The Chinese Communist Party is expanding its influence throughout Africa, the South China Morning Post reported on Thursday, by building Marxist “leadership” schools to train the next generation of dictators and their henchmen.
The newspaper relied on the scholarship of National Defence University’s Africa Centre for Strategic Studies expert Paul Nantulya, who observed that the schools in question are aligned with leftist political parties and dictators that have maintained control of their respective countries for decades, sometimes using brutal repression, and are not open to opposition parties. The flagship institution in the program is the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School in Tanzania, a country that the same left-wing party has governed since its independence, but Kenya recently signed an agreement with China to build a similar school.
According to the Morning Post, the agreement in Kenya was signed between the Chinese Communist Party and President William Ruto’s United Democratic Alliance (UDA). Ruto has strived to make overtures with China, to which Kenya is heavily indebted for joining the predatory Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) despite Ruto being elected in 2022 on a campaign platform aggressively critical of Chinese influence in the Kenyan government.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with Kenyan President William Ruto at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, on October 18, 2023. (Li Xueren/Xinhua via Getty Images)
The UDA sent a delegation to China in May to cement several collaboration proposals, among them reportedly the construction of a “leadership school,” as the Morning Post referred to it. Ruto himself was in Washington that same week, urging President Joe Biden to expand American financial aid and other cooperation initiatives with his government. Biden upgraded defense ties with Kenya to “major non-NATO ally” status during that visit.
The Kenyan government is somewhat of an outlier, by virtue of holding elections widely considered free and fair to elect Ruto president, in the list of countries working with China on initiatives to indoctrinate future Party leaders. The Nyerere school in Tanzania is a cooperative project with China but takes in students affiliated with the ruling leftist regimes of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, and Mozambique, according to scholar Nantulya. He noted that other countries with similar ideological alliances — namely, Burundi, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Morocco, and Uganda — are also seeking Chinese investment in ideological training.
Tanzania’s president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, has been in office since 2021, when her predecessor, John Magufuli, died under murky circumstances that the government never clarified. Her party, however — Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) — has been in power since 1997, when the island of Zanzibar merged with the mainland to form the modern Tanzanian state. Similarly, Angola, Uganda, and Zimbabwe have long suffered under explicitly Marxist dictatorships, while South Africa has been under the stranglehold of the socialist African National Congress (ANC) since the fall of apartheid.
China has, for years, attempted to expand its influence in academia by creating “Confucius Institutes,” branded as a way for Beijing to expose the world to core Chinese culture and help its scholars collaborate on projects internationally. The Confucius Institutes became the target of intense global repudiation, as their leaders began leveraging their presence in free societies to spread communist propaganda and silence critics of China’s regime on campuses.
China’s then-Vice President Xi Jinping unveils the plaque at the opening of Australia’s first Chinese Medicine Confucius Institute at the RMIT University in Melbourne on June 20, 2010. (WILLIAM WEST/AFP via Getty Images)
The Chinese government has steadfastly denied that the Confucius Institutes are political. The “leadership” schools in Africa are different in that they are explicitly intended to foster affection for the Chinese government but also teach African leftists how to govern their countries more like China.
“The Nyerere School was the first to be modelled on the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Party School, which trains its top cadres and leaders,” the Morning Post observed.
In May 2023, the Global Times, a Chinese state propaganda newspaper, celebrated that dictator Xi Jinping personally sent a letter to the heads of the Nyerere school to thank them for their efforts. The newspaper interviewed the principal, Marcellina Chijoriga, who stated plainly that she was teaching communist ideology in class.
“The cadres pay attention to many aspects of the CPC’s [Chinese Communist Party] growth paths,” Chijoriga said. “We have seen how China has developed over the decade, which shows the world that their development paths are working. Strong leadership has been a major factor contributing to economic success.”
Marcelina Chijoriga, the principal of the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School, speaks to Xinhua in the school in Coast region, Tanzania, on June 10, 2022. (Xinhua via Getty Images)
Following a visit to the school in August 2023, journalists with the Danish newspaper Politiken and the Washington, DC, website Axios listed the courses taught at the school as including “party governance, party discipline,” and “Xi Jinping Thought,” the dictator’s cult-of-personality belief system that he has enshrined in China’s constitution.
“The Chinese Communist Party is teaching African leaders its authoritarian alternative to democracy at its first overseas training school,” Axios wrote. “Chinese teachers sent from Beijing train African leaders that the ruling party should sit above the government and the courts and that fierce discipline within the party can ensure adherence to party ideology.”
