Writings on the wall: Chinese material traces in an African landscape

Abstract

Much current scholarship on ‘Chinese–African relations’ focuses on the monumental projects, the built walls, which are visibly transforming African landscapes, and on the increasing Chinese physical presence on the continent. Instead, this article argues that a focus on the material traces of consumer goods circulating in colonial and post-colonial markets, and in expert knowledge that shaped bodily practices, domestic habits, and rural landscapes over time, yields a more nuanced picture of Chinese–African entanglements. We examine elements of “Chineseness” that inform Sierra Leonean ways of dwelling – particularly of farming rice, and of intervening therapeutically on bodies – but often through intermediaries whose imprints mask Asian origins. Contemporary China-Africa friendship rhetoric stresses bilateralism and palimpsestic reinscriptions of earlier relations, but belies a history in which multiple Chinas struggled for global recognition through partnerships with African countries that articulated with colonial mediations and Cold War alliances.