Online Reporter
Mabasa Sasa
In recent years, China has put forward four major global initiatives, collectively seeking to answer one defining question of our times: what kind of world should we build, and how should we build it?
The Global Development Initiative provides the material foundation for shared prosperity. The Global Security Initiative establishes a framework for peaceful conditions needed for steady advancement. The Global Governance Initiative offers institutional ideas toward a fairer international order.
Holding these three agendas together is the Global Civilisation Initiative (GCI), anchored in respect for human dignity.
Proposed by President Xi Jinping at the High‑level Dialogue between the Communist Party of China and World Political Parties in March 2023, the GCI rests on a simple yet profound premise: human civilisation is inherently plural.
A world of plural civilisations
From this perspective, Zimbabwe’s heritage — the Great Zimbabwe stone architecture, Shona and
Ndebele worldviews, and ubuntu values — carries equal weight for humanity alongside civilisations of Asia, Europe, Oceania and the Americas.
No civilisation ranks above another, and no single development model can fit every nation. This argument carries special weight coming from China, home to one of the world’s oldest continuously existing civilisations.
The legacy of civilisational hierarchy
Much of the post‑Cold War era was shaped by competing hegemonic narratives that advanced opposite assumptions. Influential Western intellectual theses, such as Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” and Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” were selectively absorbed into the ideological toolkit behind the Washington Consensus.
What emerged was a hierarchy disguised as universalism: one civilisational template, one set of institutions and one economic doctrine were presented as the supposed final destination for all societies. Nations pursuing alternative development paths were framed as sources of risk.
Such narratives misrepresented human diversity and actively fuelled division across the globe. It is a history Zimbabwe knows well.
Lessons from Great Zimbabwe
For centuries, some Western narratives denied that Great Zimbabwe — Sub‑Saharan Africa’s largest pre‑colonial stone monument, built by the Shona people between the 11th and 16th centuries — could be an indigenous African achievement. Speculative theories attributed the complex to
Phoenicians, Arabs, a supposed lost white civilisation and even extraterrestrial visitors.
Even after archaeological research confirmed African authorship, these myths persisted. To acknowledge a sophisticated indigenous African state contradicted the implicit civilisational ranking embedded within those dominant discourses. When Zimbabwe gained independence, naming the nation after this monument was a deliberate act of cultural reclamation against attempts to erase local heritage.
The GCI firmly rejects such distortion and devaluation of non‑Western civilisations. It calls for exchanges to bridge estrangement, mutual learning to mitigate conflict, and tolerance to reject cultural ranking. It encourages nations to confidently embrace their own cultural roots while engaging openly with the rest of the world. Put simply, the GCI encourages societies not to apologise for their own civilisational identities.
Any initiative opposing the imposition of one civilisation’s values and systems upon others deserves full support from Zimbabwe and broader Africa. As a Chinese scholar of comparative philosophy noted at a recent Beijing forum on the GCI, the world is better understood as an interwoven mosaic of civilisations rather than isolated states graded against a single yardstick.
Agency: defining progress on Africa’s own terms
For Zimbabwe and Africa at large, this is far more than rhetorical correctness. It responds to decades of frustration with external development discourses that often came attached to moral judgements.
Structural‑adjustment programmes were marketed not merely as economic policy prescriptions, but as mandatory costs for achieving modernity. The underlying message was clear: accept the offered model, or remain excluded from perceived modern progress.
The GCI’s emphasis that no single development path is superior grants African countries something rarely offered under the Washington Consensus: space to define progress according to local realities, without seeing autonomous choices labelled as deviations requiring external “correction”.
GCI as connecting thread for global initiatives
This is where the Global Civilisation Initiative performs its vital bridging function for China’s other three global initiatives. Development cooperation lacking cultural respect risks breeding resentment. Security arrangements built without civilisational trust remain fragile, resting on temporary convenience rather than lasting conviction. International governance reform that ignores genuine cultural differences risks reproducing old hegemonies under new labels.
In this sense, the GCI serves as connective tissue helping make the other three initiatives more sustainable. It helps dismantle a long‑standing distortion within North‑South relations: the idea that respect must be earned by copying external models. It enables Africa to engage internationally from a position of cultural self‑confidence rather than defensiveness.
Diversity as shared global resource
Global solidarity cannot be built by denying communities their distinct identities. It can only grow from recognising that cultural differences are not flaws to be eliminated, but valuable resources for all humanity to share. This modest yet powerful principle sits at the heart of the Global Civilisation
Initiative. Rooted in the vision of common values for all humankind, the GCI opens new space for equal dialogue between Africa, China and the wider world, pointing toward a more inclusive international future.
l Mabasa Sasa is a political and cultural commentator. His research and writings focus on African cultural identity, decolonisation of global narratives, and Africa‑China relations.
Bongani Ndlovu