Africa: New AU Headquarters - a Tribute to China-Africa Relations
By Antoine Roger Lokongo, 2 February 2012
The new African Union building in Addis Ababa. (Photo Courtesy SA Presidency)
opinion
The new African Union building in Addis Ababa. (Photo Courtesy SA Presidency)
Which other friend of Africa would be willing to fund, design, build and maintain a new $200 million AU headquarters in the middle of a global financial crisis?
In her article published in Pambazuka News on 26 January 2012 and titled 'Tragedy of the new AU headquarters', Chika Ezeanya (an African I presume) reckons that it is an insult to the African Union and to every African that in 2012 a building as symbolic as the AU headquarters is designed, built and maintained by a foreign country - it does not matter which.
My initial reaction as a journalist was to get the information right. First of all, the new AU headquarters was inaugurated on 28 January 2012 by Jia Qinglin, chairman of China's political advisory body, the People's Political Consultative Conference, not by President Hu Jintao. Second, the project cost $200 million in total, not $124 million as Chika Ezeanya reports. Third, although the construction of the building which started in 2009 was fully funded by the Chinese government at a cost of $200 million, a team of up to 1,200 Chinese and Ethiopian workers laboured around the clock in two or three shifts to finish it on schedule. [1]
Is this not analogous to the gift of the Statue of Liberty from France to the United States on the occasion of the latter's independence which was a joint effort, whereby over 120,000 Americans led by Joseph Pulitzer contributed funds for the construction of the pedestal in 1885? Fantalun Michael, the project coordinator is an African himself. So, Fantalun and his team should have an idea of how the building was wired, unless Chika Ezeanya does not trust them too and thinks they are just manipulated Ethiopians. Can the Ethiopians take such an insult?
Perhaps Chika should also tell us what guarantee the Nigerian and Ivorian governments, for instance, have that most of their big national edifices which were designed and built by Western companies are not compromised. The master plan for Nigeria's Abuja and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) was developed by International Planning Associates (IPA), a consortium of three American firms: Planning Research Corporation; Wallace, McHarg, Roberts and Todd; and Archisystems, a division of the Hughes Organization, none of which is Nigerian. More detailed design of the central areas of the capital, particularly its monumental core, was accomplished by Kenzo Tange, a renowned Japanese architect, with his team of city planners at Kenzo Tange and Urtec company. They just handed the symbolic keys to the Nigerian government. [2]
Apart from the fact that a tunnel links the French embassy and the presidential palace in Abidjan, the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro, in Ivory Coast, was built by Dumez, a French construction company. All the marble was imported from Italy and the 7,000 square metres (75,000 sq ft) of contemporary stained glass from France. The structure, which cost $300 million, was also criticized due to the comparison between the lavish building and the impoverished surroundings. [3]
If the new AU headquarters project was coordinated by an African, it becomes factually untrue to say that the building was fully designed, built and will be maintained by the Chinese without African input. The only issue that can be raised here is that, except for Ethiopians, no other African experts were involved in the implementation of this project of continental impact.
Chika quotes Fantahun Hailemikael reporting that among the several luxuries of the building is a 'helicopter landing pad so visiting dignitaries will be flown from the airport' (let us also mention that there are three conference centres and office space for 700 people). Chika draws the conclusion according to which 'the dignitaries, of course, will be spared the sight of the slum that much of Addis Ababa is'.
Well, since helicopters will not be flown in very high altitude above the city of Addis, the dignitaries will have a much better opportunity to see the slums of Addis from the air. Moreover, what else is there to see in Addis but slums as Chika Ezeanya puts it? It is time we started to campaign for an Africa without slums which all the major African cities boast. I therefore seize this opportunity to pay tribute to Muammar Gaddafi who transformed Libya into the 'Switzerland of Africa'. Tripoli before the US/NATO invasion was about the only city in Africa that had no shanty towns.
The analogy of the 'Trojan Horse' used by Chika Ezeanya is out of place because unlike the Greeks who killed the Trojans, the Chinese are not about to kill Africans while they are partying at the new AU headquarters and set fire to Addis. This is an insult if you consider the fact that it is the US and NATO allies who, under the pretext of 'restoring democracy' or 'humanitarian intervention', are killing Africans for oil, cocoa and minerals in Libya, Ivory Coast, Eastern Congo ... Let the ancient and modern history of donation of buildings and structures from one nation to another be filled with intrigues and subterfuges, conquests, diplomatic scheming, espionage and counter-espionage, economic manipulations, political statements and dominations.
But to suggest that the Chinese, like the crafty Odysseus, have devised a plan through the new AU headquarters that ultimately will doom Africans is venal thinking; the likes of Hilary Clinton who warned Africans recently against China's neocolonialism. The very people who themselves colonised Africa, stole its land, sucked it dry of whatever resources it could lay its hands on, ran the genocidal Trans-Atlantic slave trade and carved up its territories like slices of wedding cake at the Berlin Conference at the close of the nineteenth century are telling us that China is the new coloniser of Africa. [4]
Chika Ezeanya can be as much averse to the new AU headquarters edifice as she likes to be, but evoking the construction of American embassies all over the world as underlying America's geo-strategic interests and attributing the same intentions to China is conspiracy theory in its worst.
Unlike America, China has not invaded Iraq, Afghanistan and building its biggest embassies in the world there beside the abuses in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the booming opium trade in Afghanistan, the rape of Afghan kids by UK soldiers, the urinating on Taliban militants' corpses by US Marines and other unacceptable abuses. Unlike America, China has not built one of the biggest embassies in Africa, specifically in Kigali, Rwanda, immediately after Kagame's RPF took power.
So, how come an African like Chika Ezeanya sees the new AU headquarters only as an insult, a discredit or an act of descending to a new low by African leaders when Americans, Greeks, British, Spanish, Portuguese... in short our colonial masters who now borrow money from China and benefit from Chinese investments do not?
For Chika Ezeanya's information, in the US the new 2,050 ft-long bridge that will connect San Francisco to Oakland on the other side of the bay is being built in China. The four enormous steel skeletons, the last of the 12 segments of the bridge, will be shipped 6,500 miles from Shanghai to San Francisco before being assembled on site. [5] In fact, China's economy is now nearly half as big as the US economy and may surpass US before 2020. [6] The world can no longer afford to ignore China.
During this global financial crisis, China is proving that it is Africa's friend in need and therefore a true friend indeed. What have we Africans got to show for staying with the West for centuries? We should have 'looked east' long time ago. If Angola's is Africa's fastest growing economy in Africa now (Angola is now offering to bail out her former colonial master Portugal from her debt crisis), it is thanks to sino-Angolan cooperation. Chika Ezeanya is barking up the wrong tree.
The relationship between China and Africa has always been one of mutual support and Africa's support to China has been invaluable. This is what young Chinese and young Africans must be taught and reminded. China has never come to Africa as a coloniser and has never enslaved African people. In fact, Chinese people were brought to Africa as slaves by British imperialism to work the gold mines of South Africa and to build King Leopold's first railway in Congo at the turn of the twentieth century. Back in the fifteenth century, Zheng He, a famous Chinese Muslim Admiral, sailed with his fleet as far as East Africa. They traded their goods and went away. The modern relations between China and Africa begin and are defined by the liberation struggles of the two peoples against colonialism and imperialism.
Most of the prominent leaders of the African liberation struggle have also been supporters of the Chinese revolution, a revolution they have also seen as having direct significance for their own struggle, especially against apartheid. The Black Panther Party were also staunch supporters of socialist China and of Mao's teachings and did everything they could to popularise them in their communities. The Chinese insisted on hosting a delegation from the Panthers, led by Huey P Newton before Nixon's visit. In the 1930s, Langston Hughes, the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote poetry lauding the heroic resistance of the Chinese people against invasion by Japan. A little later, Paul Robeson learned and sang in Chinese the words that were to become the national anthem after the People's Republic was founded, to express his solidarity with the Chinese people in their revolutionary war. The great scholar Dr WEB Du Bois broke the US blockade to celebrate his 91st birthday in China.
During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, when many countries shunned China, President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia were among the very few heads of state to visit. Chika Ezeanya's empty rhetoric therefore reached its climax when she caricatured Mwalimu Julius Nyerere's political philosophy, writing that indigenous Bantu culture abhors dependence on others for sustenance. A favorite Swahili proverb of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere's was 'Mgeni siku mbili; siku ya tatu mpe jembe', which means: 'treat your guest as a guest for two days; on the third day give him a hoe.'
Indigenous African tradition largely abhors dependency of any kind. It is exactly because, like Mao Zedong, Nyerere advocated self-reliance that he and Mao Zedong became great friends and Nyerere won the respect of the Chinese people. So how does Chika Ezeanya's rhetoric apply to China-Africa relations? Why did we not give a hoe to the White man the moment he overstayed his welcome in Africa? Instead we let him subdue us for centuries, leaving us with the legacy of slave mentality and a dependency syndrome deeply ingrained in minds and so difficult to free ourselves from now despite the flag and anthems of independence we achieved.
At the start of the 1970s, the People's Republic finally won the right to take its lawful seat in the United Nations and on the Security Council. It was the votes of the African countries that were crucial in securing that victory for China.
Whenever China has been under attack from hostile western forces, the overwhelming majority of African countries have always sided with China and shown their support for its vital interests. China was liberated in 1949, a time when the overwhelming majority of African countries were yet to win their political independence.
At the time of liberation, China was a desperately poor country, needing to overcome more than a century of humiliation and decades of war, yet to recover all of its national territory, its industry and agriculture in ruins, and the majority of its people illiterate, hungry and disease-ridden. Moreover, just a year after its founding, the People's Republic was forced into a vicious war in Korea against the might of the United States and 15 of its allied and satellite countries. Yet this mountain of problems did not stop China from expressing its support for the national liberation struggles in Africa.
In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela recalls that in 1953 he sent Walter Sisulu to China to secure China's support for the anti-apartheid struggle. In 1955, contacts were made between the Chinese leaders and many leaders of the African liberation struggle at the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. China recognised the provisional government of Algeria on the very day of its founding, the first country to do so, and long before the French were driven out. When Patrice Lumumba was murdered in Congo, Mao made a personal statement in solidarity with the Congolese people. Millions of people demonstrated in China and China supported the armed liberation struggle in the Congo led by figures such as Pierre Mulele and Laurent Kabila.
On 18 August 2011, celebrations were held to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Friendship Treaty between China and Ghana, signed by Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, independent Ghana's first leader and founding father of the African Union and Chinese President Liu Shaoqi in front of tens of thousands of people in the Workers' Stadium in Beijing. It is right that a bronze statue of pan-African leader Kwame Nkrumah has been unveiled in his honour at the site of the new AU headquarters.
Between 1970-75, when China was still a very poor country and going through difficult days, she built the Tan-Zam railway, which the West had refused to build. Zambia and Tanzania were being crippled economically by their support for the anti-apartheid, anti-imperialist struggle. Landlocked Zambia could only export its copper through what was then Rhodesia and South Africa. The Tan-Zam railway gave Zambia another outlet to the sea. The West said the railway was logistically impractical and too expensive to build. A still impoverished China proved them wrong.
By Antoine Roger Lokongo, 2 February 2012
The new African Union building in Addis Ababa. (Photo Courtesy SA Presidency) opinion
The new African Union building in Addis Ababa. (Photo Courtesy SA Presidency)
Which other friend of Africa would be willing to fund, design, build and maintain a new $200 million AU headquarters in the middle of a global financial crisis?
In her article published in Pambazuka News on 26 January 2012 and titled 'Tragedy of the new AU headquarters', Chika Ezeanya (an African I presume) reckons that it is an insult to the African Union and to every African that in 2012 a building as symbolic as the AU headquarters is designed, built and maintained by a foreign country - it does not matter which.
My initial reaction as a journalist was to get the information right. First of all, the new AU headquarters was inaugurated on 28 January 2012 by Jia Qinglin, chairman of China's political advisory body, the People's Political Consultative Conference, not by President Hu Jintao. Second, the project cost $200 million in total, not $124 million as Chika Ezeanya reports. Third, although the construction of the building which started in 2009 was fully funded by the Chinese government at a cost of $200 million, a team of up to 1,200 Chinese and Ethiopian workers laboured around the clock in two or three shifts to finish it on schedule. [1]
Is this not analogous to the gift of the Statue of Liberty from France to the United States on the occasion of the latter's independence which was a joint effort, whereby over 120,000 Americans led by Joseph Pulitzer contributed funds for the construction of the pedestal in 1885? Fantalun Michael, the project coordinator is an African himself. So, Fantalun and his team should have an idea of how the building was wired, unless Chika Ezeanya does not trust them too and thinks they are just manipulated Ethiopians. Can the Ethiopians take such an insult?
Perhaps Chika should also tell us what guarantee the Nigerian and Ivorian governments, for instance, have that most of their big national edifices which were designed and built by Western companies are not compromised. The master plan for Nigeria's Abuja and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) was developed by International Planning Associates (IPA), a consortium of three American firms: Planning Research Corporation; Wallace, McHarg, Roberts and Todd; and Archisystems, a division of the Hughes Organization, none of which is Nigerian. More detailed design of the central areas of the capital, particularly its monumental core, was accomplished by Kenzo Tange, a renowned Japanese architect, with his team of city planners at Kenzo Tange and Urtec company. They just handed the symbolic keys to the Nigerian government. [2]
Apart from the fact that a tunnel links the French embassy and the presidential palace in Abidjan, the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro, in Ivory Coast, was built by Dumez, a French construction company. All the marble was imported from Italy and the 7,000 square metres (75,000 sq ft) of contemporary stained glass from France. The structure, which cost $300 million, was also criticized due to the comparison between the lavish building and the impoverished surroundings. [3]
If the new AU headquarters project was coordinated by an African, it becomes factually untrue to say that the building was fully designed, built and will be maintained by the Chinese without African input. The only issue that can be raised here is that, except for Ethiopians, no other African experts were involved in the implementation of this project of continental impact.
Chika quotes Fantahun Hailemikael reporting that among the several luxuries of the building is a 'helicopter landing pad so visiting dignitaries will be flown from the airport' (let us also mention that there are three conference centres and office space for 700 people). Chika draws the conclusion according to which 'the dignitaries, of course, will be spared the sight of the slum that much of Addis Ababa is'.
Well, since helicopters will not be flown in very high altitude above the city of Addis, the dignitaries will have a much better opportunity to see the slums of Addis from the air. Moreover, what else is there to see in Addis but slums as Chika Ezeanya puts it? It is time we started to campaign for an Africa without slums which all the major African cities boast. I therefore seize this opportunity to pay tribute to Muammar Gaddafi who transformed Libya into the 'Switzerland of Africa'. Tripoli before the US/NATO invasion was about the only city in Africa that had no shanty towns.
The analogy of the 'Trojan Horse' used by Chika Ezeanya is out of place because unlike the Greeks who killed the Trojans, the Chinese are not about to kill Africans while they are partying at the new AU headquarters and set fire to Addis. This is an insult if you consider the fact that it is the US and NATO allies who, under the pretext of 'restoring democracy' or 'humanitarian intervention', are killing Africans for oil, cocoa and minerals in Libya, Ivory Coast, Eastern Congo ... Let the ancient and modern history of donation of buildings and structures from one nation to another be filled with intrigues and subterfuges, conquests, diplomatic scheming, espionage and counter-espionage, economic manipulations, political statements and dominations.
But to suggest that the Chinese, like the crafty Odysseus, have devised a plan through the new AU headquarters that ultimately will doom Africans is venal thinking; the likes of Hilary Clinton who warned Africans recently against China's neocolonialism. The very people who themselves colonised Africa, stole its land, sucked it dry of whatever resources it could lay its hands on, ran the genocidal Trans-Atlantic slave trade and carved up its territories like slices of wedding cake at the Berlin Conference at the close of the nineteenth century are telling us that China is the new coloniser of Africa. [4]
Chika Ezeanya can be as much averse to the new AU headquarters edifice as she likes to be, but evoking the construction of American embassies all over the world as underlying America's geo-strategic interests and attributing the same intentions to China is conspiracy theory in its worst.
Unlike America, China has not invaded Iraq, Afghanistan and building its biggest embassies in the world there beside the abuses in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the booming opium trade in Afghanistan, the rape of Afghan kids by UK soldiers, the urinating on Taliban militants' corpses by US Marines and other unacceptable abuses. Unlike America, China has not built one of the biggest embassies in Africa, specifically in Kigali, Rwanda, immediately after Kagame's RPF took power.
So, how come an African like Chika Ezeanya sees the new AU headquarters only as an insult, a discredit or an act of descending to a new low by African leaders when Americans, Greeks, British, Spanish, Portuguese... in short our colonial masters who now borrow money from China and benefit from Chinese investments do not?
For Chika Ezeanya's information, in the US the new 2,050 ft-long bridge that will connect San Francisco to Oakland on the other side of the bay is being built in China. The four enormous steel skeletons, the last of the 12 segments of the bridge, will be shipped 6,500 miles from Shanghai to San Francisco before being assembled on site. [5] In fact, China's economy is now nearly half as big as the US economy and may surpass US before 2020. [6] The world can no longer afford to ignore China.
During this global financial crisis, China is proving that it is Africa's friend in need and therefore a true friend indeed. What have we Africans got to show for staying with the West for centuries? We should have 'looked east' long time ago. If Angola's is Africa's fastest growing economy in Africa now (Angola is now offering to bail out her former colonial master Portugal from her debt crisis), it is thanks to sino-Angolan cooperation. Chika Ezeanya is barking up the wrong tree.
The relationship between China and Africa has always been one of mutual support and Africa's support to China has been invaluable. This is what young Chinese and young Africans must be taught and reminded. China has never come to Africa as a coloniser and has never enslaved African people. In fact, Chinese people were brought to Africa as slaves by British imperialism to work the gold mines of South Africa and to build King Leopold's first railway in Congo at the turn of the twentieth century. Back in the fifteenth century, Zheng He, a famous Chinese Muslim Admiral, sailed with his fleet as far as East Africa. They traded their goods and went away. The modern relations between China and Africa begin and are defined by the liberation struggles of the two peoples against colonialism and imperialism.
Most of the prominent leaders of the African liberation struggle have also been supporters of the Chinese revolution, a revolution they have also seen as having direct significance for their own struggle, especially against apartheid. The Black Panther Party were also staunch supporters of socialist China and of Mao's teachings and did everything they could to popularise them in their communities. The Chinese insisted on hosting a delegation from the Panthers, led by Huey P Newton before Nixon's visit. In the 1930s, Langston Hughes, the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote poetry lauding the heroic resistance of the Chinese people against invasion by Japan. A little later, Paul Robeson learned and sang in Chinese the words that were to become the national anthem after the People's Republic was founded, to express his solidarity with the Chinese people in their revolutionary war. The great scholar Dr WEB Du Bois broke the US blockade to celebrate his 91st birthday in China.
During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, when many countries shunned China, President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia were among the very few heads of state to visit. Chika Ezeanya's empty rhetoric therefore reached its climax when she caricatured Mwalimu Julius Nyerere's political philosophy, writing that indigenous Bantu culture abhors dependence on others for sustenance. A favorite Swahili proverb of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere's was 'Mgeni siku mbili; siku ya tatu mpe jembe', which means: 'treat your guest as a guest for two days; on the third day give him a hoe.'
Indigenous African tradition largely abhors dependency of any kind. It is exactly because, like Mao Zedong, Nyerere advocated self-reliance that he and Mao Zedong became great friends and Nyerere won the respect of the Chinese people. So how does Chika Ezeanya's rhetoric apply to China-Africa relations? Why did we not give a hoe to the White man the moment he overstayed his welcome in Africa? Instead we let him subdue us for centuries, leaving us with the legacy of slave mentality and a dependency syndrome deeply ingrained in minds and so difficult to free ourselves from now despite the flag and anthems of independence we achieved.
At the start of the 1970s, the People's Republic finally won the right to take its lawful seat in the United Nations and on the Security Council. It was the votes of the African countries that were crucial in securing that victory for China.
Whenever China has been under attack from hostile western forces, the overwhelming majority of African countries have always sided with China and shown their support for its vital interests. China was liberated in 1949, a time when the overwhelming majority of African countries were yet to win their political independence.
At the time of liberation, China was a desperately poor country, needing to overcome more than a century of humiliation and decades of war, yet to recover all of its national territory, its industry and agriculture in ruins, and the majority of its people illiterate, hungry and disease-ridden. Moreover, just a year after its founding, the People's Republic was forced into a vicious war in Korea against the might of the United States and 15 of its allied and satellite countries. Yet this mountain of problems did not stop China from expressing its support for the national liberation struggles in Africa.
In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela recalls that in 1953 he sent Walter Sisulu to China to secure China's support for the anti-apartheid struggle. In 1955, contacts were made between the Chinese leaders and many leaders of the African liberation struggle at the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. China recognised the provisional government of Algeria on the very day of its founding, the first country to do so, and long before the French were driven out. When Patrice Lumumba was murdered in Congo, Mao made a personal statement in solidarity with the Congolese people. Millions of people demonstrated in China and China supported the armed liberation struggle in the Congo led by figures such as Pierre Mulele and Laurent Kabila.
On 18 August 2011, celebrations were held to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Friendship Treaty between China and Ghana, signed by Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, independent Ghana's first leader and founding father of the African Union and Chinese President Liu Shaoqi in front of tens of thousands of people in the Workers' Stadium in Beijing. It is right that a bronze statue of pan-African leader Kwame Nkrumah has been unveiled in his honour at the site of the new AU headquarters.
Between 1970-75, when China was still a very poor country and going through difficult days, she built the Tan-Zam railway, which the West had refused to build. Zambia and Tanzania were being crippled economically by their support for the anti-apartheid, anti-imperialist struggle. Landlocked Zambia could only export its copper through what was then Rhodesia and South Africa. The Tan-Zam railway gave Zambia another outlet to the sea. The West said the railway was logistically impractical and too expensive to build. A still impoverished China proved them wrong.
