HONG KONG (AFP) – 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.
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 the Chinese dream.
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