Do not buy izhing-zhong !
A friend of mine was given
this bumper sticker a few days ago, although he says he’s too scared to actually use it on his car. The words translate to “The people say no. Do not buy izhing-zhong” (from Ndebele). The stickers are obviously part of a campaign against the influx of cheap Chinese goods flooding our market - the developing Zimbabwe-Chinese relationship has been mentioned previously in this blog here, and here. The image of ‘China’ giving two fingers to Zimbabweans while nonchalantly crushing the Zimbabwean bird says it all: this is a Zimbabwean protest against Chinese ‘colonisation’.
It amuses me to think that Mugabe ranted on and on and on (and boy, he can drone on and on in his speeches!) about saying ‘no to colonisation’ by the British. “Never again”, he thundered at bemused audiences held captive (and I mean that literally, because they are often forced to attend his boring speeches) by the concept that the British were trying to take over Zimbabwe again. With typical Zimbabwean humour, our country’s bemusement soon turned to amusement, responding to the ‘anti-Blair’ campaign by asking ‘Who is Auntie Blair?’.
The hard-hitting emphasis on British colonisation at election time suggested to me that mugabe needed to force the thought of colonisation into unwilling minds. What he failed to appreciate was exactly how savvy the Zimbabwean people are. We don’t buy the British colonisation story because it’s rubbish, and we’re smart enough to know the truth of that fact no matter how long mugabe drums on about it.
We’re also savvy enough to spot genuine colonisation when we do see it. And what’s more, we don’t need a politician to lead us by the nose through the ins and outs of what happens when a country is in the process of being colonised and asset stripped. Nor do we need to be persuaded to make efforts to resist that happening in our own backyard. This bumper sticker is evidence of all that.
I hope with all my heart that this sort of resistance action doesn’t spin into heartache and misery for our local Chinese community. The bumper sticker message, to me, says, ‘Say no, to Chinese colonisation’ and ‘Say no to Chinese products’. It doesn’t vilify local Chinese people who have been selling Zimbabwean products to Zimbabwean people for a very long time. I hope Zimbabweans continue to be savvy and recognise the distinction.
* Sokwanele Note: Read more about Chinese colonisation on the main Sokwanele site - On Becoming a Chinese colony : 21 June 2005
January 21st, 2007 08:44
The hard-hitting emphasis on British colonisation at election time suggested to me that mugabe needed to force the thought of colonisation into unwilling minds. What he failed to appreciate was exactly how savvy the Zimbabwean people are. We don’t buy the British colonisation story because it’s rubbish, and we’re smart enough to know the truth of that fact no matter how long mugabe drums on about it.