The Chinese influence in Tanzania looks set to become further entrenched after the University of Dodoma announced that it would introduce a Chinese language course. The university said the move was aimed at reducing communication barriers between the Chinese and Tanzanians, who have enjoyed a cordial relationship for over 50 years.
University of Dodoma Vice-chancellor Professor Idris Kikula told University World News in Dar es Salaam that the decision to introduce the course was reached after consultations between Tanzanian traders and business people and the government of China.
He hinted that China was ready to provide tutors for the course to start in the next academic year, scheduled for August.
The University of Dodoma is the first higher education institution in Tanzania to introduce such a course. The university will teach the language at degree, diploma and certificate levels.
Recent years have seen a growth in partnerships between the two nations, with the Chinese now controlling almost everything in Tanzania, ranging from construction activities to petty trading.
At the same time Tanzanians have, of late, taken centre stage in business, with many trading between Tanzania and Hong Kong.
Kikula said that with the introduction of the new course, the university was looking forward to producing teachers who would teach the language at secondary school level, among others.
He said: “The introduction of this language will be of great importance not only to students in colleges and secondary schools but also traders travelling to China and other parts of the world.”
He said that since China’s economy was growing fast, people should prepare themselves if they wanted to benefit from the development happening in that country, as its influence would continue to grow across the world.
He said that soon Tanzania would start receiving Chinese tourists, “so we need to prepare people in terms of how to communicate with them”.
The language course is due to be delivered under the auspices of the Confucius Institutes of China, which has a memorandum of understanding with the University of Dodoma to establish a Confucius Institute.
Since 2004 Confucius Institutes have been receiving financial assistance from Hanban, a non-profit organisation affiliated to the Chinese Ministry of Education, with the cooperation of local universities, organisations and institutes around the world.
The institutes are frequently compared to language and culture promotion organisations based in European countries, such as France's Alliance Française and Germany's Goethe-Institute.
Data show that since 2006 at least 200,000 foreigners have travelled to China to study Chinese, while about 20 million people have studied Chinese languages abroad.
Among African countries, Tanzania enjoys particularly close ties with Beijing. South Africa’s ties with China are also tight, on account of both countries being in the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – group. Competition between China and South Africa for trade and economic deals on the African continent is fierce though.
Zimbabwe and Sudan too are unambiguously close to China. Both countries need the counterweight of China to survive being categorised as rogue states.
In Tanzania’s case, the multi-layered connections with China are not motivated by dire circumstances that would necessitate a look-East policy.
Since independence the country has enjoyed special relations with China, partly because Tanzania – unlike neighbouring Kenya and a handful of other African nations – took the socialist path in the post-independence era and was therefore on the same wavelength as the Communist Party of China.
Tanzania-China relations run deep, thanks to the 1,800 kilometre Tanzania-Zambia railway (Tazara), which was built by China in the 1970s.
The project was made possible by the fact that the ideologies of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere and China’s revolutionary leader Chairman Mao Zedong dovetailed. One of the factors that made the railway line urgent was that newly independent Zambia under Kenneth Kaunda had a hard time transporting good via the Indian Ocean through Zimbabwe, which was still under colonial rule.
The Nyerere-Zedong-Kaunda solidarity was thus informed as much by ideological persuasions as by straightforward economics.
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