Africa -China Review Africa -China Cooperation and Transformation
In the year 2008, a junior Senator Barack Hussein Obama, the first African American to run a successful presidential campaign, ran his crusade on a very inspiring slogan: “Yes we can”!
“Yes we can”! was pregnant with a very powerful message. Most people think we can’t achieve this ambition, but believe me it is achievable. And Barack Obama, with an Islamic middle name won the US presidency. The American unwritten political norms are that to be a president you must belong to; WASP: White, Anglo–Saxons, protestant! Obama did not meet these criteria yet “Yes we can”! And yes they did! And so Barack Hussein Obama, as son of a Kenyan student broke the WASP ceiling. To be sure that I will not be accused of historical revisionism, JF Kennedy, a descendant of Irish catholic immigrants, had managed to break through the WASP, wring fenced American presidency. He paid dearly. The world still awaits the outcome of investigation on what is known about his death. Talk of western “freedom of information” bills!
63 years before Obama’s attempt to dismantle the American “WASP” monopoly of power in America; a Son of a common man in China by the name of Mao Zedong, had pioneered the “yes we can” motivational belief.
I will not dare discuss the 1944/45 world history in this article. Suffice to say that: The Chinese, under Chairman Mao Zedang, were not hostile to US during WWII and Chinese soldiers and people often protected US soldiers from the Japanese during the occupation. But, as usual the Americans wanted to have their cake and eat it. They were loyal to Chaing Kai Shek, and paranoid of what they perceived as expansion of communism. They were so desperate to prevent Mao from taking over China. Just like their murderous support of the killing of Patrice Lumumba in in Congo Leopoldville, later Kinshasa.
The overthrow of Kwama Nkrumah in Ghana, the overthrow of Abdel Nasser of Egypt, years later, the US failure to accept an alternative to their perceived god given leadership of planet earth led to policy failure in Asia, and newly independent, and aspiring African countries. But China, unlike Africa, had successfully resisted western imperialism. Its self-will and determination could not be easily swayed. The American failure to understand this wrong-headedness created animosity for many years between itself and china, leading to two wars in Korea and Vietnam.
Americans; French, Chinese, Vietnam, Dien Bien Phu’s experience what it meant for African physical and mental liberation:
“In December 1953, the French army occupying Vietnam challenged the elusive Vietnamese army to engage in a decisive battle. When French paratroopers landed in the jungle on the border between Vietnam and Laos, the Vietnamese quickly isolated the French force and confronted them at their jungle base in a small place called Dien Bien Phu. The hunters-the French army-had become the hunted, desperately defending their out-gunned base. The siege in the jungle went on as defeat loomed for the French. Eventually the French were depleted, demoralized, and destroyed. As they withdrew, the country was ominously divided at US insistence, creating the short-lived Republic of South Vietnam for which 55,000 Americans would die in the next twenty years’’ – from a book called the “ last Valley Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam.
Powerful armies like the American and the French can be defeated, by a simple guerrilla tactic. Siege. Simply be patient and exhaust the patience of the otherwise better armed enemy. In the long run “yes you can” overcome.
Although Hollywood films have always, given America, and their European and in particular their French allies victory in Vietnam, history testifies to the contrary. It is thanks to these defeats, that several African freedom fighter got motivated: Algeria’s decade war against the French; Kenyan Mau Mau eight year of resistance against the British; Guerrilla warfare in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique, Angola etc. all these liberation struggles were worn thanks to countries like China. Now that we are free our former enslavers are teaching us “how to be free!”
400 years of exploitation, and bondage, 60 years of flag independence, what next?
It is true that Africa has been exploited beyond imagination economically; socially and, culturally, even religiously. In the words of former French president, Jacques Chirac while addressing, the 21st Africa-France summit in January 2001, where about 30 heads of States gathered in Yaoundé Cameroon, he admits to this in the following words:
“We bled Africa for four and half centuries. We looted their raw material, then we told lies that Africans are good for nothing. In the name of religion we destroyed their culture. And after being made rich at their expense, now we steal their brains through mis-education and propaganda to prevent them from enacting Black retribution against US”. We is not just France, it is Britain, America, Portugal, Belgium, Spain. The catholic and protestant Churches etc. these are the same people who today would like to make themselves spokespersons of Africa when it comes to Sino-Africa relationship.
It is also true that China suffered hundreds of years fighting western exploitation, culminating in what is known as the century of humiliation, also known as the hundred years of national humiliation, the period of intervention and subjugation of the Chinese empire and the Republic of China by Western powers, Russia, and Japan between 1839 and 1949. Several times China had to make concessions to buy, some kind of exit. Where China beats Africa however, is that once it came out of Western and other foreign domination, theirs was a point of no return.
As at October 2020, Contemporary China is just 71 years old, having been created in the year 1949, after 4 years of war of liberation. On 1st October 1949, Chairman of the central government, Mao Zedong; proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China. In the same year 2020, several African countries celebrated 60 years of independence.
On 1st October 2020, Nigeria celebrated 60 years of independence. A few months earlier, on June 30th, DR Congo also made sixty. August 5th, Burkina Faso ( originally upper Volta) also made 60; Mali, 22nd September, 20th June Senegal, 1st July 1969, Somalia; Togo April 27th 1960, Sudan got independence much earlier in 1956, Egypt was granted full independence in 1956; while Ghana got independence in 1957 to mention but a few.
A number of African countries have been independent for close or more than 60 years. That is about 10 to 11 years younger than contemporary China. True, pre-colonial exploitation and colonialism did a lot of damage to Africa. However, Africans cannot continue to cry over spilled milk. If the hard won self-determination, had come with social political determination like China did, where would Africa be?
Part 2 of this article to be continued in our next publication.
Mweusi Karake is a veteran journalist and former head of Public Relations/Corporate Communication at the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA).
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