AP, Johannesburg :
The normally bustling supermarket in Wuhan was deserted, looking more foreign than ever. Khamis Hassan Bakari walked the aisles and saw just two other shoppers, and fear sank in.
“Everybody is scared. Scared of seeing anyone,” the 39-year-old Tanzanian doctor said, as authorities around the world scramble to contain the new virus that began in the industrial Chinese city of 11 million. “You don’t even want the supermarket to touch the products you buy.”
Bakari spoke with The Associated Press this week from his university housing in Wuhan as China’s astonishing lockdown of more than 50 million people continues. Transport links have been cut. Streets are largely empty. Lunar New Year festivities have fallen flat.
With thousands of foreigners stranded in Wuhan, and with richer countries like the United States and Japan preparing to evacuate some citizens, the PhD student has become a leader for hundreds of African peers with little chance of a similar escape.
“I’m feeling like I’m trapped here,” said one Ethiopian student at Wuhan University of Science and Technology, who gave only his first name, Abel. He, like other students, cited worries that angering Chinese or their country’s authorities could lead to retaliation, like loss of scholarships.
Beijing’s push to expand its influence on the youthful African continent means Africans now make up the second-largest population of foreign students in China, behind those from elsewhere in Asia, according to China’s education ministry. In 2018 African students numbered more than 80,000.
More than 4,000 are estimated to be in Wuhan alone.
None of them expected this. No one knows how long the lockdown will last, or all the ways the virus can spread. The southern African nation of Botswana has openly worried about its students’ supplies of water and food.
So Bakari and a small committee of fellow doctors from his East African country regularly send updates on social media about the outbreak to the more than 400 Tanzanian students in Wuhan, as well as hundreds of countrymen elsewhere in China.
