Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 07: Tayo Oviosu

Jamarlin Martin catches up with Tayo Oviosu at SXSW 2018. Oviosu is the Founder and CEO of Paga, the leading mobile payments company in Nigeria.

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There has been much discussion about Chinese investments in Africa, and often times it is praised for not having “strings attached.” But while there has been a long and growing financial partnership between China and many African nations, all is not as rosy as it may appear on the surface.

Recent incidents in Kenya highlight racist views held by some Chinese against Africans.

While China has invested infrastructure projects and agriculture projects in Kenya (as well as elsewhere in Africa), many Kenyan workers are speaking out about racist incidents they have experienced in their dealings with Chinese companies in their own country. In one case a worker, who said this was his first ever experience of racism, was called a monkey by his Chinese boss. He ultimately videotaped one of their interactions and the video has since gone viral.

Now many are wondering why there is such a disconnect between the two cultures. Fact is most often when Chinese invest in projects, they bring in their own workers firing just a few locals. The Chinese workers live and eat together in structures just for them. There is rarely any interaction between the Chinese and the locals of the country they are in.

On top of this, they are bringing with them stereotypes they have heard about Africans. “Because of the isolation and lack of integration, usually they are not very aware of the local situation,” Hongxiang Huang, a Chinese conservationist and former journalist who has lived in Nairobi, told the New York Times. “They do not know very well how to interact with the outside world.”

“Chinese investment in Kenya is bringing with it a nasty by-product — racism and discrimination from Chinese employers toward the local population and its workforce,” CNBC reported.

 

According to the NYT, the Chinese population in Kenya is around 40,000.

A recent article in the NYT explored the problems in Kenya, including what happened to Richard Ochieng’, 26, who was working at a Chinese motorcycle company that had just expanded to Kenya. His boss was a Chinese man of his own age. Ochieng’ was offended when his new boss started calling him a monkey. Ochieng’ made of video on his phone of this boss calling all Kenyans monkeys. The video went viral. The boss was fired and removed from Kenya by the company.

In another incident, a Chinese manager slapped a female Kenyan worker for a minor mistake. At one Chinese project where Kenyans have been hired, there are two bathrooms, Kenyan workers told the NYT–one for Chinese employees, the other for Kenyans.

Many Chinese arrive to Africa with “hierarchical views of culture and race that tend to place Africans at the bottom,” said Howard French, a former New York Times correspondent who wrote the 2014 book “China’s Second Continent,” which chronicles the lives of Chinese settlers in Africa.

Even outside of its dealings with Africa, there was a very public racially insensitive incident in China involved a television commercial from 2016. In the television commercial for a laundry detergent company, the proof of the detergent’s effectiveness was shown by using the product to turn a Black man into a light-skinned Asian man.

Meanwhile, it seems like the Kenyan government is taking action against the violations made by Chinese companies in Kenya. “Last month, the Kenyan police raided the Nairobi headquarters of a Chinese state-run television channel, briefly detailing several journalists,” the NYT reported.

I feel like not enough attention is being paid to China's shenanigans in Africa.:
Chinese investment into Kenya is reportedly bringing racism and discrimination with it https://t.co/Xt12MYPXK6

— AnnaZ (@AnnaZ) October 20, 2018