The man who took the clip of Chinese national who refered to President Uhuru Kenyatta and Kenyans as monkeys has finally spoken out.
Richard Ochieng’, recorded Liu Jiaqi, whom he accused him of always referring to him as a monkey.
In the video, Liu bragged that there was nothing poor, black, smelly Kenyans could do to him.
Speaking to the New York times, Ochieng’, “Not while growing up as an orphan in my village near Lake Victoria where everybody was, like me, black. Not while studying at a university. Not until his job search led him to Ruiru, a fast-growing settlement at the edge of the capital, Nairobi.”
He was employed at a Chinese motorcycle company that had just expanded to Kenya.But then, his new boss, a Chinese who is his agemate, started calling him a monkey.
He further said, Ochieng’ said it happened when the two were on a sales trip and spotted a troop of baboons by the roadside when his Chinese boss called them his brothers asking Ochieng to share his bananas with them.
Following his dissapointment he decided to record one of his boss’ as he declared that Kenyans were “like a monkey people.”
The video recorded on his cellphone circulated widely last month, leadingb to Kenya authorities deporting his boss back to China.
Instead of a tidy resolution, however, the episode has resonated with a growing anxiety in Kenya and set off a broader debate.
According to New York times, “It is a wrenching question for the nation, and one that many Kenyans, especially younger ones, did not expect to be confronting in the 21st century,” New York Times wrote.
The experience of Ochieng’ and other workers speak to the future of relations between the two countries.
Ochieng took a job as a salesman, thinking it would secure a prosperous future, but when he showed up to work he found a different reality.
The pay was a fraction of what he was initially offered, he said, and it was subject to deduction for a long list of infractions.
“No laughing,” was one of the injunctions printed in the company rules. Each minute of lateness — sometimes unavoidable given Nairobi’s notorious traffic — came with a steep fine. An employee who was 15 minutes late might be docked five or six hours’ pay, he said.
Ochieng’ said sometimes Liu Jiaqi smiled and was good-natured. But whenever the question of pay came up or something went wrong, Liu turned on his subordinates.
When Ochieng’ left a sales brochure behind in the car during a sales visit and had to excuse himself to retrieve it, he said Jiaqi began crowing, “This African is very foolish.”
But the most painful, he said, was the monkey insults — the kind of dehumanisation used to justify slavery and colonisation.
Ochieng’ said he protested several times, but the monkey comments did not stop.
He further added saying, “It was too much, I decided, ‘Let me record it.’”
Ochieng asked his boss why he was taking out his anger on him.
“Because you are Kenyan,” Jiaqi explained, saying that all Kenyans, even the President, are “like a monkey.”
“Like a monkey,” Jiaqi responded. “Monkey is also free.”
Ochieng’ said he had heard stories of colonialism — “what our forefathers went through” — and worries that the Chinese will take Kenya backwards, not forward as the nation’s leaders have assured.
“These guys are trying to take us back to those days,” he said in the tiny room he shares with his wife and two-year-old son. On the wall hung a poster with a verse from Ephesians. Nearby, on a little desk rested two Bibles, both equally dog-eared with use.
“Someday I will tell my son that when you were young, I was despised because I was black,” he said.