Forty kilometers west of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, the Julius Nyerere School of Leadership campus is a flamboyant symbol of cooperation between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Southern Africa's ruling formations. Inaugurated in February 2022 at a ceremony featuring a message from President Xi Jinping, the school was built by a Chinese company and donated by Beijing. Regular seminars are given here by professors from the CCP's executive schools for six parties, all of which have in common the fact that they fought for independence or against apartheid and are still in power today. The flags of Tanzania, South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe are raised side by side with the CCP's red hammer-and-sickle banner.
The teachers come from the Chinese Communist Party Central School, from some of its provincial branches, and also from Chinese agricultural universities. From October 29 to November 7 2023, for example, a session entitled "Shaping a Common Future, CCM Young Leaders Workshop" (Chama Cha Mapinduzi, Revolution Party, Tanzania's main party) was organized by the International Department of the CCP Central Committee. A few months earlier, in June 2023, China had trained 136 young leaders from the six parties.
This testifies to the full confidence of the Chinese party-state, which considers that, thanks to the economic development achieved by the country, it not only has no lessons to learn from the West, but can also share its experience. It offers a competitor model to the democracies, which would be just as legitimate, not least because of its achievements. These exchanges help to normalize the Chinese model, decried in the West for the absence of the ballot box and the rule of law. "China wants to help these movements stay in power and, by presenting its model to their promising executives, gains a lot of political influence," said Paul Nantulya, a researcher at the Washington-based Africa Center for Strategic Studies.
The strategy has not been limited to the Tanzanian school. A China-Africa Institute, based both at the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa and at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, was opened in 2019, with a vocation to radiate across the continent. In Zimbabwe, China has renovated the Herbert-Chitepo School of Ideology of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party. Kenya's leading party, the United Democratic Alliance, was not to be outdone: Its leaders visited Beijing in May and were offered the construction of their own leadership school in Nairobi. In addition, the People's Liberation Army Command College in Nanjing regularly welcomes promising officers from African forces.
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