First looks at China, or some aspect of it, at least those that have impinged on the broader consciousness, have often been travelogues. Think Peter Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze or Tim Clissold’s Mr China. Over the years, these books have covered expats, farmers, millennials, businessmen, but despite China’s ever deeper involvement with Africa—one of the more important contemporary geopolitical developments—there has been little, at least in extended book form, written on Africans living and working in China. Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Black Ghosts may be the first, certainly one of the first, at least as something other than an academic study.
Saro-Wiwa is not (as Hessler and Clissold were not) a China expert, but rather an award-winning travel-writer.
In my lifetime, I had encountered infinite permutations of the immigrant experience, from Lebanese people in Guinea, to Nigerians who live in Alaska or speak with Scottish brogues. In our economically liberalised and interwoven world, the exotic ‘ethnic enclave’ has lost its novelty to an extent. But Africans living in China still held a certain intrigue, this Sino-African fault line a relatively new and unlikely bumping of cultural tectonic plates. I wanted to observe that fault line up close and get first-hand experience of their lives as hei gui [“black ghosts”]. Without knowing anybody in Guangzhou, I boarded a plane to Hong Kong and took off into the unknown.
Black Ghosts has all the strengths and weaknesses of that combination. Her grasp of Chinese (unsurprisingly, to be fair) is weak and her descriptions of the Chinese economy and society are basic. But China itself isn’t her target: rather it’s the expat Africans; and yes, there is such a thing, but they’re not living the sort of life that the term “expat” normally conjures up. There are no gated communities or international schools. There are however traders, restaurateurs, barbers, pastors, mixed-race families, families (sometimes another wife) back in Africa, deals, debt, knock-off goods, some drugs. It’s not in general what most readers would consider a good life, but it may be better than the alternative, whether back in Africa or trying to make it, quite probably illegally, in Britain or Europe, including:
guys living contented lives, teaching karate, teaching English, enjoying a certain ease that they hadn’t found in their home countries, and certainly couldn’t find in the West.
At “nearly five months”, Saro-Wiwa doesn’t stay as long as Hessler or Clissold, and unlike them, she had no other purpose in being in China other than writing a book (something her often reticent subjects tended to suss out). But Saro-Wiwa knows her craft: highly-visual descriptive passages, good characterization; there’s a lot of dialogue, rendered (one hopes) faithfully from interviews. The result is a very readable, albeit impressionistic, series of vignettes. There’s no soft-filter lens here. The men can be overbearing and misogynistic; but some are good fathers. Women (often Asian, since the African population in China is largely male) can be competent and strong-willed, but one of her subject has a serious problem with drink. Most of her subjects are Nigerian as is Saro-Wiwa herself (at least by origin; she comments on the advantages of her British passport); whether this is the way the cards fell or an accurate representation of the demographics isn’t clear.
Africans, it seems, are no freer from prejudice than anyone else, not just as regards the Chinese in whose midst they choose to live, but among themselves. The Igbo and Yoruba, Nigerians all, even when thousands of kilometers from home, don’t think much of each other either. Saro-Wiwa includes one man, Ikem, who considered himself Biafran:
By all appearances, life in China was going well for Ikem. He had a Chinese wife, two young children, a job, a home. Bankruptcy was a distant memory. Yet he felt trapped, implacably so. Years in Guangzhou had made him even more Biafran than the Biafrans back home. His disdain for Nigeria had fermented and calcified out here, and now bordered on an obsession.
Saro-Wiwa herself is not entirely immune to odd insensitivity. In describing Chinese pronunciation, she writes about “the ‘lü’ part of the word requiring an almost cunnilingual waggling of the tongue,” a colorful turn of phrase unlikely to be appreciated by those who speak Chinese as a mother tongue. A woman is described as having “bulging South African eyes”. There is quite a lot about Chinese spitting, what she considers boorish behavior, in queues, public transport and at tourist sites and certain Chinese foods she’s not keen on. Yet among the occasionally off-hand remarks, there are some clear-eyed observations:
I’m amazed that the Chinese, with all their manufacturing capabilities, are still willing to buy Western brands at all. They could easily produce their own… Western power hangs by a soft thread of brand cachet. One wonders if and when the Chinese will snip that thread.
Stories about Africans making a life in China (Guangzhou mostly) and Hong Kong aren’t entirely new, but having many together in a book draws a picture for a community that individual tales cannot.
Africa, Nigeria in particular, doesn’t come off well in comparison with China. Whatever problems there may be, China has progressed in a way Africa, her subjects and Saro-Wiwa herself universally acknowledge, has not. And although she doesn’t dwell on it, Saro-Wiwa clearly has issues of African immigration generally on her mind, and it’s hard to not contrast the African experience in China with that in, say, Europe. Africans go to China for much the same reason: dissatisfaction with life “at home” and possible opportunities elsewhere. But Africans go to China, on the whole, for business, to buy products for their home market. There are some expired visas, and some are there illegally, but on the whole this is a matter of straightforward mutual opportunity:
But China wouldn’t tolerate African immigrants at all if it didn’t benefit from them in some way. It would have got rid of them by now if it wanted to.
Yet between COVID and trends that were already underway, the heyday of the African community in China may have already passed.
Even during my short time in China, there was a sense that the African community was shrinking. China was cracking down on intellectual property infringements of the big global brands, making things harder for the bootlegging trade. And the price of Chinese wholesale goods was rising as wages went up in a maturing economy and the exchange rate worsened for African currencies. China was becoming less attractive as a place of opportunity for Africans.
Perhaps China is snipping that thread after all.