When we were in the North of Ethiopia, we came across a scene.
It was one donkey barreling down a lane at us no less being followed by another donkey
who quite clearly was hoping to have sex with the first donkey.
Let's say it plain.
And it was so funny, but what was more funny about it that we happened to have the camera on at the time
and caught the whole thing.
Like 3-5 minutes of kids screaming, donkey sex footage.
And what do you do with that?
What do you do with that footage?
It's not philosophical. It's not even travel.
So we decided, naturally, the best thing to do with it was make an episode on Chinese imperialism in Africa.
Ethiopia is China’s China.
They see in it what so many saw in them years ago.
It has a large, labour-hungry population.
It has an agricultural society that's just yearning for industry.
It's a sound investment overseas.
In many ways, Ethiopia is meant to be China’s example country in Africa.
In their new form of imperialism, infrastructure is traded for control of said infrastructure.
And the nation’s leaders are happy to have a new world power to play off the others.
In return, for a few billion in investment, the People’s Republic expect to get a supportive vote in the UN,
a debtor to buy their goods and a future population for their factories.
China’s China.
And for the most part, this has all been welcomed by the Ethiopian government.
Investment is investment, and this is not a country that can easily say no to infrastructure.
In allowing tacit Chinese control, this country has seen a railway built to the coast in Djibouti,
a highway around their major city, and hundreds of factories ranging from cement to shoes.
Every tall building you pass in the cities, the taxi driver will turn and say “China”.
There are clear reasons to take part in the promise of the East.
They’re the ones writing the cheques.
But it’s hard to say that it’s going entirely to plan.
Like many attempts to colonize Africa, they’re not exactly endearing themselves to the local people.
Africa is an incredibly complicated continent, and few places more so than Ethiopia.
Being from the wrong ethnicity, religion, or clan is the difference between friendship and hate.
And as far as I can tell, the Ethiopians absolutely hate the Chinese who are living here.
They’ll mention it without prompting.
We had a taxi driver even laughingly refer to them as flies.
There's open hostility in their neighbourhoods.
When you walk through Chinatown here, there is racial tension spilling over into the street.
Undoubtedly, the most uncomfortable we've been filming in this entire country was in Addis Ababa’s Chinatown.
In the eyes of the local people, a nation that prides itself on never being colonized,
China’s presence here feels like the new threat.
Like the Falasha.
They’re outsiders.
They don’t fit in here.
And in this society, not fitting in is the worst thing you can do.
The rules are rigid here.
Despite having over eighty distinct cultures, it would be hard to call it multi-cultural.
They refer to their system as an Ethnic Federation, and have divided the country into regions
that are created around and often named after the minority with the strongest control.
But as virtually all of Ethiopia is in use, expansion for one people means taking land from another.
One state's glory is another state's loss.
Ethnic clashes have led to a situation where Ethiopia is working to resettle nearly two million internal refugees.
For most people, particularly those with little education, things that don’t fit into their system are a threat to it.
The incoming Chinese workers don’t believe in the local religion or follow their ways of life.
They have no tribal connections.
They have no historic land.
The buildings that they're bringing to Addis are as tall as anything anybody here has ever seen before.
And they’re injecting these condos and office towers onto the landscape like this is any other Chinese city.
But for all the wealth they’ve brought, the people aren’t seeing it as a gift.
They’re seeing it as change that they don’t want.
A threat to the culture.
And this is why I think that no matter how much money the Chinese sink into this country,
they’re ultimately going to fail here.
Which brings me to donkeys.
Donkeys are vital to the Ethiopian way of life.
83% of this country relies on a donkey at some point during their day.
There is no country on this planet that has more of them than here.
No matter where you go, from downtown of the biggest city to countryside fields, you’re going to see a donkey.
They do everything.
They bring water.
They haul crops.
They carry stone.
For many families, owning a donkey is the difference between poverty and complete destitution.
Yet, despite being the most reliable worker in the entire country, donkeys get no love.
They’re considered unclean by both major religions.
Nobody here would ever eat a donkey.
Even if they were starving to death.
They wouldn't even touch the meat.
Donkeys aren't to be slaughtered under any circumstances.
If one dies here in Ethiopia, they leave it for the hyenas.
But in China, donkeys are a cash crop.
Ever since a sham alternative medicine company spread the idea that donkey skin was the new wonder drug,
millions in the country believe it can cure everything from the common cold to insomnia.
As more donkey medicines have flooded the Chinese market, more people have started to believe that they must be effective.
If they weren't effective, why would there be so many on the market?
Global donkey prices have skyrocketed.
Herds have been slaughtered in such numbers that entire countries are starting to feel the pinch.
When you can get that much for an old donkey, it’s hard not to sell.
And with the second largest economy and a sixth of the world’s people, when China sneezes,
we all catch cold.
But, in the eyes of the Chinese company coming to Ethiopia to set up a slaughterhouse,
they viewed their presence here as a win-win.
This was an untapped market.
The number one country for donkeys.
A safe investment in a country their government had bought and paid for.
China’s China.
Everyone would benefit.
Farmers would get more for their haram donkeys than they’d ever dreamed possible,
local trucking and infrastructure funding would increase, and the government would get vital tax dollars.
They'd even bring in their own butchers from China.
Sure, it was heretical.
But out of sight, out of mind.
It had worked across Africa, and it would work here.
Capitalism at its finest.
Yet for all their sweet words, the local people just heard foreigners slaughtering donkeys.
It took less than a year before it was banned.
The story of Addis Ababa’s first slaughterhouse is, to me, the story of all colonization in Africa.
Despite having nearly endless capital, those Chinese investors trying to build that factory failed.
And failed because they repeated the same patternistic mistakes
that had happened all throughout colonization's history.
They imagined that their capital was worth more than the local culture.
They imagined that if they controlled those on top, they also controlled those on the bottom.
In the case of the slaughterhouse, they made mistakes from the very start.
To save a bit of money, they built on an old factory that’d been burnt to the ground
in an ethnic protest just a year before.
They failed to imagine that to the community around their walls, it was like seeing heresy
built on the back of their political frustration.
Donkey meat instead of change.
Before long, calls began to burn it down, too.
Rumours spread faster than calm.
Some Oromo nationalists starting asking if the government had done it as an insult.
Did the Tigray and Amhara do this to undermine their culture?
Was this their response to the protests?
Both Christians and Muslim Oromo, rarely united in their anger, came together to pressure the local government.
And in the interest of stopping the inevitable riot that was to come, regional officials declared it illegal.
After spending five years getting a permit to build, and another two putting up the walls,
they were legally closed in under a year.
But the company wasn’t willing to give in that easily.
They pressured their embassy to lean on the national government.
In the Chinese system, a factory that has bribed the right people is not a factory that gets shut down.
Ethiopia was supposed to be China’s China, surely a little political muscle
and a little more grease could get it reopened.
After all, what were all these billions in infrastructure projects for
if not to buy enough goodwill to run a single donkey slaughterhouse?
But before they could learn the hard way about how far their goodwill could take them, the government collapsed.
The bureaucrats who China had come to rely on for decades, the men with a memory of bribes, all gone.
While more in the new administration would quickly fill their shoes, this was unquestionably a hard reset.
The donkey show was over.
Ethiopia's new Prime Minister had no interest in his first act being selling out his base to the Chinese.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
He used the closure of the slaughterhouse as good PR and in 2018, Ethiopia even started
making the first steps towards safeguarding their herd from skinning.
Effectively meaningless, but politically quite symbolic.
It definitely sends a message.
And that message, at least as far as I see it, is that even if your plan to conquer someone is clever,
they’re still going to resent feeling conquered.
And for this reason, I don’t think China is going to see the success they’re hoping for in Ethiopia.
This is more than just a clash of cultures.
This is a misunderstanding of what money can actually buy.
Because sure, while to some people a donkey may be unclean,
that doesn’t mean you just get to do whatever you want with it.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode on Chinese imperialism and donkeys and...
I just realized we didn't show you that donkey sex footage yet.
Okay, we'll put it after the credits.
This is Rare Earth.