… could have been the title of a detailed piece by The Economist on the actions of the Chinese Queensway Syndicate in Africa:

The syndicate is built on links forged during the cold war. It is largely the creation of a man known as Sam Pa. Though he uses several names, he was born Xu Jinghua. After attending a Soviet academy in Baku four decades ago, say people who have looked into his career, he traded with Angola during its civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 2002 and over the years was a proxy battleground for several outside powers, including China, America, Cuba, the Soviet Union and South Africa. Mr Pa is a private and rarely photographed person. His name appears in few syndicate documents. He is believed to exert control through Veronica Fung, who may be a member of his family. She controls 70% of a core company, Newbright International. The two frequently travel in Africa, using the syndicate’s fleet of Airbus jets. They are said sometimes to bypass customs.

They are in Angola, Guinea, and Zimbabwe, but surprisingly not in Nigeria or Sudan. From the information that is available, Chinese involvement in the Nigerian oil sector is fairly minimal, mainly because the industry is mature in Nigeria, and most of the stakes are already owned by European (Shell and Total) and American (Chevron and Exxon-Mobil) companies. It is harder to explain the Sudanese case. Read the whole piece here.

You probably already know about the Freshlyground music video.

Well, in what is probably the least surprising news of the day, the Zimbabwean government has pulled their work visas. Upcoming concerts in Zimbabwe are cancelled.

Listen to band members Zo and Simon talk on the PRI’s Global Hits programme here [mp3].

You probably know her. She is the award-winning author of An Elergy for Easterly, a beautiful collection of short stories. I didn’t drop the book until I finished it. Get it if you can.

She writes in Guardian of April 14:

Thirty years ago on Sunday the renegade British colony that had been Rhodesia was born as Zimbabwe. In the nightmarish events of the last 10 years the euphoria of that day has been all but lost. Certainly, the achievements of Zimbabwe in the last 30 years are in danger of drowning in the mire of statistics about rampant inflation and unemployment, in images of the political repression of a cowed populace – all taken as evidence by those Thabo Mbeki calls the Afro-pessimists. For his part, President Mugabe has certainly provided much grist to the mill of the brigade that believes Africans cannot rule themselves and that independence has achieved nothing worth celebrating.

As we say in Yoruba, One is able to see, even when one is crying.

Petina Gappah blogs here.

1. How Mathematics might have caused the financial crisis

2. To which Gillian Tett says, Bad practice, not the discipline itself, is to blame for the financial crisis

3. Sex and the single black (American) woman

4. On Goodluck Jonathan’s Amanpour interview

5. Joe Stiglitz: An Agenda for Reforming Economic Theory

6. Zimbabwe hangman position vacant, applicants sought

1. An impending UK bonds market crisis might be worse than the Greek debt crisis – Telegraph H/T Keith Hart

2. Haiti, two months after the earthquake – Global Voices blog review

3. Why are religious films making a come-back? – Guardian

4. Morgan Tsvangirai defends Zimbabwe’s indigenisation laws – AllAfrica

5. Should Germany change it’s economic model? – The Economist

Mugabe “thanked the Chinese embassy for its painstaking preparations for the birthday celebration and … hoped to further expand friendly cooperative relations in every field between the two nations”, the foreign ministry said.

The ministry’s website (www.mfa.gov.cn) showed pictures of Mugabe cutting a birthday cake in front of a large sign wishing him “Happy 86th birthday” and addressing almost 100 guests.

Really, no kidding.

The International Telecommunication Union recently published their Information Society Statistical Profiles 2009 – Africa. The 76 page document details their statistical analysis of the progress of telephony and internet in Africa in the ten years up to the end of 2008. And guess what? Nigeria ranks highly in the fastest growing categories for mobile subscription, and internet and broadband. Again, this isn’t surprising, as a country we are effectively an African superpower.

But then:

Before we get carried away with this, we do need to pay attention, relative to the size of our population, we have a long way to go. We only have 7.8 internet users per 100 inhabitants, while tiny countries like the Seychelles and Mauritus have 37.8 and 29.9 respectively. Only 5.1% of Nigerian households have a computer and our bandwidth puts us in league with Zimbabwe and DR Congo (both countries currently in turmoil compared to us) at less than 100 bits per internet user.

That is Lolobloggs writing for NigeriansTalk. The full post is here.

Zimbabwe: How the Berlin Wall collapse affected us: Zimbabweans have no compelling reason to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – or the fall of Communism, which followed it, domino-like. True or false? Most zealots of the original plot to turn the country into a one-party state pretend it never happened. Or that, if it did, it had little effect on their politics or the country’s political destiny. That, some would say, was the height of self-delusion.
The two liberation movements, ZANU PF and PF ZAPU were proteges of communist China and the Soviet Union respectively. Without their material, ideological, and moral support, they wouldn’t have made any headway in the struggle against the white supremacists.

Then, after independence, the short-lived coalition government chose Marxism-Leninism – almost inevitably. ZANU PF was more obsessed with that goal than PF ZAPU. There is little doubt that Robert Mugabe was keener on controlling everything and everyone in the country than Joshua Nkomo. Journalists working for the private media found themselves, after 1981, suddenly working for the government media. This point of “control” was brought home to them with the violence of a tsunami. Those who had visited the Soviet Union and China saw the stark similarities: the campaign of regimentation, of all people dwelling on one thought – serving the Sate and The Party. For them, it had a sickening sense of de javu.

Overnight, there were incessant briefings, not just by Mugabe himself, but by diverse cabinet ministers. Their theme was the same: acquaint the people with the government programme – which was of implementing “Gutsa ruzhunji” – socialism. There was no time for according capitalism any special mention, except as the No. 1 Enemy of the People. Capitalism had backed the Smith regime against the socialist-backed struggle of the guerillas of ZANLA and ZIPRA. Most of the journalists had learnt their journalism through Western eyes. Their view of both China and the Soviet Union was jaundiced: intrigue, murder, lies, falsehoods, and the “oneness of the people” – the one party system.

After the fall of both the Wall and communism, there was an embarrassed, ambivalent silence among the leaders. Most whispered among themselves that there would be a reversal: Mikhail Gorbachev was pilloried. He didn’t know what he had started, they warned darkly. He had taken on more than he could chew, they said. They predicted he would bite the dust. There was an inept attempt to pretend the crisis was overblown. It was no crisis at all – Communism would survive, would bounce back, they insisted, rather desperately. Remember Hungary in 1956? Remember Alexander Dubchek in Czechoslavakia? They had all fizzled out, and communism had triumphed. It was indestructible.

Then Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize. No leader in Zimbabwe came anywhere near to winning anything of anything. Nobody was giving awards for bungling an economy that should have been nursed carefully to achieve its potential. So, who had bitten the dust? Rather apologetically, both Russia and China made gestures to the leadership that they were still looking after their interests, even if less glaringly than before. Both could not disguise their willingness to profit from the change in their ideological thrust: the Russian Federation was manifestly capitalist. China went crazy over the consumerism of free enterprise. Continue reading.

Last week, I wrote a column titled Africa after 1989.