TOO CHINESE TO BE IRRELEVANT

Mao Zedung’s use of collective labour is an ancient practice across Africa, writes Okello Oculi

‘The worst form of human rights violation is to deny a people information about human affairs and feed them with silence about it’, so said a local wit. An example of this was silence across Africa and the Americas about unconventional initiatives directed by Mao Zedung in the struggle to build development in China. Most of it came to small groups of ‘’radical students’’ in several American university campuses who were desperately hungry for contradictions to an American power that was waging war against Vietnamese people. Several of such wits can be recalled.

Dr John Bryant told the story of Mao defeating a pandemic of schistosomiasis whose hosts were snails which lived in holes on banks of rivers. They released eggs which bore into feet of victims and travelled into human liver causing swelling of bellies and bleeding that came out in urine. Companies that made huge profits from selling medicinal drugs sold known cures at prices which China could not afford without taking loans from countries that manufactured the drugs. Mao Zedung’s solution was to turn his people into the equivalent of the mountains from which they had launched their victorious guerrilla warfare. On the same day the Communist Party of China sent 14 million people into rivers to scoop out offending snails. The death of these hosts also eliminated the disease.

When rats became consumers of food items and spread plague and other diseases, members of the Chinese Communist Party were instructed to attend weekly meetings with at least one tail ‘’borrowed’’ from a rat. This measure severely tested the generosity of rats, especially those accustomed to visiting people’s kitchens and eating root crops on farms.

When party leaders reported complaints by farmers against invasions of ripe grains on their farms by sky-darkening swarms of ‘’quilla birds’’, Mao advised 10 million farmers to bang tins and drums all-night long. Since birds cannot survive without a required amount of sleep, they would drop dead in the morning and supplement diets of farmers. The party, thereby, denied businessmen contracts for spraying chemicals across vast cereal farms.

Malaria was fought with campaigns for draining out stagnant bodies of water, grasses and bushes around homes, elimination of rain water collected in broken pots and other containers. The denial of bodies of water for mosquito larvae to survive denies malaria that destructive access to human blood as breeding diet. Money guzzling measures like purchases of chemicalised mosquito nets and anti-mosquito sprays were blocked from rolling loans from ‘’donors’’ into China.

The other wit was that of training ‘’barefoot doctors’’ – a concept familiar across Africa as primary school children travelling on bare soles of their feet to catch flowers of education. Dr Edward Margai once told stories about deep bitterness among secondary school youths from rural Sierra Leone who were much insulted by children of urban Creole families going about boarding school grounds tracking their bare footprints as those of ‘’hooves of animals’’. Under Mao’s wit ‘’barefoot doctors’’ were medical auxiliaries who lived among local communities and handled simple health problems – including bleeding from minor injuries. In Africa, Professor Olukoye Ransome-Kuti was a much celebrated advocate and supporter of what he broadcast to other African countries as ‘’Primary Health Care’’.

This matter of policies informed by past practices assumed much importance under Muamar Gaddafi. Italian colonial rulers imported Sicilian peasants to produce agricultural products on soils from which Libyan farmers and cattle rearers had been chased away: with many killed. They also prohibited employment of Libyans in Italian factories and industrial activities. When Gaddafi seized power in 1969, he had to import workers from Egypt to replace the Italians he had – in retaliation - deported from Libya. To grow ALFALFA grass to feed over 100,000 sheep in the desert, he imported experts from Arizona State in America. NATO’s fear that immigrants from China, Philippines, Indonesia and West Africa would create a strong industrial economy in Libya– including exploitation of gas discovered on Egypt’s coastline at Alexandria – hastened the expulsion of foreign workers, a military bombardment and the assassinated of Gaddafi.

This legacy of labour crossing borders is worth further imaginative consideration. As an example, scores of millionaires in Nnewi (Anambra State) could honour Odumegwu Ojukwu’s sojourn to Ivory Coast by funding a brigade of scientists and entrepreneurs mobilised from across Africa to build factories for manufacturing products out of mineral and agricultural resources in the vast zone from South Sudan to North-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Mao Zedung’s use of collective labour was an ancient practice across Africa. While taking photographs of traditional architecture in Zaria City, I witnessed a communal road construction work in which the rhythm of digging followed drumbeats, songs and shouts to animate vibrant muscles. In most farming communities, groups of men do work for different households on a rotational basis. Accordingly, Otedola and fellow millionaires could mobilise unemployed youths from Gambia to Ethiopia, from Mozambique to Cameroun, to plant and irrigate several rings of trees for ‘’Great Green Walls’’ to stop the Sahara desert from agricultural soils through wind erosion and sand dunes. Other youths would replant forests looted by companies ranging from Malaysia and South Korea to Scandinavian countries; and building their own small and medium scale wood-based industries.

WHILE TAKING PHOTOGRAPHS OF TRADITIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN ZARIA CITY, I WITNESSED A COMMUNAL ROAD CONSTRUCTION WORK IN WHICH THE RHYTHM OF DIGGING FOLLOWED DRUMBEATS, SONGS AND SHOUTS TO ANIMATE VIBRANT MUSCLES. IN MOST FARMING COMMUNITIES, GROUPS OF MEN DO WORK FOR DIFFERENT HOUSEHOLDS ON A ROTATIONAL BASIS