The 2021 China-Africa Video and Photo Competition reached a finale at an award ceremony in Beijing on October 14. Themed Friendship in Focus, Together for Future, the competition aims to provide a platform for Chinese and African people to share their stories and experiences through videos and photos. Launched on May 21, the competition attracted wide interest from Chinese and African photo and video lovers, receiving over 2,500 entries.

The Special Prize was won by Zimbabwean Michael Mubaiwa for his work Love for Guqin in the video category, and Huang Shiyong, a doctor working with a medical aid mission to Botswana, for his work Guarding the Hope in the photo group. Other awards included first, second and third prizes, individual awards for highest popularity and best editing, creativity and visual effects, as well as the Friendship Award and Outstanding Organization Award.

The ceremony was hosted simultaneously in three venues, with Beijing being the main venue and Dakar in Senegal, and Johannesburg in South Africa joining through video link. During the event, guests exchanged ideas about the works of the competition, as well as China-Africa friendship in general.

Outstanding creations

The Special Prize-winning photo features a nurse checking patient status in a ward during the night. According to Huang, the photo was taken when her colleague Ye Liwei in the 16th medical aid mission to Botswana from Fujian Province of China was working in an ICU in the African country.

In his remarks on behalf of the judges at the award ceremony, Hosam Farouk Elmaghrabi, an Egyptian language expert at China.org.cn and a 2017 Chinese Government Friendship Award winner, said he was particularly impressed by the hope shown in the photo with its sharp contrast between light and darkness. "At a time when the epidemic is raging, this work shows us that China is willing to work with Africa and the international community to overcome the epidemic and the darkness," he said.

He also mentioned his favorite video featuring two African brothers volunteering in a community in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. He admitted that viewing the works of the competition as a judge was a new kind of experience. "I always heard my friends in China say the word 'African Brothers,' but it was not until I saw these wonderful videos and photos that I realized the brotherhood between China and Africa," he said.

In the top prize-winning video, the creator, a Zimbabwean student in China, tells the story in fluent Chinese how he came to China and became an expert of the Chinese culture in the eyes of his friends. He concludes his video with a marvelous performance of guqin, a traditional Chinese musical instrument with seven strings that has a history of over 3,000 years.

Other entries also tell heartwarming stories and cover a wide variety of topics ranging from China's medical aid in Africa and Chinese in Africa helping local communities fight the pandemic to how young Chinese are attracted by African drum and dances and how young Africans are exploring the secrets of poverty reduction in China's rural areas.

Enhancing friendship

Speaking at the ceremony, Deng Li, then Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs of China, said he was glad to see so many touching stories in various aspects of China-Africa friendship. "It is stories like these that have driven the development of China-Africa cooperation and make us confident about the prospects of the China-Africa relationship," he said.

Martin Chedondo, Zimbabwean Ambassador to China, praised the works of the competition for their focus on reflecting and sharing cultural experiences and friendship in the pandemic era. "Understanding each other's cultural practices is the backbone of any human interaction, including business," he said.

Speaking on behalf of the winners of the Outstanding Organization Award, David Monyae, Co-Director of University of Johannesburg Confucius Institute, said that the institute reacted proactively to the call for entries, and students and teachers worked together to produce 10 video entries. He said that the competition is popular in Africa and hoped that it will continue to serve as a platform for Africans to share information.

El Hadj Hamidou Kassé, Special Advisor to the President on Culture and Arts of Senegal, said that the images are an important medium to reflect people's views on the world and that the competition has contributed to correcting the image of Africa that has been distorted by the Western world through their visual media. He applauded the equality, mutual respect and care for each other between Chinese and African people shown in the entries, and believed this kind of relationship will help build a new culture in the international community based on equality, friendship and unity.

Active participation

Gao Anming, Vice President and Editor in Chief of China International Publishing Group (CIPG), said that the organization had sponsored the competition in a response to the call for improved people-to-people exchanges included in the Eight Major Initiatives proposed by China at the 2018 Beijing Summit of FOCAC. He emphasized the importance of joint efforts from both Chinese and African people in promoting China-Africa ties. "People are not only active drivers of the growth of China-Africa relations, but also the best storytellers of the touching stories between the two sides," he said.

Presenting an overview of the competition, Li Jianguo, Editor in Chief of BEIJING REVIEW under CIPG, the major organizer of this competition, said that the competition has seen a further increase in involvement compared to previous editions of the competition held in the past two years.

For the evaluation of the entries, 11 judges from China, South Africa, Senegal and other countries were invited to score 90 works selected from the 2,500 entries. The scores given by the judges were combined with the results of online voting which saw the participation of about 2.7 million viewers in China and Africa. According to Li, the entries were viewed over 40 million times in China and more than 40 African countries, thanks to the help of media partners.

This year's competition was co-sponsored by the Secretariat of the Chinese Follow-up Committee of the FOCAC and CIPG, and co-organized by BEIJING REVIEW, China Media Group Mobile, CGTN French, and TRANSSION's HippoAD and Vskit, in partnership with Seneweb in Senegal and South African Independent Media Group. CA

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