Many Chinese construction and mining workers have settled in Africa’s sub-Saharan countries, where they work in all four sub-Saharan regions.
The African governments have agreed to allow the Chinese to build infrastructure and develop the continent while strengthening bilateral ties by allowing their citizens to migrate to the country.
Temporary Chinese migrants fathering children with young African women and girls with no means of support have strained relations with African governments, but this hasn’t stopped them from showing their seeds on African soil.
Hundreds of Chinese-looking babies have been born to African women and girls without fathers in mining towns in Ghana, communities around the Karuma dam construction site in Uganda, and the Thika Road construction site in Kenya.
According to a BBC Pidgin documentary broadcast in April, many young women in Dunkwa in the Central Region were struggling to care for the mixed-race children of Chinese illegal miners.
Until a government crackdown on illegal mining activities in 2013, about 4,500 Chinese miners were operating in this area. Stigmatization and ridicule of their mothers in their impoverished communities affected the children the most.
I was surprised to learn that my daughter had a Chinese-looking baby after she gave birth.” Wofa K, the grandfather of Evans Kofi China, a 7-year-old Afro-Chinese boy, said, “We tried to find the father of the boy, but the Chinese had left.”
Because she can’t afford school fees, hai,r, and body lotion, his mother has difficulty raising him.
The 10-year-old Afro-Chinese daughter of Afua, Ama, was raised for two years by her Chinese father before he returned to China. She’s confident he’ll return with them, and the humiliation she’s suffered will be over.
A 20-year-old student named Patricia is reported to be searching for her 2-month-old baby’s father in Kenya, where the Chinese are building a highway that connects the capital Nairobi to the industrial town of Thika.
She claimed that a Chinese worker gave her a lift home from secondary school last year and that he then impregnated her. She hasn’t seen him since, and as a result, she’s dropped out of school.
According to Kamdini sub-county chairperson Sam Ogwang Alunyu, who spoke to the local newspaper Daily Monitor, there are around 20 Afro-Chinese children without fathers in the sub-county.
It is estimated that Jacqueline Adero, a 23-year-old Zambian woman, has a 4-year-old daughter with Yahang, a Chinese worker who has not been identified.
In 2015, while she was looking for a job at the company, they allegedly met and began dating. While she was five months pregnant, he broke his promise to take her to China to marry her and start a new life there.
Adero was left without a job and a baby she couldn’t care for after the death of her husband. There are rashes all over her body when we serve her local dishes because she only eats biscuits and soft drinks.” I can’t raise this child because I am just a peasant,” Alfred Kolo, the father of Adero, told the company that they should help him find his son’s biological father.
Due to her specialized diet, it is extremely expensive to provide her with the medical care and nourishment she requires.” It’s time for her real father to step in and help her out,” he said.
Uganda Electricity Generation Company Limited’s (UEGCL) corporate affairs manager Simon Kasyate said, “Sex at Karuma is being traded based on an eager buyer and an eager seller. These girls were well aware that the Chinese nationals were wealthy, and they planned to take advantage of that fact.
According to Sam Ogwang Alunyu, the chairperson of the Kamdini sub-county, efforts to get the Ministry of Gender, Labour, and Social Development to intervene have been unsuccessful.
If the Chinese continue to set up temporary communities in African towns and villages for government-approved construction projects, the issue of fatherless Afro-Chinese children will remain a problem.
To prevent the “unwanted legacy” that Chinese workers leave behind, governments must step in, because the future of the continent’s fatherless children depends on their suffering.
