Inside the Fort of São Sebastião on Mozambique Island, which for 500 years was Portugal’s capital of its East African colony, there is a museum in which one of the prize exhibits is a Ming vase.
The vase stands out amid a collection of colonial detritus — rattan chairs, tapestries of shipwrecks, heavy furniture, cannons — for its simple beauty.
Ask any of the guides where it came from and they will simply say “China”. Another guide, standing on the ramparts of the fort overlooking the Indian Ocean, waves his hand over the glistening sea and says, “lots of Chinese pottery there”.
The Chinese explorer-admiral Zheng He, who led half a dozen so-called “treasure voyages” from China in the early 15th century, is thought to have called at Mozambique Island almost a century before the Portuguese arrived.
That China turned inward after the end of the voyages in the mid-15th century has echoes in what looks like the gradual end of the American Empire and, with it, the influence it wields in global affairs.
So to Nasrec, south of Joburg, where the rubbish has been cleared and the streetlights are working and there are promises that the water will not be throttled at any time when leaders of the G20 nations gather for the conference.
The US snubbed the meeting without so much as an RSVP card saying “the administration regrets …”. Its reasons seem to be rooted more in petulance than from any concerns about the G20’s actual relevance. Meanwhile, though China’s Xi Jinping will not attend, his premier, Li Qiang, will.
The growth of Chinese influence across the world, from making the things that the West wants to rebuilding broken railways in Africa, is not new.
But the absence of one of the world’s two superpowers at the G20 feels like a shift in the wind. Admiral Zheng He would have felt it at his back and he would have been very pleased.
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