Chapter 1 - Kofi Awoonor Imagines China

Summary

The first chapter, Kofi Awoonor Imagines China: The Longue Durée of Ghana–PRC Relations, maps a cultural history. I begin with the Afro-Asian solidarity of the Cold War and end with the beginning of the period governed by the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC); its first summit occurred at the turn of the millennium. I examine the life-writings and poetry of the Ghanaian poet and diplomat Kofi Awoonor and how he imagines the history of modern China through a series of key geopolitical events in three poems: the Red Army’s Long March in 1935, which Awoonor interpolates into pan-Africanist imaginings of decolonization in “The Black Eagle Awakes” (1965); the Cultural Revolution, which sows the seeds of a disillusionment with Chinese socialism (culminating in the government crackdown on democracy protests in 1989) marked in “The Red Bright Book of History” (1989); and “Xiansi, Pou Tou Dalla,” about an official trip to a rapidly industrializing China during the 1990s. In ironic contrast to the previous poem’s disillusionment with China, the speaker admires the Chinese development miracle even as widespread suspicion emerges about the PRC’s investment in the continent.