“Let’s all go out and round them up,” the man says in the video, urging Greeks to follow his lead and perform citizen’s arrests on migrants. “They will burn us.” 

The Greek police arrested the man who made the video, and he is currently awaiting trial. The police also arrested the migrants the man claimed he had caught attempting to start fires. They were later released without charges.

The video, and others like it, tapped into suspicions among residents of Evros that the wildfires were the fault of migrants, thousands of whom pass through the region’s thick forest every year en route to inland Europe. Simmering anger against migrants has bubbled to the surface in Greece, aided by social media, as locals seek to apportion blame for intense wildfires that have been torching their region since July.

More than 300 square miles of land along Greece’s border with Turkey have been devastated by the blaze, which is the worst wildfire ever recorded in Europe. Lightning strikes were suspected to be the cause, but the arrests of 160 people across Greece on charges of arson — 42 for deliberately starting fires and the rest for negligence leading to fires — have heightened local anger.

Speculation that foreigners ignited the fires was also linked to the charred remains of 18 suspected migrants, two of them children, found on August 22. The deceased, sheltering in the forest, appear to have been trapped as gale-force winds spread the blaze with devastating speed. One group was found huddled together, appearing to have clutched each other as the fire claimed their lives. Earlier this month, the Greek authorities said they had rescued a group of 25 migrants who were trapped in the Dadia Forest, where fires blazed for more than two weeks.

A few days after the video began circulating on social media, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis stood in front of parliament to defend his government’s performance in the face of mounting cries of incompetence. 

“It is almost certain,” Mitsotakis claimed, “that the causes were man-made.” He added: “It is also almost certain that this fire was started on routes that are often used by illegal migrants who have entered our country.”

Mitsotakis didn’t present any evidence to back up his certainty. Indeed, the only thing he conceded he didn’t know was if the fires were caused by negligence or if they were “deliberate.”

Armed militia groups, some linked to extreme far right political parties, seized on the tension to conduct illegal arrests. And elected officials, like the ultranationalist Paraschos Christou Papadakis, gave them a boost. “We’re at war,” Papadakis has been filmed saying. “Where there are fires, there are illegal immigrants.”

On X, previously known as Twitter, and Facebook, it is easy to find Greek users who contend that migrants are to blame for the fires and that the fires are indeed deliberate. In the comment fields on videos in which Greek vigilantes are filmed “hunting” and restraining migrants, it is not unusual to find people calling for migrants to be burned and thrown in the fire.  

For decades, migrants have crossed through the forests and the cold, fast-moving Evros River to get from Turkey to Greece. Sometimes, they find themselves in no-man’s land, trapped on islets that appear to be controlled by neither Greece nor Turkey. Last year, Human Rights Watch reported that migrants, if they make it over to the Greek riverbank, are sometimes turned over by the authorities to “men who appear to be of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin,” who are tasked with forcing the migrants onto rubber dinghies and leaving them in the middle of the Evros River. From there, the migrants either take shelter on an islet or wade back to the Turkish side where they are also not welcome.

Political scientist Pavlous Roufos, who has written extensively about Greek social movements and the 2010 economic crisis, told me, “There’s a kind of dehumanization of the migrant situation happening in Greece at the moment.” Now a professor at the University of Kassel, in central Germany, Rouflos monitors both the physical violence migrants face and the disinformation being spread online about their responsibility for the wildfires in Evros. 

“What we are seeing online,” Roufos told me, “is just a fraction of what’s happening in these communities. You can multiply those videos by 20 or 30 to get the real picture.”

Local antipathy towards migrants in Evros shows, Roufos suggests, how little has changed since February 2020, when Turkey announced that it would open its western borders for migrants and asylum seekers looking to go to Europe. In what became known as the “Evros Crisis,” Greece responded by shutting its borders, suspending asylum laws and violently arresting and pushing refugees back over the border toward Turkey. Armed citizen groups, similar to those who rounded up migrants in Evros last month, stood shoulder to shoulder with Greek border guards to repel asylum seekers trying to enter Greece.

In September 2020, when fires tore through the Moria camp, a squalid housing unit for 13,000 refugees in a village in the northeastern Greek island of Lesvos, anti-immigrant groups helped police block people from getting to safety in neighboring towns. Six Afghans were convicted on arson charges, though human rights lawyers familiar with the case have argued that the refugees were framed and that their jailing was a matter of political expediency rather than justice.

During both events, there were huge surges of activity in online groups promoting extremist and anti-migrant narratives, according to a study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The researchers tracked nearly 2,000 Facebook and Twitter accounts that promoted harmful rhetoric around the incident: They pushed the narrative that refugees deliberately started the Moria fires and were, in some cases, burning their children to elicit sympathy. The accounts also pushed white supremacist campaigns like #TheGreatReplacement, which refers to a conspiracy theory that foreigners are seeking to culturally and demographically replace the white race. 

The researchers wrote that their work “makes clear that the refugee crisis has acted as a catalyst for mobilizing a transnational network of actors, including far-right extremists and elements of the political right, who often share common audiences and use similar tactics.”

After the German government promised to accommodate 1,500 asylum seekers from Moria, German far right groups were also set off, with accounts linked to far right political parties, like the Alternative for Germany, spreading new rounds of hate and disinformation targeting migrants. 

The spread of these narratives has coincided with the rise of the far right in Europe, where populist movements are uniting across borders and merging with previous center-right factions over issues like migration, identity and Islamophobia. Similar to Austria and Italy, Greece is seeing a shift to the right. Three ultranational parties won 12% of the seats in parliament in recent elections, and the ruling conservative New Democracy party has been accused of pandering to extremist agendas to keep poll numbers up.

“The toxic narrative against migrants has been going on for a long time,” Lefteris Papagiannakis, the head of the Greek Refugee Council, told me. “The violence was to be expected as we have already seen it in Lesvos in 2019,” he added, referring to racist attacks against migrants housed on the Greek island. Attacks in the past have targeted not just migrants but also rights activists and NGOs assisting refugees. Lefteris says he and his colleagues are “worried, of course.”

But the wildfires and the damage they have caused have catalyzed a fresh wave of anti-migrant anger. By implying that migrants might be arsonists, Greek politicians, including the prime minister, appear to have the backs of the vigilantes.

The post While Greece burned, politicians blamed migrants appeared first on Coda Story.

When France sent its soldiers to the Malian capital Bamako in 2013 — as part of the much-feted Operation Barkhane intended to put an end to terror attacks by Islamist groups waging IS and Al Qaeda-backed jihad — they were greeted as heroes by ordinary Malians singing paeans of gratitude.

After early successes, though, the French soldiers struggled and the relationship with Malians deteriorated to such an extent that the French were suspected of supporting the very terrorists they were meant to be fighting. 

On Facebook, a Malian activist group, “Yerewolo Debout sur les Remparts,” responded to the departure of French troops with glee, describing it as a historic triumph. The group posted a cartoon which summed up the feelings of many Malians – a French soldier on the receiving end of a giant Malian boot.

But now it's not only Malians who are celebrating the unceremonious exit of the French. The Kremlin too is delighted, happy to declare Operation Barkhane a debacle, with billions of dollars spent and the loss of thousands of lives, including dozens of French soldiers, to little effect.

If the West was hoping to isolate Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia sees an opportunity in the “global South” to gain more diplomatic influence and secure lucrative economic deals. “Russia is using Africa as a pawn to out-muscle the west,” Jean le Roux, Africa expert at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), told me.

Russia, for years now, has been adept at playing on and inflaming anti-France sentiment in former French colonies, from Mali to the Central African Republic. The Kremlin has largely succeeded in charming African leaders into tighter alliances and upsetting both the United States and particularly Europe, whose once unshakeable hold on the continent, in terms of trade, has considerably weakened.

Even now Russian trade with Africa ($14.5 billion in 2020) is but a fraction of the value of the continent’s trade with the EU (over $280 billion), China (around $255 billion) and the U.S. (over $65 billion). But Russia supplies a significant portion of Africa’s weapons, its wheat and grains, and its fertilizer.

And, as some have argued, Africa’s trading relationships with the EU are starting to chafe. In February, for instance, Odrek Rwabwogo, an adviser to the president of Uganda, wrote that “restrictive trade policies from wealthy western countries and blocs keep African countries chained to raw materials exports…while making the countries and blocs that implement them wealthier still.”

RUSSIA’S AFRICA STRATEGY

Last month, the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov undertook a five-day whistle-stop tour of Africa to talk up the growing collaboration between countries on the continent and Russia as a respite from colonial arrangements and colonial condescension from the European Union. Russia also blamed U.S. sanctions for the rising price of grains and fertilizer that had led to food insecurity and acute hunger in several African nations.

In a column, published in prominent newspapers in Egypt, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and Ethiopia, Lavrov wrote on July 22 that, “Our country who has not stained itself with the bloody crimes of colonialism, has always sincerely supported Africans in their struggle for liberation from colonial oppression.” Lavrov also evoked the “master-slave” dynamic that he wrote continued to characterize relationships between European powers and their former colonial possessions.

It is an argument that has been amplified on social media in recent years, particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to a receptive audience. Big Tech platforms, including the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, are notoriously lax in their moderation policies in much of the world, enabling social media in Arab countries, Latin America and Africa to be a practically unfettered space for Russian propaganda.

And Russia’s narratives are finding their mark.

In 2019, the Stanford Internet Observatory published a whitepaper describing Russia’s experiments with disinformation in Libya, Mozambique, Sudan, Madagascar, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In these six countries, the researchers concluded, Russia was “engaged in a broad, long-term influence operation.” Their tactics included posting “almost universally positive coverage of Russia’s activities in these countries,” while the posts also “disparaged the U.N., France, Turkey Qatar… most often while purporting to be local news sources.”

The researchers noted 73 Facebook pages set up by Russian agencies on Facebook alone targeting audiences in the six African countries, with as many as 8,900 posts being made across the pages in a single month. The disinformation came directly from companies linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the researchers said, whose Internet Research Agency had played havoc with the 2016 U.S. elections.

Backing up its cyberspace guerilla tactics, Prigozhin’s shadowy companies, chiefly the notorious Wagner Group, also had boots on the ground, providing paramilitary fighters and services across Africa.

THE ROLE OF THE WAGNER GROUP 

In Sudan, for instance, protests have been ongoing for over a year to remove the military junta that deposed the longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019, only to hold on to power rather than create the conditions for democratic elections and a civilian government.

In Khartoum, more than a hundred protestors have been killed since October. Many more have been wounded. Democracy activist Nasr Eldin Safiyah was injured in a rally in June, the side of his head split open by a teargas canister hurled into the crowd. “I have not been well,” he told me. “But we are determined to take down this corrupt military junta.”

Standing in his way are Wagner Group mercenaries. “It’s a known fact here in Sudan that Russia supports the military junta,” Safiyah says. “Wagner is operating and training militias and they are helping them to loot our gold.” An investigation last month in the New York Times revealed that Russian firms are active in Sudanese gold country, mining tons of the precious metal and described the Wagner Group as providing “interlinked war-fighting, moneymaking and influence-peddling operations.”

As with the six African countries, including Sudan, studied in the Stanford Internet Observatory paper, Mali too has been the target of a sophisticated Russian campaign. Le Roux, the Africa expert at DFRLab, wrote back in February that a “network of Facebook pages promoting pro-Russian and anti-French narratives drummed up support for Wagner Group mercenaries prior to the official arrival of the private military group in Mali.” He added that these carefully constructed fake pages “also mobilized support for the postponement of democratic elections following a successful coup in May 2021, Mali’s second in less than a year.”

Russian president Vladimir Putin called Mali’s military leader Asimi Goita, as the last French soldiers prepared to leave, and reportedly reassured him that food, fuel and fertilizers would be made available. Goita tweeted to pointedly praise Putin’s respect for “the sovereignty of Mali and the aspirations of its population.”

Earlier this month, Russia also delivered several warplanes and a helicopter to Mali to bolster its defenses in its ongoing fight against Tuareg rebels and Islamist terrorists. And last year the Malian foreign minister visited Lavrov in Moscow in part to discuss the deployment of Wagner Group paramilitary troops in Mali. Both countries deny the official presence of Wagner Group mercenaries in Mali, describing the militants as instructors to Malian soldiers.

But a U.N. report unearthed this month by the Associated Press claimed “white soldiers” had been seen with Malian troops committing likely war crimes in the massacre of at least 33 civilians. Both U.S. and U.N. officials have confirmed the presence of Wagner soldiers in Mali. 

The Wagner Group, albeit supposedly unconnected to the Kremlin, is also playing a growing role in the fighting with Ukraine. State-sanctioned Russian media have lavished praise on the exploits of Wagner Group fighters in the Donbas region. And the presence of Wagner Group soldiers in Mali, even if it’s not clear how many, is in keeping with Russia’s intervention in the affairs of several African countries.

Prigozhin, the oligarch who controls the Wagner Group, is known as “Putin’s chef” because he apparently owes his great wealth to catering contracts signed with the Kremlin. He is also linked to Russian companies that have filed into countries like Sudan to illegally mine tons of gold which they carry away from military airports. Miners along the lawless Sudanese border with the Central African Republic accuse Russian mercenaries of massacring their colleagues and stealing their gold. Sudanese officials admit that about four-fifths of the country’s 100 million tons of annual gold exports are smuggled out of the country.

Mali, incidentally, is Africa’s third largest gold exporter.

WHAT’S NEXT?

On the day the military took power in Mali in May, last year, Malians took to the streets to cheer. Some shouted slogans in support of Russia, some raised the Russian flag and chanted “France degage!” Clear out, France. The support for Russia is real, despite groups like Human Rights Watch pointing to arbitrary detentions and torture and the connection of Wagner Group fighters to massacres of civilians.

DFRLab’s experts say Malian social media is where there is most praise for Russia and mentions of the Wagner Group. But neighboring Burkina Faso is catching up. In January, there was a military coup in the country and since then complimentary social media chatter about Russia and its influence in Africa has dramatically increased.

Burkinabe protestors have been rallying against the French presence in their country too, as French troops relocate Operation Barkhane to Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad.

In the last month, demonstrators in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, have burned the French flag and chanted, “France, the godmother of terrorism, get out,” and, “We are all for the liberation of Burkina Faso!”

Are Wagner Group mercenaries already packing for the 500-mile journey from Bamako to Ouagadougou?

The post Russian trolls and mercenaries win allies and good will in Africa appeared first on Coda Story.

As early as 9 a.m. on May 17, Bashir had already seen up to four corpses pulled out of the wreckage of a building that once stood in the Sabon Gari area of Nigeria’s populous northern Kano state. He’d seen crying children in bloodied uniforms spilling onto the streets. He’d seen body parts scattered around those same streets and agonized families searching for their loved ones.

The businessman, who asked me only to use his first name, had been on his way to work when a blast thundered through the dense neighborhood. He rushed towards the sound, recorded the carnage on his phone and posted the footage on Twitter.

Eyewitnesses told him how minutes before, a suspected suicide bomber, who, failing to get past a primary school gate, detonated the explosives in a structure opposite the school. “Bomb blast in Kano,” Bashir tweeted.

He was unprepared for the ferocious response from his compatriots. Bashir had found himself on the wrong side of an information war that highlights the Nigerian government’s sometimes desperate attempts to muddy narratives around the country’s worsening insecurity. And he is still reeling from the impact.

While the government can be frustratingly opaque and unpredictable in its responses to crises, Bashir did not realize that there was an entire online community of trolls, many of whom were based outside Nigeria, who made it their business to spread the government’s version of events, even if it meant denying the lived experiences of other Nigerians.

Government authorities arriving at the scene that day immediately denied there was any attack at all, let alone a suicide bombing. Kano police chief Sama’ika Dikko told reporters that “it was a gas explosion,” and redundantly scolded those who were spreading “false lies” about a bomb.

That was when the social media army that supports the government decided to attack Bashir. “Agent of darkness,” one wrote, accusing Bashir of escalating tensions in a country on edge from alarming increases in violent incidents in recent months.

“I swear it was a bomb,” Bashir tweeted again, trying to impress on the doubters that he was a witness, that he had seen for himself the barely-there bodies that looked as if they had been turned inside-out, that he had seen for himself the massive damage at the epicentre of the blast. 

It didn’t work. As major media houses ran with the government line about a gas explosion, Bashir was tagged across Nigerian Twitter as a liar.

Then, days later, after the news agenda had moved on, Nigeria’s police released forensic “findings” — a jumble of words that neither confirmed nor debunked the bombing but that carried a line Bashir seized on as validation of what he knew to be true.

Materials “suspected to be used for making Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs),” were found at the site, the statement read, and “some arrests have been made.”

“I received so many abusive messages,” Bashir told me, still pained by his experience. “I jotted down the handles of all the people who accused me, but when I wrote to them all after the police report, no one replied.”

It hurt him that, in an ethnically and religiously fractured Nigeria, many people on social media seemed to discount the news specifically because it had affected one of Kano’s minority Christian areas, where tribes from the country’s south live — Sabon Gari loosely translates to “stranger’s quarters” in Bashir’s Hausa tongue.

“It felt like this is the truth of what is happening but officials were trying to change it,” Bashir said. “And seeing people twisting the narrative really demoralized all of us in the neighborhood.”

The Kano incident is only one of many in response to which Nigerian officials have chosen to stick their heads in the sand. They are aided in their efforts by partisan social media debate in which attitudes and ideological positions are far more important than facts or witness accounts.   

But this is not a new tactic nor is it unique to this administration, argues Cheta Nwanze, the lead researcher at SB Morgen, an intelligence firm in Lagos that has been tracking such violence. 

“Nigerians love to look at things going wrong and pretend that it’s not happening, so this has been a systematic thing,” Nwanze points out, referring to what some scholars describe as a culture of impunity in the country. 

There is little accountability, few consequences and seemingly no appetite to discuss a fraught history. And attacks such as the May 17 bombing that are perceived to be targeting southern Igbos in Nigeria’s Muslim-majority north could lead to chaos — they are too reminiscent of the beginnings of the 1967 civil war.

Many of Nigeria’s contemporary convulsions stem from that war in which the majority Igbo and Christian south attempted to create their own separate state of Biafra. They were pummelled with bombs, isolated, and starved. By the end of all the fighting, in 1970, two million people had died.

Little time if any is spent on the civil war in Nigerian schools, nor has a process of reparation and reconciliation been instituted. In fact, since the war, Igbos have been politically marginalized in a country where it is the third largest tribe and constitutes over 15% of the population. 

Yet there is no meaningful national dialogue on these issues. Instead, silence permeates. And many other groups and tribes claim to have been wronged in similar fashion, with only simmering anger and resentment in place of justice.

“What we do is hope that if we sweep it under the rug it will go away and that has been entrenched in the way our governments operate” Nwanze continues. “What has happened now is that the bottom of the rug is full.” Denial as a mode of official communication is a form of disinformation. It is designed to mislead.

A June 2022 study on fake news by the Abuja-based Center for Democracy and Development (CDD) notes that Nigerian authorities often knowingly employ rebuttal tactics on social and traditional media platforms, or in some cases, stoic silence, as a way to save face.

In the Kano case in particular, experts believe the aim was to reduce panic, although it inadvertently caused confusion. 

In an eerily similar case to the one in Kano, officials denied a suicide attack in Lagos at the height of the Boko Haram insurgency in 2014, refusing to admit that the terrorists, whose home base is up in the country’s northeastern fringes, had infiltrated Nigeria’s commercial nerve center.

Boko Haram has been seeking to create a caliphate in Nigeria since 2010 and has been behind many suicide bombings and kidnappings. But the Lagos explosion was blamed on gas canisters too — a fairly common cause of accidents in the country.

But the worst case of government denial — or more accurately, disinformation — would come in October 2020. Nigerian youths protesting the brutality of a notorious, bribe-collecting police unit popularly called SARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad), were gunned down by security forces in Lagos.

Authorities denied then — and still deny — the killings, despite video evidence from eyewitnesses who streamed the shootings on Instagram.

The incident spurred a worldwide social media campaign, with millions using “#ENDSARS” in solidarity with Nigeria’s youth, shaming President Muhamadu Buhari and his government. 

“ENDSARS was when the government deployed all their fake news arsenal,” says Idayat Hassan, lead at CDD and co-author of the fake news report. As with Bashir, government trolls discounted witness testimonies online, gaslighting even the wounded who barely survived. “They went all out,” adds Hassan.

The consequences of official lie-peddling online could be far-reaching in a presently divided Nigeria with 122 million internet users, 24 million of whom are active on social media. Already, the discourse, online and offline, brims with tribal and religious sentiment as citizens experience both rising violence and a deteriorating economy under Buhari.

His leadership has failed to emphasize unity in the multi-ethnic nation and has led to calls for secession in several quarters. Fake news, separate from the fake news spread by the state, has flourished, sometimes leading to deaths.

The spreaders of disinformation are often everyday users, online influencers, hired foreign companies or Nigerians in the diaspora. One of the persistent recent conspiracy theories is that  Buhari is in fact an impostor, and that the real president died after he traveled abroad for medical treatment in 2018. The much-better looking man who returned to Aso Villa, the president’s home in Nigeria’s capital Abuja, is actually a Sudanese man named Jubril, or so the theory goes.

As Buhari’s eight-year term ends in 2023, the race to succeed him is in full throttle as are the fake news campaigns. In previous elections, politically-motivated groups and troll farms were  fixtures, churning out propaganda for their favored candidates. Former President Goodluck Jonathan’s supporters were known to have hired the infamous U.K. firm Cambridge Analytica to run their election campaigns.

In the larger west Africa region, disinformation tactics are becoming normalized too. Although internet penetration is at a low 17% in the region, many west Africans online and offline are vulnerable to fake news. News spreads rapidly from platforms like the Meta-owned messaging app Whatsapp to having an effect on real life, notes Hassan, the CDD researcher. Online rumors are often fodder for serious debates on TV news stations.

Sometimes, official gaslighting tactics escalate into repression. Abuja resorted to banning Twitter in 2021 after a tweet by President Buhari was flagged for incitement. Indeed, save for Ghana, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, all 15 West African nations have ordered internet shutdowns in the last decade, according to CDD. 

Nine people were killed and 27 injured in the Sabon Gari blast — the highest civilian fatality count of Nigeria’s 14 IED explosions this year. The last bomb attack in Kano was in 2015, at the peak of the Boko Haram insurgency.

But no group has so far claimed responsibility for the bombing in May. The silence adds to the confusion surrounding the incident. Even government officials, who admit in private that there was a bomber don’t know who to blame it on, says Hassan.

Bashir’s neighborhood still bears the scars of May 17. The primary school building is now empty — the school authorities have moved the kids to another location. Opposite it, the building in which the bomb exploded remains a wreck.

The Kano police chief who initially swore there was no bomb could not be reached for comment. There is little indication that authorities will ever state clearly the results of their analysis.

As the February, 2023 general elections roll around, heated ethno-religious political campaigns rely on the spread of disinformation. “No one knows what the truth is anymore,” Hassan says. “And it might only get worse.”

Bashir, so alarmed by the scale of the trolling he faced, would no doubt agree.

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The post Nigerian trolls defend the government and gaslight victims appeared first on Coda Story.

“I don’t feel safe,” Christian told me via a WhatsApp voice call. He added that he has no recent travel history and had been tested negative for the virus by the authorities less than a week before he was detained. “I was healthy,” he said. “I’m worried about my life.”

Christian’s experience mirrors that of a number of people in Guangzhou, a manufacturing hub of 13 million residents and home to the largest African population — about 15,000 — in China. While restrictions on movement were lifted after a 76-day lockdown, local authorities in Guangzhou maintained that Africans must remain quarantined amid fears that they are spreading the virus. Around 4,500 African traders, students and migrants now face strict pandemic control measures, including repeated testing and arbitrary isolation in government facilities, hotels or their apartments.

The crackdown began in early April after five Nigerians tested positive for Covid-19. Local authorities upgraded the risk levels in two African communities and began forcefully isolating them. Videos on social media showed Africans being turned away from public spaces, including a local McDonald’s, which had put up a notice that read, “We’ve been informed that from now on black people are not allowed to enter the restaurant." McDonald’s China has since issued an apology in a statement to NBC News. 

In the weeks since, reports of xenophobic attacks on Africans by Chinese citizens have increased. Landlords have also kicked African tenants out of private apartments and hotels, forcing them to sleep on the street. 

This treatment has stirred such anger that it is now threatening to harm China’s economic relations with the continent. Along with the African Union, a dozen governments including those of Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana met with Chinese ambassadors and protested the mistreatment of Africans. A group of African ambassadors in Beijing also published an open letter urging authorities to stop the “inhuman treatments meted out to Africans.” The letter stated that "stigmatization and discrimination" created the false impression that Africans are responsible for spreading the virus.

China has denied victimizing Africans in any way. Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Linjian explained in a statement on the ministry’s website that the country is under great pressure to prevent a second outbreak of Covid-19, but added that it had “zero tolerance for discrimination.” 

“The Guangdong authorities attach great importance to some African countries’ concerns and are working promptly to improve their working methods,” he said. 

Prominent activist organizations have also condemned China’s actions. On April 12, Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, tweeted: “Coronavirus shouldn't be a pretext for discrimination: Africans in China have become targets of suspicion and subjected to forced evictions, arbitrary quarantines and mass coronavirus testing, as Beijing steps up its fight against imported infections.”

Following the backlash, the authorities distributed gifts of cookies, masks and thermometers to Africans in Guangzhou. Some have also received government certificates stating that they are free of the virus. This documentation should allow them to move around normally, but a number of Africans spoken to for this story said officials had told them to remain indoors for now. 

Last week, the Chinese embassy in Kenya posted two videos on Twitter showing Africans happily going about their daily lives. “We never ignore the concerns of African friends in Guangzhou,” said the text accompanying one post. Another video posted on Twitter by the Chinese embassy in Uganda showed African residents entering a supermarket. 

But according to a spokesperson from Black Livity China, a reporting organization that focuses on the African experience in the country, free gifts will not make up for the mistreatment of Africans in Guangzhou. 

“A lot of people feel like these simple gestures will not erase or downplay what has happened,” said the spokesperson, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals. “There’s a sense that we’ve suffered these injustices and this token will not erase or downplay that. As long as the Chinese government keeps on reporting new cases, saying, ‘Oh, imported by foreigners from this particular country,’ I think that hostility is just going to build and fester.”

In recent years, President Xi Jinping has courted African nations with billions of dollars in infrastructure loans, as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Chinese billionaire Jack Ma delivered millions of testing kits and large amounts of personal protective equipment to all 54 African countries in March, and 23 Chinese doctors have been dispatched to Algeria and Nigeria to counter the spread of the coronavirus. However, China’s image in Africa now appears somewhat tarnished. Following reports of discrimination against Africans, Nigeria announced plans to evacuate its citizens from the country last week. On Thursday, Nigerian Foreign Affairs Minister Geoffrey Onyeama said the country was “deeply wounded” by the discriminatory treatment.    

According to W. Gyude Moore, a policy analyst with the Center for Global Development and a former Liberian minister, the deep economic ties between China and Africa mean that these tensions could be resolved quickly.

“African governments needing assistance to respond to the pandemic — whether on debt or the provision of medical supplies — cannot afford to antagonize China right now,” he said.

Alongside his immediate anxieties about the virus and the prospect of a prolonged period in lockdown, Christian fears for the future. He was recently evicted from his apartment by his landlord, and is worried he will no longer be able to rent a home when the restrictions are eventually lifted. He also continues to face discrimination and says the leaders of African countries should intervene to help.

“Wherever I go, Chinese people pick up their phones and start recording videos, which trend on their social media platforms like Weibo,” he said. “Here in China, we have no voice and I'll advise our leaders to wake up and stop all this.”

The post ‘Here in China, we have no voice’ appeared first on Coda Story.