Month: April 2022

Vagrants doze in doorways and the smell of burning trash fills the air on Commissioner Street, a rundown and dangerous section of inner-city Johannesburg. But look carefully and an observer might notice a few pagoda-style rooftops, decrepit buildings decorated with dragons, and shop signs with faded Chinese characters.

The street is home to South Africa’s first Chinatown, which dates to the 1880s, when Chinese from the impoverished south of the country came to the frontier mining town they dubbed “gam saan,” or “Gold Mountain” to seek their fortunes – only to discover that non-whites were barred from obtaining diggers licenses.

Some stayed anyway, setting up businesses and later battling the racist apartheid laws. South Africa now has the biggest population of Chinese residents in Africa – about 350,000 people. Since the advent of the “Rainbow Nation” in 1994, when South Africa became a democracy, and in the wake of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative for building infrastructure in dozens of countries, many more Chinese have flocked to the country.

These newer migrants, mainly Mandarin speakers unlike the early Cantonese community, have set up a second Chinatown, with a giant decorative archway, in a safer middle-class suburb called Cyrildene. Here there are numerous restaurants, travel agents, retail stores and beauty salons.

“There’ve been many, many more new migrants,” Melanie Yap, a third-generation Chinese-South African, author and historian, told VOA. “The Chinese community has in fact become more vibrant, evidenced by the fact that there’s a second Chinatown.”

China is South Africa’s largest trade partner, with imports and exports totaling $54 billion last year, and the two countries – both members of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) – maintain strong diplomatic relations.

Canton to Cape

It wasn’t always this way. The very first Chinese to come to Africa arrived in the Cape colony as convicts sent from Batavia, in modern-day Indonesia, in the 1660s. After serving their sentences, some returned to Asia, while others settled in the multicultural and cosmopolitan Cape. Then, during the early 1800s, Chinese indentured laborers were brought to work on the railways for the British government.

Finally, “free” Chinese started migrating to South Africa in the late 1880s as part of the gold rush. They were, however, banned from mining. Other barriers in place because of their race also affected their ability to trade.

The Chinese teamed up with members of the Indian community in a campaign of civil disobedience led by Mahatma Gandhi – who lived in South Africa at the time. “They said, ‘We will not take up violence, but we will go to prison rather than obey your law,’” Yap told VOA.

Later, under the apartheid system that began in 1948, the Chinese were classified as a sub-group of the “colored group,” a racial categorization that lumped together anyone who wasn’t black or white.

“There were only certain things that were open to you, so technically you could only go to school and live in the areas that were designated to you,” Yap explained.

Forbidden love

Under apartheid it was illegal for people from different races to marry.

That didn’t stop Yolande Dreyer, 71, and her husband Wynand, 72. Yolande – a third-generation Chinese-South African, whose grandparents from Guangzhou, China [also known as Canton] had originally immigrated to escape drought and food shortages – defied her family and the law to marry Wynand – of mixed Dutch and British heritage.

“Because we were breaking a law … they could have definitely arrested us,” she told VOA, recalling how the couple married in 1980 in a multi-step process. They first married in a church in South Africa, but the officer couldn’t sign a marriage certificate. They then traveled to England to wed to make it official.

“We were kind of breaking the mold at the time; we were pushing against quite a lot of resistance,” added Wynand, noting that both families were against the union and worried the couple’s children would be “outcasts.”

Luckily the Dreyer’s twins were raised in democratic South Africa, a racial melting pot, where mixed marriages are now common.

Identity politics

Some Chinese-South Africans are now involved in their country’s political system, such as Michael Sun, who belongs to the opposition Democratic Alliance and is a member of the Mayoral Committee for Environment and Infrastructure Services department in Johannesburg.

Sun was born in Taiwan and came to South Africa as a child in the 1970s when his family arrived to set up businesses. The city councilor said growing up, he and his siblings had been questioning and exploring their identities living with two different cultures. Sun still speaks Mandarin with his parents but felt foreign when he visited Taiwan after attending university.

“I felt more like a tourist than anything else … other than the language, I was really a stranger,” Sun said. “I’m more at ease in terms of my South African lifestyle.”

Meanwhile, Chinese in South Africa are becoming victim to rising xenophobia, with some people – wary of Chinese loans and investments through Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative – accusing them of being the “new colonialists.”

Sun says he himself was the victim of racism a few years ago.

“I decided to put my name forward for the local election in 2006, and it was not easy. … I’ve been many times a victim in terms of racism, bigotry, racial slurs,” he told VOA.

Ironically, having gone from being “colored” under apartheid to being regarded as “white” after it, the Chinese Association of South Africa took the government to court in 2008 to change their racial classification.

This was in order to benefit from South Africa’s affirmative action policies in the business sector known as “Black Economic Empowerment.”

“Only Blacks, Indians and Coloreds [multiracial ethnic groups] qualified for affirmative action,” explained Yap, on why the community went to court over the issue.

“This was not economic opportunism by the Chinese, but about lack of recognition that they had for centuries faced racial injustice in South Africa,” she added.

The High Court ruled in their favor and, legally, Chinese in South Africa are now considered “Black.”

Source: Voice of America

Analysts are questioning the East African Community’s capacity to equip a multinational military force formed to battle insurgencies in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Last week, the seven nations that make up the regional body announced the force’s mission would be to ”end decades of bloodshed,” Reuters reported.

The challenges of getting the force on the ground are enormous, said Onesphore Sematumba, an analyst on the DRC and Great Lakes region at the International Crisis Group. He questioned the readiness of EAC countries to provide troops and logistics for the force and deploy it.

“Unfortunately, this regional force does not yet exist. It must first be mounted and made operational,” he told VOA.

Over 120 rebel groups and militias still operate in the DRC’s eastern provinces nearly two decades after the official end of the country’s civil wars. The effort to restore peace has, since 2010, involved the United Nations’ largest peacekeeping force, with billions of dollars invested in the operation.

Some of the groups in the eastern DRC have operated there for two decades or more. That includes cross-border groups considered hostile to their countries of origin, such as the Ugandan Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), which operates in DRC’s North Kivu and Ituri provinces. According to the United Nations, the ADF killed over 1,200 people in 2021 alone, an increase of nearly 50% from the previous year.

Other cross-border groups are the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda), or FLDR, in North Kivu and the RED-Tabara of Burundi in South Kivu.

Naureen Chowdhury Fink, executive director of the New York-based Soufan Center, said it was crucial to “reflect on lessons learned from other regions” where multiple groups are active. “It can get complicated very quickly,” she told VOA.

Fink added that it was important for groups such as the EAC military force “to ensure their operations are based on the rule of law, as human rights violations can further exacerbate tensions with the communities they are intending to serve.”

“Also importantly,” she said, “there needs to be a clearly defined operational strategy and objective so that it does not end up targeting a wide and undefined group of actors in the name of countering terrorism.”

EAC partners include Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and, finally, the DRC, which became the community’s newest member earlier this month.

“Even by bringing together all the armies of the region, it will be difficult to militarily defeat more than 120 armed groups scattered over a very large area in a region of forests and mountains,” Sematumba said.

“We are dealing with extremely mobile groups that have a very good knowledge of the field and have good networks of information within the populations,” he told VOA. “Their asymmetrical warfare strategy requires a similar type of intelligence and special forces response from a potential regional force. States need patience.”

Source: Voice of America

The Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (AVCA) says Africa attracted a record $7.4 billion in private capital in 2021, more than double the year before. But while the continent provides ample possibilities for investors, it also presents challenges, from instability to climate change. At this year’s AVCA conference in Senegal, investors discussed some of the trends.

More than 500 people from some 50 countries filtered in and out of conference rooms at Dakar’s Radisson Hotel Tuesday for Day 2 of AVCA’s annual gathering.

Africa offers a rich environment for local and international investors, attendees say, as it has a growing youth population and consumer market.

Alexia Alexandropoulou is a research manager at AVCA. She said investor interest in the continent has been largely driven by the attraction of financial technology companies. A number of sizable infrastructure deals also contributed to investment growth.

“And these infrastructure investments were focused on renewable energy, transportation and communication services. And they support African governments to fill the infrastructure gap on the continent. We expect to see more of these trends continue in the years to come,” she noted.

Some African governments such as Senegal’s have successfully attracted international investment in recent years. In 2019, it became the second African country to pass a “start-up act,” which eases regulations and provides tax breaks to innovative new businesses.

Venture capital activity here comprised 80 percent of total reported deals in 2021, up from 6 percent between 2016 and 2020, according to AVCA. But investing in African companies also comes with challenges, investors say, including currency volatility, small national economies, limited access to finance and banking services and political unrest.

“If you have a long-term view, and if you’re well diversified, you can obviously overcome those issues,” expressed Walid Cherif, the managing director of BluePeak Private Capital, adding “from [the] outside you read the news, or you think it’s scary, it’s difficult. But at the end of the day, there’s so many opportunities on the ground, so many great businesses. As long as you put the tools in them and give them a lot of assistance and support, you can definitely help them become strong businesses.”

Climate change is another major hindrance. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to suffer disproportionately from extreme weather events such as floods and drought. This is disruptive to businesses, particularly those in the agricultural sector.

Some investors have begun setting climate goals.

Clarisa De Franco is the managing director of British International Investment. Last year, her company set a goal of having 30 percent of their investments dedicated toward addressing climate change.

“They will have to have the specific mandate of addressing climate from a resilience, adaptation or mitigation point of view. How do we achieve that from a new commitment point of view, but also from a portfolio point of view, is something that we need to explore a bit more,” De Franco pointed out.

Potential investments might include the renewable energy and plantation sectors, she said.

The AVCA conference continues in Dakar through Friday.

Source: Voice of America