A viral video of a Natasha doll is making its rounds in China, and what this video gained notoriety for is not pleasant; in fact, it is racist. The video is of a Black baby stress toy.
Chinese social media users are on camera indulging in squeezing, stretching, and maiming these dolls just for the fun of it. Adding insult to injury, a user mentioned that a white baby, on the other hand, would look too “human” and people would feel bad for hurting it.
This sort of behavior is not a one-off. Not so long ago, a Chinese man living in Malawi was outed by the BBC for filming children without the consent of their parents and selling those videos to his Chinese clients.
L, also known as Suzu, has been handed a 12-month prison sentence, which he has already served in police custody. He has been ordered to leave Malawi within seven days and never return. He was arrested last year following a BBC Africa Investigative Report, which showed him filming Malawian children making personalized greeting videos, some of which included racist content. The videos were bought for up to $70 on Chinese social media.
The Malawian government convicted this Chinese national on multiple charges, including trafficking and procuring children to take part in illicit entertainment.
This abuse of Black children on social media is not easy to locate since China has a massive firewall on all social media apps that are not Chinese owned. The country has its own social apps like RED note and WeChat. This means that most of the content posted on these apps stays inside China and is geared towards the Chinese audience and their preferred taste.
According to news content creators of OkayAfrica, China has a large market who enjoy watching videos of Black African children hurt and abused. Not long-ago ADN (African Diaspora News) reported that Africans who go to China to teach or do other jobs always complain that Chinese people treat them like animals. They treat them like foreign aliens, and they all said they experience racist attacks.
Suzu is said to have paid 16 million qua in restoration to the families of the children, which does not exempt him from his crimes. These children were unaware of what they were doing in that video. They were deceived into thinking that they were greeting folks when, in fact, they were made to cuss and degrade themselves in a language they did not understand.
Suzu, together with all those who share his views, needs to be persecuted to the full extent of the law, and this starts with Africa. If the situation were reversed, you bet the African man caught doing this to Chinese children would rot in a Chinese prison.
One of the big questions here is why African leaders continue to welcome a nation that does not regard Africans as human beings? Do these leaders possess any self-respect? If not for themselves, but for the people who elected them? During the pandemic, Chinese landlords showed Africans what they thought of them by evicting them for the fun of it. When will Africa learn?
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