GOING GLOBAL
“Black America UNCHAINED from America”, sponsored by the King’s Town Family Foundation

A report came out of the Independent in the UK on Sunday that Chinese trade industries have ripped off the Ghanaian textile trade and are bringing in cheap imports that are hurting true African/Ghanaian businesses.

53-year-old GTP technician Isaac Eshun has worked half his life at this textile company in Tema, a coastal town around 10 miles from the capital of Accra. His career and the industry is slowly and tediously being slid out from under them in much the same manner as the Republican Party and their Blue Dog Democrat friends sold off America, piece by piece, to Chinese manufacturers.

Not only was the USA inundated with low quality goods filled with unregulated carcinogenic toxins, but hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost in the process, and cheap Chinese “junk” is making its way into African nations. The end result of this is a slowed-down economy that is indebted to China and literally can no longer exist without their imports. And China apparently cannot co-exist without the pollution.

Skilled artisanship gave way in America through not only a loss of jobs and capital, but through the lost arts, such as the fine art of making good cloth and sewing material with which to make those beautiful colorful outfits that we love so much that remind us of our true ancestral origin as Black people in America.

Says Mr. Eshun, “I have worked here for 25 years and our product is very fine and people can see the difference when they buy it, but the counterfeiting is a problem … It is killing us and it is killing the industry.”

Says Independent “Counterfeit goods, border inefficiencies and rising costs have hit the industry hard, and last month it emerged the government had replaced a local company as the provider of school uniforms for public schools with a Chinese fabric producer.”

Apparently, 1980s America, under the reign of Ronald Reagan and then co-signed and underscored by the Clinton Administration a decade later, had the same impact on Ghana that it did on the USA. It equated to magnanimous job losses for Black citizens here and there; and now, they say that there are fewer than 3,000 jobs left in the industry — thus putting thousands of workers out of jobs and thrusting them into the throes of poverty.

Still using the labor of cotton pickers, as America once did, the dyes, chemicals and machines used to make these fabrics are still sold at higher costs, which squeezes the originators of these products out of business and results in higher prices for cloth buyers, who pay more for a lower quality inauthentic “cheap Chinese” product.

One thing the world has learned to do is copy Black cultures without being fully appreciative of Black people the world over. All they know or care about us is how to sell us and capitalize on our labor and products, which has circumstantially turned the world into nothing more than a “counterfeit Africa.”

Says managing director Kofi Boateng, “We started to see that there was a lot of smuggled goods coming from the Far East copying our designs and being smuggled into the country. They don’t only copy our designs they copy the trademark and logo and label. Almost every design we make has been copied.”

If you ever wanted to see for yourself just exactly how Black people lost their creations, ideas, resources, labor, land, and economies to European rule and domain, take a lesson from the way the USA sold our own country off to China and how that has empowered them to “invade Africa” through counterfeiting the real thing.

If they don’t steal from us one way, they will find another.

If it comes from Ghana, it should not say or feel like “Made in China.” Period.

#reparationsaredueandowing