‘Brotherly strangers’: historicising and disaggregating Kenya and Zambia’s relations with China (1961-2000)

This thesis examines post-colonial Kenya and Zambia’s relations with the People’s Republic of China from ideological, political, economic and social perspectives, encompassing encounters between Kenyans, Zambians and Chinese as well as between their states. China’s growing significance in Africa is a popular subject in the press and academia but hitherto has been little analysed from a historical dimension. Through the triangulation of the global Cold War, African history, and Chinese history, the thesis examines the encounters, conflicts, and dynamics of China-Kenya/Zambia relations from 1961 until 2000, as well as the basis on which historical narratives regarding Chinese encounters with Kenyans/Zambians have been constructed. In doing so, it explains the on-going development of these relationships and sheds light on the historical underpinnings – or lack thereof – on contemporary China-Africa relations. The thesis title, ‘brotherly strangers’, identifies two key ostensibly contradictory aspects of China-Africa relations: ‘strangers’ in the sense of their diverse historical trajectories, but ‘brotherly’ in terms of an asserted shared historical lineage of western domination. The dynamics of their changing relations across a wide span of time are examined by the comparative studies of Kenya and Zambia’s respective relations with China. From a Chinese state perspective, Zambia has been primarily of political/strategic importance, whereas Kenya, although politically estranged and even hostile, has been of greater economic significance. Their distinctive historical legacies, and the variation in China’s relations with specific African states, challenges both the ‘taken for granted’ role of the China-Africa historical lineage in contemporary analyses, as well as its tendency to assume uniformity in these relationships.