China can help Africa ‘lose its shackles’
Print Edition
SOUTH African President Jacob Zuma said yesterday that China’s growing influence in Africa will allow the continent to free itself from its “colonial shackles” as he wound up a visit to Beijing.
“The emergence of China as a power among others gives or offers an opportunity to African countries to be able to free themselves from the shackles that are really colonially designed,” Zuma told an audience of students at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Zuma, whose African National Congress led the struggle against apartheid, added that in African countries’ relations with “Europe in particular, you are regarded as either a former subject or a second and third-class kind of a person.”
But “the relationship between China and African countries, particularly South Africa, is different,” he said.
“We relate as brothers and sisters to do business together, not because one is a poor cousin.”
The ANC leader was in Beijing on an official visit — on the anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s death — during which he has been hailed by China’s President Xi Jinping as “the Chinese people’s old friend and good friend.”
Zuma was awarded an honorary professorship at the university, one of China’s most prominent, and added that Chinese sailors may have visited South Africa before European explorers.
“We have people in Cape Town who claim descent from 15th century Chinese sailors,” he said.
The first European sailor to explore southern Africa, Bartolomeu Dias, rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488.
Chinese Admiral Zheng He embarked on a two-year expedition in the 1400s that took his fleet of 300 ships as far as East Africa.
Historians do not generally believe that he visited Africa’s southern tip, but Zuma said that “we have to know more” about Zheng, whom he called a “great Chinese navigator.”
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