Kissing up to Chairman Mao

Harare, Zimbabwe. Our admiration for Chairman Mao, architect of China’s Cultural Revolution from 1949 to 1976, is boundless. We have just named  a new highway after him.

Back in a now-distant day, of course,  he did provide guns and training for African liberation movements.

Some say Mao was a puppy compared to history’s worst genocidal dictators because his enforcers only killed 76 million people, a small percentage of the country’s 900 million population at the time. It is a matter of scale, proportion and percentages, they say.

On this percentage basis, Mao doesn’t compare with Pol Pot’s Kymer Rouge henchmen who killed 30 percent of the population in the killing fields of Kampuchea/Cambodia.  Nearly two million Cambodians died in a population of slightly more than seven million in a mere four years of forced labour, starvation, torture and straight slaughter.

Closer to home, it isn’t completely clear how many people King Leopold II of Belgium had killed, maimed and tortured  in the Congo Basin. He is in the league table with Stalin, Hitler & Co. Uganda’s Idi Amin is also there proportional to his then-population.

On ideological gains in global influence over the dastardly neo-imperialist West and turning a blind eye to any neo-colonial designs by China,  the present incumbent-for-life Comrade President Xi Jinping says his continuing cooperation with Africa will  “create  a just and equitable world on a global scale.”

Idyllic Miombo under threat – credit ADF magazine

This comes at a time when the world’s respected Wildlife Conservation Society says illegal Chinese loggers are felling hardwoods with abandon in the Miombo Woodlands. These include rosewood, tigerwood and “red-hued” trees sought after by their factories and furniture makers . Miombo spans eight countries from Burundi to Angola and down to southern Mozambique. Departing truckloads of wood and the roar of chainsaws impact on wildlife survival, local communities and local weather patterns in these woodlands that cover 10 percent of Africa’s total land mass, according to WCS.

China’s mechanised gold panning silting up rivers and laying waste alluvial ground.

Meanwhile hereabouts, questionably legal and noisy Chinese machines  have replaced traditional hand-held  gold panning pans to devastating effect, ripping up river bank areas that should be growing food in this drought year.

In the polyglot of southern Africa slang ‘china’ means friend or mate from old London rhyming slang ‘china plate’ or mate. So China, being our china, needs to exercise more honesty over its African adventures and without doing so any china of mine like China will not remain my china for much longer.

The Chinese, inveterate smokers, are manufacturing their own brand of cigarettes here. JinLong, Made in Zimbabwe, says the packet.

The world anti-smoking lobby has left China as the biggest buyer and grower of tobacco here – in what was once one of the one of the biggest producers of the so-called “golden leaf.”

***Sir Walter Raleigh brought tobacco from the Americas to the court of Queen Elizabeth 1 in the 16th Century. What do you do with it? You roll it up, put in your mouth and light it, said Raleigh, and demonstrated. “Disgusting,” the courtiers agreed. “It’ll never catch on,”

*** Old Cockney rhyming slang still in use today. Take a butchers, take a look from Butcher’s Hook, a fart is a raspberry from Raspberry Tart, Duck and Dive is skive or hide, Apples and Pears are stairs, Whistle and Flute is a gentleman’s suit and if you are a berk it’s is a rude insult, dare we say it,  rhyming  with Berkshire Hunt, thus you are a downright c-word. The Berkshire horse and hound hunt was a jaunt of the rich despised by London’s then East End dockers and working classes.