This chapter highlights South Africa, Tunisia, Mauritius, Morocco, and Kenya as the 4IR leaders in Africa. Each country is compared with the use of the GII and GCI scoring to explore their strengths and weaknesses in the 4IR. The GII is a measure of the components of innovation, while the GCI measures twelve specific components that determine a country’s long-term competitiveness. The two have similar overlaps, but the GII is the primary index of analysis with the GCI as a supplementary unit of information. Following the overall comparison of the five countries comes country-specific analyses that include noteworthy innovations and strengths and challenges. Each country analysis helps in looking at the overall digital maturity of the African continent. It also gives more insightful glance at specific sector reforms and policies.

Similar to Chapter 7, this one explores the three rising leaders in Africa: Egypt, Rwanda, and Nigeria. Innovation in each is explored and analyzed to determine each of their strengths and weaknesses. The analysis in this section is to help stakeholders navigate the Fourth Industrial Revolution and strategy to implement. Egypt ranked highest with a strong GII score in knowledge and technological outputs, followed by Rwanda and Nigeria, which both rank highest in market sophistication. Each country analysis is concluded with potential opportunities and strategies needed to be a leader in the 4IR.

The world is at a crossroads, with a new technological era that is fundamentally changing the way we live, work, and relate to one another. This Fourth Industrial Revolution, a term I first coined in 2015, is characterized by new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital, and biological worlds and offer both great potential and great peril to societies as they drive structural transformation to systems of global production, labor, governance, and beyond. In today’s interconnected world, no country or industry can avoid feeling the direct or indirect repercussions of technological development. The question for states, firms, and individuals is not whether to participate in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but how to manage its enormous opportunities for growth and the troubling risks posed by immense market disruption and structural transformation. The pace and unpredictability of innovation during the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be unprecedented; these changes will force public and private sector stakeholders to adapt rapidly or risk falling behind. Although extensively studied since the publication of my book entitled The Fourth Industrial Revolution, little work has been done to better understand Africa’s role in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This is why I have welcomed the opportunity to write the foreword for one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders, Professor Landry Signé’s pioneering book, Africa’s Role in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Riding the World’s Biggest Wave of Disruptive Innovation. In this book, Professor Landry Signé examines what defines the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its key technological components, drivers, and global implications. He forecasts Africa’s participation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution by analyzing consumer and industry trends shaping the continent and countries which are leading the way, evaluating specific opportunities, risks, and strategies for Africa presented by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. He provides guidance for government, business, academic, and civil society leaders to help capitalize on the Fourth Industrial Revolution and maximize returns from deploying new technologies. His book presents the duality of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to leaders across the African continent, as both an opportunity for leapfrogging and a risk of falling even further behind. Overall, Professor Signé demonstrates that the Fourth Industrial Revolution offers an unparalleled opportunity to address many of Africa’s key challenges and can help catalyze the continent to unite if governments, business, academic, and civil society leaders can work together to harness this potential. This book will change the way you see Africa’s transformation and potential in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Everyone, especially leaders interested in understanding how the Fourth Industrial Revolution is changing the developing world and how policy and business leaders can shape it to capture its dividends and mitigate its risks, must read this book.

Chapter 2 gives an extensive overview of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and how it will significantly change the way the world works. It is defined as a bridge for digital transformation and an innovative combination of “cyber-physical” systems. To better understand the 4IR, the previous three are broken down to give contextual background. The chapter highlights the exact technologies that will shape the broad themes and implications of the 4IR. These technologies include 3D printing, advanced material science, artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain, cloud computing, drones and automation, high-speed internet (5G technology), the Internet of Things, nanotechnology, and quantum computers. The technologies are explained and applied to how they are already being used in Africa or how they might be used. The chapter concludes with several themes based on the analysis of technologies and their characteristics. The four themes are productivity and sustainability, disruption and structural transformation, cooperation and inclusivity, security, privacy, and data integrity.

Chapter 9 explores the overall risk of cybersecurity and cybersecurity resilience on the African continent. Africa ranks low on the 2018 International Telecommunication Union’s Global Cybersecurity Insecurity and the continent scores lowest of all regions in the five pillars: legal, technical, organizational, capacity building, and cooperation. With the rise of 4IR technologies, the importance of a national infrastructure is critical in evading cyber-attacks. This chapter goes on to explain how cyber disruptions impact different sectors and civil society.

Chapter 6 is a further deep dive into the tertiary sector of Africa, which includes banking and financial services, tourism, information and communication technologies, and health care. Similar to Chapter 5, this one breaks down each of the industries into current developments and prospects for the 4IR. It also includes implications among the connectivity of people and global market competitiveness of Africa. In addition to this, the chapter explores more of the synergies between cyber and physical spaces in each sector. Each section concludes with opportunities for governments, businesses, and entrepreneurs.

This chapter analyzes traditional sectors, such as manufacturing and industrialization, infrastructure and construction, oil and gas, and agriculture and agro-processing and their potential in the 4IR. Implications, challenges, and opportunities are discussed in each, as well as how new technologies will hinder or better the potential of the sector. It is discussed how growing opportunities in these sectors will help cultivate better environments for innovation. Potential harms may include the disruption of the labor market, exportations, and infrastructure gaps. In order to reduce the disruptive effects of the 4IR, governments and businesses need to work together to help build training programs, investment initiatives, and digitalization. The proper integration of new technologies can aid help in environmental regulations and productivity growth. Each section in the chapter provides opportunities and strategies to achieve success in the 4IR.

The introduction offers a brief overview of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and its implications on different sectors. It then discusses the opportunities and risks of structural transformation that will be brought on by technological innovation. Following this, the 4IR is framed as an inevitable acceleration of digitalization, resulting in market disruptions that the African continent cannot escape. After this, questions about the implications, advantages, key players, and leaders of the 4IR are discussed. This concludes with the final question of Africa’s ability to grow and develop in the 4IR. The research questions are followed by an explanation of 4IR technologies and the methodology of the book, in addition to an overview of the remaining chapters.

Chapter 3, Figures of Risk: Memoirs of a Chinese South African and a Cameroonian in China, features two memoirs of diaspora – from a South African of Chinese descent and a Cameroonian student in the PRC. Both represent the vicissitudes of diasporic mobility in Africa–China relations. They conceptualize mobility through the complex interplay between racial identity, government bureaucracy, threat of imprisonment, personal risk, and economic gain. This chapter shifts the focus to figures of risk, embodied by the gambler and the trickster. As memoirs, these narratives foreground how an individual positions their cultural identity (Hall), complicating and even subverting the official narratives of Africa–China relations through an explicit claim to lived experience. By focusing on these autobiographical writings, I expand the concept of the alluvial to mean the accretions and erosions of everyday life, whether material or metaphysical, acquired through interactions with Others. The texts exemplify cultural creolizations that play (or gamble) with the alluvium of diasporic experience.

This Introduction lays out the gap in Africa–China scholarship regarding the humanities and world literature particularly. The need for humanistic scholarship on Africa–China relations pinpoints how these exchanges are more than just economic or political; they are also linguistic and cultural. I also articulate how the book intervenes into African literary history. I detail my method of interpreting these texts according to frameworks that include the Cold War, Third Worldism, the Indian Ocean, and the Global South. These approaches enable how I read African literature beyond its conventional relationship with the former European colonizer and the West in general. One main goal is to rework our understanding of postcolonial literature’s “worldliness” by configuring it according to African literary imaginaries of China.

Chapter 2, Figures of Extraction: Representations of Mining in Ghana and Zambia, examines how postcolonial masculinity is reconfigured according to Africa–China relations. I home in on what I call “figures of extraction” by examining representations of mining – literal mineral alluvium – in two pieces of genre fiction. One main stake is to unpack the sensationalist discourse surrounding Africa–China relations that depicts the dynamic as a Manichean struggle between an African hero and Chinese villain. Another is to show how Chinese investment triggers the colonial trauma of European colonialism, even as the Chinese presence is configured in critically different ways. I demonstrate that when the dynamic is oversimplified, jingoistic nationalisms easily instrumentalize it to incite an “anti-Chinese populism” (Hess and Aidoo). This simplification often ignores the complicit role that corrupt African elites play in facilitating resource exploitation.