[Q&A] Chinese immigrant in South Africa: 'will my new baby be welcome here?'

Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden are the duo behind the China Africa Project and hosts of the popular China in Africa Podcast. They’re here to answer your most pressing, puzzling, even politically incorrect questions about all things related to the Chinese in Africa and Africans in China. If you want to know something, anything at all… just hit them up online and they’ll give it to you straight:

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Dear Eric & Cobus, I am a Chinese small business owner in Johannesburg, South Africa. Three months ago I heard that I was pregnant. My husband and I are happy, but we wonder about our future. We both like it in Africa, and there are chances to do business. But we are worried if we stay here our baby will never fully be South African. In the past some of our black workers asked me why we don’t integrate more. The truth is we are still new in the country and we don’t know a lot of people yet and for a boss to hang out with their workers will be strange for everyone. But it made us worried because we have not really found ways to integrate since then. We are now wondering if we stay here our baby will always be a stranger in Africa? Should we go back?

                                                                                               -- Jenny Li via email

Dear Jenny, in the first place, congratulations on the wonderful news! We hope your your baby will be happy and healthy.

Regarding your question, it is quite a complicated one to answer. I obviously don’t know what your economic position is in South Africa and China, but it seems that you’re finding it relatively easy to make a living in South Africa. The main issue seems to be cultural and whether you can see making a life in South Africa, or elsewhere in Africa.

Your worker’s question about integration is underlain by a lot of bad history. Africa has suffered a lot from foreigners arriving and claiming a connection to, and mastery of the land. Not that that is what you’re doing of course, but the reality is that this history of foreign invasion does shape the way Africans see their relationship with the outside world. The moral obligation to acknowledge the weight of the historical crime of slavery and colonialism and current movements to acknowledge that past, also don’t leave a lot of space to deal with how contemporary African societies integrate new immigrants. Rather, all of the responsibility is put on the migrants themselves: the assumption seems to be that if you can’t integrate all on your own then you don’t really want to integrate at all.

What becomes a difficult, mostly unasked question is how much Africans wish foreigners to integrate. In other words, does the complaint that Chinese don’t integrate enough come from a wish that they should integrate more? Or does it function as a catch-all reason to express dissatisfaction with the fact that they are present in Africa at all? I’m sure it can be either of the two, depending on the person. And as you intimate in your letter, issues of class also become a real barrier in some of these interactions.

However, these barriers face migrants in other parts of the world as well. Arriving in even a relatively cosmopolitan big city like Toronto or London can be very alienating and lonely. It simply takes a while to make friends. You just have to be pro-active and try to meet new people and find ways of draw them into your life.

The reality is that your child will always be a member of a minority group in Africa. Such groups can have very happy lives on the continent, but they can’t necessarily expect to be counted as African even if they have lived here their whole lives. While many minorities live lives of privilege in comparison to black Africans, they are also marginalised from the centre of culture for the same reason. It is two sides of the same reality.

 Your children will probably be strangers in Africa, but there are ways to make them integrate more than you and your husband have: arrange education in local languages, place them in diverse schools and live in diverse neighbourhoods. These are ways that you can widen your circle and become part of a community. In the end you have to decide how much belonging you want for them. Moving them back to China means they will be reinserted into ‘their own’ culture - but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will belong. Many people don’t feel they belong in their own culture. The choice facing you is to which you want to make belonging or not belonging an explicit theme of their childhoods. One can have as rich a childhood not belonging as one can fitting in perfectly. The former just needs more support from you.

                                                                                          -- Cobus

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