The Sinbad the Sailor Show: interval is over
It’s now no news at all that the next millennium will belong to the Chinese. I am surprised that Trevor Manuel hasn’t pushed for the importation of Chinese teachers to teach us all Mandarin as part of his Look East recommendations in his national development plan.
Going by the rumpus over China’s plans to build a naval base in the Seychelles, some observers appear to believe the Chinese offensive for domination of the world has started. Upon a closer look, this seems exaggerated – just as the building of China’s first aircraft carrier became less ominous when it was discovered it was a second-hand ship, so one base for peacekeeping purposes looks whimsical compared with the hundreds and hundreds of American bases in foreign lands.
Not that we should believe Chinese propaganda that it’s just about peacekeeping. There has long been a doctrine of a Greater China in Beijing, of a sinosphere of influence around all the areas where Chinese populations have been settled. And the Seycelles are not that far from Singapore.
Neither should we fool ourselves that it’s not about domination. The sense of racial superiority is strong among enough Chinese to spell trouble for the rest of us in the future. (If only 1% of Chinese were racial supremacists, for the sake of the argument, they would still number about 13-million.)
But that’s how it was meant to be. The truth is that this millennium has already been the Chinese millennium. Or a Chinese Millennium Interrupted, to be more precise. And Africa would have featured strongly in it, had this millennium been realised.
Its leader would have been Admiral Zheng He, or San Bao, the greatest explorer of all time. It is only in recent years that the significance of his voyages has been acknowledged, even though in some Arabian communities he had been long lionised as the reincarnation of Sinbad the Sailor.
Zheng He, for those of you who haven’t heard the story yet, assembled the greatest fleet in history in terms of vessel numbers, and set out during the Ming dynasty in the 15th century to impress on its neighbours that China was the Middle Kingdom, and that they were all, well, barbarians.
After seven voyages, Zheng He had progressed right to the Mozambican Channel. When he encountered other empires or kingdoms, he would come with a show of naval and cultural force – a stick and carrot of gunboat diplomacy and clever courtesans, if you will. All along the Pacific Rim he revived Chinese settlements, today called the Overseas Chinese empire, whose enormous savings over several centuries are driving China’s resurgence.
But then the most astonishing event in world history happened. Just as Zheng He was about to venture out to what was 60 years later called Natal by the Portuguese, the admiral was recalled to Nanjing, then capital of China. Citing divine instructions, the Ming emperor ordered his enormous ocean-going fleet to be disbanded, and that the empire’s defensive resources be devoted to fighting the Mongol hordes to the north.
Had this not happened, Zheng He or his scouts soon would have discovered Durban harbour, perhaps, or Richards Bay. It is quite possible that a Chinese colony would have been settled there, several generations before any English, or before the first Bantu peoples arrived from the African interior, for that matter.
Table Bay might have followed, and what is now Luanda and Congo. Somewhere in all this a computer game is waiting to be developed, around wars of African conquest between European slave traders and Chinese settlers in the Bay of Benin. Had Jan van Riebeeck still managed to sneak into Table Bay, Afrikaans would have been infused with Chinese word and phrases, and not Malay. Afrikaans may have been written in its own script – wouldn’t the Broederbond have liked that.
Being avid explorers, Zheng He’s teams, or those of his successors, would have discovered southern Africa’s gold and diamonds in no time. Instead of De Beers, we might have had Deng Bao, and Anglo American could have been Chin Chin. All indigents would have worn conical hats, and not only those of Lesotho.
Of course, it’s all speculation, tempered by the fact that Zheng He himself was reluctant to venture much beyond the upper parts of Mozambique, apparently seeing Africa as even more barbarian and unexploitable than Arab deserts or Indian decadence.
But the current invasion of Africa by China should not come as any surprise. It’s about half a millennium overdue.