Who is complaining about Africa’s romance with the Chinese?

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At the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation meeting that opened yesterday at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sham-el-Sheikh, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao pledged to give African countries 10 billion dollars in concessional loans, on top of 5 billion dollars in assistance. In addition, Mr. Wen pledged to cancel the debts of 31 African countries and to build 100 clean energy projects across Africa.


This has already caused considerable unease among the Europeans and the Americans, people who have become accustomed in the past 500 years of seeing Africa as their natural dustbin. Envious Western journalists, academics and politicians are pouring sand into the Sino-African garri by alleging that the Chinese assist repressive African regimes in return for lucrative business deals.

Very good. Who is complaining about Africa's romance with the Chinese? What did they themselves do when they lorded it over this continent in the last 1,000 years?

Beginning with the Romans; when Alexander the Great came charging into Egypt, all the books that the Greeks and Romans later wrote, allegedly plagiarised from looted Egyptian libraries, did they pay for the copyright?

All the Arabs who brought mirrors and kaftans to African chiefs and marched away across the Sahara with long columns of slaves, were they better than the Chinese?

The Portuguese too should shut their mouths in this matter. Since they came to the African coast 600 years ago and began carting away our palm oil in ships along with 10 million West Africans to be shipped away to slavery in the Americas, which human rights did they respect?

Even the French, what can they tell us about being wary of the Chinese? They should remind their cousins, the Belgians, to pay reparations to us for sitting down in Berlin in 1884 to carve out African colonial entities. The French themselves should pay for "assimilating" Africans during the colonial era.

The Brits should also keep quiet on this matter. For 100 years, they made African pupils sing, "The sun shall never set on the British Empire!" while they were busy carting off African cocoa, cotton, groundnuts, hides and skins, oil and bambara nuts.

Let's not talk about the Germans. All the colonies they grabbed across Africa in the 19th Century, in Tangayinka, Namibia, Togo and Cameroun, what did they do with them?

Even the Russians, we thank them for helping the liberation struggle in many parts of Africa. Though they didn't do it for humanitarian reasons, but as part of their Cold War against the Western Powers. All that they were good at giving to us were Kalashnikov rifles, T-54 tanks, surface-to-air missiles and MiG fighters.

Even the Japanese, apart from inundating Africa with Sony TVs, Honda cars, Suzuki motorcycles and Yashica cameras, what else have they done?

The Taiwanese too, we Africans are fed up with sub-standard consumer goods manufactured by Taiwanese factories, allegedly with specifications from crooked African businessmen.

Or the biggest one of them all, the Americans. We Africans have followed them sheepishly all through the American Century, and all we got was an Africom military command based in Stuttgart.

China is projected to be the next superpower, with an economy projected to overtake Germany's this year, overtake Japan's in a few years' time and overtake the US' Goliath economy anytime between 2035 and 2040. We Africans want to grab the short Chinese coat-tails and ride on it into what is expected to be the Chinese Century.

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