China-Africa development: ‘Those who fall behind get trampled on’
Daniel Nelson
China meets Ethiopia, modernity meets tradition, capitalism meets community in Made In Ethiopia. And “meets” is a euphemism for clash.
The result is sad, funny and revealing.
The documentary hones in on the country’s first industrial park, a special economic zone designed to house dozens of factories, and to spearhead Ethiopia’s ambition of becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of Africa.
Sited in the dusty farming town of Dukem, it is the lodestar of a new way of living for thousands of workers, most of them away from home and family; for neighbouring farmers opposing plans for the park’s expansion because they rightly distrust the government’s promises of compensation; and for a batch of Chinese managers gambling on hopes of making more money than they can earn in their homeland (“There’s honour for parents, there’s love, and there’s money. That’s it”).
The focus is on young factory worker Beti (“I left my family to be independent. I don’t want to go back”) and farming family wife Workinesh, but the show is stolen by fast-talking, indefatigable, incorrigible enthusiastic park director Motto Mar, who gladhands peasant opponents, extols the glorious future of industrialisation and railroads prospective Western investors into pussy-car submission: a Danish businessman is driven to gobsmacked silence (“No questions”) by Motto’s problem-free, profit-guaranteed spiel and one of those unpopulated utopian business videos that look like a repressed Western entrepreneur’s idea of paradise.
She sees Ethiopia as ”just like China used to be” before its own manufacturing revolution and though Ethiopian workers are perhaps not as biddable as Chinese (“When you go to the toilet you drag your feet,” complains an exasperated supervisor), “once they have hope they’ll be no trouble. People often ask why there is so much unrest in Ethiopia. I say it’s because their dream is so far from their reality.”
It’s win-win: “Ethiopians get experience. We can all make money together.”
Motto is driven by two targets: getting on with phase two of the park, which means getting the farmers to agree to relinquish their land, and working out how to bring her daughter and family to Ethiopia.
The town’s officials are less gung-ho, partly because the Ethiopian bureaucracy is not built for speed and partly, presumably, because they know the reality of the lives of their fellow citizens.
The film does not say so, but one of the most shocking flaws of development has been governments’ failures to honour their promises of land and financial and other assistance for people displaced by development projects. Millions, many millions of people have been abused in this way.
The film neatly captures the differing dreams and dramas, all heightened by, first, the Covid-19 outbreak, which knocks back the industrial park’s companies, leading to massive sackings, secondly, the eruption of military conflict in the north of the country; thirdly, by US sanctions.
As discontent grows, the formerly confident, modernising mayor of Dukem looks stunned, bewildered: “We need to work more on social responsibility.”
Motto, in turn, is agitated and angry when the mayor accuses the park authority of failing to develop Phase 2.
It’s bleak, and the lives of everyone in the film change again.
“Development is a hard truth. Those who fall behind get trampled on. That’s the cruel reality,” says Motto, before adding, “If you press on, there’s always a glimmer of hope.”