The banknotes are dirty -- and so are the unwelcome 'zhing-zhong'

The heart of Robert Mugabe's darkness beats in a bright bubble of denial in which strangers say hello, ask how you are, wait for an answer and assure you that they are also fine. Except if you are Chinese. Then they look through you, wishing you were not there.

"Zhing-zhong" is the term Zimbabweans have applied to all things Chinese. It does not have pretty connotations - cheap, nasty and likely to fall apart at the first attempt to use the damned thing for its intended purpose. The slur has grown wings and now also applies to incompetents, regardless of their nationality. It has even been translated into two Chinese characters.

Neither of them appears on the Mandarin signs meant to help the stream of visitors from the Asian giant cut through the red tape at Harare International Airport.

That was where Zimbabwean hospitality ran out for one unfortunate man who tried to enter the country recently.

"So," the immigration officer said with a cynical sneer and without looking up from his paperwork, "you're the marketing manager of this company, are you?"

"Yes, I am the marketing manager," came the clear, polite reply from behind square spectacles and a stiff black fringe.

"But the last time you were in Zimbabwe you were not the marketing manager, were you?"

"No, I was not."

"And this time you are. Hmm ... are you sure you're the marketing manager?"

At which point the man asked to fetch, from his suitcase twirling forlornly on a nearby carousel, something that would prove he was not a liar. With a curt nod, the immigration officer granted permission.

The man returned with much of his fringe in disarray, his glasses askew, holding a precious document that fluttered in his outstretched hand.

The immigration officer ignored him, preferring to stamp without fuss the passports of a string of people who, many minutes previously, had been waiting in the queue behind the Chinese man.

Why chop-suey the Chinese, a cab driver was asked. "Because they come here, sell all their 'zhing-zhong' rubbish, don't do anything for Zimbabweans and take all the money they make out of the country."

That was the short answer. Longer, more explicitly bigoted variations on the theme were delivered by all three comedians who took to the stage on a single evening at the Book Café, downtown Harare's gritty cultural hub.

Their material included suppositions on the size of Chinese men's penises and what their owners looked and sounded like in the throes of orgasm. Those were not the only Asian targets.

"Can you imagine what the child of a Chinese guy and an Indian girl would look like? No man, that would just be so wrong. And what would you call it? A Chindian?"

There were no Chinese in the audience, but one person was of Indian descent. The few whites in attendance were welcomed enthusiastically by the comics, as if their presence meant racism was alright on the night.

And this in a country where blacks and whites fought a race war. These days, whites are more popular than the Chinese among blacks, who know - just as their forebears did when Cecil John Rhodes tried to cut a swath of subjugation through Africa in the service of the British empire - that they have no chance of fending off the new colonialists.

Chinese involvement in the economy grows ever more ambitious. Previously satisfied to confine themselves to low-level retail operations, the Chinese are now involved in several major construction projects, including hotels, shopping malls, hospitals and a military academy - where Zimbabwean labourers have complained of assaults by managers, along with more traditional concerns such as poor pay and bad working conditions.

The diamond fields at Marange, 400km east of Harare, have been infiltrated by the Chinese, who again stand accused of underpaying and mistreating Zimbabweans who work the mines.

That is not how Mugabe, whose government has been charged with selling off national assets to the Chinese and keeping the profits, see things. "I want to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to China and our Chinese friends here," Mugabe said in February, when the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation accepted a gift of state-of-the-art digital and satellite equipment from the Chinese government.

"Teach us the road from analogue to digitilisation. I hope it will not be a long road to travel for our experts.

"Some of the equipment has come to Africa for the first time. If we are the first, then we must beat our chests that Zimbabwe has done it. Zimbabwe has done it because it has been looking east for some time."

Two things are wrong with this picture: Africans are no strangers to digital television and the equipment will be used by the ZBC in their unvarnished propaganda to ensure Mugabe's re-election later this year.

It will not have been lost on ordinary Zimbabweans that the broadcast system was worth $6.5-million.

Since April 12 2009, the US dollar has been the official currency of Zimbabwe. It ended the hyperinflation that had required a dark sense of humour to smile at the 100-trillion Zimbabwean dollar bills in circulation. The sudden stability meant that goods began seeping back to the shelves of previously barren supermarkets and that the cost of a beer remained unchanged from one evening to the next.

But dollarisation has also raised the cost of living in Zimbabwe to the point where it is an expensive country for visiting South Africans, who have to fork out the equivalent of double what they would pay for the same goods at home.

Many of those dollars, particularly those of lower denomination, are peeled out of shoes and underwear, as well as pockets, at checkout points. They are, in a word, filthy.

In the US, dollar bills are in circulation for about 20 months. In Zimbabwe, they could keep going round and round for 20 years. Zimbabweans have taken to laundering their banknotes - yes, money laundering made legal - and they are accustomed to being given change in lollipops and chewing gum.

In Bulawayo, if the amount of change is large enough, it is likely to be doled out in South African rands, Botswana pula and a mint humbug, as well as US dollars. Anything, that is, but the Zimbabwean dollar.

None of which will stop strangers on the street from saying hello, asking how you are, waiting for your answer and giving you theirs, whether or not you have asked for it.

Except, of course, if you happen to be Chinese. Call that attitude all sorts of things, or call it what it is: zhing-zhong.