Kenyan writer who explores China’s links with Africa

By ABENEA NDAGO

In Africa: A Biography of the Continent (1997), John Reader explains that a swarm of Europeans landed on the southern tip of the African Continent because it is a honeycomb of minerals. Geographical forces, which formed our African land mass packed all manner of mineral wealth in Southern Africa and, driven by greed alone, white locusts came to ravage through an inhuman experiment called apartheid.

The chief topic in Africa today is how to sever ties with the West and ‘Look East’ – at least at the level of economics. Culturally, Africa’s consumptive middle class eternally looks West. Kenya knows it because, beginning early this year, two Kenyans have been trying as best they can to dress exactly like Barack Obama.

 The contradiction only shows that many African countries cannot tell whether China is a genuine visitor or a silent thief. It is safe to rely on the advice of individuals who have the Chinese experience, especially authors, because most serious writers are famous for their honesty.

Ideological novel

Ken Kamoche’s Black Ghosts (2013) is one such book, e-published by Master Publishing, and available on the URL http://www.amazon.com/Black-Ghosts-ebook/dp/B00DQFW9L4. This is an ideological novel, which narrates the friendship between Zimbabwe and China from 1986, to the period beyond the turn of the millennium.

The book traces events at the heart of Robert Mugabe’s indigenisation programme of the early 2000s, a narrative, which still haunts that country to date. Coming from the President’s Shona tribe, Dan Chiponda wins a Chinese scholarship to study Engineering at South Nanjing University.

But his father wants him to study Agriculture so he can return and manage the farm they hope to wrestle from their white employer, Mr Brian Walter. From the year of Zimbabwe’s Independence in 1980, to the narrator’s departure in 1986, the Chiponda family still squats in Mr  Walter’s estate.

Zimbabwe is at the time a contradictory country where less than one per cent of the population (white) owns more than 80 per cent of all fertile land. The narrator’s mother advises him to emulate the motif of the African fish eagle, which pounces onto opportunities just at the right moment.

In China, Chiponda meets other African students: Diallo (Gambian), Kabinga (Rwandese), Julius (Zambian), and Alex (white Zimbabwean). The Cold War means there are also student-spies from America. Chiponda encounters Wang, a suave but hawkish entrepreneur who is as generous as he is cruel, greedy, and rapacious where money is concerned. Wang helps Chiponda with money when the latter is in trouble with the Chinese authorities, but he will also arrange for Kabinga to be beaten up, and he eventually robs the Rwandese of 80, 000 US dollars, with which he expands his business empire. Chiponda’s friendship with Wang sucks in Yu Shian and Liu Ming, a cabal of crooks with a reputation for cruelty and illegal deals.

The narrator and his African friends nearly desert their studies as they struggle to survive. They abandon the courses for which they had enrolled, and Chiponda takes up Information Technology, which proves handy at the time of the mysterious ‘millennium bug.’ Business takes him to Hong Kong, and Macao – where he becomes a gambler and his marriage to the Chinese girl Lai Ying tumbles through a rough patch.

Association with Wang

Eventually, Chiponda’s association with Wang’s group ends up in Zimbabwe, where they hope to establish ‘guanxi’ (connections) with corrupt government officials – symbolised by General Chuma – to purchase a diamond mine in Zimbabwe.

But it is an ill-fated journey. The narrator finds that Zimbabwe has changed forever. President Mugabe and the Third Chimurenga have seized white farms, and the countryside is covered in smoke as villagers torch white farms.

Chiponda’s only hope is that his wife Lai Ying will come home to Zimbabwe with their young daughter Chacha, so they can start a family.

In deciding to ‘Look East,’ it helps to know the image of China which the author depicts in the novel, compared with our knowledge of the West – and the reader is disappointed.

Culture shock

Not only do African students reel from a long bout of culture shock, but they also discover that China is a hot bed of racism. There are gross human rights violations against minorities and the Chinese themselves. Richly armed with insatiable appetite, voracious sex pests beckon and wait for you in the numerous massage parlours, which populate every corner of the street.

Africa is referred to as ‘hak gwei’ and ‘Feizhou,’ the ‘negative continent,’ which echoes V.Y. Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa (1988). African students are generally called ‘hei gui’ – ‘black devils.’ The author shows that resentment against African students in China was a precursor to the 1989 Tiananmen Square riots. Just as the West loves to identify its penetration of Africa with Vasco Da Gama in 1498, the Chinese stake a claim through one Admiral Zheng He, who the novel says preceded Vasco to Africa by 65 years. But this negative reference is counterbalanced by Chiponda’s father’s quip that the Chinese are also ‘foreign devils,’ the author’s suggestion being that racism may be a cultural problem.

Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid (2009) revealed how a great deal of foreign aid is usually ploughed back to the West. The novel shows that China isn’t any different.

Chinese concept

The Chinese concept of ‘guanxi’ is an interconnected web of corruption and naked opportunism. After President Mugabe has thrown white people out of the farms, Wang writes to Chiponda: “My friend Eggman, so many thanks for your replying. Now, your country too much problem. For me, problem mean money. Your president he throw white peoples out. Is chance for Chinese. Wang visit your country, we buy farm. Minerals. We make the plan, okay?”

However, when the author suggests through Wang, that China is interested in business but not politics, he spreads the same deception that the West came to Africa to preach Christianity. He seems to imply that business and politics are separable when they are forever intertwined.  It would mean that, when the US used the CIA to enforce Katanga’s secession from the former Zaire, America was completely unaware of that district’s mineral wealth. Wang should have known that, even now, the US would earlier have instigated military intervention in Syria, but for China and Russia – if that’s not politics already, then it isn’t business either. Ironically, Kamoche shows that the Chinese indulge in the niceties of western culture as much as Africa does, and that African music has pride of place. The novel proves that China and the US are two sides of the same coin and, barring this year’s cases where Kenyans rioted against Chinese immigrants who were taking over their small-scale businesses, and Ghana chased the same people from her mines, Africa stands to gain by playing the two powers against each other. The publisher must be specifically commended for letting slip only three typos – an extremely rare thing in Kenya’s publishing these days. Black Ghosts is a journey across the continents, a rich novel for some Kenyan writers whose small worlds begin and end with Nairobi.

The author was born and raised in Kenya. He studied at the University of Nairobi after which he won a Rhodes scholarship to pursue a master’s and doctoral degrees in Management at Oxford University.

He has worked as an academic at Birmingham University, City University of Hong Kong, Nottingham Trent University, and is now Professor at Nottingham University Business School. He researches jazz improvisation as a metaphor for management, human resources, knowledge management, and Chinese investments in Africa. In addition to numerous short stories, his previous works of fiction include: A Fragile Hope—a collection of short stories that was shortlisted for the Commonwealth First Book Award—and True Warriors, a novel.

Ndago teaches Literature, Bondo University: abeneandago@yahoo.com