A friend of mine sent me this informative yet disturbing article about China's imperial agenda for Africa. When will the exploitation end? I guess when Africa's children stand up to say "enough is enough" cos if we don't do it, who will?
By Andrew Malone
June 5, 1873, in a letter to The Times, Sir Francis Galton, thecousin of Charles Darwin and a distinguished African explorer in hisown right, outlined a daring (if by today's standards utterlyoffensive) new method to 'tame' and colonise what was then known asthe Dark Continent.'
My proposal is to make the encouragement of Chinese settlements ofAfrica a part of our national policy, in the belief that the Chineseimmigrants would not only maintain their position, but that they wouldmultiply and their descendants supplant the inferior Negro race,'wrote Galton.'
I should expect that the African seaboard, now sparsely occupied by lazy, palavering savages, might in a few years be tenanted byindustrious, order-loving Chinese, living either as a semidetacheddependency of China, or else in perfect freedom under their own law.'Enlarge Close relations: Chinese President Hu Jintao accompaniesZimbabwe President Robert Mugabe to a ceremony in the Great Hall ofthe People in Beijing.
Close relations: Chinese President Hu Jintao accompanies ZimbabwePresident Robert Mugabe to a ceremony in the Great Hall of the Peoplein Beijing. Despite an outcry in Parliament and heated debate in the august salonsof the Royal Geographic Society, Galton insisted that 'the history ofthe world tells the tale of the continual displacement of populations,each by a worthier successor, and humanity gains thereby'.
A controversial figure, Galton was also the pioneer of eugenics, thetheory that was used by Hitler to try to fulfil his mad dreams of aGerman Master Race.Eventually, Galton's grand resettlement plans fizzled out becausethere were much more exciting things going on in Africa.
But that was more than 100 years ago, and with legendary explorerssuch as Livingstone, Speke and Burton still battling to find thesource of the Nile - and new discoveries of exotic species of birdsand animals featuring regularly on newspaper front pages - vastswathes of the continent had not even been 'discovered'.
Yet Sir Francis Galton, it now appears, was ahead of his time. Hisvision is coming true - if not in the way he imagined. An astonishinginvasion of Africa is now under way.In the greatest movement of people the world has ever seen, China is secretly working to turn the entire continent into a new colony.
Reminiscent of the West's imperial push in the 18th and 19th centuries- but on a much more dramatic, determined scale - China's rulersbelieve Africa can become a 'satellite' state, solving its ownproblems of over-population and shortage of natural resources at astroke.With little fanfare, a staggering 750,000 Chinese have settled inAfrica over the past decade. More are on the way.
The strategy has been carefully devised by officials in Beijing, whereone expert has estimated that China will eventually need to send 300million people to Africa to solve the problems of over-population andpollution.The plans appear on track. Across Africa, the red flag of China isflying. Lucrative deals are being struck to buy its commodities - oil,platinum, gold and minerals. New embassies and air routes are openingup.
The continent's new Chinese elite can be seen everywhere, shoppingat their own expensive boutiques, driving Mercedes and BMW limousines,sending their children to exclusive private schools.The pot-holed roads are cluttered with Chinese buses, taking people tomarkets filled with cheap Chinese goods. More than a thousand miles of new Chinese railroads are crisscrossing the continent, carryingbillions of tons of illegally-logged timber, diamonds and gold.
Mugabe has said: 'We must turn from the West and face the East'New horizons? Mugabe has said: 'We must turn from the West and face the East'The trains are linked to ports dotted around the coast, waiting tocarry the goods back to Beijing after unloading cargoes of cheap toysmade in China.Confucius Institutes (state-funded Chinese 'cultural centres') havesprung up throughout Africa, as far afield as the tiny land-lockedcountries of Burundi and Rwanda, teaching baffled local people how todo business in Mandarin and Cantonese.Massive dams are being built, flooding nature reserves. The land isscarred with giant Chinese mines, with 'slave' labourers paid lessthan £1 a day to extract ore and minerals.
Pristine forests are being destroyed, with China taking up to 70 percent of all timber from Africa.All over this great continent, the Chinese presence is swelling into aflood. Angola has its own 'Chinatown', as do great African cities suchas Dar es Salaam and Nairobi.Exclusive, gated compounds, serving only Chinese food, and where noblacks are allowed, are being built all over the continent. 'Africancloths' sold in markets on the continent are now almost alwaysimported, bearing the legend: 'Made in China'.
From Nigeria in the north, to Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Angola inthe west, across Chad and Sudan in the east, and south through Zambia,Zimbabwe and Mozambique, China has seized a vice-like grip on acontinent which officials have decided is crucial to the superpower'slong-term survival.'The Chinese are all over the place,' says Trevor Ncube, a prominentAfrican businessman with publishing interests around the continent.'If the British were our masters yesterday, the Chinese have takentheir place.'
Likened to one race deciding to adopt a new home on another planet,Beijing has launched its so-called 'One China In Africa' policybecause of crippling pressure on its own natural resources in acountry where the population has almost trebled from 500 million to1.3 billion in 50 years.China is hungry - for land, food and energy.
While accounting for afifth of the world's population, its oil consumption has risen 35-foldin the past decade and Africa is now providing a third of it; importsof steel, copper and aluminium have also shot up, with Beijingdevouring 80 per cent of world supplies.Enlarge President Robert Mugabe leaving the eleventh ordinary sessionof the assembly of the African Union heads of State and government inSharm el-Sheikh, EgyptPresident Robert Mugabe leaving the eleventh ordinary session of theassembly of the African Union heads of State and government in Sharmel-Sheikh, EgyptFuelling its own boom at home, China is also desperate for new marketsto sell goods. And Africa, with non-existent health and safety rulesto protect against shoddy and dangerous goods, is the perfectdestination.
The result of China's demand for raw materials and its sales ofproducts to Africa is that turnover in trade between Africa and Chinahas risen from £5million annually a decade ago to £6billion today.However, there is a lethal price to pay.
There is a sinister aspect tothis invasion. Chinese-made war planes roar through the African sky,bombing opponents. Chinese-made assault rifles and grenades are beingused to fuel countless murderous civil wars, often over the materialsthe Chinese are desperate to buy.Take, for example, Zimbabwe. Recently, a giant container ship fromChina was due to deliver its cargo of three million rounds of AK-47ammunition, 3,000 rocket-propelled grenades and 1,500 mortars toPresident Robert Mugabe's regime.After an international outcry, the vessel, the An Yue Jiang, wasforced to return to China, despite Beijing's insistence that the armsconsignment was a 'normal commercial deal'.Indeed, the 77-ton arms shipment would have been small beer - afraction of China's help to Mugabe.
He already has high-tech,Chinese-built helicopter gunships and fighter jets to use against hispeople.Ever since the U.S. and Britain imposed sanctions in 2003, Mugabe hascourted the Chinese, offering mining concessions for arms andcurrency.While flying regularly to Beijing as a high-ranking guest, the84-year-old dictator rants at 'small dots' such as Britain andAmerica.He can afford to. Mugabe is orchestrating his campaign of terror froma 25-bedroom, pagoda-style mansion built by the Chinese. Much of hisestimated £1billion fortune is believed to have been siphoned off fromChinese 'loans'.The imposing grey building of ZANU-PF, his ruling party, was paid forand built by the Chinese.
Mugabe received £200 million last year alonefrom China, enabling him to buy loyalty from the army.In another disturbing illustration of the warm relations between Chinaand the ageing dictator, a platoon of the China People's LiberationArmy has been out on the streets of Mutare, a city near the borderwith Mozambique, which voted against the president in the recent,disputed election.
Almost 30 years ago, Britain pulled out of Zimbabwe - as it had donealready out of the rest of Africa, in the wake of Harold Macmillan's'wind of change' speech. Today, Mugabe says: 'We have turned East,where the sun rises, and given our backs to the West, where the sunsets.'Despite Britain's commendable colonial legacy of a network of roads,railways and schools, the British are now being shunned.According to one veteran diplomat: 'China is easier to do businesswith because it doesn't care about human rights in Africa - just as itdoesn't care about them in its own country. All the Chinese care aboutis money.'
Nowhere is that more true than Sudan. Branded 'Africa's KillingFields', the massive oil-rich East African state is in the throes ofthe genocide and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of black, non-Arabpeasants in southern Sudan.In effect, through its supplies of arms and support, China has beenaccused of underwriting a humanitarian scandal.
The atrocities inSudan have been described by the U.S. as 'the worst human rightscrisis in the world today'.Mugabe has received hundreds of millions of pounds from Chinese sourcesMugabe has received hundreds of millions of pounds from Chinese sourcesThe government in Khartoum has helped the feared Janjaweed militia torape, murder and burn to death more than 350,000 people.The Chinese - who now buy half of all Sudan's oil - have happilyprovided armoured vehicles, aircraft and millions of bullets andgrenades in return for lucrative deals.
Indeed, an estimated £1billionof Chinese cash has been spent on weapons.According to Human Rights First, a leading human rights advocacyorganisation, Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifles, grenade launchers andammunition for rifles and heavy machine guns are continuing to flowinto Darfur, which is dotted with giant refugee camps, each containinghundreds of thousands of people.Between 2003 and 2006, China sold Sudan $55 million worth of smallarms, flouting a United Nations weapons embargo.
With new warnings that the cycle of killing is intensifying, anestimated two thirds of the non-Arab population has lost at least onemember of their families in Darfur.Although two million people have been uprooted from their homes in theconflict, China has repeatedly thwarted United Nations denunciationsof the Sudanese regime.While the Sudanese slaughter has attracted worldwide condemnation,prompting Hollywood film-maker Steven Spielberg to quit as artisticdirector of the Beijing Olympics, few parts of Africa are nowuntouched by China.
In Congo, more than £2billion has been 'loaned' to the government. InAngola, £3 billion has been paid in exchange for oil. In Nigeria, morethan £5billion has been handed over.In Equatorial Guinea, where the president publicly hung hispredecessor from a cage suspended in a theatre before having him shot,Chinese firms are helping the dictator build an entirely new capital,full of gleaming skyscrapers and, of course, Chinese restaurants.
After battling for years against the white colonial powers of Britain,France, Belgium and Germany, post-independence African leaders arehappy to do business with China for a straightforward reason: cash.With western loans linked to an insistence on democratic reforms andthe need for 'transparency' in using the money (diplomatic languagefor rules to ensure dictators do not pocket millions), the Chinesehave proved much more relaxed about what their billions are used for.Certainly, little of it reaches the continent's impoverished 800million people. Much of it goes straight into the pockets ofdictators. In Africa, corruption is a multi-billion pound industry andmany experts believe that China is fuelling the cancer.
The Chinese are contemptuous of such criticism. To them, Africa isabout pragmatism, not human rights. 'Business is business,' saysChinese Deputy Foreign Minister Zhou Wenzhong, adding that Beijingshould not interfere in 'internal' affairs. 'We try to separatepolitics from business.'While the bounty has, not surprisingly, been welcomed by Africandictators, the people of Africa are less impressed. At a market inZimbabwe recently, where Chinese goods were on sale at nearly everystall, one woman told me she would not waste her money on 'Zing-Zong'products.'They go Zing when they work, and then they quickly go Zong andbreak,' she said. 'They are a waste of money. But there's nothingelse. China is the only country that will do business with us.'
There have also been riots in Zambia, Angola and Congo over the floodof Chinese immigrant workers. The Chinese do not use African labourwhere possible, saying black Africans are lazy and unskilled.
In Angola, the government has agreed that 70 per cent of tenderedpublic works must go to Chinese firms, most of which do not employAngolans.As well as enticing hundreds of thousands to settle in Africa, theyhave even shipped Chinese prisoners to produce the goods cheaply.In Kenya, for example, only ten textile factories are still producing,compared with 200 factories five years ago, as China undercuts localsin the production of 'African' souvenirs.
Where will it all end? As far as Beijing is concerned, it will stoponly when Africa no longer has any minerals or oil to be extractedfrom the continent.A century after Sir Francis Galton outlined his vision for Africa, theChinese are here to stay. More will come.
The people of this bewitching, beautiful continent, where humankindfirst emerged from the Great Rift Valley, desperately need progress.
The Chinese are not here for that.They are here for plunder. After centuries of pain and war, Africadeserves better.
The image to the left is Ikenga, Ibo god of industry and prosperity-giver of strenght in the accomplishment of one's goals.
