From The Last Train to Zona Verde (Paul Theroux, 2013)
264-5
l asked Akisha about the Chinese who’d come to Lubango. She said there were many – hundreds here, thousands on the coast, but they kept to themselves. Like their counterparts in Namibia, they had all arrived within the last few years from the People’s Republic. They ran small businesses, they were engaged in construction, some were farmers, and three of them owned a restaurant in a corner of Lubango.
For our farewell meal, Akisha took me to a Chinese restaurant, which was on a sloping potholed dead-end road. Like many of the other shops, it had a red-painted facade and a wooden porch. But inside, it was China, with sticky plastic tablecloths, a pinkish calendar showing a colorful pagoda, porcelain animal figures, and a small shrine of a gilded, potbellied immortal flanked by a dish of burning joss sticks.
Eight chain-smoking Chinese men sat at one of the round tables, shouting and drinking beer. They were the sort of tough manual laborers I’d once seen in China lashing bamboo scaffolds or digging ditches — hard-eyed and suspicious, and these were wheezy and red-faced from the alcohol. They yelled for food, they yelled at each other, they yelled for the bill. Outside, in Angola, they had to be deferential or circumspect, but inside, in this version of China, they could howl. “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.”
Like us, they were served by a young woman, Mei, from Tsingtao, and the food was cooked by Zhou, a middle-aged man in an apron. The manager was a woman I took to be about thirty-five, Wang Lin, from Yantai, who called herself Irma; but she told me she had a nineteen-year-old son, so she must have been more like forty-five. Akisha and I had spicy mapo dofu with rice and got acquainted with the owners. Mei, in her mid-twenties, was a recent arrival. Wang Lin had been in Lubango for a year; she said it was okay – not bad, a little quiet perhaps. But she didn’t miss home.
“I might go back to China for a visit,’ Wang Lin said in Portuguese to Akisha, “but not to stay. I am staying here.”
Mei said, “I want to go to Spain for a holiday?” Zhou said, “This is where I live now.”
Angolans never came to the restaurant, they said, but that was all right. There were enough Chinese and Europeans and Cubans in Lubango to keep the place busy.
Every time I encountered Chinese in the hinterland I felt I was seeing the future of Africa – not a happy future, and not a distant one, but the foreseeable future. They were a new breed of settler, practical, unsentimental, mainly construction workers and do-it-yourselfers and small businessmen, hard to please but willing to put up with tougher conditions than any Portuguese.
Some Africa watchers and Western economists have observed that the Chinese presence in Africa – a sudden intrusion is salutary and will result in greater development and more opportunities for Africans. Seeing Chinese digging into Africa, isolated in their enterprises, offhand with Africans to the point of rudeness, and deaf to any suggestion that they moderate their self-serving ways, I tend to regard this positive view as a crock. My own feeling is that like the other adventurers in Africa, the Chinese are exploiters. They have no compact or agreement or involvement with the African people; theirs is an alliance with the dictators and bureaucrats whom they pay off and allow to govern abusively a conspiracy. Theirs is a racket like those of all the previous colonizers, and it will end badly maybe worse, because the Chinese are tenacious, richer, and heavily invested, and for them there is no going back and no surrender. As they walked into Tibet and took over (with not a voice of protest raised by anyone in the West), they are walking into the continent and, outspending any other adventurer, subverting Africans, with a mission to plunder.
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282-3
Another place I saw soon after I got to Benguela was an area in the southern part of town where Chinese developers and laborers were putting up six big, ugly multistory buildings, some of them pale pink, others canary yellow, still others pastel blue. Chinese industry, Chinese people, Chinese effort, Chinese paint, and Chinese investment are evident everywhere in the port cities of Benguela and Lobito.
The first Chinese workers to arrive in Angola were criminals, prisoners of the. Chinese justice system – thieves, rapists, dissidents, deserters, ‘and worse, an echo of the earliest immigration from. Portugal. Characters in Yaka speak of being exiled to Angola to work off ten-year sentences. The first workers the Chinese sent were convicts shipped in chains, to work off their sentences in forced labor. Angola, having begun as a penal colony of the Portuguese, became just recently a penal colony for the Chinese. These Chinese convicts were the labor force for China-Angola development projects – the ugly oversized pastel buildings, the coastal roads, the dredging of the deep-water port of Lobito – and after they had served their sentences, the agreement was that they would remain in Angola. Presumably, like the Portuguese degredados, they would elevate themselves to the bourgeoisie or a higher class of parvenu. Possibly, again like the Portuguese convicts, the Chinese would become the loudest racists, and for the same reason. “The inferiority complex of the uneducated criminal settler population contributed to a virulent form of white racism among the Portuguese, which affected all classes from top to bottom,’ the political historian Lawrence Henderson wrote of the early settlers. The Portuguese convicts became the most brutal employers and the laziest farmers, and a sizable number turned furiously respectable, in the way atoning whores become sermonizing and pitiless nuns.
After the first wave of Chinese convicts (“We started seeing them around 2006, a man in Luanda was later to tell me), more shiploads of semiskilled Chinese workers arrived. As with the early Portuguese convicts, they were all men. Then, a few years later, women were allowed to work in Angola, like Wang Lin and Mei, whom I had met in Lubango. Now there were Chinese marriages, Chinese children with Angolan nationality, Chinese shopkeepers, and Chinese stonemasons, plumbers, carpenters, and heavy-machinery operators up and down the country.
How many Chinese were there in Benguela and Lobito? Everyone I spoke to had a different figure, but always a high one. One estimate wrong, it turned out was a quarter of a million. I put these high figures down to fear. As in Namibia, Chinese businessmen were at the low end of the construction industry for example, manufacturing cinderblocks to sell to Africans to make slum houses.
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