Africa’s 600 year-old Chinese Fable
In 2010, China named a player of mixed African and Chinese heritage to the national men’s volleyball team. The selection of Ding Hui was noteworthy in a country where mixed-race citizens are still something of a novelty.
A native of the eastern city of Hangzhou and the son of a South African man who was raised by his Chinese mother, Hui began playing competitive volleyball in his mid-teens. Similarly, the participation of mixed-race Lou Jing in a reality show, sparked intense debates about the meaning of being “Chinese.” Critics felt she should not have been allowed to compete on a Chinese show, nor selected to represent Shanghai in the national competition as she does not have fair skin, which is one of the most important factors for Chinese beauty.
In recent times, China’s trade with Africa has doubled every three years since 2000, hitting $107 billion in 2008 and eclipsing the United States as the continent’s biggest trading partner. Hui and Jing are the first among what bodes to be many mixed African-Chinese children – the products of increasing fraternization between the East and Africa where there are currently some 800,000 Chinese workers, according to SAIIA. Data from the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau from 1994 to 2008 indicate that there has been an average of 3,000 mixed-race marriages annually in Shanghai in that 14-year period. These first-generation products of mixed-race marriages are looking for their identity in a society where birth registration requires an indication of one of 56 government-approved ethnic groups. There is currently no provision for mixed-race identification.
China’s historical relationship with Africa is being rewritten by the recent arrival of a team of Archeologists in Kenya to search for the ancient wreckage of part of a Ming dynasty armada. This underwater evidence of China’s economic history with Africa is a 600-year-old tale dating back to the early 15th century. The sunken ship is believed to have been commanded by Ming dynasty admiral Zheng He, who reached Malindi in 1418. According to Kenyan lore, a handful of survivors swum ashore after the ship sank. The newcomers won the confidence of the locals by killing a python that had been plaguing a village and was allowed to stay and marry local women, creating a community of African-Chinese whose descendants still live in the area. The three-year, £2m joint archaeological project will centre on the tourist towns of Lamu and Malindi and should shed light on a largely unknown part of both countries histories. DNA tests conducted in Siyu village on a Swahili family whose oral history and facial features left hints of their antecedent as descendants of Zheng’s shipwrecked sailors, further confirmed evidence of Chinese ancestry. Consequently, a 19-year-old woman called Mwamaka Shirafu was given a full scholarship to study traditional medicine in China, at a time when Western aid in Africa is in decline. Recently, a top economist and former CEO of France’s international development agency, the Agence Française de Dévelopement Jean-Michel Severino announced that the era of compassionate aid for Africa was over.
With the world and western economies struggling, the Kenyan project goes a long way to strengthen China’s historical ties with Africa. US Commerce Department records that America’s trade ties with Africa fell from $141 billion in 2008 to $86 billion in 2009. According to the IMF, the only parts of the world experiencing economic growth in the global recession are Asia and Africa, where its most populous country Nigeria is the world’s third fastest-growing economy after China and India. On-going cooperation in Nigeria includes the 2006 Lekki Free Zone Development Company (LFZDC), where the Chinese consortium led by the China Civil Engineering Construction Company holds a majority stake. The $750 million project is due for completion in 2014. Lessons learned from the LFZDC’s experience include the need for greater confidence in negotiating with Chinese investors, especially where the prospects of technology transfer increase the overall benefit to the host country. Small wonder Africa is welcoming China as it pitches its tent on the continent. As China’s trade and influence in Africa increased, the West’s continues to shrink.
In recent race debates in China, the critics felt that Lou Jing cannot be regarded as a “real” Chinese, an argument put to the test by the acceptance of Ding Hui on the National Volleyball team. As Lou put it, “When I meet somebody for the first time, they’d often ask me how I can speak Chinese so well, and I tell them ‘Because I’m a Chinese, of course I can speak my mother-tongue well.'” she says defiantly. “I don’t like to be treated differently.” Hui says of all the controversy: “All I want to do is play a good game”. While the Hui and Lou-generated public debate exposed a deep-running vein of xenophobia in Chinese society, the Kenyan archaeological project also shows that time blurs the race lines, or does it? Africa simply needs to apply the lessons learned from the West’s scramble for Africa in its engagement with the East.
