Dona Filismina didn’t know anyone at The White House. She didn’t know anyone at Buckingham Palace either, or the Élysée, or the German Chancellery. Nevertheless, the same thing that had been keeping the leaders of the Western world awake at night was distressing her too: the return of the yellow peril. Before the vigilants of good moral shoot me, I beg your pardon, cancel me, I hasten to say that I use that expression – “the yellow peril” – I do not say inadvertently, but with the express purpose of ridiculing it or, at least, making obvious its perfect uselessness in face of new global dynamics, whatever they may be.
For those who don’t know her, Dona Filismina is an Angolan woman somewhere between fifty and sixty years old. She is the mother of three children. As time went on, Dona Filismina became more and more preoccupied by what she called ‘the yellow peril’ — the growing presence of Chinese workers and businesses across Luanda, building roads, bridges, ports, and buying up neighbourhood shops.
Her neighbours, once sympathetic, began to keep their distance, whispering that the old woman was losing her mind. Dona Filismina, however, remained convinced that her old, transformed neighbours — the wide boys who had mysteriously grown rich — were somehow behind the arrival of so many Chinese workers.
One day, without warning, Dona Filismina’s nineteen-year-old daughter Mingota went into labour in the doorway of the kitchen. Dona Filismina, who had trained in traditional midwifery, delivered the baby herself. When the child was born, she lifted him up in the backyard and screamed to the heavens, horrified to discover that her grandchild was, in her words, a “Chinese mulatto” — the final, unbearable proof, in her mind, of the yellow peril that had consumed her city and now her own family.