When Chokepoints Become Shockpoints: Middle East Conflict, Maritime Rerouting, and African Trade Resilience, 2023-2026

Background: Maritime chokepoints have become critical sites where geopolitical conflict is converted into trade cost, delay, uncertainty, and unequal supply-chain exposure. Purpose: This study examines how Middle East conflict-related disruption around the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, Suez Canal, Bab el-Mandeb, Cape of Good Hope route, and Strait of Hormuz affects African trade resilience. Design: The article uses a pragmatic critical-realist mixed secondary-data design combining a completed PRISMA-guided systematised evidence map, documentary policy analysis, and descriptive analysis of verified institutional indicators. Results: The evidence map screened 53 records after removing 9 duplicates and included 25 scholarly and institutional sources. Verified UNCTAD evidence shows that Suez-linked rerouting can add approximately 12 days to a Shanghai-Rotterdam voyage, approximate a 30% transit-time shock, reduce effective container capacity by about 9%, and increase containership arrivals around the Cape of Good Hope by 328% by gross tonnage by early March 2024 relative to early December 2023. Across Djibouti, Kenya, Tanzania, and Sudan, reported Suez-route exposure ranges from 10% to 34% of foreign trade by volume, with a mean of 22.5% and coefficient of variation of 52.4%. Contribution: The article integrates supply-chain resilience, time-as-trade-barrier economics, maritime connectivity, global value chains, trade facilitation, and geoeconomic risk into an Africa-focused framework. Implications: African trade resilience requires route-risk monitoring, port productivity, digital customs, corridor redundancy, supplier diversification, data systems, and strategic regional integration.