By Bill Durodie

Last December, a full seven years after the last summit of EU and African leaders held in Cairo in 2000, the long postponed EU-Africa summit finally took place again in Lisbon.

Europe is Africa's single largest trading partner, so you might imagine such get-togethers are fairly important and ought to occur frequently. But the real trigger behind this delayed meeting was China.

In November 2006, Beijing hosted a lavish Forum for China-Africa Cooperation which set pundits' tongues wagging in the West. China is now variously portrayed either as an economic competitor in Africa, or as its oppressor.

In March of this year, a well-known magazine ran a photo-montage front page of a man wearing a pith helmet, riding on a camel and carrying China's national flag. The magazine explored China's supposed new role and impact in Africa.

The Beijing forum had hosted 48 heads of state from Africa and signed billions of dollars worth of deals, setting a target of $100 billion of trade with Africa by 2010 which, judging by what usually happens when the Chinese government sets a target, should be met well ahead of schedule.

The EU-Africa summit, on the other hand, hastily convened in the aftermath of Beijing, simply led to a further meeting in Brussels on April 1 this year in order to make the partnership agreed in Lisbon a reality . So presumably, the Lisbon meeting had just been talks about having future talks rather than being decisive in any way.

Despite all of this, several African leaders arrived in Tokyo early this month, during the G8 summit of the world's richest powers, to demand that the promises of aid, debt relief and trade, that had been made three years earlier at the much-publicized Gleneagles summit, should be seen through.

China primarily imports oil and other resources from Africa and exports manufactured goods to it. But nothing is as simple as it seems.