When a traveler told me over breakfast that he'd spent the previous night in a Free State town overrun by Chinese migrants, I decided to investigate. Dark suspicions about the Middle Kingdom'
s aspirations in Africa are so rife these days that, after learning nothing from Google other than that "there are no events in Warden", I headed off down a misty, cosmos-lined N3 last week to the pretty country dorp that is known for its massive 1 750-seater sandstone Dutch Reformed church and the biggest potholes in South Africa.
There was no sign of the rumoured invasion as I parked on Warden's main street. Indeed, the place was deserted on a Thursday morning except for two horses hitched to an empty cart. But when I popped into shop after shop on a once-busy, three-block strip, there they were, manning their silent tills. Not all Chinese, some were from Bangladesh, and a couple were from Somalia.
Few of the businesses are still white-owned. Not one of them belongs to a black South African.
What surprised me most was how young the new entrepreneurs were. Chen Wen Yuan (21), who owns a clothing store, left China three years ago. He is engaged to marry a local African girl. Min Xun (22), sole proprietor of a general trading business specializing in cellphones, has been in Warden a year longer. Shah Jalal (26) left Bangladesh in 2004, choosing the dead town of Warden as the source of his future fortune three years later.
Greengrocer Jalal says the dorp is quiet but offers better prospects than he could achieve back home. "You save a little bit above your needs every day," he explains. He rents a room from one of the 500-odd mainly elderly white residents of the town, although many of the migrant shopkeepers live in cramped quarters at the back of their premises.
Chen Yang, like everyone else, complains about Warden's water supply. "You turn the tap but nothing comes out," he says. "Or you turn the tap and mud comes out." The town's only restaurant was featured in a recent issue of the regional newspaper because its dirty dishes had to be washed for a week in a bathful of swimming pool water. Another problem, says Yang, are the enormous potholes, which put motorists driving between Johannesburg and Durban off stopovers in Warden.
On the pavement, I ask locals how they feel about the town's new commercial community. One shrugs in silence. Piet Chelekhule, who was promoted from municipal gardener to postman when the ANC came to power, walks backwards, desperate to escape my curiosity. But Rose Butu, a cleaner at the town hall, is more forthright. She says the governing party is campaigning vigorously among the 15 000 "location"-dwellers for their votes in the upcoming local elections. "There are too many problems," she says. "No water, no electricity, no jobs. The Chinese are not a problem; only the ANC is our problem."
Driving into the nearby township, past the dam that is clearly drained beyond viability by the overcrowded conditions, you ride over electrical cords illegally linking one block of RDP houses with power to another section without it.
Saibul Islam (22) sits alone in his corrugated iron shop, built just a metre from one of the larger houses in the township. He has cut a deal with the homeowner because he arrived from Bangladesh without capital: Islam will work the business for five years, living in the tiniest curtained-off compartment at the back; then give both the structure and the business goodwill to the landlord by way of accumulated rent when he leaves.
Several men have gathered at the door to see what's going on. One of them notes that Islam's immaculately organised shop will fail once locally-run. His friends nod in agreement."South Africans sometimes become jealous of these successful shopkeepers because they make money even when it's so hard," says DA election candidate Hennie de Beer, a Warden-born farmer who delivers milk to the township shops. "But the locals themselves tend to lack planning skills and so their own infrequent business ventures fail."
De Beer is one of the farmers around Warden who ferries his workers from the township to the worksite, rather than accepting the prescribed social responsibilities that followed the state's outlawing of farming's old exploitive ways.
Looking as a whole at Warden's chaotic, over-populated township and its under-populated town - the result of a shocking murder rate on lonely farmsteads and medium-scale farming becoming unprofitable - you realize that a partial explanation of the ANC's dismal service record in rural South Africa lies in the unintended consequences of its farm labour reforms. The government did not expect to inherit full responsibilitity for farm workers' lives, some of which had been shared previously, albeit meanly, by employers.
Nobody would advocate a return to the heartless feudalism of the past, but progressive alternatives do not spring to mind. What Warden needs desperately, like the rest of the country, are jobs. That hard-working young Asians are running so many of the town's sluggish businesses d oes not seem to be an issue at the moment, despite their apparent tendency to employ migrants in preference to locals.
Instead, what keeps recurring in my conversations about the regrettable lack of local traders - given that the migrants seem to be succeeding with virtually no capital and the tightest of margins, even while sending money home to support their families - is the supposed need for microfinancing and startup loans. Yet these are not proven answers to the absence of modest business initiatives - and not only because the interest invariably charged on loans increases household debt.
A bigger barrier is the fact that 80% of small businesses fail worldwide, so why should South Africa's poor, with all their existing disadvantages, be anywhere near as good at trading as intuitively entrepreneurial Asian migrants?