"No one alive at the close of the 19th century," says David Blair, writing in the Daily Telegraph, "could have missed the 'scramble for Africa'. A motley collection of robber barons, imperialist ideologues, explorers, rogues and adventurers - the likes of Cecil Rhodes and the appalling Leopold II, King of the Belgians - carved up the continent in the name of five European powers.

"Today, few appear to have noticed that a second 'scramble for Africa' is under way. This time, only one giant country is involved, but its ambitions are every bit as momentous as those of Rhodes and company. With every day that passes, China's economic tentacles extend deeper into Africa. While Europe sought direct political control, China is acquiring a vast and informal economic empire."

This sets the scene for China's connections with South Africa and Zimbabwe. China's support for President Robert Mugabe's ZANU party, of course, goes back to before independence in 1980, but now that Mugabe is an international pariah, the scope for Chinese intervention in Zimbabwe has widened vastly.

The ANC's new political hierarchy has distanced itself from Mbeki's "quiet diplomacy" towards Zimbabwe, and before long it will review all President Thabo Mbeki's foreign policies, including the cosy relationship with China. This relationship is unlikely to be abandoned, but if the left-leaning labour movement in South Africa gets its way, tariff and other adjustments will be made. Some in the ANC would go so far as to demonise China, which they think is too rapacious, but the dominant view will be to establish a "fairer" balance in the existing trading pattern.

According to the Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu), one of the issues that needs to be raised (not only with China) is "beneficiation of mineral resources." Cosatu wants South Africa to be able to do more with its mineral resources, not just sell them in their raw state. It protested in an interview with the Financial Times: "We allowed the marketers to take charge of important departments and all they knew was that South Africa had to be exposed to the chilly winds of competition. They cut tariffs even faster than was required by the World Trade Organisation. In the process they undermined the engine of growth itself, the manufacturing sector. We are a developing country. We ought to develop our industries first."

Zimbabwe is rich in natural resources. It has deposits of more than 40 minerals, including ferrochrome, gold, silver, platinum, copper and asbestos. President Robert Mugabe has plundered these resources (plus blood diamonds smuggled in from the Congo) to sustain his tyrannical regime. Particularly, he has brought China into the picture.

A question arises whether, as Zimbabwe went downhill over the past eight years, the idea occurred to the South African practitioners of "quiet diplomacy" that when Mugabe finally quit the presidency, through force or decay, South Africa could move in with aid and skills - and acquire a sort of colony. The snag though is whether SA has the capacity to embark on such an ambitious mission, seeing it cannot even manage its own affairs adequately. So who will move into Zimbabwe as the Scramble for Africa 2008 begins?

According to Wikipedia the first Scramble for Africa was the "proliferation of conflicting European claims to African territory between the 1880s and World War I in 1914. The last fifth of the 19th century saw the transition from ‘informal imperialism' of control through military influence and economic dominance to that of direct rule. Attempts to mediate imperial competition, such as the Berlin Conference (1884 - 1885) between Britain, France and Germany, failed to establish definitively the competing powers claims."

As the debate goes back and forth, and becomes quite heated at times, views on the new scramble differ widely.

On the one side are those who believe that Chinese investment offers Africa's best hope for economic development. In a recent article in the Mail & Guardian William Gumede observed that the West has been "watching China's re-engagement with the continent with trepidation. China is setting up Confucius schools, laying out roads and railways and stitching together deals to buy its commodities - oil, platinum, gold and minerals. Perhaps not since the first wave of independence during the late Fifties has there been such a buzz in Africa. And crisis meetings, conferences and summits are hurriedly being put together as the United States, the European Union and Japan scratch their collective heads over how to respond."

"China's investment" Gumede writes, "might offer Africa the first real chance to lift itself out of poverty, not unlike postwar Europe under the Marshall Plan or the industrialisation of the Asian tiger economies, neither of which could have happened without US investment..." However, he adds that "China's development is not all positive as the support given to Mugabe's regime shows."

On the other side are those who believe that Chinese imperialism risks severely worsening the situation on the continent. In The Times (London) Camilla Cavendish wrote "Oil doesn't just power our lives. It also fuels violence. The new scramble for Africa ...is inflaming conflicts that could dog the rest of this century. This remake of history could have some even nastier endings than the Victorian version...China already sources a quarter of its crude oil from Africa, about 6 per cent of which comes from Sudan. The problem there is that the Sudanese regime has been emboldened by the Chinese pipeline that sucks out 350,000 barrels a day. It has defied every UN initiative to resolve the Darfur crisis. The refugee camps grow daily, and the conflict is spreading to Chad and the Central African Republic."

Cavendish warns that in "30 years' time we could have a brave new world containing two types of country: those that are dependent on unspeakable dictators for their heat and light, and those that are free." Also in The Times, Matthew Parris suggested that the new imperialism is very likely to breed more of the latter. He writes that the "new imperialism will be less benign. Great powers aren't interested in administering wild places any more, still less in settling them: just raping them. Black gangster governments sponsored by self-interested Asian or Western powers could become the central story in 21st-century African history." He notes:

"European imperial powers lost the will rather than the capacity to own and govern overseas resources. A world in which all could buy and sell on the global market was arriving. It is a world, however, which is now feeling the pinch in the natural resources with which Africa is richly endowed. Meanwhile, the continent is in many places run by outfits that resemble gangs rather than governments... But a solution beckons: buy your own gang. You hardly need visit and are certainly not required to administer the gang's territory. You simply give it support, munitions, bribes and protection to keep the roads and airports open; and it pays you with access to resources. You dress up the arrangement as helping Africans to help themselves. The French, who have been doing this in their former African possessions for years, lead the way...

Interviewed on television, a businessman with long experience in Africa remarked: "If Africa produces leaders who dictate to us the conditions of trade for mineral resources, if they tell us that this is the name of the game - what are we supposed to do? If we don't do it, someone else will."