By now we’ve probably all heard how China is taking over Africa. But it’s one thing to read about it, and another thing to have your water shut off for three months in your dorm in Botswana as a Chinese firm diverts all of the town’s water to its construction site. Everywhere I went in sub-Saharan Africa, the phantom of China followed me. Scuba diving in Mozambique, I was told illegal Chinese fishing boats had overfished the last tiger shark in the area four months before my arrival. The Chinese-made truck I was hitchhiking in the back of broke down two hours after we crossed the border back into Botswana. At a bar in Nairobi I met a British ex-Special Forces soldier who was leading the anti-poaching initiative in the Serengeti against—you guessed it—Chinese poachers who were killing unprecedented numbers of elephants for their ivory tusks.
China isn’t taking any chances in Africa—with its Malthusian craving for resources and an economy exploding at break-neck speed, the Chinese are hedging their bets by becoming a presence in virtually every African country. And unlike American investors who flinch at the idea of corruption, poverty, disease, and the thousands of other problems that plague the more volatile areas of Africa, the Chinese aren’t waiting. South Sudan earned its independence after decades of a bloody civil war on July 9. The bombing hasn’t even subsided in the north and the Chinese are already setting up shop there—oil drilling operations and construction, to be specific. Meanwhile, the only Americans you see there are either humanitarian workers or State Department workers. Everywhere you go in Africa, the Chinese are cutting deals and making moves.
It’s like taking candy from a baby. The African countries have been left in the dust of globalization, and are so desperate for debt relief, credit, investment, and infrastructure that they’re willing to trade the island for a chest of beads and trinkets. With no leverage and few liquid assets, countries in sub-Saharan Africa practically give away their natural resources in exchange for poorly built ministry buildings and roads that crumble within the decade.
In heavily indebted Mozambique, people had no cash to pay for the infrastructure projects it so desperately needed, so they relinquished their fishing rights in exchange for Chinese construction companies to build them roads, bridges, and dams. Most African countries not only have little idea of the potential value of their natural resources, but they don’t have the technical knowledge or equipment necessary to take full advantage of them. In their eyes, they’re getting a great deal. Meanwhile, the Chinese probably can’t believe their luck—they’re winning the natural resource lottery as African countries bend over backwards to court their trade and investment.
At first I was willing to give the Chinese some credit—perhaps these projects would provide jobs for locals, and money earned on the projects would circle back into the local economy, and the projects themselves would be useful for the local people. Wrong. The Chinese generally import their own workers from China instead of employing local Africans (and I use “workers” loosely, as they are almost all prisoners who would rather work for ten years in Africa than languish in jail in China for twenty-five). They import their own food, and send the money they make back to China in remittances. In short, virtually none of the money garnered on these projects makes it back to the locals. The only Africans who tend to benefit are the corrupt ones at the very top. And the Chinese are willing to go where Americans won’t—they’ll bribe, illegally dump, and turn a blind eye to human rights abuses.
People wonder why there is piracy off the coast of Somalia. Piracy off Somalia started with a group of vigilante Somalian fishermen pirating illegal Chinese fishing vessels that were raping their coast and destroying the livelihoods of thousands. The coast of Mozambique is now so overfished that thousands of Mozambican fishermen who had lived off the sea since time immemorial are now starving. But it’s not just fishing grounds, and it’s not just Mozambique. It’s oil, copper, timber, iron, natural gas, other minerals—you name it, it’s being exploited. To use a South Sudanese expression, Africans are trading their cows for the price of a goat.
And the world thought Apartheid was bad …