happy, excited kids and make them chant something so demeaning? those questions sent me on a journey to an industry that s exploiting kids across africa. i was shocked by what i heard along the way, but in the end ifound my answers. done i a writer and journalist, and although i now based in london i lived in china for several years, studying chinese and working in beijing. i loved it there but i didn t always feel welcome. as a black woman in a country with a chinese mac tiny black population, i experienced countless incidences of racism; sometimes indirectly but often write in my face. i soon realised i wasn t the only one. see, i wasn t new to racism before china, it s a global problem, but i had never been anywhere that made it quite so difficult to speak out. i felt black people in china needed a space to unpack these experiences, so i decided to take a risk. i created that liberty china, an online space and website to start that conversation. hello and welcome to anot
talking about kamwendo, it was time to pay a visit. kamwendo is a trading post near the zambia border. in this area too, susu had found his way to a remote village. we wanted to talk to the kids he had used as his stars, and to find out if they had shared and the profit that susu had boasted about. henry had been told that he had heard that the kids had been paid up to half a dollar a day. i was keen to speak to the family of one young boy in particular, he was a prolific performer in susu s videos, known across chinese social media as xiao gulah. he was a cute kid, such a natural performer that he became a poster boy for the industry. even now, you can see him giving the thumbs up in adverts
for chinese blessing videos. it didn t take long to find xiao gulah and his mum. she invited us inside, out of the rain. the boy s will name is bright. he is now six. do you remember how old you are when you started taking the videos? four. four! and what do you remember about taking the videos? can you tell us anything about susu? what was he like? what was his character, his personality?