Lesotho — Anti-Chinese Resentment Flares:

UN Integrated Regional Information Networks
24 January 2008
Posted to the web 24 January 2008

Maseru

For 14 years, Mathabo Mabekhla was one of Lesotho’s most successful entrepreneurs. Her ladies’ clothing boutique sold dresses, blouses and slacks imported from neighbouring South Africa, and boasted a client base that included cabinet ministers and their wives.

But dwindling sales forced her to shut down last year, for which she blames the country’s growing community of Chinese retailers. “Chinese are selling very cheap and not good quality things, and they are killing Basotho businesses,” said Mabekhla, 59.

She now sells cigarettes and beaded jewellery on the sidewalk in the capital, Maseru. “The Chinese, they must go back home,” Mabekhla told IRIN. “We don’t want Chinese here.”
[more…]

When I was a kid growing up in the Maseru suburb of Qoaling, we would go to the Chinese plantations not too far from home. There they grew and sold rice and other things. I believe that their project was government financed, or somehow in tandem with a government undertaking. I recall no problem at that time.

There were not only Chinese immigrants but Italian (Mataliana), Indians (Makula) and others. And they were mostly traders and shopkeepers. No problems there either, as far as I can remember. At Peka where I went to high school, there was an Indian trader with whose children we went to school. Apart from the usual kids’ jokes (on those that are different), there were no problems to speak of. In the capital, Maseru, most fast food cafés, as we called them, like the famous Maseru Café, were run by Basotho of Italian descent: white people who were visibly different. No problem. So what is the matter now? Why are we saying, “We don’t want Chinese here,” something we never said to other immigrants?

To my knowledge, when the hard times bite, the immigrant is always the scapegoat. It is happening in France today (immigrants are being forcibly flown to their countries of origin), it has happened in Germany where the Turkish population there has been blamed for economic woes, and Idi Amin chased Indians out of Uganda because they ran most retail businesses there.

I think that Basotho who are suffering from economic disease are right to vent their anger. But I do not think that immigrants are the right targets of that anger. We, the Basotho, have lived for many years on money sent home by our immigrant brothers, fathers, uncles who worked in South Africa’s mines. True, our labour filled a gap, but the Chinese in Lesotho are not exactly vultures. They have provided a certain amount of income for suffering families, through factories or retail employment. If we want to blame someone for being poor, we should blame the government. Governments are elected to work for the populace, and when the populace suffers, those governments, and them alone, remain accountable.

Blaming and attacking the Chinese, or any other part of the population, is discrimination, and it’s wrong. There are lots of Basotho who live and work overseas, and there are other nationalities who live and work in Lesotho. That’s the way it is, and i’m sure we wouldn’t like it much if Basotho who live overseas were attacked in the same manner. Our solution lies in being innovative and entrepreneurial. If we can’t, then there’s something wrong with the way our country is being run, and that’s where we turn toward the government and start asking questions. Khotso, Pula, Nala.
By Rethabile

Technorati Tags: anti-chinese resentment chinese in lesotho
Del.icio.us Tags: anti-chinese resentment chinese in lesotho
Furl Tags: anti-chinese resentment chinese in lesotho

When a giver of life
gives hers to the world, we should
listen for, and trace, the ingredient in her
that carries forward — it’s in the way
she lasts like a river, even at this late hour
past life and its impediments, past
frail moments and grand ones,
a child’s death there, a grandchild’s here,
the experience of God’s miracle of
arms that levitates you to truth.
She makes us see through her, past
our windshield into the storm, see
the subtle things that define her, showed the world
where we’re from, threw her out of and into
love with my father, circa nineteen fifty-five.
Thing is, she’s lying before us now on this
metal plate, silent as a black-and-white photo.
She doesn’t speak to us in words, but
through her body we watch life
seep into the linen, and drip through tubes as if
on a sky’s whim suddenly we need her soul
at this time to feed the world — it’s in the way
she enters the latticework and flows outward
along the conduits, the root’s route toward
trunk, limb, then upward to pleased leaves,
permeating as if a time of succumbing,
when her last drip drops, was coming
© Rethabile Masilo

del.icio.us tags: the viewing death poem
furl tags: the viewing death poem

Yay! We’ve got more time…

We’ve just gotten word that the deadline to make donations to Menu For Hope food blogger charity campaign has been extended through the weekend. So if you missed out in entering the raffle for our fantastic prize package, or any of the dozens of other prizes that are up for grabs, you still have time to do so.

If you missed it, now’s the opportunity to help some children in Lesotho. And you might win something grand in the process. Please visit: www.tasteto.com and www.cooksister.com for more details.

37 hours left to help feed Lesotho kids — and win great prizes:

by Bonnie P. @ 2:45 pm on 20 December 2007.

As just about every food blog has publicized already, Pim Techamuanvivit of Chez Pim is once again spearheading the epic online fund-raiser Menu for Hope to benefit the U.N. World Food Programme. In 2006 she raised over $62,000. This year’s donations — which just passed $55,000! — will be earmarked for the school lunch program in Lesotho, a small country landlocked by South Africa, as an extra incentive to encourage families to educate their children.

Details here: news.myspace.com/living/organicliving and here: www.cooksister.com. It’s a good cause.

I was attracted enough by the title of an AllAfrica.com article to resolve to read it. The title read: “Uganda: Africans Can Overcome HIV/Aids.” I wanted to know how we could do so. If Uganda can do it, then Lesotho can, also, I reasoned. Lesotho has one of the highest rates in the world. I went home this year after 7 years away, and found many of my friends gone, compromised to AIDS and the folly surrounding it.

But I was quickly disappointed by the article, even if it spoke some truths that I would agree with. Shunning promiscuity is one of those. But the author also says things like, “since the condom is about safe sex and safe sinning,” it cannot be Jesus’ approach. Now, I don’t know if it would be Jesus’ approach — my worry lies in the fact that the author thinks condoms are for sinning.

Condoms are for safe sex that should be had by any couple if one of the partners is infected. We must remember that infection does not equal sinning, and that infected people should not be stigmatised like it has been done before. There are many ways to catch a virus. And even if someone catches the HIV virus by fornicating, sinning, cheating their spouse, our job is to help them, not to hurl Biblical verses at them, not to cast the first stone. That’s what Jesus said to the mob that wanted to stone that woman accused of whoring, right? Who are we to pass judgement?

Condoms are also for birth control. If I have “enough” children, or if I don’t want to have children, full-stop, then naturally I use a rubber. There are many reasons why a responsible person would want to use a rubber. They may not want to infect their partner or be infected by their partner, they may want to control the size of their family, they may feel more comfortable having sex with a rubber than without, they may want to use a rubber in order to prolong the excitement of the act. And any of those are as valid as wanting to eat to live.

“Since the intervention of the condom hinders man and woman, whether married or not, to become one flesh, the sexual act that follows merely implies manipulation of among partners as conduits of sensual pleasure and masturbation. Thus the prevailing mistrust for abstinence and faithfulness among partners seriously betrays African cultural and Christian values in preference for secularism and utilitarianism.
[source…]”

I think it’s wrong to imply that who uses a condom sleeps around and cheats their partner (in bold in the quote above; the highlighting is mine). It is simply untrue. And the sexual act can be enjoyed only for sensual pleasure. It is an outlet of love that God has bestowed on us (and maybe on dolphins, too, I don’t know. And who cares?). The sexual act is the ultimate in acts of love. Ranks right next to dying for someone. Maybe that’s why they call it “the small death.”

I also happen to think that this is not a question for Christians, or Jews, or Moslems, or Atheists alone, but for humans. AIDS hits flesh and blood, not spirituality. So I think to look at the issue and make it Christian is beside the point. And that’s what the author is doing. HIV/AIDS is hot-blooded, and kills my Jewish neighbour as well as my Hindu friend. We need to address it in those terms. Go and tell their families what you think Jesus would want and they will tell you what they think their own saints would want. Where does that leave us, standing on this blue, vulnerable planet at the edge of a hostile environment? You tell me.

“The African solidarity with the infected and affected, augmented by the Christian story of the Good Samaritan will bring about the holistic physical and spiritual healing required.”

I dig that. But the article does not convey that meaning. The Good Samaritan stops to help without saying, “Huh, what faith is this one, and did they or did they not fornicate?” I’m a Christian brought up in a Christian home (It is true, but I have to say that here to give my point of view the benefit of being at least looked at by some. Much like running for President in the United States). But I don’t think anyone has the right to interpret either the Bible or the teachings of Jesus Christ for humanity. I accept the fact that there are other religions that do not necessarily agree with mine. I do not want to fight with followers of those religions (or those non religions), but would like to hold hands with them to face the difficulties facing our lonely, vulnerable planet. The only basic, universal truth here is that we’re in deep shit together. Now, how do we get out?
http://allafrica.com/stories/200712170390.html