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New AU headquarters: A tribute to China-Africa relations
A response to Chika Ezeanya
Antoine Roger Lokongo
The relationship between China and Africa has always been one of mutual support and Africa’s support to China has been invaluable. This is what young Chinese and young Africans must be taught and reminded. China has never come to Africa as a coloniser and has never enslaved African people. In fact, Chinese people were brought to Africa as slaves by British imperialism to work the gold mines of South Africa and to build King Leopold’s first railway in Congo at the turn of the twentieth century. Back in the fifteenth century, Zheng He, a famous Chinese Muslim Admiral, sailed with his fleet as far as East Africa. They traded their goods and went away. The modern relations between China and Africa begin and are defined by the liberation struggles of the two peoples against colonialism and imperialism. Most of the prominent leaders of the African liberation struggle have also been supporters of the Chinese revolution, a revolution they have also seen as having direct significance for their own struggle, especially against apartheid. The Black Panther Party were also staunch supporters of socialist China and of Mao’s teachings and did everything they could to popularise them in their communities. The Chinese insisted on hosting a delegation from the Panthers, led by Huey P Newton before Nixon’s visit. In the 1930s, Langston Hughes, the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote poetry lauding the heroic resistance of the Chinese people against invasion by Japan. A little later, Paul Robeson learned and sang in Chinese the words that were to become the national anthem after the People’s Republic was founded, to express his solidarity with the Chinese people in their revolutionary war. The great scholar Dr WEB Du Bois broke the US blockade to celebrate his 91st birthday in China.

During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, when many countries shunned China, President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia were among the very few heads of state to visit. Chika Ezeanya’s empty rhetoric therefore reached its climax when she caricatured Mwalimu Julius Nyerere’s political philosophy, writing that indigenous Bantu culture abhors dependence on others for sustenance. A favorite Swahili proverb of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere’s was ‘Mgeni siku mbili; siku ya tatu mpe jembe’, which means: ‘treat your guest as a guest for two days; on the third day give him a hoe.’ Indigenous African tradition largely abhors dependency of any kind. It is exactly because, like Mao Zedong, Nyerere advocated self-reliance that he and Mao Zedong became great friends and Nyerere won the respect of the Chinese people. So how does Chika Ezeanya’s rhetoric apply to China-Africa relations? Why did we not give a hoe to the White man the moment he overstayed his welcome in Africa? Instead we let him subdue us for centuries, leaving us with the legacy of slave mentality and a dependency syndrome deeply ingrained in minds and so difficult to free ourselves from now despite the flag and anthems of independence we achieved.

At the start of the 1970s, the People’s Republic finally won the right to take its lawful seat in the United Nations and on the Security Council. It was the votes of the African countries that were crucial in securing that victory for China.

Whenever China has been under attack from hostile western forces, the overwhelming majority of African countries have always sided with China and shown their support for its vital interests. China was liberated in 1949, a time when the overwhelming majority of African countries were yet to win their political independence. At the time of liberation, China was a desperately poor country, needing to overcome more than a century of humiliation and decades of war, yet to recover all of its national territory, its industry and agriculture in ruins, and the majority of its people illiterate, hungry and disease-ridden. Moreover, just a year after its founding, the People’s Republic was forced into a vicious war in Korea against the might of the United States and 15 of its allied and satellite countries. Yet this mountain of problems did not stop China from expressing its support for the national liberation struggles in Africa.

In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela recalls that in 1953 he sent Walter Sisulu to China to secure China’s support for the anti-apartheid struggle. In 1955, contacts were made between the Chinese leaders and many leaders of the African liberation struggle at the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. China recognised the provisional government of Algeria on the very day of its founding, the first country to do so, and long before the French were driven out. When Patrice Lumumba was murdered in Congo, Mao made a personal statement in solidarity with the Congolese people. Millions of people demonstrated in China and China supported the armed liberation struggle in the Congo led by figures such as Pierre Mulele and Laurent Kabila.

On 18 August 2011, celebrations were held to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Friendship Treaty between China and Ghana, signed by Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, independent Ghana’s first leader and founding father of the African Union and Chinese President Liu Shaoqi in front of tens of thousands of people in the Workers’ Stadium in Beijing. It is right that a bronze statue of pan-African leader Kwame Nkrumah has been unveiled in his honour at the site of the new AU headquarters.

Between 1970-75, when China was still a very poor country and going through difficult days, she built the Tan-Zam railway, which the West had refused to build. Zambia and Tanzania were being crippled economically by their support for the anti-apartheid, anti-imperialist struggle. Landlocked Zambia could only export its copper through what was then Rhodesia and South Africa. The Tan-Zam railway gave Zambia another outlet to the sea. The West said the railway was logistically impractical and too expensive to build. A still impoverished China proved them wrong.

The greatest contribution to the liberation of Mozambique and Zimbabwe by any non-African country came from China and fighters of nearly every African liberation movement were trained in China in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of them are today leaders of their countries, such as the current President of Eritrea. [7]

So instead of lambasting China, Africans should take their own responsibility. How come 60 years ago, Africans and Chinese had the same standard of living but China has become the world’s second biggest economy while Africa cannot even feed its people in the 21st century? Why is the African Union always cash-strapped making it a toothless organisation that takes decisions but has no means to implement them and therefore nobody can take it seriously? Here again Gaddafi’s total commitment to the establishment of an African Monetary Fund is to be commended (Gaddafi has been bankrolling the always cash-strapped African Union). Why are African governments not regularly paying their membership dues to the African Union as they do so promptly with the Commonwealth, Francophony or Lusophony, all these vestiges of colonisation in Africa? Africa has been hit by the global financial crisis it is not responsible for since it has been caused by the corruption of the Western financial system. Which other friend of Africa would be willing to fund, design, build and maintain a new $200 million AU headquarters in the middle of a global financial crisis of such magnitude besides bailing out individual African countries or investing there in the middle of the crisis?

It is indeed true that China needs many of the resources that Africa possesses in such abundance (although countries like Ethiopia are not so rich in natural resources, they have become China’s great partners). But China’s win-win, infrastructures for natural resources exchange has given a remarkable boost to Sino-African economic cooperation. While America is building military bases under the African Command scheme (Africom), China is championing a developmental approach in its relation with Africa. Bilateral trade between China and Africa reached over $150 billion in 2011, a jump from less than $20 billion a decade earlier. [8]

So far, China is the only partner that Africa has which exports its products to Africa but at the same time transfers technology to Africa, builds houses, roads, bridges, railways, airports, ports, telecommunications, power networks, water supply, sewage and drainage systems, low-cost housing and hospitals, specialised laboratories for biology, computer science, analytical chemistry, food preservation and processing, horticulture and civil engineering. This is concretely happening at a time when Obama is talking about ‘going around the world to create markets for American products’. [9]

It is only through its close relationship with China – the brother who has gone ahead and whose valuable experience, especially in the agricultural sector, is desperately needed – that Africa will be able to achieve its second independence; that is to say, its economic independence. Western economists are already unanimously concurring that China and Africa is going to be the centre of world trade. [10] The Chinese too are fully aware of the growing interdependence between their nation and Africa. Not only has China completed numerous vital infrastructure projects for African countries, it has also trained tens of thousands of skilled workers for them to sustain their comprehensive development (China awards 5,000 scholarships a year to African students). Moreover, Africa’s modernization and the future of the Chinese economy are inseparable as Africa’s modernization boosts China’s manufacturing and construction industry, while China’s engagement promotes Africa’s rapid modernization. [11]

Some Africans have now become the mouthpieces of Western powers and they endlessly repeat that China is coming to exploit Africa – they add ‘just like the West did’ only for convenience. It is true that not all Chinese who come privately to Africa ‘to get rich quickly’ are good. Some are involved in poaching and other illicit activities with the complicity of Africans themselves and it is up to African governments to report them to the Chinese government to rein in on them. But As a Congolese (DRC), I can only say that of all mining contracts our government has signed with external partners, the stakes of the Congolese state do not go beyond 17 percent in all mining contracts signed with Western companies. It is only in the contracts that Congo has signed with China that the stakes of the Congolese state reach at least 32 percent. President Mugabe has said that whether you are Asian or Westerner, if you want mining concessions in Zimbabwe, the stakes of the Zimbabwean state must reach at least 51 percent. And the Chinese say they are OK with that. What about the Westerners? You can judge for yourselves from the way Mugabe has been demonised in the West. And so, I have asked the Congolese government many times. ‘Why don’t you do like Mugabe then? In that way you will increase the revenues to rebuild the country’. I have not received any reply so far (…).

So, it is up to our governments! Targeting China, I believe, is a cover up for something else. People are paid by Western lobbies and secret services and by Taiwan just to do that (…). It has become a big business among Africans from all over the world. Many Africans made the issue of whether the South African government should or not grant a visa to the Dalai Lama their very own battle. We saw it.

Perhaps Chika Ezeanya has a problem with ‘China’s gift to Africa’ as the new AU headquarters is termed. He sees in the new AU headquarters only a ‘poisoned or poisonous gift’. However, in the Chinese culture, gift giving is a way to express your friendship, gratitude, loyalty or hospitality to one another. China has built ‘Friendship Hospitals’ and ‘Friendship Schools’ almost in every African country. Would Chika Ezeanya then suggest that we close them because they were designed, built and maintained by the Chinese?

A building as symbolic as the AU headquarters, as Chika Ezeanya puts it, has been designed and built mainly by the Chinese. But there is still room for improvement. I suggest that an AU City be built around the new AU headquarters for dignitaries to stay in during the summits and for other purposes such discussion meetings related to the issues African masses are facing; funded, designed, built and maintained by Africans themselves and hope that we will not wait until cows come home.

Antoine Roger Lokongo is a journalist and PhD candidate at the School of International Studies, Centre for African Studies, Peking University, Beijing, China. 

REFERENCES
[1] Vaughan, Jenny. 2012. New AU headquarters marks strong China-Africa ties.
[2] Abuja: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
[3] Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
[4] Brar, Halpar . 2011. China in Africa: A building block of a new anti-imperialist world order. Lalkar Online.
[5] Moore, Malcolm. 2011. New San Francisco bridge built in China to be shipped to US. The Telegraph, June 28, Work News Section. UK Edition.
[6] Karlsson, Stefan. 2012. China’s economy may surpass US before 2020. The Christian Science Monitor.
[7] Brar, Halpar, Loc. Cit.,
[8] Vaughan, Jenny. Loc. Cit.,
[9] Doug, Palmer. 2012. Obama plans new team to get tough on China trade.Reuters.
[10] Fletcher and Ahmed. 2012. Davos 2012: China and Africa to be centre of world trade. The Telegraph, January 26, Finance Section, UK Edition.
[11] Lu Hui . 2012. Commentary: A top-level visit to enhance China-Africa friendship amid growing interdependence. Xinhua.

 

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