Thirty years on, the worm has turned in the Ogaden. The casualties suffered by Chinese oil workers in that region of eastern Ethiopia are a reminder that Chinese are not exempt from the perils of operating in Africa. It is also a reminder that China's interest in the continent is not new but will never be more than peripheral and unstable.
Modern China's first major foray into Africa was in 1964 when Zhou Enlai made a multi-nation tour of the continent. I saw Zhou in Sudan - one of his stops and now, for different reasons, perhaps China's most important and most difficult African relationship. China then was focusing on its political role as a leader of the non-aligned world days before the Cultural Revolution caused it to shut down most of its diplomacy. It was also just starting its foreign aid business.
Later that year, I visited the first Chinese exhibition in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania - one result of the Zhou visit. Another was China's biggest contribution to African development - the Tanzam railway linking landlocked Zambia to Tanzania and the sea. It was a political and development project, designed to free Zambian copper exports from dependence on outlets through then Portuguese-ruled Angola and Mozambique and white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa.
The irony now is that white rule in Africa is history, but so too are most of Zambia's once huge copper exports, a victim of mismanagement.
The railway project was a diplomatic coup, but left a legacy that remains today. China's import of its own workers, and treatment of local ones not accustomed, even under former white masters, to Chinese disciplines created many resentments.
China's African forays, more recently, have tended to be successful. Its oil investments in Sudan are doing well. Another civil war that had long been raging in the south and other trouble spots meant the risks in Sudan were always going to be high. But China's success has been partly offset by diplomatic embarrassments over Darfur. Nor can there be any certainty that the oil investment will not become the victim of the local discontent that has dogged Nigeria's oil industry. Flush with money and prestige, and eager to secure supplies of raw materials, China's recent forays into Africa are understandable.
