EnlargeChina in Africa | photo illustration by Plamen Petkov

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Special Report: China in Africa (Part 2) Mozambique: A Chain Saw for Every Tree

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Special Report: China in Africa (Part 3) Zambia: China's Mine Shaft

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Special Report: China in Africa (Part 4) Congo: A Moment of Truth

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Special Report: China in Africa (Part 5) Equatorial Guinea: A Strongman Turns East

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Special Report: China in Africa (Part 6) Endgame: Hypocrisy, Blindness, and the Doomsday Scenario

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The Race for Raw Materials

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Dead Heat

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Beijing's Leverage

The No. 2 killer in Africa by parasite, after malaria, is an organism called Entamoeba histolytica -- or "Eh" for short. It was discovered in 1873, the year it took the life of missionary-explorer David Livingstone, that great champion of British imperialism on what his countrymen called the Dark Continent. I know this because, when I returned home from reporting in the sub-Sahara, the same pathogen was drilling through the walls of my gut. It would colonize there for months, unbeknownst to me, absorbing my nutrients and spewing its toxins, as I grew weak and emaciated.

A skillful intruder, Eh can produce a population explosion in a very short time. While its plan of attack is complex and still not entirely understood, it seems to trick human defense mechanisms into thinking all is well in the homeland. (It achieves that by killing local immune cells, then hiding the evidence by eating the cells' corpses.) Unfortunately, the more virulent the strain, the more the parasite risks killing the host -- sometimes by invading the brain -- rendering everyone homeless. Nonetheless, the more I've learned about Eh, the more I admire its resourcefulness, its work ethic (talk about intestinal fortitude!), and its resolve to survive and propagate. It's a shame we couldn't just get along, that my ecosystem couldn't sustain us both.

I likely picked up my dose of Eh in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an epicenter of virulent disease, from flies that transported it from infected human feces to food. "If you were a malnourished kid in a refugee camp in Congo," remarked my doctor, a tropical-disease expert who has labored in dozens of such camps, "you would probably die from this infection." As it happened, I had just made it to age 47, the statistical end of the line for the 770 million people who live in sub-Saharan Africa. By their standards, I was already an old man.

An unfathomably vast terrain comprising 49 nations, the sub-Sahara represents nearly one-fifth of the earth's landmass. Yet its total economy is tinier than Florida's. Here, 300 million people get by on less than $1 a day. Until they don't: It is the planet's biggest tomb, where compared to the 1960s, twice as many children under the age of 5 are now dying each day from disease; a bottomless badland where $500 billion of Western aid since World War II (more than four Marshall Plans) has barely made a dent in the poverty; a region whose market share of world trade is shrinking by the hour as it gets left behind, perhaps permanently, in the dust of globalization; a place so desperate for everything -- cash, trade, investment, infrastructure -- and so powerless to negotiate strategically, that it's pretty much up for sale to the highest bidder.

During my recovery, I had time to dwell on parasites, how they invade and deplete their hosts, much as successive colonial powers have done over the centuries in places such as Africa. Anyone who thinks that kind of ravenous acquisition of resources is a thing of the past should take a close look at the suction China is applying in the sub-Sahara. The region is now the scene of one of the most sweeping, bare-knuckled, and ingenious resource grabs the world has ever seen.

The sub-Sahara is now the scene of one of the most bare-knuckled resource grabs the world has ever seen.