A Chinese Man’s Frustration with Africa

Huijian Wu·Why can’t Africa get itself together and take care of itself? It seems aid never ends there and nothing helps beyond temporarily, yet it is one of the oldest civilizations in the world.

To be honest, I don’t think that giving Africa another 200 years will change anything, it has been 600 years since European colonialists ruled Africa…

But when we criticise Africa, when we point out the problems in Africa, we are immediately called racist by Africans, and the most extreme racists at that.

That’s the difference.

You know what the real colonisers did?

In the long and strongly colonial black slave trade of some 400 years, it is now estimated that some 12 million slaves were transported from Africa to the Americas, with some scholars obtaining relatively higher figures, especially from Africa. Including the 10 million people who died in shipping, the figure for Africa’s population loss could be as high as 30 million.

And how many Africans have been killed by China?

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I started travelling and trading in Africa more than ten years ago. My feeling is this.

Africans are very, very, very sensitive and you can’t say they’re bad, even if that’s the truth. If you say that, you are a racist in every sense of the word, and you don’t deserve the friendship of Africans.

Especially when many highly educated Africans are of the same mindset.

For them, giving them aid, giving them money is the best thing to do.

If you open factories and employ workers there, then it’s exploitation, it’s an infringement of African interests.

If you say something like African workers are not motivated to work, then you are being racist, an unmitigated racist.

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Africans lack a sense of labour, in fact we see in Africa, large areas of fertile land, where it is deserted, but Africans don’t plant it. If this were in China, a bunch of people would have developed and planted crops.

The whole world knows that the Chinese like to grow vegetables.

The constant flow of international aid to Africa every year has somehow made them think that they can survive on relief, so why should they work?

In the eyes of many Africans, they feel that they are poor because the international community is giving them too little. Therefore, many African countries justify asking the international community for financial support, taking it for granted. The international community has been exporting aid to African countries over the years, but the truth is that they are poorer than they were twenty years ago. Because there is a huge waste of land in Africa, a lot of land is just sitting there uncultivated.

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There is a perception that Africa is so hot and the land is so arid that no crops grow, so people starve to death?

This is what most people believe, but they make the grave mistake of not having seen a world map and not understanding world geography. The equator and the Tropic of Cancer both run through Africa, the largest continent in the world in terms of trans-tropical area. The region’s climate distribution is characterised by a tropical rainforest climate, with a north-south savannah distribution and the most widely distributed savannah climate. The tropical rainforest climate is characterised by high temperatures and rainfall throughout the year; the savannah climate is characterised by high temperatures throughout the year and is clearly divided into wet and dry seasons. Although 1/3 of Africa is covered by desert, it has 60% of the world’s arable land area. The area south of the Sahara Desert is the region with the largest number of black Africans and is in a savannah, tropical rainforest climate. There is generally a dry season and a rainy season.

There are 31 African countries south of the Sahara Desert, classified by the United Nations as the least developed countries in the world. It is a place where poverty, disease, hunger and war are common. But poverty and famine are not the result of a geographical location or climate that is unsuitable for farming, but rather an evil result of being more suitable for farming. Take Cameroon on the west coast of Africa, for example, where the farming conditions are unbelievably good! Most crops can be grown once and benefit for life. For example, many bush plants and crops can only be grown once a year in eastern China. But in Cameroon they can be planted once and benefit forever. This is because here the temperatures are good all year round, the rainfall is very abundant and the plants will grow endlessly. The Chinese people who went over there to build a bridge and a road brought some cucumber seeds over …… to plant in the yard next to the base. Magic happened! Planted once and harvested for years, endless cucumbers all year round!

And the soil in Africa is definitely better than our land in China. What’s more, their land is purely organic with no pesticides and no chemical fertilisers! The reason is simple: the climate is unbelievably good, with abundant water and a warm, humid climate, a lot of organic matter is multiplying in the soil. Of course, Africa has a rainy season and a dry season, and the land you see on TV, where children can fall through the cracks, is the dry season! The land of the continent is so easy to harvest food, fruit and vegetables. How easy is it? In Africa, it’s usually women who grow, like black women, who sleep until the sun goes down, wake up to the sound of birdsong, then take the seeds, take a sharp-beaked hoe, dig a hole, throw the seeds in and plant. Large machines to turn the ground are not needed in Africa. The soil in Africa is so soft because of the high organic content that it doesn’t need to be turned at all. The black women drop the seeds in the ground and go home to nurse their black babies until it is time to go back to the field at harvest time. You only have to work seven days a year, no weeding, pesticides, fertiliser or irrigation.

You can’t imagine that many Africans are not in the habit of storing food, and so come the dry season, they are left to starve. Black Africans can’t understand that Europeans and Asians like to pile up food all the time? Isn’t there food everywhere in the woods? Why eat something that is not fresh? Obviously, Africans have never experienced winter and do not know how to store food for the winter, whereas the ancestors of Asians and Europeans have been hoarding food to fight against the harsh winters.

Without the knowledge of storing food and without modern agriculture, hunger was a common occurrence. It was once written that in sub-Saharan Africa, a month’s delay in the rainy season would start a famine in Africa.

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So, what is the state of agriculture in Africa?

While in Europe and China agriculture has long been modernised, with machines sowing, fertilising and harvesting almost everything, in Africa there is hardly any agricultural civilisation, let alone any modernisation of agriculture.

At present, most of Africa is still very primitive in terms of farming. Africans have no desire to cultivate, no affection for the land and waste fertile land resources for nothing. Most people in Africa, will grow a small plot of land, in a very wild African style of farming. It is the aforementioned, take a stick and poke a hole in the ground, throw seeds and then gather all kinds of edible things in the woods and countryside mainly.

Africans are very keen to grow some highly productive plants such as cassava and potatoes. Plant a few a few years ago and in a few years it will be a huge cassava and potato …… that you don’t even have to transplant or manage. In African countries such as the Congo, if you see overgrown potato gardens on all sides of the road, with pheasants flying around in them, and you think they are deserted, they are probably food plots that people depend on for their livelihoods.

Rough farming methods, combined with a lack of knowledge of irrigation and drainage and no ditches at all, lead to heavy waterlogging during the rainy season, and fertile land is just soaked. As no pesticides are used, it is not uncommon for crops to be eaten up by pests. The tropical climate of Africa is not only suitable for plant growth, but also for pests. It is said that a large aspen bug, the size of a palm, such a pest can eat the trunk of a papaya tree empty in a day. When the plants they grow die on a large scale, the old black man will not grieve, nor will he take videos and post them to his friends for state subsidies, like Chinese farmers who suffer from floods, droughts and hailstorms. Africans will think they have suffered a curse from the gods, get down on their knees and kowtow, then change their land and continue to grow papaya.

If you don’t want to farm, how about work? You can’t even do labour! African workers are paid a daily wage, they work one day, they play one day, they get paid to pick up black girls, they drink, they gamble, they work six days a week? There’s no one to play with, you dare to pay once a month, that’s not possible either

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As for you daring to criticise them, sorry, you’re an extreme racist.

I even think the western media is deliberately baiting Africans instead of encouraging Africans to work hard to start their own businesses. Because that’s how they can better control Africa.

I tried to set up a coalition to help Africans about ten years ago by mailing seeds of crops like sweet potatoes and maize from China, and agricultural tools to people in Africa, and it lasted for over a year to find that all the agricultural tools sent there were thrown away, and the seeds went nowhere.

There were even model plots of land set up over there, with the Chinese demonstrating to them how to plough, how to water, how to de-weed and how to handle farmyard manure.

It turned out that a bunch of Africans were just watching the fun or came straight over to ask for money and nothing more.

I tried very hard and very seriously to help Africa, with limited ability, but I wanted to do my bit, and in the end I found it useless and had to give up.

No more, I’ll be a racist again.