By Lydia Polgreen and Howard W. French in Kabwe, Zambia
Ms. Zimba, 40, a quality-control worker at the plant here who asked to be identified only by her common last name because she feared losing her termination benefits, first got a job at the factory in 1989, after moving to Kabwe from the depressed eastern region of the country with her brother.
She earned a little less than $100 a month, as well as free health care and a pension, and a little three-room house in the workers’ compound. But since she lost her job, her family’s standard of living has plummeted. The water was turned off, and Ms. Zimba does not know where she will come up with next semester’s tuition for her 20-year-old daughter’s trade school.
“We will see what God brings me,” Ms. Zimba said.
For Ms. Zimba, the transition from salaried work to selling goods for pocket change in the market is a devastating setback to a grim fate she thought she had escaped — her mother was widowed when Ms. Zimba was 15 and reduced to selling in the market as well.
“I am right back where I started,” Ms. Zimba said.
As for the Chinese, she bitterly refers to them as “briefcase investors.”
“They just fill their briefcases with our wealth and leave,” she said.
Such anti-Chinese sentiment has been brewing here for several years. When China’s president, Hu Jintao, visited Zambia earlier this year he received the usual red carpet treatment from his Zambian host, President Levy Mwanawasa , but the reception from many ordinary Zambians was nasty. A trip to the site of China’s big new investment, Chambishi, had to be scuttled entirely because of fears of unrest, and the circumstances of the industrial disaster there are still not entirely understood.
The mine at Chambishi had for decades been run by the government, and had limped along while copper prices slumped in the 1980s. When the Non-ferrous Metal Mining Group bought the rights to develop the mine in 1998, local residents cheered, hoping for new jobs.
In 2003, Keegan Chibuye got one as a mechanic at the mine, a job he was grateful to have in a country where even skilled men like himself struggled to find work. Mr. Chibuye’s sister, Vennie, 27, also found work for the Chinese, as a computer specialist at an explosives factory on the mine’s grounds. Ms. Chibuye was the eldest of seven, and her parents had sent her to Britain at great expense, to a technical college in Derbyshire, where she earned a diploma in information technology. A brother, Mwape, got a job as a casual worker in the explosives factory, for a little more than a dollar a day, to save money for college.
Keegan Chibuye said he had concerns about the way the Chinese managers were running the mine almost from the beginning. “They were careless,” he said. “Safety was not their priority. Everything was about productivity no matter what.”
On April 20, 2005, Keegan Chibuye heard an ear-splitting boom that would shatter his world — a huge blast at the explosives factory.
There was almost nothing left of Vennie and Mwape left to bury. Virtually all the bodies had been incinerated. Only fragments were buried just off the main road at the graveyard built by the Chinese owners — a finger, an ear, a bit of scalp. As the 46 headstones testify, most of the workers were young, born after 1980.
Officials of the company that runs the mine did not respond to repeated telephone requests for an interview to talk about working conditions and safety at the mine. But at the Chinese workers’ compound in Chambishi, Han Yaping, who identified himself as the company’s human resources manager, said that the company hoped to help Zambia develop.
“China works here in cooperation with Zambia,” Mr. Han said in English. “It is friendship.”
Asked why the wages at the mine were lower than those paid by other companies, Mr. Han said that Zambian workers had limited skills and no experience with technology. By way of example, he said, a Chinese worker trying to remove a screw would use a screwdriver.
“But a Zambian worker,” he continued with a chuckle, “he use his finger.”
A look around the compound for Chinese workers illustrates why China is able to do business so profitably in Africa. While Western companies must provide relatively plush and private accommodations to attract expatriate workers, the Chinese employees at Chambishi live in barracks-like conditions, several to a room. A table for table tennis and a dusty soccer field are the only recreational facilities.
“We like simple,” Mr. Han explained.
Many African scholars and political leaders say Africa has no need for the colonial baggage and paternalism of the West, and they welcome the Chinese approach of cowboy capitalism. “Let the Chinese come,” said Mahamat Hassan Abakar, a lawyer in Chad, a former French colony in central Africa with deepening ties to China. “What Africa needs is investment. It needs partners. All of these years we have been tied to France. Look what it has brought us.”
In South Africa, dozens of clothing and textile companies closed, according to trade organizations representing manufacturers. Tens of thousands of jobs were lost because of Chinese imports, and in response the government negotiated temporary voluntary restraints on some items.
But Iqbal Meer-Sharma, deputy director of South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry, said that the clothing industry was ultimately less valuable to South Africa than the other benefits of its growing relationship with China.
“We’ve always known we have a dysfunctional relationship with the West,” Mr. Sharma said. “Now with China we have a relationship as equals. They don’t look down on us. They are not condescending.”
In an era of ruthless global competition, Mr. Sharma said, Africa should stop trying to compete with China at what it does best — producing cheap goods for export — and find other ways to compete instead.
In the meantime, many Africans are caught in limbo.
Clarissa Fabrik, 19, lives at the edge of Atlantis, a depressed industrial town in South Africa’s Western Cape. She had hoped to earn an engineering degree, courtesy of the scholarship fund from her mother’s clothing workers’ union benefit package. But her mother’s factory closed, and now she is trying to teach herself basics from a textbook on industrial electronics when she is not at her retail job.
“I don’t know what the future will bring,” she said.
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