Hifikepunye Pohamba’s new presidential palace sprawls over hectares of prime, hilly Windhoek real estate. It is surrounded by an imposing iron fence, adorned every five metres or so with garish, vaguely botanical crests.
The tiled walls give the impression of a high-end outhouse and there is a distinct whiff of gangster communism about the place — it would, one imagines, be more sanguine in Pyongyang. Indeed, the North Koreans prepared the designs for, and started construction on, the stronghold. When they were unable to finish it, a Chinese firm stepped in. Underneath the vast main buildings, we are told by a local construction magnate, bunkers and tunnels have been built to spirit away Pohamba and his court should things turn nasty.
On a velvety night, cold blue moonlight catching the acacia-studded koppies, the palace makes for an impressive sight. We pull off on to a side road and prepare to take some pictures. Several shots in, a van pulls up. Three armed men leap out and start barking orders and the most strident among them, a North African Arab — one of an increasing number of foreign mercenaries in the country, loyal only to their paymasters — demands our passports. “Would you take a picture of the president’s home in your country?” he asks. “Never!” They possess a coiled violence that makes us both very nervous.
The foreign-built palace and these men suggest a new development in Namibia’s coming-of-age. Ever more detached from its people, the South West Africa People’s Organisation government — once revolutionaries — have, by and large, morphed into a cosseted elite. What, then, of this new foreignness? Is this the first salvo in a full scale Chinese takeover? Or is it rather the Namibian elite surfing a Chinese wave for their benefit alone?
Both of these positions unravel at a touch. For us, the understanding begins on a rainy Windhoek afternoon, en route to the muddy and neglected location of Katutura, 10km or so from Windhoek’s CBD.
“There has been no electricity for two years and to use the toilet you must go to the bush,” says Simeon Bernardino of the apartheid-era township in which he lives. (The name says it all: Katutura is Otjiherero for “the place where we do not want to live”.) At 20, he has spent half his life in Katutura and as we drive he gives us a candid appraisal of the new Chinese.
“The Chinese wholesalers in the industrial area are the worst,” we’re told. “They have a different method, they don’t fit in with the laws of the country. And their products! You don’t have any guarantee. Once it’s broken, it’s broken.” It’s a sentiment with which we’re already familiar; the notion that the cheap goods that arrive on Namibia’s shores from faraway places like Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Yiwu are irredeemably faulty.
The opposite view, which holds that China offers everything from cellphones, to running shoes and musical instruments to Africans who would not otherwise be able to afford such things, is less popular. But then we’re more interested in how Bernardino has come to be “in business” with the Chinese.
He is a “five-star” member of the Tiens Group, a multinational conglomerate that extends into 110 countries from its homebase in Tianjin, northeastern China. It was founded in 1995 by Li Jinyuan, a suspiciously fresh-faced septuagenarian from nearby Cangzhou, based on his business philosophy of “Serving Society by Restoring Health to Mankind”. As with most Chinese companies, revenues and profits are known only to God and Mr Li, and not necessarily in that order.
Like Amway in the United States, which calls itself a “direct-selling company”, Tiens prefers not to use the word “pyramid” in its description of itself — its brand slogan is “Together We Share”. Like Amway, however, Tiens rewards its members according to the number of new salespeople they bring in. Profit share is worked out on a strict hierarchical chart; the higher up the ladder you go, the more you stand to make.
When its members reach the “lion” stage, Bernardino explains, the company automatically rewards them with boats, cars and overseas trips. There are also travel incentives for the more promising neophytes and Bernardino says proudly that last year he had to contribute only the equivalent of R500 for a trip to Johannesburg. Tiens, he adds, operates in 13 countries across Africa — from Angola, the DRC and the Republic of Congo in the west to Madagascar in the east — with the headquarters and site of the annual conference in Gauteng.
While the thought of a Chinese company awarding a speedboat to a Zambian national at a conference in Johannesburg is tantalising, our concern is how Bernardino sells his product in his own neighbourhood. We park our bakkie outside the small house and Bernardino introduces us to his mother, Albertina, and his three sisters and brother. As the eldest of the children Bernardino has his own room — it’s dark and hot, but it has a bed and cupboard that he’s bought with the proceeds from Tiens.
For the demonstration, the “machine” is unveiled. It’s a small battery-powered box that runs electrical current through a cord topped with a silver stylus. Bernardino inserts an earbud in his ear and places a two-sided chart on the table, one side showing an open palm and the other the back of a hand.
Based on the ancient Chinese principles of palmology and acupuncture, the machine administers slight shocks to various parts of the hand — pain at the top of your thumb, for instance, indicates that you may have bronchitis. Bernardino then produces a catalogue of items for “treatment” of the diagnosed ailments.
“These days I don’t even know where my hospital card is,” he says of the impeccable state of his health since first he began sampling the merchandise. He says, too, that he has cured dozens of his friends and neighbours — of everything from headaches to cancer.
The following day we visit the head office of the Namibian chapter of Tiens just off Robert Mugabe Avenue and find, below a framed picture of President Pohamba, a plaque that reads: “Tiens was officially launched by the Honourable Petrina N Haingura, Deputy Minister of Health and Social Services, on 28 July 2010.”
It’s no doubt significant that the Namibian government has recently endorsed a direct-sales company focused on the distribution of Chinese traditional medicines in Africa; equally significant, however, is how Tiens has appeared to alter and complicate the standard perception of the Chinese among ordinary Africans.
There are 25 such branches dotted across Africa, with a further nine waiting to register for branch status. The branches are just like this one locals who cannot afford, or distrust, doctors, sit in plastic chairs and wait to get tested by the patented Tiens machine. Members rush in to buy merchandise that they will later sell in their own communities. The office is clean, if a little shabby, and well run.
We meet a spry woman named Nambata Kambombo, a 67-year-old bronze lion (Tiens owes her a car she is not yet ready to collect), in the lobby, under a noisy flat-screen television. She explains to us: “I remember after I joined in 2003, people didn’t want to listen. The things you see in Chinatown, they were comparing it to that. Later they saw that the Tiens products are better.”
By “better,” what Kambombo perhaps means is something akin to “of lasting value” — no matter what the Western view of Tiens’s motives and business practices may be, there’s no arguing that for Kambombo and Bernardino the company has delivered real hope where previously there was none. In Katutura, “the place where we do not want to live”, that has to be worth something.
The DVD playing on the mounted flat screen in the branch office depicted the 2006 Tiens Award Ceremony that took place in a cheerless auditorium in Midrand. Theme music from Chariots of Fire blared through the speakers, while African after African took to the stage to accept performance rewards from a Chinese woman in a Tiens blazer. At first, the whole affair seemed like a parody of the Golden Globes. But it betrayed its poignancy in how heartfelt the speeches were and, more importantly, in how the inexorable parade of strivers suggested an Africa that was not so easily drowned under a Chinese tidal wave.
Granted, below the television screen was a cupboard full of Tiens gimcrackery — Beneficial Capsules and Nutrient High Calcium Powder and Vitality Soft Gel Capsules. But while Tiens may well be a pyramid scheme, whether it is more so than capitalism itself remains an open question. Yet what the DVD hinted at was a latent African entrepreneur class that had been waiting for a shot, for a moment. In Tiens that moment had arrived.
In dozens of locations throughout Africa the entrepreneurial fever, in part stoked by Tiens, is spreading from shack to shack, just as it did in Katutura. On the flat screen, after a woman from Botswana received the keys to her speedboat, the following taglines appeared: “Tiens gives you the OPPORTUNITY!!! Opportunity to Live Your Dreams!!!”
Half an hour later, when we passed the presidential palace on the way back to the hotel, the frisson of Pyongyang paranoia that ran through us represented another cultural import, no less profound. We were once again reminded that in this epochal encounter, there are no simple narratives, no stock characters and nothing boilerplate or borrowed. Something that Bernadino said came to mind. “In these days it is not like before,” he told us. “Now, I think constantly about the future. I look forward.”
Kevin Bloom and Richard Poplak have been commissioned by Jonathan Ball Publishers in South Africa and Portobello/Granta in the UK to write a book entitled White-out: The Chinese Advance and the Twilight of the European in Africa. It will appear on shelves in late 2012