"Chinese investment in Africa has led to a great spurt in economic progress and its demand for raw materials has produced a commodities boom.

"I suspect they are the biggest single foreign player in Africa now. They have a real sense of what African governments want and they work hard at it. I think the West is tired of dealing with Africa, they have aid fatigue and they have debt relief fatigue."

Meredith says China's position in the world is enhanced by delivering what Africa wants.

"They (China) want prestige and influence and they have now accumulated an awful lot of it in Africa. If you are an African government and want your football stadium built, the Chinese will come in and in nine months it will be there. They deliver these things."

Meredith, now 71 and living near Oxford eschewing modern devices such as mobile phones, has had a life almost fitting of the great African adventurers of the Victorian era.

From a family of musicians, he dropped out of the Royal College of Music in London and funding himself with money he borrowed from his grandmother went off to Africa.

"I was going to be a composer but it was a boyhood passion to explore the Nile after reading Alan Moorehead's books and that is what I did.

"I had a huge amount of fun venturing to places such as the Maluti mountains in Lesotho. I traversed the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana which, as far as I know, no European had ever done."

He eventually became a reporter for The Times of Zambia in the mid-1960s, where then president Kenneth Kaunda used to phone him up personally about stories in the paper.

"I remember I started a campaign for the abolition of capital punishment and he phoned me and asked me to desist since it was giving him trouble.

"I was just 22 and he asked me round to tea and said that while he was in favour of it, others in the cabinet were not."

He went on to work as a correspondent for The Observer and then The Sunday Times for nearly two decades.

"It was a time when it all started to go wrong for Africa after the optimism following independence," he says.

Meredith saw first hand China's building of the 1,860-km Tanzam railway linking Dar es Salaam and Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia and regarded as the foundation stone of the modern China-Africa relationship.