Nina’s Reporter’s Notebook #2: Welcome to Little Africa
Photo Credit: Nina Porzucki
By Nina Porzucki
My first day in Guangzhou, China, I stood on a footbridge for nearly an hour just watching the thoroughfare below. Traffic choked the road, music blared from the wholesale malls along the road, and trucks crowded the curb as men unloaded gunnysacks full goods and merchants loitered on the sidewalks to watch their wares, shaking hands with each passing potential customer – in short, total chaos.
This is China, I thought. Except the music pumping out of the storefronts was Nigerian hip hop, the billboards lining the road advertised cheap shipping to Lagos, and the merchants on the sidewalks called out to each another in a mixture of African languages. Welcome to Little Africa.
Guangzhou is home to the largest community of Africans in China. There are no official records of how many Africans live in the southern city; estimates range from 10,000 to 100,000.
The heart of Guangzhou’s Little Africa is Guangyuan Xilu [Gwahn-You-En She-Loo], a four block commercial strip in the center of the city. Just as Chinese residents in Africa and all over the world for that matter, have turned their adopted land into a microcosm of home, Guangyuan Xilu is a world unto itself from restaurants specializing in fufu and Nigerian soup to money transfer agents who deal in naira and dollars.
What are Africans doing in China? “I’m living the American dream in the land of the dragon,” one Nigerian merchant told me in a packed McDonald’s on the second floor of a wholesale mall. I couldn’t help but smile. The merchant, Spartan Arinze, has been living in China for nearly a decade. He has worked as a teacher, a trader, and now he calls himself a “media mogul.”
Two years ago he fulfilled his dream and started gbooza.com. The site is half message board, half news aggregate; he likes to think of it as the Nigerian-Chinese Huffington Post or as he joked, Arinze Post. The world is flat indeed.
Arinze is just one of many people that I met during my time in Little Africa. I spent three weeks haunting the markets of Guangyuan Xilu. What I found were tales of success and heartbreak: African traders who lived in fear of deportation for overstaying their visas, a Nigerian merchant who had been scammed out of thousands of dollars on his second day in the country, a Chinese businesswoman who pined for her Nigerian fiancée who was deported two years ago.
A Chinese blogger, Tang Buxi wrote, “If the 20th century was defined by the American Dream, what can China bring to the world in the 21st Century?” The Chinese dream is being worked out right now on Guangyuan Xilu.
Stay tuned. —NP