The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
A series on the economic entanglement of Europe and Africa — and a promise about how it will be written.
Europe and Africa are already entangled. Not in the sense of a partnership agreement or a summit communiqué, but in the plain sense that money, goods, people and infrastructure move between them every day, in both directions, at scale, whether anyone intends it or not.
What is missing is not connection. What is missing is an honest account of it.
Why three parts
Most writing on this subject picks a side and stays there. The development brochure sees only opportunity. The critique sees only extraction. Both are reading the same ledger and reporting half of it.
The entanglement is real. Whether it is good is a separate question, and it has more than one answer.
So this series has three parts, and they are not a narrative arc. They are three lenses on the same object, and I intend to look through all of them.
The rule about numbers
I write software for a living, and the habit that survives contact with production is the same one that should survive contact with an argument: state where the number came from, or do not state the number.
So every figure in this series carries its source, visibly, under the chart. Not in an endnote, not "according to studies" — the institution, the dataset, the year. Where I draw something that is not data — a structure, a flow, a mechanism — it is labelled as a drawing, and you will see the word on it.
That is not a stylistic preference. In a subject this contested, an unsourced number is not an argument. It is decoration.
Who is writing this
I am a software architect in Munich, not an economist. That is a limitation and I would rather name it than have you discover it.
What I bring instead is the thing my job actually trains: reading a system to find where the value is created, where it leaks, and who is standing at the leak. And a personal stake — AGULHAS.ONE is being built as a working current between European and African technology, so I am not a neutral observer. I want the connection to be good. That is exactly why I intend to look at the parts that are not.
The first piece follows.