Africa lost control to foreign mining companies

Ben Radley, lecturer in international development at the University of Bath in England, has researched economic transformation in central Africa, with a particular focus on resource-based industrialisation. He argues in this excerpt of his new book, Disrupted Development in the Congo: The Fragile Foundations of the African Mining Consensus, that the return of transnationals was carried out through a three-stage process beginning with a misguided reading of African economic stagnation from the mid-1970s onwards.