Apart from the fact that the land is cheap — at £38 a hectare in Tanzania — it circumvents complications major Indian food and flower producers face at home. Smallholdings and middlemen dominate Indian farming. An estimated £6 billion is lost as produce rots on its way to market. There are also government bans on the export of non-Basmati rice, so by growing it in Africa, Indian companies can sell it overseas. As in China, a more affluent Indian middle class is eating more meat, which means an urgent need for maize-based animal feed. 

Various African countries have begun to experience inter-ethnic tensions involving Asians. So far these have been focused on the Chinese, whose clannish hard-heartedness is deeply resented. In Maseru, the capital of tiny Lesotho, there were anti-Chinese riots in 2007, sparked not by Chinese domination of textile mills, but by the fact that every successful Chinese entrepreneur brings along 100 relatives who take over local stores. Africa has been down this path before. In the 1960s several African leaders, including Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta and Tanzania's Julius Nyerere, exploited anti-Asian sentiment for their own political ends. So did the grotesque Idi Amin of Uganda, who drove out tens of thousands of East African Asians in the following decade.

There is a further issue. One aspect of China's soft power is to export its authoritarian capitalist model, based on a combination of rapid development and hearing and seeing no evils in the regimes it deals with. The dealings routinely include putting up to $500 million in the rulers' Swiss bank accounts, lavish presidential palaces, hospitals and roads. But sometimes things do not pan out China's way. The fact that Zambia has just had a peaceful election in which power passed smoothly from Banda to Sata is also part of Africa's story, and it was not a win for Beijing's Confucian capitalism.