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Apart from his native Tanzania, the 32-year-old businessman Justice George Kaundama is interested in just one country.
“China Africa is the future,” he says, sitting on the Veranda van Shamwaa, the Tanzanian restaurant that he opened in Guangzhou last year. “We are becoming big partners.”
Kaundama came to the South Chinese city for the first time, known for decades as China’s “Little Africa”, in 2018. After two years of studying Mandarin, he opened a logistics company that sent Chinese goods back to Tanzania. He came to China to get rich. More than six years later he says he’s coming.
Kaundama is one of the tens of thousands of African migrants who have been attracted to Guangzhou by his gigantic wholesalers that connect African buyers with the abundance of China’s vast production basis.
Estimates for the number of Africans in Guangzham vary enormously, partly due to the mix of full -time residents and temporary traders on short journeys in the city. Pre-Covid, officials set the number between 10,000 and 20,000.
This is a relatively small community in a city with a permanent population of almost 19 million. But the influence of Africa on Guangzhou, who has been the leading foreign trade hub of China for centuries, is clear. Traders here can place bulk orders for traditional North African Gandoura Tunics and Nigerian goses Hoofd wraps and burns on food from over the entire continent hidden in restaurants in the back shots of Xiaobei and the industrial suburbs of Baiyun.
Although much documented racist treatment and expansions during the COVID-19 Pandemia led many to leave, the existence of the decades of old community threatened, it seems to be recovering.
This recovery is explained by the irresistible attraction of the enormous Chinese production basis, African traders told me. At the continental level, trade between China and Africa reached almost $ 300 billion last year and Beijing is now the number one trading partner for the continent.
Yet Covid was “very hard,” says Kaundama. Social media videos from that time show a distance from stand-offs between guards and expanded residents, many of whom were forced on the street. ‘It was rumor [that] African people bring Covid. So everyone is afraid of African people, “he says.
Even now, after having lived in his current apartment in a chic neighborhood for two years, he is regularly challenged by guards when he returns home.
But African residents who spoke with the Financial Times said that the situation has improved considerably since the pandemic was brought under control. They pointed to visa and work permits that were issued faster – confirmed a fact by two visa agents with whom I spoke to the requests of Africans – and said that both business registration procedures and the general attitude of the authorities had been relaxed.
Yoofi Greene, who arrived from Ghana in Guangzhou in 2014 to study international trade, said that the Chinese were also more interested in African culture. He gives a weekly Ghanaese Azonto Dance class to local students, who can then show off their skills during always popular African nights in the clubs of the city.
The increase and diversification of African interests in China is contrary to a rapid withdrawal of Westerners. It also invalidate concern that the rise of e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba, which connect African markets directly to Chinese factories, would lead to a decrease in personal exchanges and the number of Africans that lives here.
Josephine, a Kenyan businesswoman who runs two restaurants in the city, said that China was ‘difficult’ when she arrived for the first time. She also had to get used to the locals who stared at her and moving seats when she was sitting with them on public transport.
“I tended to see that the police were generally very strict and then not very friendly to us. But now things have changed,” she said. “I have experienced ups and downs, but my 14-year-old Stint in China has been pretty fertile. Guangzhou has been good for me.”
