This chapter employs an archive that was counterinsurgent in its creation in order to tease out an insurgent narrative of the uprisings, spotlighting the demands and experiences of working people as it traces the spread of labor unrest across various plantations that year. The central argument is that despite racialized job segmentation, residential segregation, and disparate historical experiences, the unrest demonstrates active cooperation among the Black and Indian communities that confronted the sugar industry and colonial state. In this case, strong racial identities did not preclude joint action. The chapter demonstrates that laborers were not only aware of their position in the colonial economy, but also advanced a vision of modern politics and connected their interests to global concerns of their day, particularly the invasion of Ethiopia and ideas about communism.

Evangelical Christianity gave Phillis the means, motive, and opportunity to become a poet. She was writing poetry by 1765, a mere four years after she arrived in America. The poems she wrote in the next few years display an almost incredibly rapid improvement in her skills in versification. As a recently converted “Ethiop” she assumes the role of a lay preacher. Phillis experimented with various literary forms, such as allegory, as well as with rhyme patterns besides the rhymed couplets she uses in almost all her later poems. In response to the growing tensions between Britain and its North American colonies during the 1760s, Phillis began writing overtly political poems, creating what I call a proto-national American voice. Phillis’s persona alternates between identifying as African and as American in Phillis’s elegy on the death of George Whitefield in 1770. She uses the occasion to address contemporaneous religious and political issues. Republication of her elegy brought Phillis transatlantic recognition.

Chapter 6 examines migration management aid in Ethiopia – a semi-democracy. Ethiopia’s history of foreign aid and migration is intertwined with intra-regional conflicts, the politicization of famine, and forced resettlement in service of centralizing control and statebuilding. The EU and its member states built on shifting alliances throughout the 1990s and 2000s to become the largest humanitarian and development donors in Ethiopia, all while pushing European interests in the region and overlooking the government’s human rights record. The EUTF grants fit within this pattern of conditional aid in which the EU dangled the carrot of €281 million, in exchange for ambitious promises to reform refugee protection. By the end of 2023, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, had fought a devastating war in the Tigray region, relocated refugee camps, blocked aid to displaced people in Tigray, and redirected economic investments toward his allies. In the case of Ethiopia, migration management aid was used to tie domestic actors to central authorities in the refugee agency (pathway III), and ultimately to redirect aid away from Tigray (pathway II).

Chapter 5 explores the sharper edges of China’s image-making and illuminates the subtle, multifaceted silencing that permeates China’s diplomacy. The experiences of Ethiopian journalists, PR professionals, officials, and scholars point to the core feature of censorship as controlled information release. This includes proactive selective publicity and information withdrawals, as well as spontaneous and reactive silencing, at times carried out by non-state actors. Ethiopian elites reinforce the efforts of Chinese stakeholders and co-discipline China narratives out of their own strategic interest in upholding a positive relationship with China. At the same time, in private spaces, these same elites also articulate and spread negative stories about China through satire and rumors.

Chapter 6 brings in a transnational dimension to the study of China’s image-making in Ethiopia by examining the role of the West in conditioning this encounter. Drawing on interviews with core participants in Chinese initiatives, including Ethiopian elites and Chinese diplomatic professionals, the analysis reveals their shared aspirations for the West, and especially for the United States. Ethiopian participants tend to treat the West as a quality marker, and China as a secondary choice, and at times even as a pathway to experiencing the West. Ironically, Chinese soft power promoters also appear to uphold and aspire to Western hierarchies and use Ethiopia and Africa as a channel toward more desired professional destinations in the West. While Chinese official narratives invoke competition with the West, the actual participants in the Sino-African encounter still strive to be part of it.

Chapter 1 grounds this study in larger policy and theoretical debates, including literature on US-China competition, China’s authoritarian diffusion, South–South communication flows, and China–Africa relations. It further introduces the analytical and conceptual framework of this study: China’s uneven image-making in Africa, which includes its ambitious image promotion mechanisms, as well as disjointed implementation and reception on the ground. The chapter also explains the methodological choices, including the focus on Ethiopia and Global China ethnographic approach.

Chapter 3 delves into the material facet of China’s image-making or attraction through tangible offerings. Drawing on the analysis of China’s core diplomatic initiatives in Ethiopia, namely elite training and education diplomacy, Confucius Institutes, and media outreach, the chapter illuminates how offering access to opportunities and resources is at the heart of initiating participants into China. It also examines the uneven deployment of “tangible enticement” by demonstrating how Chinese actors, including embassy personnel and Confucius Institute directors, amongst others, are at once strategic and methodical about presenting targeted opportunities, as well as spontaneous and hands-off in promoting and allocating resources. The chapter then analyzes the reception from Ethiopian target audiences, finding a mix of opportunistic engagement and negotiation of China’s offerings.

Chapter 7 summarizes the core findings of this book and positions them in a larger comparative context by examining how they translate to other contexts in Africa and in the Global South. The chapter further discusses future research pathways in the field of China’s soft power in the Global South, including comparative directions, and provides some practical considerations for policymakers.

Chapter 4 engages with China’s ideational power as part of its image-making in Ethiopia, and more broadly in Africa. The chapter directly speaks to the ongoing debates about the export of the China model to the Global South by delving into the content of and perceptions toward China’s official training programs of African elites. Rather than exporting a model, I find that Chinese educators and officials attempt to legitimize China’s governance (both domestic and global) and to show off China. The actual delivery of these trainings carries some consistency, such as the presentation of China as an alternative type of democracy, as well as some arbitrary content diffusion in specific governance domains like journalism. Far from passively buying into the “China model,” Ethiopian participants soften their perceptions of China, but also negotiate and reject some of its persuasion narratives and strategies.

This chapter deals with the institutional history of Nuer Christianity and examines how various interconnections that were made possible through people’s movement across the frontierlands contributed to the development of churches and the circulation of Christian knowledge. It starts in the early twentieth century with the coming of missionaries to southern Sudan and explores the introduction of Seventh-day Adventism in the 1970s and the consequent emergence of Messianic groups out of the Adventist church since the 1990s. The chapter demonstrates how claims of biblical authenticity (that is, of being the ’true church’) fuelled schisms and institutional fragmentation. The chapter is concerned with both the history and proliferation of Messianic institutions in Gambella, and the ways in which Messianics thought about the history and biblical indexicality of their churches, as institutions that traced their roots to the Holy Bible.

This chapter explores Nuer experiences of encountering the urban frontier and the Ethiopian state in the borderlands. It does so by tracing the history and evolution of Gambella town and Newland, the Nuer dominated peri-urban settlement at its eastern edges. Newland has long been a place that attracted people seeking modern education and links with new actors and institutions. Over the past two decades, this peri-urban settlement expanded significantly and emerged as an important node in global Nuer networks. The chapter highlights the salience of fears of manipulation, trickery, and embarrassment in people’s engagements with the urban frontier, and central role such sentiments played in motivating people’s quest for education, knowledge, and global connectivity in the urban environment. The attitudes concerning learning and modern education that this chapter explores are essential for understanding the religious dynamics described in the rest of the book.

While there were some aspects of Nuer ‘tradition’ or ‘culture’ that Messianics in Gambella proudly endorsed and celebrated as biblically authentic, others were rejected as ‘pagan’ or satanic. In this chapter, I turn to the relationship between Messianic Judaism and ‘Nuer customary law’, to explain these dynamics. The chapter traces the process through which the spiritual significance of cattle declined, under the influence of the secular state, and instead, under born-again Christian doctrines, the individual human (body and soul) emerged as the prime means of communicating with God. Cattle in its desacralised form, however, was still used by Messianics for bridewealth payments, and they insisted that their marriage practices were not only the most loyal to Nuer ‘tradition’ but also biblically authentic. The chapter offers new insights on the endurance of pre-Christian practices among African born-again Christians, showing how old ‘customs’ may be deemed relevant and meaningful even under a radically new regime of spiritual mediation.