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Rubbing black and yellow noses
The May 2010 issue of Le Monde Diplomatique features a fascinating article, The improbable saga of Africans in China. Its author, Tristan Coloma, reports and analyses how a growing number of citizens from countries like Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Guinea have elected China's 18-million Southern metropolis Canton (Guangzhou) to develop business.
Although the article does not contain just good news, it is there. The Africans and the Chinese, with such diverse cultural roots and aspirations, learn from each other and work together: do business, marry and have children, and - speak each other's language.
Or at least in Guangzhou the Africans do, learning Chinese on the spot - or had taken initial steps already in their home countries, where the enterprising Chinese had founded a Confucius Institute.
English just goes so far. It is useful for reading bills of delivery - and bills. Building confidence between trade partners is however both for Africans and Chinese a matter of acceptance of each other's cultural riches.
As the Africans go to Canton to trade, they do so in their customers' and suppliers' language.
Rubbing black and yellow noses. Political incorrectness alert! Accepting the Other also means accepting the color of his and her skin. It certainly does not mean ignoring or misrepresenting it. Children never do.
An exhilarating article.
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Interestingly, the great and abused African country of Congo is celebrating its 50 years of independence these days.
Belgian journalists Koen Vidal and Tim Dirven are writing a warm-hearted series of snapshots of Kinshasa neighbourhoods in the Dutch-language daily De Morgen.
Its June 22 issue features an article called A Chinese success story in social powder keg Ndjili. It's about Ms You Yi's business, a general store she opened in the poor neighbourhood near the airport. Her business thrives. To quote a customer: “After a few weeks she surprised us already by addressing us in Lingala.”
And he commented: “You see, in that respect the Chinese are a bit faster than you Europeans. You do speak French but as you rarely speak Lingala or Swahili, that seems to be an obstacle to real contact with this country, don't you think?”
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Haven't the languages and cultures of Europe, spread over the entire world, played this seminal role: to provide the lingua franca (English, French, Spanish) through which contact, trade, communication could arise among cultures and peoples distant and diverse?
Yet now, global communication shrinking ever more our village boundaries, pressing our noses together, we are discovering that real interaction requires acceptance, i.e., learning of the other's identity, culture, language.
The Chinese and Africans have learnt this, and are busy jettisoning the lingua franca that helped them along.
As South-South trade is booming and blooming, China, Brazil, South Africa, India are beyond mating rituals: interpenetration will increasingly involve rubbing noses and languages.
The European, or rather the Western world, will have to learn from this - very fast. Sticking to the refusal to learn the other's language as we can use English “anyway” (can we?), will increasingly be perceived as a “retro-neo-colonial” reflex, suspect of following a narrow political agenda of hegemony - instead of one of development, growth, change.
As a reflex of fear, whereas what we really want is to be brave, open-hearted, welcoming and - curious.
All those cute and funny noses!
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• The schoolkid kit
• “All this is marketing”: Coaching is co-creation or The proof of the pudding is in the eating
• Assessing the Learner's needs and skills
• How we plot the Learner's Language learning Adventure
• Plan thoroughly and implement flexibly
• Plurilingualism is key but also the key
• Assignment: Company-wide progress in Spartan circumstances
• Assignment: Company-wide coaching of High Performers
• Assignment: Customer-oriented writing in an insurance department
• Crossing the ultimate frontier: Towards Trans-Cultural Excellence
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