ALTHOUGH Chinese culture may seem very distinct to that of Africans, the fundamental principles are very similar.
The China we see today is led by a Government and law, both of which have tried to encapsulate the culture and traditions of their nation.
The richest point in Chinese history, when the foundations of Chinese tradition and culture were laid down, was around 1000 BCE.
Before this period, the rulers in China were getting despotic and chaos was becoming the order of the day.
This was until the Zhou Dynasty came to prominence from the west of China.
They introduced and promoted a philosophy called the Dao/Tao which literally means road/way and can be translated to gwara/nzira in Shona.
This way was inspired by the belief in a mandate from heaven (Tianming) of which mankind was to conform to otherwise chaos and disorder would prevail.
The Zhou Dynasty taught that even a nation’s leadership had to be ordained from heaven and would be bound by heavenly principles that they would have to follow in order to succeed. This was in great contrast to China’s Xia and Shang dynasties’ beliefs that predated the Zhou Dynasty and depended solely on military prowess and thus aggressiveness to rule over the people.
The Zhou Dynasty rulers believed in the heavenly mandate so much that their supreme leader was called Zhou Tianzi which literally meant Zhou’s son of heaven.
After the rise of the Han Dynasty, the title Tianzi remained and was used in reference to emperors such as Qinshihuang.
Tianzi sounds like and has the same meaning as tenzi in Shona, thus hinting a historical connection between the two distant lands.
The Zhou had many notable figures who taught about the heavenly mandate and the Dao, including Sunzi or San Tzu who wrote the Art of war, Laozi or Lao Tzu who wrote the Daodejing/Taoteching and Kongzi or Confucius who was the key character in Lunyu or Analects of Confucius.
These men were intellectuals who expounded teachings that would deal with how a nation, community and individual ought to behave in order to achieve harmony on earth.
Though their work is now being treated as different philosophies because they addressed different issues in different periods of time, their schools of thought all stemmed from the Zhou dynasty.
Thus the way in which cultured Chinese people behave is also rooted in this period of history.
Amazingly, the teachings are identical to traditional African and also ancient Hebrew philosophy.
This period predated Christianity and Buddhism, but would contain teachings that would eventually be found in the two religions.
For example, Confucius who lived 500 years before Yhwshua (Jesus) taught saying: ‘What you do not wish to be done to you, do not do to others’.
Confucius is the most revered and known Chinese philosopher in the world.
He was born to a Zhou father though his mother was from a state called Zou.
He existed in a time when the Zhou leadership was waning and took it upon himself to re-establish the way of the Zhou in society and among the rulers of his day.
In analysing the key principles that were taught by Confucius, we will clearly see the cultural connections between ourselves and the Chinese.
Confucius centralised his teachings on zhong, li, yi and ren which mean loyalty, ceremony, righteousness and humanness respectively.
Zhong or loyalty discouraged betrayal towards an individual, community or nation.
It was a stand against treason and can be understood as patriotism when applied on a national level.
Confucius encouraged this and taught that rulers cannot be successful without winning over their people’s loyalty.
Li involved ceremonies and rituals that involved ancestral veneration, burial rites, weddings and so on.
Confucius was a great proponent of ancestral veneration and encouraged people to know and honour their roots so as to keep their identity.
He honoured the Zhou because they had brought the nation into prosperity and harmony with the heavenly mandate.
Thus the way the Chinese venerate their ancestors and traditionally bury their dead was rooted in the Zhou period and reinforced by the likes of Confucius.
In Africa, ancestral veneration was and continues to be an important part of our culture and tradition.
Though Westernisation has demonised it, it is clear that even the ancient Hebrew people such as Yhwshua remembered and observed rituals such as the Passover which were set up to remember the travailing of their ancestors.
The Passover involves animal and grain offerings and having a feast.
Hebrew people identified themselves in the tribal names of their forefathers and this is exactly how it was in many places in Africa until Western Christianity cut many from remembering and honouring their roots.
Zimbabwe, for example, has a ceremony called ‘bira’ meaning offering, which is done for all the deceased who bore children. This is done about two years after the death of the person, after winter and before the rain season.
An animal and drink offering is made during this ceremony and feasting takes place.
Today the Chinese have a similar festival called ‘Qingmingjie’ which takes place after winter and before the rain season.
It is a national holiday whereby everyone must go to his or her village to sweep the graves of their ancestors and make offerings.
The week-long holiday is characterised by feasting, particularly on the fifth day on which the actual grave sweeping takes place.
Yi involved not only righteousness, but justice, impartiality, blamelessness and so on.
It also involved good manners which is called tsika in Shona. This was a fundamental part of both Chinese and African culture and one could not be called well-cultured if he or she had bad manners and bad behaviour.
Confucius taught that righteousness was the key to a ruler gaining favour from his people and the people gaining favour from their rulers.
Ren or humanness which is known as hunhu in Shona and ubuntu in Ndebele was by far the principle that Confucius upheld the most.
He taught that if a person grasped or achieved hunhu to the extent of living it, then all other principles would also be in his or her grasp.
In Africa, a person with hunhu/ubuntu likewise cannot be expected to have bad manners, defile sacred rituals and betray his people or nation.
Confucius taught that ren is what everyone, including rulers and common people, should seek to attain in order to realise ultimate order because then all would be working in accordance with the mandate of heaven or the will of God.
In Africa, hunhu was a prerequisite to being considered a human being by society.
There are sayings such as: ‘Munhu munhu nehunhu’, meaning a person is only human through humanness.
This saying also exists in China as ‘Ren jiushi youren’ and contains the same phrasing and meaning.
The reason so many similarities existed between the culture and beliefs of the Zhou Dynasty of China and those of Africa is that the Zhou came to China from the west.
West of China are the lands of India, Arabia and Africa.
This is why the watermelon which came to China from Africa is called ‘xigua’ which literally means western melon.
The Zhou of China were associated with the monarchy of Ethiopia whose queen called Makeda is identified as the Daoist queen of the Zhou called Xiwangmu meaning mother of the western kings.
Both figures have stories that correlate because both of them were powerful monarchs that existed in the same period and were very spiritual people.
The Han Dynasty which came after the Zhou from the north and makes up the ethnic majority of the Chinese people we see today have always painted Chinese historical figures according to their own likeness.
The same was done with the Buddhas whose original images depicted them as blacks with kinky hair, broad nostrils and so on, but the Han would later portray them in their own likeness.
Thus it is important to note that the images of historical figures such as Confucius are not based on his actual likeness.
But the fact that he lived 700 years before the Han began ruling certainly shows us that he and the rest of the Zhou were not of the ethnicity of the contemporary Chinese.