An eye for an eye leaves us all blind, but on this China issue…

Black people are the most despised humans on the planet.

Every race — white, brown, yellow, whatever — believes blacks are subhuman and subordinate to it. Shockingly, a large number of blacks believe they are inferior to other races.

This wasn’t always the case. The Age of Europe, starting roughly 500 years ago, has been dominated by whites and the West.

That’s why most black Africans carry a European name and speak a European language. It’s a fact of history that black Africans have had two traditional and mortal enemies, Arabs and Europeans, or whites in general.

But now black Africans face a third, equally lethal foe, the Chinese. The Children of the Dragon are on the verge of enslaving Africa.

Nowhere is China’s recolonisation of Africa more evident than in Kenya. Initially, the Chinese targeted Africa’s “anchor states” for penetration and submission.

These are South Africa, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Algeria, and Kenya. Others included Sudan, DRC, Angola, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The Chinese mission in Africa has been twofold: economic and geopolitical.

CONTROL OFAFRICA

The Chinese are bent on exploiting every last natural resource in Africa to feed their hungry and voracious industrial appetite.

The flip side is the Chinese penetration of the African import market with cheap, often substandard, goods.

Geopolitically, the Chinese are keen to displace the United States and Europe in Africa. To become a truly rival imperial power to the United States, the Chinese must fully control of Africa.

The Chinese stranglehold on Africa has been advanced through “cheap” loans by the Export-Import Bank of China (Eximbank).

Exim bank and China Development Bank, both state organs, now lend more to developing countries than the World Bank and the Group of Seven Western industrialised nations.

Chinese companies often “win” tenders through Exim bank by bribing corrupt African officials. Most of the contracts by Chinese companies in Africa are opaque, and not publicly available.

The terms of the contracts are usually onerous and tied to exploitation of natural resources and at throwaway prices, or unconscionable clauses to repossess infrastructure in case of default.

Kenya’s SGR, the controversial railway line, is the classic Chinese vice — a chokehold — on Kenya’s fragile sovereignty.

KENYANS TORTURED

Along with these Chinese “investments,” other evils have reared their ugly heads. There’s uncontrolled immigration of Chinese in African states, Kenya included.

Colonies of Chinese settlements have cropped up in different parts of Kenya. Chinese businesspeople are fast displacing local African entrepreneurs.

What the Chinese don’t export to Kenya, they now make in Kenya, often with Chinese labour.

But Kenyans have also flocked to China for higher education and to source cheap goods for import. While Kenyans in China navigate the country wearily, the Chinese in Kenya strut around the country like colossi, as though they own Kenya.

Three recent cases of Chinese racism and intolerable arrogance come to mind. In the first, a Chinese restaurant refused service to blacks.

In the second, a Chinese expat called Jubilee’s Uhuru Kenyatta a monkey. In the third, a Chinese restaurateur was captured on video beating, caning, and torturing a black worker.

There’s a gazillion such cases. Yet the Kenyan state, which is deeply beholden to the Chinese government, has been docile and slavish in its failure to act decisively to protect the dignity of Kenyans and the country’s sovereignty against Chinese racist abuse.

The proverbial stuff — you know what — hit the fan last week when video footage and reports of Kenyans in Wuhan being evicted and openly beaten emerged.

INTERNATIONAL LAW

This isn’t the first time the Chinese have savagely beaten and persecuted Kenyans in China. What’s shocking is that Wuhan was the origin and epicentre of the coronavirus disease Kenyans had nothing to do with.

Turning on innocent Kenyans and treating them like dogs shocks — haunts — the human conscience. Yet all the Kenyan government could muster was filing a feeble “complaint” against the Chinese.

It’s clear that the Kenyan government has been neutered by the Chinese. This castration started under Mwai Kibaki and has exponentially grown and climaxed under Mr Kenyatta.

Kenya can’t allow itself to be recolonised. It must take bold steps to repudiate the actions of the Chinese.

For a start, it should invoke international law, under which a state is allowed to invoke the principle of reciprocity to retaliate, within proportionality, against the hostile acts of another state.

In this case, Kenya should retaliate by publicly and loudly expelling a good number of Chinese citizens to register its anger over the Chinese forced evictions, or ethnic cleansing, of Kenyans in Wuhan.

This is the only way to teach the Chinese a lesson. Then Kenya must start unwinding its unconscionable enslavement.

Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor at SUNY Buffalo Law School and chair of KHRC; @makaumutua.