CHINA last week held a historic summit with African leaders. India, under Nehru, celebrated Afro-Asian solidarity. There is palpable worry in Delhi that China will now project its powerful influence in Africa, leaving India suitably tethered to the neighbourhood in South Asia. Some Indian analysts have peevishly described Beijing's new initiative in Africa as inspired by neo-con worldview, hitherto considered a western monopoly.

On the other hand, the Chinese character for Africa is indeed used also to denote "the wrong country". There may be no parallel between China's interest in Africa and India's decidedly smaller stake in it, but both have nurtured racial biases towards its dark coloured people.

That is why if India wants to understand the sensitivities of the African people it should pay more attention to people like Mbongeni Ngema, a South African songwriter-playwright rather than to routinely send its leaders on pointless visits to Natal where Mahatma Gandhi was thrown off a train by a white supremacist railway marshal. Ngema's controversial tune, "AmaNdiya", about racism that blacks in KwaZulu-Natal have suffered at the hands of Indians, was banned in the country, and Nelson Mandela asked the writer to apologise to keep the peace. Ngema respectfully refused: "I am amazed that in a democratic South Africa, a song can still be banned. It's time we deal with this. I am the voice for the man in the street who has none. "I want to open the way for reconciliation between blacks and Indians, not incite hatred," said Ngema. "I cannot apologise for pointing out the truth." There are over a million Indians in KwaZulu-Natal, among the largest number of Indians outside of India.

With 70 per cent of Durban Unicity jobs occupied by Indians, resentment can be felt in some quarters against the South Asian group that has resided there for years. In the song, Ngema also speaks of black children working in factories in the province without unions to represent and protect workers rights. The prelude to the song says that it is meant to raise awareness of the problem, open it up for debate and lead to a true reconciliation between Indians and Africans. But according to Nelson Mandela, stereotyping on grounds of race, tribe, region or ethnicity was "poison" and against the principles for which the African National Congress had fought.

As is his wont Mandela was being large-hearted with his people's Indians tormentors on this festering issue. Otherwise Indians have been historically divided along the racial lines in South Africa, between those that fought shoulder to shoulder with the ANC against the white man's apartheid and those Indians who joined Botha's racist Tricameral parliament under a system that denied equal rights to the black majority.

The Chinese have nurtured biases against everyone whose skin was not yellow. But they are not known to have colluded with their colonial conquerors to target another people. For them the world outside of China is/was inhabited by barbarians. Thus the Chinese have neither spared the whites, nor the browns and certainly not the black people from their racial invectives. Martin Jacques, who covered Condoleezza Rice's visit to Beijing for The Guardian last year made an astute observation.

According to Martin the internet has become an important indicator of public opinion in the country where more traditional media are tightly-controlled. The recent upsurge in nationalism, for example, has found powerful expression on Chinese websites. The internet response to Rice's visit was revealing. The racist character of much of it was followed by Liu Xiaobo, a veteran critic of mass movements in China since Tiananmen, who has written a response on the New Century Netwebsite.

Liu said that of 800 messages he scanned about Rice's visit, no less than 70 involved racist comments about her colour. Of these, only two were relatively moderate; the rest were vicious, describing Rice as a "black ghost", "black dog", "black woman" and "black bitch". One stated, "You are not even like a black ghost, a really low form of life," and another, "Her brain is even more black than her skin." One writer said: "I don't support racism, but this black ghost really makes people angry, the appearance of a little black who has made good."

Chinese people are generally known to believe they are superior to those of darker skin. The attitude towards whites, as Liu points out,

is much more complex. They tend to acknowledge the historical achievements of the West, but with the belief that at some point in the future the innate virtue of Chinese civilisation will again assert itself.

The official position of the Chinese Communist party, of course, has always been anti-racist, but there is a vast difference between official attitudes and the deeply held prejudices of a people. In any case, China's stepped up interest in Africa could not have been prompted by its latent ideas against dark coloured people. The Africa link goes back at least 500 years ago. In fact history books in many countries may need to be rewritten in the light of new evidence that Chinese explorers had discovered most parts of the world, including parts of Africa, by the mid-15th century.

Thus ancient artefacts and anthropological research has shown that when Columbus discovered America in 1492, he was 72 years too late. And so were other explorers, such as Cook, Magellan and Da Gama, whose heroic voyages took them to Australia, South America and India. Instead, according to recent research, a former submarine commanding officer who has spent 14 years charting the movements of a Chinese expeditionary fleet between 1421 and 1423, the eunuch admiral, Zheng He, was there first. It was Zheng He, in his colossal multi-masted ships stuffed with treasure, silks and porcelain, who made the first circumnavigation of the world, beating the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan by a century.

Had China not collapsed into economic chaos in 1423, forcing its fabulous treasure fleet, now considered frivolous, to be mothballed, the history of racism across the world might have been different and Ngema would be singing a different tune.