Paying away from home

Photographer gets wide-angle view on how Africans are helping themselves

Overseas communities of traders sending money back home could eliminate the need for aid in many African countries, suggests a chronicler of the African community in Guangzhou.

Photographer Pieter Van Der Houwen says that communities like Guangzhou's send home an average of three to four times the amount of money that many African countries receive in international aid.

By nurturing the growth of such merchant communities, governments could help supplant the millions provided in international aid to African countries.

"You could argue to get rid of aid and development as we know it," the 53-year-old Dutch native told China Daily.

Money sent back home from Africans working worldwide was valued at $51.8 billion in 2010, compared with $43 billion in Official Development Aid, according to figures from the World Bank.

However, the African Development Bank estimates that around 75 percent of money coming to Africa from overseas is sent through informal channels, either being by mail or delivered by hand, avoiding high bank fees.

Van Der Houwen has spent more than two decades traveling the globe, documenting African culture from behind the lens. His most recent work on China's African community, a photo series titled External Africa, is due to be released later this year.

He says contrary to common perception, compared with Europe, China is more open to receiving traders, giving it access to millions of dollars worth of deals done daily.

"It takes a Nigerian and a European just as long and the same amount of money to get a Chinese visa," he says.

"For a Nigerian to come to Europe is close to impossible."

Nigerians seeking to go to Europe face a stringent two-year visa process with results not guaranteed. For China, the process takes as little as a day.

"Many of my Nigerian friends have said: 'All I want to do is travel to Germany and fill up two containers with BMW parts and leave.' But they can't even do that."

Calculating Guangzhou's daily business transactions at $30 million to $50 million, he says what is Europe's loss is China's gain.

"Europe has become like a fort," he says. "The whole migration patterns of Africans are shifting to the East."

Traveling to Guangzhou for the first time in 2010, Van Der Houwen spent about 10 weeks over five trips observing and engaging with the city's African traders.

In addition to his photo series, he released a documentary in February this year titled Black Money: The Future Comes From Africa, which examined Guangzhou and Europe's need to attract a similar type of commerce to revitalize the economy.

Seeing the interactions between African and Chinese traders up close, he argues against the view that the foreign community is treated harshly.

"Our relation with Africans is that we always tend to look at them as victims," he says. "But when I went there, I saw a very dynamic group of Africans thoroughly enjoying themselves, flowing with initiative and sending a hell of a lot of money back home."

Though the relationship between Chinese and African businesspeople is often cast as tense and tentative, the two have a lot in common when it comes to their attitude toward trade.

"When I first thought of this economic frenzy, this economic interaction, I had never seen Africans and Chinese sitting down to business with three calculators between them," he says.

"But after spending a lot of time there, I realized that the two had a lot in common."

Namely, he says, when it comes to business transactions they share a more grounded sense of entitlement when compared with European counterparts, meaning that there is not as much expectation for outside assistance.

"They have a sense that if they want to succeed they must do it themselves."

(China Daily Africa Weekly 07/19/2013 page7)