A brightening picture? And a dark shame
Thursday, August 26, 2010
NO BALLYHOO has come – at least not from the two-thousand pound dragon itself – since China surpassed Japan as the world’s second biggest economy, behind the US.
It’s been the occasion, indeed, for some wry amusement among China-watchers at how unwilling the country’s leaders have been to indulge in any public exultation over this long-expected accession to Number Two. They are well sensitized to how much nervousness has grown in the West about China flexing its strengthening economic (and increasingly its military) muscle internationally.
So it’s been simply business as usual for the Chinese this week. And that means - for a spectacularly expanding economy (at 9 percent a year, compared with a dismal 2.4 percent in the US) - feeding its extraordinarily voracious need for raw materials and commodities. You’ll have to look hard in the specialist area of America’s business media to learn of this, but China’s Paramount Leader Hu Jintao has been welcoming President Jacob Zuma of South Africa - who surely envies his host’s grand title - for trade talks (above left) which Zuma has called “crucial”.
How crucial? Well, China has already supplanted the US as South Africa’s biggest export buyer, mainly taking its iron ore, as well as manufactured iron and steel. Now in a fresh and significant deal China is to invest $877 million as a means to take control of a South African mining company and so establish a whole new major platinum mine.
China is gobbling up platinum as fast as it can, especially for its rocketing automobile industry, since it’s an indispensable element in every car's catalytic converter. And South Africa is far and away the world’s most important platinum source, accounting for some 80% of global production (most of the rest coming from Russia).
Platinum could almost stand as a shiny symbol for the developing relationship between the two countries.
One of China’s sharpest Africa experts, Xu Weizhong at Beijing’s Institute of Contemporary International Relations says: "South Africa wants to be the bridge between Africa and China". And for his own part Zuma makes little secret of seeing China as the key to helping him deal with a now-sluggish economy, after years of encouraging growth - and consequently with the increasingly corrosive discontent and unrest among his country’s workers, the unemployed and the poorly-housed. In fact from his Beijing platform Zuma has been predicting a new South African growth rate of 7 percent a year, up from the current 4.6 percent.
Let’s hope he’s right.
Many might want to rephrase Publius Virgilius (plain Virgil to all his many fans) and say that African nations should fear China, even when bearing gifts ... or rather bearing a "Comprehensive Strategic Partnership" (as this week’s Hu-Zuma agreement was titled). But all the same, China’s very real needs could well help to propel Africa into a brighter future.
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A DIFFERENT IMAGE OF AFRICA, the clichéd and fevered picture painted by (conscious or unconscious) adherents to “Heart of Darkness” notions about the continent, arose this week with a cruel vengeance.
It emerged in the American media, initially rather few, that picked up on those excruciating and somewhat guilt-laden United Nations reports about gang-rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo. First voluntary medical agencies, and then the UN itself told of scores - probably in reality hundreds - of women being gang-raped by soldiers in the eastern Kivu region. The overhang of guilt was inescapable since the four-days' outbreak of appalling sexual violence took place just twenty miles from a base run by UN peacekeeping forces.
The fact that this outrage occurred in the Congo served as a springboard or much stereotyping commentary alongside the news accounts. That huge stretch of central Africa is, after all, the setting for Joseph Conrad’s powerful 1902 novel (above right) - powerful, but also a lastingly divisive work for those who cherish both literature and the real Africa.
How easy it has been for modern-day writers to evoke Conrad's atmosphere of African savagery.
Some media outlets felt it was enough to quote international agency sources saying: “Rape is common in the Democratic Republic of Congo”. And the widespread tone (was it moral superiority?) was disconcertingly evident in assessments like this generalization from the San Francisco Chronicle: “Rape as a weapon of war is taking a heavy toll on women's lives today … particularly in African countries” [my emphasis].
Far too little effort was made – over-obvious though it is to repeat this – to stress that rape is and always has been a weapon of war, all over the world. (It’s only patriarchal blindness that delayed until this current decade its formal global acceptance – in the Rome Statue establishing the International Criminal Court – as a war crime and a crime against humanity.)
MY OWN EDUCATION IN THIS SHAMEFUL human reality came early, with the viciously conducted war over Bangladeshi independence in 1971. At one point I was a day behind the marauding West Pakistan army, witnessing the aftermath as the troops swept through unarmed Bengali villages, killing, burning and raping as they went. As unbearable as it was, I saw only a tiny subdivision of the entire vast horror. History tells us that some 200,000 women were raped.
Further back in time, more than 18,000 rapes of Chinese women by Japanese troops were reported during the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, though the numbers have inevitably been disputed since, with the Chinese claiming there were many more.
As a necessary, and not-so-distantly historical counterweight to the racism all-too-implicit in Western outrage over Congo’s latest atrocity, we should recall that an estimated 20,000 to 50,000 Bosnian women were raped during the Balkan fighting of the early 1990s, numbers attested by determined journalists, the UN’s Humanitarian Affairs office, the International Criminal Tribunal on former Yugoslavia, and the US Senate’s Judiciary Committee.
Those mass rapes took place only 700 miles, and three small European states’ borders, from Joseph Conrad’s birthplace. The heart of darkness will beat in any continent.
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