Even if guilty, it’s a bad move for China to hang Ugandans By Bernard Tabaire China does not see Africa only as a source for raw materials such as minerals or timber. China, he said, is more interested in Africa’s growing population, which in a few decades may have morphed into nearly two billion consumers. At the office nearly two weeks ago, former New York Times journalist Howard French gave a lunch-time talk on China and Africa. It revolved around his new book, China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants are Building a New Empire in Africa. China does not see Africa only as a source for raw materials such as minerals or timber. China, he said, is more interested in Africa’s growing population, which in a few decades may have morphed into nearly two billion consumers. Yes, Africans generally may be poorer today, but they are growing richer. With rising income and wealth will come increasing levels of consumption. The Chinese want those Africans to be buying Chinese. The minerals thing and the construction of roads and railways and dams and stadiums with fairly cheap loans from Chinese banks is a way for China to get in here, settle, get used to the place. In the process, the Africans also will get used to Chinese people and everything else Chinese. The big people in Beijing are betting that the sense of familiarity will yield dividends for a China that seeks to be a pre-eminent world power at some point not too far away. That sounds like a reasonable plan. It may unravel, however, because China likes to kill people it considers criminals. The corrupt. The drug traffickers. News broke this week that the Chinese had recently hanged two convicted Ugandan drug traffickers. Yes, the Chinese courts gave the order. Even then, did the authorities have to follow through and execute the hapless chaps? Ugandan authorities say they attempted to have the guys’ sentences changed to life. That failed. Or maybe have them serve their sentence in Uganda. Zilch. I suspect China is sending out the message that it is tough on crime and that it respects court orders. Domestically in China, that makes sense. In Uganda, where we have not executed anyone in more than a decade and as things stand the death penalty is essentially dead, we may take in a different message. We may start to “look at Chinese people differently”. Any Chinese who commits a crime, regardless of gravity, may not survive mob justice. It may not happen immediately. But people do not forget this sort of thing. The two Ugandans, Andrew Ngobi and Omar Ddamulira, were caught hustling to make a living out there in China when they met their end. The Chinese hustling to make a living in Uganda may be treated similarly. They are moving into African countries in numbers as Mr French suggests. His book is, in fact, built around telling individual stories of individual Chinese settling and hustling in the different sub-Saharan African countries. An early chapter talks about a Chinese man, Hao Shengli, arriving with nothing and speaking neither English nor Portuguese. He settles in rural Mozambique and tries his hand at agriculture. To secure the fortune he hopes to make amidst the poverty of the “natives”, he plans to have his children marry Mozambicans – especially his two sons taking local brides. He brags that his older son was already living with a local girl. Intermarriage as saviour! The reality tends to be slightly different. As numbers of Indians and other South Asians in East Africa and their wealth grew, they lived apart and married amongst themselves. They still do. Not much different with the Lebanese in West Africa. Save for the occasional interracial marriage and despite the good intentions of the pioneers such as Hao, the Chinese are likely to go the way of the Lebanese and Indians. Chinese enclaves are likely to develop. A rich (racial) minority living apart is never a good thing. Uganda’s history, from which many are not learning a thing, offers sobering lessons.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 21:01:11 +0000
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