Deterred by immigration controls in the West,
African families and traders are moving
to major Chinese cities,
adding a new dimension to China-Africa relations.It’s raining again in Guangzhou. The downpours are sudden and violent, but do little to cool the city or relieve the cloying humidity. It is an ugly place and the uniformity of its sprawl is disorienting. Under the grey skies, the traffic flows relentlessly through webs of flyovers and underpasses, around towering apartment blocks and multi-storey shopping complexes. Here you can buy anything: leather, shoes, wigs, handbags, jeans, luggage, electronics, jewellery, plumbing, picture frames, reflective strips, motorbikes and even African crafts; original or copy, you can find it or get it made.
 Africans are flocking here – the wealthy, the hopeful, the ambitious and the desperate. In the heartland of the southern Chinese economy, where commerce and industry are king, Guangzhou is both a city and a dream for sale. Many find what they seek, but for others, imagination is painfully disappointed as myth
collides with reality.
In a borrowed apartment on the outskirts of Guangzhou, Mari* sits holding baby Crystal as her four-year-old son Favour excitedly runs laps around the dining-room table. It is early evening and Mari is exhausted with worry about the precarious circumstances of her family. A journalist from Cameroon, she and her husband Emmanuel, an engineer, left Africa six years ago in search of opportunity. They hoped to find work in the UK but could not because of increasingly stringent immigration controls.
On a friend’s advice they left instead for China, from where they still hoped to find a way to Europe. But business in China proved to be good: Mari taught English in a Chinese school while Emmanuel set himself up as an exporter, shipping cheap Chinese goods to Africa.
Eastern promise
The dream of riches has fuelled a boom in the number of African migrants to Guangzhou. Immigration has increased by one-third each year since 2003, as word spreads that there is money to be made. There are now an estimated 20,000 Africans legally resident in the city – predominantly West African, young and male – and an unknown number of illegal residents and short-term visitors could swell the figure toward 100,000. The rise of Chinese interests in Africa, matched by the flood of imported Chinese goods into African markets, has fuelled the trend.
Chinese officials speak a language of equality with Africans, emphasising “mutual benefits” and “win-win relationships”. Mo Jun, director of the Guangzhou municipal government foreign affairs office, said that the growing presence of African traders and business-people reflects closer ties between the city and Africa. In the eyes of many Africans, a new land of opportunity has opened its gates in the East, just as those of Europe are closing.
Kevin is in his mid-20s. “I have suffered the world to get here,” he said. From Ghana, he tried first to secure a visa for Europe, but like many others, Kevin had heard of new jobs and businesses in China. The dream is easily sold: another young African migrant, 24-year-old Raymond, describes paying fees to ‘agents’ who offer jobs or even football contracts – false promises which fill young men with often unattainable hopes.
The Chinese have dubbed the 10km² area where Africans do business as “Chocolate City”. Thousands of containers of clothes, hair extensions, textiles, phones and household goods are shipped from Guangzhou to markets in Africa. Mr Oyemi, a Nigerian freight agent, estimates that the volume of his cargo has increased by a third in the past three years. Profits have thinned as markets become saturated and the global recession takes its toll, but immigrants are not deterred. “People will keep coming here until they find an alternative,” says Oyemi. Africans of all economic and social backgrounds head to Guangzhou. The most popular businesses are export-import, freight handling, wholesale distribution and sourcing. But African residents also include teachers, pastors, doctors and, inevitably, criminals. For Chairman Akapa, a Ghanaian businessman and pastor in a Congolese church, China has lived up to the dream of prosperity.
But he has had enough. On the 21st floor of an apartment block peppered with unlicensed African-run restaurants, he tells of his troubles, over a plate of Jollof rice. He tried five times to register his restaurant but finally gave up, only to be visited four times in a week by police who ordered the business closed. It is bizarre, he said, that only his restaurant was targeted. Once his youngest child graduates from university, Chairman Akapa says he will go home.
In general, life for Africans is becoming more difficult. “At first, the Chinese were friendly,” recalls Mari, “now it’s just so rotten.” Africans who have lived in Guangzhou for years say relations with the Chinese have deteriorated since about 2006 and became markedly worse in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. A sense of fascination with the newcomers has given way to instances of racism, police harassment and an increasingly stringent and corrupt visa system that has contributed to a rise in illegal migrants.
Entry visas are easy to get, but a combination of tighter regulations and corruption has made visa renewals more difficult and expensive. “It’s just luck whether or not your visa gets extended,” says Mari.
The system is dominated by Chinese agents and shadowy middlemen, whose commissions have inflated the cost of renewals ten-fold since 2003. Nigerian passports cost the most: a one-year visa extension sells for between RMB10,000 ($1,460) and 18,000. Fees are hiked opportunistically, and after protests sparked by the death of a Nigerian who tried to escape a police crack-down on illegals in July 2009, the fee for a one-year extension soared to RMB35,000 (US$5,126).
Africans have little say in the process, regardless of how long they have been residents. For many, agents offer the best prospect of securing a visa renewal for longer than one month. “It’s next to impossible to renew visas at immigration in Guangzhou,” explained a young Kenyan businessman.
African fishing basket
However, agents are expensive and unreliable. Mari recalls an incident three years ago when her visa was extended but not her husband’s. They tried a different agent, who demanded more money but refused to return Emmanuel’s passport and about 120 others. They complained to immigration officials, but nothing was done.
In desperation, someone broke into the agent’s house and recovered the passports. After three more failed attempts at renewing his visa, having spent RMB26,000 on agents’ fees, Emmanuel and Mari gave up. “China is like an
African fishing basket,” says Chairman Akapa, “with a wide mouth that makes it easy to get in, and a small way out that leaves you trapped”.
In the early evening before the close of the business day, the unexpected rattling of metal shutters being pulled down at Deng Feng Trading Centre signals an imminent police raid. A crackdown on shopping complexes and apartment blocks frequented by Africans is part of an official policy to clamp down on overstays without valid visas. Stephen, a prospering young businessman, hurries for the exit. He has a valid visa, but he forgot to carry his passport. If caught, he would be locked in a van and taken to the police station until someone brings proof of his legal status. As he slips into an idling taxi, he looks back to see another African, in handcuffs, being loaded into a waiting van. The price of capture is high and means either a stint in prison and a fine before buying a ticket home – or, some say, paying a bribe of up to RMB15,000.
Ben, a Nigerian, is one of those doing his best to evade capture since his one-month visa expired. He runs a cargo office, rented under the name of a friend with a valid visa. When police raided the shopping complex, he jumped a fence, injuring his ankle. Five months later and still on crutches, Ben is ready to go home. His experience – and the stories he hears, including that of a Nigerian beaten to death by the police – have made him afraid. But for now he is stuck: an agent disappeared with his passport and the RMB10,000 fee. Refuge in nanhai
Many Africans in Guangzhou vent feelings of helplessness, humiliation and anger in the face of harassment, racism and indifference. “Africans are treated like cockroaches,” said a shopkeeper, who complained that the police are “the law, justice and God”. Unconcerned for Africans’ welfare, he said, officials ignore crimes against them and frequently abuse their positions of power. When three Africans, two women and a man, all with valid visas, tried to intervene in an assault by police during the arrest of a Nigerian, they were thrown into jail for ten days.
Good fortunes There are those for whom dreams of China turn to gold. Francis
Tchiégué arrived in Beijing five years ago. Armed with a doctorate in mathematics and aeronautical engineering, he had made a career on Cameroonian television. He is now a regular media star on Chinese programmes, appearing in cultural shows and presenting special television events. He is well known for his perfect grasp of Mandarin. His favourite memory? “Standing next to Jackie Chan during the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games – it only happens once in a lifetime!”
Jeannine Ollo-Servat of Côte d’Ivoire has created a consultancy firm, Zuloga, that seeks to create a bridge for Chinese investors looking to invest in Africa and for African businesspeople wanting to trade with China. Looking beyond the traditional state-to-state resource deals that dominate Asia-Africa business, Ollo-Servat has set up a cultural centre in the upmarket Village shopping mall in the Sanlitun district and brought African Union Chairman Jean Ping to visit. Ping’s aim is to continue changing the perceptions of Africans in China.
Infectious Afrobeat from the studio of Nigeria’s Sunny Kwesi Dada has become a staple in the Chinese capital. His band, Afrokoko Roots, can be heard every weekend and is working on its first album. Olivia Marsaud |
Mari and Emmanuel are desperate to go home. “We came to look for greener pastures in a brown desert,” said Mari, bitterly. “But there’s nothing green about China. Everything is brown like the Yangtze River.” She laughs stoically as she recounts humiliations encountered during her work as a teacher: people rubbed her skin to see if the black would come off and a student’s mother called her a chimpanzee. The depth of her frustration surfaces only when she describes how her contract was terminated after parents at her school demanded a white person in her place to “teach their children to interact with whites abroad”.
As Guangzhou becomes too ‘hot’ for those without valid visas, many Africans are moving out. Across a foul-smelling river and the toll-gates on a broad motorway lies the relative safety of Nanhai. Here, the police are friendlier, prices are lower and landlords will still rent a room to undocumented residents. Like a tidal pool, Nanhai empties during the day as Africans head back to Guangzhou on business, and fills up again – bus load by bus load – as night falls. After Guangzhou, Nanhai feels small and clean, and the pace of life is reassuringly slow.
David, Mark and Harrison share a single room on the top floor of an apartment block. Wary of passport thieves who linger on certain corners after dark, they all return home by early evening. The open windows – plastered with newspapers which serve as curtains – let in a welcome breeze. A small TV stutters on the floor at the foot of the mattress which, somehow, the three men share, surrounded by suitcases, a keyboard and a four-string guitar. “People back home don’t know what it’s like,” said David. Yet he is not ready to go home.
Beyond commerce and officialdom, interactions between Chinese and Africans are limited. Few Africans – even those who speak fluent Mandarin – have Chinese friends, and inter-racial partnerships are rare in any sphere of life.
But there are important exceptions. Through the smoke and the booming bass of party tracks at Hei Hei, a popular night club, the prejudices of the daylight world are set aside. Money is downed for bottles of whisky by blinged-out young men and sleek high-heeled ladies. Around tables cluttered with glasses and on the dance-floor, Africans and Chinese get drunk and get down together. Hip hop has united them, even if for the briefest of moments.
Not everyone comes to China to make money – some are driven by a missionary zeal. On a Sunday afternoon at the Royal Victory Church (RVC), the crowded hall is stiflingly hot after two hours of worship. From a flat-screen television hung on the wall behind the lectern, Pastor Daniels’s image flickers and reappears as his sermon continues. Skype is unreliable, but serves its purpose. The African pastor was expelled from mainland China five years ago but continues to lead his congregation from Hong Kong. A Nigerian born-again preacher from Port Harcourt, Pastor Daniels had a dream in 1994 that led him to the East: “I was riding a bicycle through China. This bicycle reached a point and powered itself through where there was no way in the bush to the destination where people received me.”
It has been a difficult mission, as China permits only state-sanctioned churches. The RVC has been forced underground and faces routine harassment. Most churches are constantly on the move, forced to pack up and leave in the wake of complaints. Neighbours accused a local Congolese church of “putting on discos”. In one of the eight police visits to the RVC, riot officers tore down the building. Their hard-line stance followed an earlier encounter, when police officers were sung out of church by an impromptu barricade of believers.
It was at an RVC service that Pastor Augustine met his Chinese wife, Bessie. As they walk to the store, sometimes arm-in-arm, passers-by stare openly at the rare sight of a mixed-race couple. Their four-year-old daughter – with Chinese features and an afro hairstyle – attracts even more attention, as she chirps away merrily in Mandarin. Pastor
Augustine and Bessie are used to others’ curiosity, but worry about how it will affect their daughter and her baby brother.
What seems certain is that, as they grow up, these children will face more complex challenges than their parents did. The talk of brotherhood and mutual benefits is at odds with the daily experience of Africans in Guangzhou, yet Pastor Augustine clings to optimism. His hope is that this new generation of mixed-race children will become “the ones the Chinese cannot refuse”, softening mutual distrust and paving the way to a more peaceful society.
Guangzhou is still a frontier territory, a land of quick prejudice and fast profits, where such statements may yet prove unrealistic. But among the dashed expectations and urgent evangelism, the family’s hope for the future is just one of many dreams on which the city is built. *Names have been changed to protect the identity of individuals |
