From a windowless room in a dilapidated Hong Kong high-rise, Ali
Diallo sells Chinese electronics to retailers across Africa. The modest
surroundings belie the multi-million dollar business the West African
trader has built in the five years since he moved to the city.
Ali Diallo
The 39-year-old from Guinea is part of a growing number of African
entrepreneurs thriving in southern China, as trade between the world’s
second-largest economy and fastest-growing continent soars.
Sitting in a small room cluttered with cardboard boxes destined for
Nigeria, Diallo welcomes the latest delivery of Chinese-made mobile
phones to his office in Chungking Mansions — a bustling labyrinth
better known for budget hotels and no-frills restaurants.
The building is also the go-to place in Hong Kong for African buyers
in search of cheap electronics, with phones selling from around $8
each.
“In China there are opportunities for people who can start from
scratch and build up their own business. Obviously not in one day but
through hard work and networking you can do it,” says the trader,
whose company sees an annual turnover of $11 million a year
through the sale of phones and tablets alone.
Trade between China and Africa hit new highs of nearly $200 billion
last year, according to official Chinese data, driven by Chinese
industry’s appetite for African raw materials.
The African traders in southern China are the flipside of this
deepening relationship. Entrepreneurs like Diallo have made
Chungking Mansions one of the most important passageways for
Chinese gadgets air-freighted to Africa.
According to Gordon Mathews, professor of anthropology at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong, up to a fifth of all mobiles in Africa
have passed through the building’s corridors in recent years.
But while this 17-storey hive is the storefront, the engines behind this
trade lie in the industrial heartland of neighbouring Guangdong
province in southern China.
This mecca for low-cost manufacturing has drawn entrepreneurs from
across Africa, creating one of the largest black communities in Asia.
A pivotal role
In the provincial capital Guangzhou, at least 20,000 Africans live in
the city, research from local Sun Yat-sen University shows.
Though their number is a fraction of the million Chinese now living in
Africa, these migrants are playing a pivotal role in their new home.
“Traders bring with them vast skills and capital, supporting large
amounts of Chinese manufacturers… If all the African traders were to
vanish it would have an enormous effect on the south China economy
and business people realise this rather strongly,” says Mathews.
Many traders work in and around a downtown neighbourhood dubbed
“Little Africa”, or more insensitively “Chocolate City” by the local
media. Along its winding central alley, a restaurant serves Tilapia
with fufu — a staple Congolese meal of fried fish and cassava — as
well as traditional Chinese fried rice and steamed fish.
A few kilometres away at Canaan Export Clothes Trading Centre, a
vast complex where Igbo is spoken as often as the local Cantonese
language, Lamine Ibrahim loads thousands of jeans into bags
destined for Africa.
He is one of several hundred Africans who has forged a deeper
connection to the city by marrying a local Chinese woman — a
relationship founded on love but also economic prudence.
“For (communication) with the Chinese people… she can do. I buy my
car, she is there, I open my own factory, she is there. So if I have no
wife it’s not easy,” says the Muslim trader from Guinea in broken
English.
Five months ago Ibrahim and his wife Choi Zoung-mai — renamed
Maryam Barry after converting to Islam — opened their first factory
hiring 43 Chinese workers. With this latest investment they hope to
secure a bright future for their four-year-old son who speaks fluent
Mandarin as well as French, English and Fula.
Prejudices can run high
While there are several success stories, not all African entrepreneurs
make it in China — for some rising costs and intense competition
make it difficult to stay afloat. But this migrant community, which
began forming in Guangzhou in the 1990s, has built a network of
groups to support each other’s ambitions.
This is vividly apparent in the handful of African Pentecostal churches
that have sprung up across the city. Tucked away on the ninth floor of
a building behind Guangzhou railway station, 150 worshippers crowd
into Royal Victory Church.
“Our prayer is that you will prosper,” the pastor preaches to cries of
agreement from a mostly male congregation drawn from Nigeria,
Cameroon and Ghana.
The African entrepreneurs who are flourishing in Guangzhou are
succeeding where many foreigners fail. Not only are they navigating
the notorious Chinese bureaucracy but at times overt racism in a
country where prejudices can run high.
This can range from mild snubs from taxi drivers who refuse to pick
up black customers to more serious accusations of traders being
unfairly targeted by police when they conduct raids for illegal
immigrants.
Even so others report good relations with the Chinese. “Many traders
feel much more comfortable working in China than they do in Europe,”
says Roberto Castillo, a Lingnan University researcher in Guangzhou.
Ojukwu Emma, president of the local Nigerian community, says the
main problem for Africans trading in China are the increasing
clampdowns on visas. He says it is getting harder for African
residents in the city to renew visas, or for those travelling back and
forth to gain re-entry.
“You cannot allow foreigners to come in and not give the foreigner
confidence to stay. Once you are out to the world, you must be open,”
says the businessman who has lived in the city for 16 years.
But for now booming Sino-African trade continues to draw new waves
of African entrepreneurs, drawn to the shores of Guangzhou in search
of Chinese dream.
Source Vanguard
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