Imagine being in a hotel you paid for. Then in the middle of the night, Chinese officials come and ask you to leave your hotel and force you into a quarantine. That is if you are lucky. If you are unlucky, you find yourself in some type of holding area where you are treated as if you have some disease. Mind you the disease itself gained prominence in China and because their government officials kept lying and manipulating the numbers, the rest of the world never had enough time to prepare accordingly.
This is the same country that also stands by Myanmar as they slaughter Muslims. This is the same nation that is also slowly killing its own Muslim population in the name of reorienting them. But because they have managed to buy the loyalty of spineless governments in Africa, our officials are claiming to be working through diplomatic channels to resolve the abuse of their citizens. Who in their right mind thinks this abuse is not officially sanctioned by the Chinese? The Chinese leaders know exactly what is going on and they are choosing to give it a wink and a nod. We have rendered ourselves impotent because we chose to mortgage our future to the Chinese through stupid buildings and handouts!
China has designs on unabashedly conquering the world to establish a hegemony. From their actions in the disputed South China Sea, to their soft power initiatives in which Africans are simply pawns, China has no respect for any nation that it thinks is in its way to it hegemonic ambitions. African nations and leaders, always too eager for handouts, unsuspectingly march right into the hands of China on the premise of some nonsensical “partnership” where China dictates and we just nod right along. So their people can abuse our citizens and because we have entangled ourselves in their largesse and benevolence, we simply make perfunctory statements to appease the people and swallow Chinese propaganda.
Until Africans become self-reliant, the color of our skin will continue to define how we are treated by everyone else. And until we dismantle the self-defeating colonial foundations we subsist on, we will never become self-reliant. We shall continue to helplessly watch Arabs enslave our daughters, Americans kill our brothers and Chinese spit on our folks while we celebrate leadership mired in mediocrity.
