and financial services.

I see agricultural economies that could retain far more value by processing and manufacturing products locally rather than exporting raw commodities.

I see governments looking for investment.

And I see markets that American businesses have too often allowed others to develop.

What Washington frequently describes as African “development needs” are also some of the greatest commercial opportunities of the twenty-first century.

The Africa I First Saw Is Not the Africa of Today

Perhaps the easiest way for me to explain the transformation I have witnessed is to think back to the Africa of 1978.

Idi Amin still ruled Uganda.

Ghana was under military rule and desperately poor. General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong had governed the country for much of the decade before being removed from power in 1978.

Those were among the images of Africa that reached Americans at the time: coups, dictators, poverty, famine, civil wars, and instability.

Unfortunately, some of those images became frozen in the Western imagination.

Africa changed.

Our perceptions often did not.

Uganda is one of my favorite examples.

I frequently tell people that, in my opinion, Uganda may be the best-kept secret in Africa.

The country I know today bears little resemblance to the Uganda that became internationally synonymous with Idi Amin.

It offers extraordinary wildlife, including the iconic animals people travel to East Africa hoping to see. It has mountains and jungles, Lake Victoria and Murchison Falls, and the headwaters of the Nile. I have been whitewater rafting on the Nile, trekked on foot through a game reserve, and experienced some of the most spectacular natural environments on the continent.

I have also found Uganda relatively affordable, with good roads in many of the places I have traveled and, perhaps most memorably, generous and friendly people.

That is a very different Uganda from the one most Americans learned about through news reports and movies about Idi Amin.

Ghana offers another example.

The Ghana I encountered in the era of military governments was a poor country struggling economically and politically.

Decades later, on one of my more recent flights into Accra, I remember looking down as we approached the city and being genuinely struck by what I saw.

There were neighborhoods below me that could have been housing developments in Southern California.

Modern homes.

Planned residential areas.

Road networks.

Commercial development.

An expanding city.

It was one of those moments when the magnitude of Africa’s transformation becomes visible.

Certainly, poverty has not disappeared from Ghana, Uganda, or anywhere else on the continent. Neither have governance problems, inequality, infrastructure deficiencies, or security challenges.

But focusing exclusively on those problems produces a profoundly incomplete picture.

Over 48 years, I have watched African countries develop institutions, infrastructure, businesses, universities, industries, professional classes, and increasingly sophisticated consumer economies.

That transformation matters because American policy and American business strategy cannot be based on the Africa of 1978.

We have to engage the Africa that exists today—and help build the Africa that will exist tomorrow.

From Foreign Aid to Foreign Investment

This requires a change in thinking on both sides of the Atlantic.

Instead of asking primarily how much assistance America should provide Africa, we should increasingly ask:

How much business can Americans and Africans do together?

How can American capital help finance African infrastructure while earning a competitive return?

How can American energy companies help expand electrical generation?

How can American engineering and construction companies compete for roads, ports, airports, water systems, housing, and transportation?

How can American technology companies participate in Africa’s digital transformation?

How can American agricultural expertise help African farmers produce more while African processing industries retain more of the value?

How can American universities, vocational schools, and businesses work together to educate people specifically for jobs that actually exist?

How can African entrepreneurs gain better access to American capital and American markets?

And how can American companies establish themselves now in economies whose consumer markets could become vastly larger over the coming decades?

These are not questions of charity.

They are questions of commerce.

Build With Africans, Not Merely in Africa

There is another lesson I have learned from watching foreign engagement on the continent.

It is not enough to build something in Africa.

We should build it with Africans.

If an American company builds a power plant, Africans should be trained to operate and maintain it.

If Americans develop transportation infrastructure, African engineers and technicians should gain the skills necessary to sustain it.

If natural resources are developed, we should look for economically viable opportunities to process more of them locally, creating additional African industries and jobs.

If we train military or law-enforcement personnel, our objective should include developing African instructors capable of training the next generation themselves.

The measure of a successful partnership should ultimately be how much capacity remains after the Americans leave.

Training should produce trainers.

Investment should produce industries.

Infrastructure should enable commerce.

Education should produce employable skills.

Capital should create businesses capable of attracting more capital.

And successful American companies should help create successful African partners.

That is how dependency ends.

Africa’s Greatest Resource Is Its People

Discussions about Africa’s strategic importance inevitably turn toward resources.

Oil.

Natural gas.

Gold.

Uranium.

Copper.

Cobalt.

Lithium.

Rare earth minerals.

Those resources matter enormously to the global economy and increasingly to American national security.

But after nearly half a century of working on the continent, I believe Africa’s most important resource is its people.

Africa’s extraordinarily young population can become one of the great economic engines of this century.

But young people need opportunity.

They need education.

They need useful skills.

They need jobs.

They need access to capital.

They need a reason to believe that building a future at home is possible.

This is where economics and security intersect.

Economic opportunity is security policy.

A factory that creates thousands of sustainable jobs can contribute enormously to stability.

Reliable electricity can transform an economy.

A vocational school connected directly to employers can transform thousands of families.

A road connecting farmers with markets can generate prosperity for generations—provided that road is built and maintained to serve those generations.

Partnership Means America Benefits Too

There is sometimes an uncomfortable tendency in American foreign-policy discussions to pretend that our interests should be absent from development.

I disagree.

There is nothing wrong with America benefiting from a relationship with Africa.

In fact, mutual benefit is precisely what can make the relationship sustainable.

African countries possess resources important to American manufacturing, energy, technology, aerospace, and defense.

African markets offer enormous opportunities for American products and services.

African countries occupy strategically important geography bordering major waterways and international trade routes.

African governments can become increasingly important diplomatic and security partners.

And prosperous Africans become customers, investors, entrepreneurs, and trading partners.

That is not exploitation.

It is commerce—provided the relationship is transparent, voluntary, competitive, and beneficial to both sides.

A partnership in which both parties have something the other values is inherently healthier than one permanently defined by giver and receiver.

Don’t Ask Africa to Choose

America also needs to resist another temptation.

We should not approach African governments demanding that they choose between the United States and China, Russia, Europe, or anyone else.

African governments will pursue their own national interests.

They should.

Our responsibility is to make partnership with Americans attractive enough that they choose us.

Compete with quality.

Compete with technology.

Compete with financing.

Compete with education.

Compete with transparency.

Compete with professional standards.

Compete by developing local workers and businesses.

Compete by keeping our commitments.

And perhaps most importantly, compete by listening.

Instead of arriving with a predetermined solution, ask our African partners:

What do you need? What can you contribute? And what can we build together?

Forty-Eight Years Later

When that 16-year-old boy stepped off an airplane in Addis Ababa in 1978, he saw Chinese advisers, Cuban soldiers, and Soviet military aircraft.

Elsewhere on the continent, Idi Amin ruled Uganda. Ghana was struggling through military government and economic hardship.

Those images helped define Africa for a generation of Americans.

They should not define it today.

I have lived long enough—and returned often enough—to see another Africa emerge.

I have driven its roads and worked in its cities. I have trained alongside its soldiers, worked with its governments and businesses, and spent time with people whose ambitions for themselves and their children are not fundamentally different from ours.

I have watched foreign powers come and go.

I have watched well-intentioned development programs succeed and fail.

I have watched infrastructure rise, businesses develop, governments change, cities expand, and new generations of Africans demand greater opportunity.

And after 48 years, I remain extraordinarily optimistic about Africa.

The opportunity for the United States is not to replace France.

It is not to imitate China.

It is not to fight another Cold War against Russia.

And it is not simply to write larger aid checks.

We have an opportunity to build a distinctly American model of engagement based on entrepreneurship, investment, education, technology, professional capacity, access to capital, security cooperation, and mutual interest.

For much of the past half-century, Americans have asked:

“What can America do for Africa?”

After 48 years, I believe we should ask a different question:

“What can Americans and Africans build together?”

That question—not how much we can give, but how much we can accomplish together—could define one of the most important partnerships of the twenty-first century.