Much has been written in recent years about China’s emerging role in Africa — specifically, its aggressive policy of extracting huge amounts of natural resources from the African continent to fuel Chinese economic expansion. These precious resources — copper, cobalt, oil — are being bought up by the Chinese through bargain basement concessions that enrich African governments, but return very little in the form of infrastructure investment in the form of hospitals, housing and transportation.

Increasingly, watchdog human rights groups and journalists report that China is taking these resources by exploiting Africa’s human assets: poverty-stricken African men, women and children who are “employed” by Chinese overseers as little more than modern-day slaves.

This is the allegation of a lengthy investigation by the UK-based London Daily Mail, whose correspondent, Peter Hitchens, has been looking into rumors of slave-like working conditions in two neighboring African countries, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

His report is detailed — very long for many readers, in fact — and remarkable for its portrait of how the world’s largest nation appears to have become a 21st Century colonial power in Africa, mining and harvesting precious natural resources, using slave labor for the dirty work.

Here is Hitchen’s vivid description of the labor conditions he witnessed:

These poor, hopeless, angry (African) people exist by grubbing for scraps of cobalt and copper ore in the filth and dust of abandoned copper mines in Congo, sinking perilous 80ft shafts by hand, washing their finds in cholera-infected streams full of human filth, then pushing enormous two-hundredweight loads uphill on ancient bicycles to the nearby town of Likasi where middlemen buy them to sell on, mainly to Chinese businessmen hungry for these vital metals.

To see them, as they plod miserably past, is to be reminded of pictures of unemployed miners in Thirties Britain, stumbling home in the drizzle with sacks of coal scraps gleaned from spoil heaps.
Except that here the unsparing heat makes the labour five times as hard, and the conditions of work and life are worse by far than any known in England since the 18th Century.

Many perish as their primitive mines collapse on them, or are horribly injured without hope of medical treatment. Many are little more than children. On a good day they may earn $3, which just supports a meagre existence in diseased, malarial slums.

Reading this article, it is difficult to believe that the conditions Hitchens describes are happening now — today. Worse, other than shocked journalists and frustrated human rights organizations, there is little world outcry about what is transpiring in Africa.

It does raise important questions: how will Secretary of State Clinton deal with China? Will that nation’s economic and political policies, which seem so stripped of any regard for basic human dignity, be challenged by the Obama Administration? Or will the U.S., like the rest of the world, continue to neglect what is taking place in Africa, to the land and to its people?

Daily Mail article reproduced with the permission of the Herald & Times Group.