Chinese envoy says Xi's visit to raise China-Zimbabwe relations to new high

Xinhua  11-29-2015

HARARE, Nov. 27 -- Chinese President Xi Jinping attached importance to the relations with Zimbabwe, hence he made it one of the two African countries he is visiting this year, and the visit is expected to raise the China-Zimbabwe all-weather friendship to a new high, China's ambassador to Zimbabwe Huang Ping said Friday.  President Xi will pay a state visit to Zimbabwe Dec. 1 - 2 on his way to South Africa for the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit, making it the fourth African country he has visited since assuming office.  "This demonstrates the importance he attaches to this country," Huang told local reporters in a group interview.  "Actually, when our two Heads of State met in Beijing in August last year and in Jakarta in April this year, President Xi spoke very highly of the traditional friendship between China and Zimbabwe and our current bilateral relations," he said.  Xi will hold bilateral talks with Mugabe and exchange views on international and regional issues to strengthen the unity and coordination among developing countries.

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China-Africa ties testify to new type of international relations

English.news.cn | 2015-12-01

BEIJING, Dec. 1 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping will pay a state visit respectively to Zimbabwe and South Africa on Dec. 1-5, and will also chair the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Johannesburg. During his visits, the Chinese president is expected to discuss with his African counterparts the "new type of international relations" featuring practical win-win cooperation and construction of common destiny of mankind, and announce new measures to help Africa with its development.  The expected announcement is in line with his proposal made at the UN General Assembly in September on increasing aid to African countries to help them promote their peacekeeping ability so as to achieve common peace and prosperity.  In retrospect, the relationship between China and Africa is an inspiring practice and paradigm of the "new type of international relations".  NEW TYPE OF INT'L RELATIONS  The Chinese president called for a new type of international relationship featuring win-win cooperation when speaking for the first time at the annual UN General Assembly high-level debate on Sept. 28.

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Chinese president leaves Paris for Zimbabwe, South Africa visits

Editor: Zhang Jianfeng

Xinhua  12-01-2015

PARIS, Nov. 30 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping left Paris on Monday evening after attending the opening ceremony of the UN climate change conference.
Following his Paris stop, Xi is scheduled to pay his state visits to Zimbabwe and South Africa before chairing a summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Johannesburg.
Xi arrived in the French capital on Sunday and delivered a speech at the climate change summit on Monday, expressing resolve in fulfilling Beijing's commitments in combating global warming and showing willingness to advance international cooperation.
Xi also met separately with French President Francois Hollande, U.S. President Barack Obama, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff on the sidelines of the conference.

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Between Rwanda and Mandela

AFRICA IS A COUNTRY -  November 26, 2015

I recently reread “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,”  the famous lecture given by the late Chinua Achebe in 1975 and later published in the Massachusetts Review in 1977 (now published by Penguin as one of its Penguin Great Ideas series). It is an excoriating critique of Conrad’s autobiographical novel. Achebe treats Conrad like an overt racist who rendered his African characters as unspeaking brutes, and the African landscape as possessing a virgin innocence as well as an unspeakable darkness. In this way Conrad is shown to be a conventional Victorian racist, and relatedly of deploying some fairly crude gendered tropes to the supposedly African “character.”
Achebe goes on to reflect on the broader European imagination of Africa which Conrad represented. Two excerpts are particularly resonant:

Th[ere is a] desire – one might indeed say the need – in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest…

 And:

The West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity, it could say with faith and feeling: There go I but for the grace of God. Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray – a carrier on to whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate.

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Mahmood Mamdani remembers his friend and comrade Sam Moyo

AFRICA IS A COUNTRY - November 25, 2015

I no longer recall when exactly I met Sam. Maybe it was in the late 1970s at CODESRIA, or in the early 1980s at the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies. The late 1990s, though, was the time we truly got to work together, closely and intensely. The two of us were at the helm of CODESRIA’s leadership, as President and Vice President. The next two years were a time of deep and sharp differences in policy, and it often seemed as if there was no end in sight.  I remember a particularly difficult episode a year down the line. We had an emergency meeting in Dakar but Sam said he could not be there because he was to have a delicate operation in a few days. I explained what was at stake and asked if he could postpone the operation by a week. He warned me that he would not be able to sit for long in his current state. But the next day, he was in Dakar. During the meeting, he kept on shifting the weight of his body from one side to the other, now leaning on one buttock, then on another. He was obviously in great pain, but it never showed on his smiling face.  That was Sam, selfless, committed to a fault, totally reliable. He was the person you would want by your side if you expected hard times ahead. But no matter how difficult the times, as during those years, I never saw him turn vindictive against anyone. Later, we would look back on that period as something of a crossroads in the history of CODESRIA. Then, however, it was hard and painful. It was the kind of ordeal that can forge enduring friendships. Sam was that kind of a friend.

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Xi Jinping’s 10 Key Remarks on Developing China-Africa Relations

Editor: zhenglimin 丨People's Daily Online  11-28-2015

Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend and chair the Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in early December in Johannesburg, South Africa. The remarks on developing China-Africa relations Xi delivered in recent years point the way for people to better understand China- Africa relations.
1. China-Africa cooperation is comprehensive
Regardless of changes in the international landscape, China will, as always, continue to support and promote Africa's efforts to achieve peace, stability, prosperity and development, and strength through unity and participate in international affairs on an equal basis. China and Africa are enjoying wide-ranging cooperation. China attaches great importance to developing friendly relations with all African countries, whether they be big or small, strong or weak, rich or poor. China treats them equally and actively carries out mutually beneficial and win-win pragmatic cooperation.
——Xi’s joint interview to media with the four other BRICS countries in Beijing on March 19, 2013.
2. Pioneering spirit is vital to improved China-Africa cooperation
The defining characteristics of China-Africa relations are sincerity, friendship, mutual respect, equality, mutual benefit and common development. To maintain the vigorous development of China-Africa relations, the two sides must keep pace with the times and forge ahead in a pioneering and innovative spirit. During more than half a century, the two sides have always adopted a long-term perspective to find new areas of common growth, promoting China-Africa relations to achieve development. This kind of pioneering spirit to seeking solutions to different kinds of problems is vital to enhancing China-Africa cooperation.

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