Vantage point: Dengfeng-Xiaobei
As African presence had increased substantially by the late 2000s,Tianxiu Building (along with some of the other buildings nearby) reachedtheir capacity. Consequently, there was a gradual spillover into Dengfeng, which, due to its size and open spaces, became some kind of gravitational centre (or critical point of intersection) for several African and Chinese trading, migratory, and cultural flows.
The ensemble formed by Dengfeng-Xiaobei has been a crucial locale — a node at the intersection of several subeconomies involved in the reproduction of African presence in the city.13 The urban village of Dengfeng, in particular, has been a great vantage point from where to observe and make better sense of how Africans and Chinese have articulated at the local level. The space itself is one of intense activity, movement, competition, collaboration, and struggle.
Just walking over the pedestrian bridge fromTianxiu in 2015, for example, you could see internal migrants selling everything from cheap and ingenious curios to photo souvenirs and phonecards, African traders (among others) on the hunt for everything from garments and cosmetics to electronics and machinery. Middle Easterners on their way to the upmarket Turkish and Syrian restaurants that flank one side ofHuanshi Middle Road, local grandparents walking their grandchildren home from school, and beggars greeting passersby with a salaam alaikimi. After spending enough time there, you could also spot Hui youngsters offering on-the-spot currency exchange, Chinese graduates in search of a piece of the trading cake, Nigerian singers, football players and movie stars, Congolese priests and acolytes on their way to religious congregations, Ghanaian cooks taking a break from their kitchens, Colombian, Kazak, and Nigerian sex workers off ering their services, and the occasional uniformed cheiiggtiang (Ji/nj1 looking for overstayers. As you got off' the pedestrian bridge and neared the tunnel marking the entry to Dengfeng, the activity intensified and the energy became more chaotic. It was as if you were entering an area controlled by a different regime — another city, a refuge from Guangzhou. It was a microcosm where myriad transnational and translocal stories and trajectories shrunk and collapsed at different paces — sometimes faster, sometimes slower.
In the midst of this vibrant conglomerate of economies, languages, and ethnicities, the New Dengfeng Hotel stood out as a critical hinge for certain transnational, translocal, and local subeconomic processes that struggled over and regimented the daily activities in the area. Originally developed by Hunanese migrant entrepreneurs, the New Dengfeng Hotel is a ‘mixed business’ that has a trading mall, upscale
Muslim restaurants, Sahelian eateries, internet cafés, mini-‘mosques’, hairdressing salons, massage parlours, cargo offices, religious congregations, and hotel rooms distributed across its eight floors. At any one time, it could host around 400 sojourners who came, predominantly, from Angola, Kenya, Zambia, Tanzania, Congo, and Guinea.15 Seizing the opportunities brought about by the intersection of the above-mentioned flows in and around this hotel, Chinese nationals from different provinces and ethnic groups — the most salient being Hui, Uyghur, and Han from Hunan and Hubei — developed several microindustries in the area.
Every day at dawn, during the several months I spent in the New Dengfeng Hotel, an incessant noise rose from one of the alleys by the side of the hotel. Dozens of middle-aged Hui men, glued to their phones with calculators in hand, held tense negotiations before swapping packs of dollars and renminbi in an informal foreign exchange market. After fixing the exchange rates, they distributed smaller amounts of money to their fellow Hui youngsters who then roamed around the area offering currency exchange to foreign traders.16 While the men organised the informal currency exchange activities in the neighbourhood, many of their female relatives either managed the highly frequented 24-hour Lanzhou halal restaurants, or sold international phonecards. Although most restaurants and hotels had ‘cautionary notes’ advising foreigners not to exchange money or buy phonecards from street hawkers, these subeconomies thrived, in broad daylight, in Dengfeng.
The area in front of the New Dengfeng Hotel is a small, open ‘plaza’ (about 200 square metres) that bustled with activity for around 20 hours every day. From early in the morning, hundreds of people converged there offering a plethora of different services. A large part of the space was taken up by the nonstop ebb and flow of minivans driven by young men from Hunan and Hubei who transported the merchandise acquired by African traders in the markets around Guangyuan West Road. As the minivans parked, female porters from the same provinces bustled about waiting for the goods to be unloaded onto trolleys before pushing them towards hotel rooms. Most rooms in the New Dengfeng Hotel were packed to the hilt. Once a room was full, the merchandise would get taken (usually by the same women) to cargo offices in the vicinity of the hotel. There were close connections between the people working as porters and drivers and the hotel staff — many of them had familial ties or came from neighbouring towns or cities.This tightly knit assemblage of people, who shared regional or kinship ties, collectively controlled a whole layer of activities aimed at satisfying the trading and everyday needs of foreigners in the area.
Throughout any of those days, the open space in front of the hotel was a site of intense multiethnic, translocal, and transnational interactions. As night fell, the area often became a social centre for small groups of African men and women to discuss politics and exchange information about prices and markets. As those conversations emerged and trading activities seemed to fade, a whole ensemble of mainly Hunanese migrants carrying poles hung with colourful clothing, reminiscent of the traditional bamboo yokes, would start populating the empty spaces left by the morning exchange market and the surrounding alleys. Around the same time, Uyghur grilling carts would arrive, colonising the space previously taken up by the minivans, and the mostly young men would start preparing whole roasted chickens for the Africans in the area. Over the stretch of a day, these same young Uyghurs switched from driving the pervasive mototaxis, to peddling freshly cut fruit, to finally participating in the grilling activities. Although the scene could come across as highly chaotic, the whole assemblage of sellers and peddlers occupying the alleys was highly regimented — the different microindustries having strong ethno-national affiliations. As the night deepened, many of the small restaurants would become bars and the myriad passersby from Africa, the Middle East, and China, would dine, drink, shop, and socialise in the neighbourhood. To some extent, the presence of Hui and Uyghurs alongside North Africans, Middle Easterners,Turkish, Pakistanis, and sub-Saharan Muslims generated a Muslim atmosphere, or to be more precise, a Sino-Afro-Islamic assemblage.
If you walk out of the village and over the pedestrian bridge that connects Dengfeng with Xiaobei, it takes only a few minutes to reach Tianxiu Building. Tianxiu has some 680 apartments (many of which are now empty). In 2015, out of the building’s occupied apartments, some 50 to 60 percent were leased to Africans, and the rest to mostly Middle Easterners and Chinese.The building loosely follows the Hong Kong high-rise model with a shopping area at the bottom and apartment towers on top of it (there is even a pool that has been empty for years). On an everyday basis, hundreds of people shop in or pass through the official commercial space where mostly Chinese shopkeepers sell all kinds of shanzhai (iJLlil) — knockoff computers, USBs, headphones, tablets, and smartphones, alongside shoes, garments, bedding, fabrics, leather products, powdered soap, toys, cosmetics, wigs, and human hair. The higher floors of the building are officially designated as residential and semi-commercial. In the afternoons, countless Africans would pack into the elevators to visit one of the 50-odd restaurants or eateries (some better established than others) where — as pointed out earlier — many West African cooks work in tandem with Chinese cooks preparing foufou, jollof, plantain, and other African dishes. On the ground floor, the Egyptian and Libyan owned cafés like Lounge Coffee (which I introduced earlier) are critical spaces where French, Bambara, Wollof, and Swahili speakers do business and socialise. Although most Africans in the city identify the buildings as a place to find people from all over Africa, francophones (manly Malians, Guineans, Senegalese, and Togolese) have been the most salient.
While some Africans with more ‘settled’ histories have managed to open small businesses like garment shops, hair salons, and eateries in Tianxiu, Dengfeng and some of the other malls in Xiaobei, they, in no way, compete directly with internal migrants at the microindustry and subeconomic levels described above. Moreover, as in the GuangyuanWest Road area, African-owned commercial spaces tend to be located in less accessible places — such as on the top floor or in the basement — where rents and visibility are lower (the same goes for churches and mosques). While African and Chinese businesses are, in a way, together (located in the same buildings), they tend to occupy different, and somewhat separate, spaces. One of the areas where Africans and Chinese do appear to compete and collaborate on relatively more equal grounds is in the highly competitive sector of import-export
The emergence of the ‘Chocolate City’ 49 cargo and representation offices (business consultancy) (Haugen, 2011). Generally speaking, however, rather than competing commercially with Chinese, Africans in the area tend to act as mediators weaving together multiple components in assemblages of translocal/transnational subeconomies, thus generating new and more complex economic spaces.
It is in Dengfeng-Xiaobei that almost all Africans I have spoken to started looking for contacts and business opportunities. A great number of those who have lodged or lived in Dengfeng report having had knowledge of the existence of an ‘African neighbourood’ prior to their arrival in the city. Over the last decade, regardless of their statuses (whether settled or itinerant traders, whether aspiring to ‘immigrate’ or just wandering) most Africans have converged, at one time or another, in either Dengfeng or the surrounding areas of Xiaobei. These two areas are, however, not only a main point of entry for a great number of Africans who pass through the city but, more importantly, a crucial site where they intersect with other Africans and with the complex ecology of Chinese internal migrants. Accordingly, it could be argued that the whole area is a site where transnational African flows meet with those of the transprovincial and transethnic Chinese systems — a neighbourhood where the local, the translocal, and the transnational converge.
