Feature: African-Chinese love story blossoms in Africa

Over 25 years ago, a young peasant boy in the eastern Ugandan district of Kaliro set out on a long journey into the unknown. His country had just undergone a brutal civil war and the ruins were still evident as the new government sent him to the Far East, China.

Ayub Sooma had won a scholarship, the first ever the new government had got, to go and study electrical engineering in China.

His mother could not hold back her tears as her son, the first born of her husband's 42 children boarded a plane to China, a country then known by many Ugandans as a Kung Fu country. Many Kung Fu movies had flooded the Ugandan market then.

Sooma's story is a classic example of how Uganda and China are bonding not only at higher level but also at the people to people relation.

Like all students who go to China, Sooma's first task was to learn the Chinese language. The difference back in 1988 was in their class, their teacher did not speak English as well as some other foreign students who had come from French and Arab speaking countries. The only way was to consult Chinese language books if they were to understand each other.

This was the same method if you were to go to the market for shopping.

"If you want to buy anything, you bring your book and show the Chinese. Those who forgot their books they never bought anything. At that time it was very difficult to find a Chinese who speaks English," Sooma told Xinhua in a recent interview.

Difficult as it were to learn a foreign language, it is here that Sooma got bitten by a love bug. He fell in love with a Chinese girl, Wang Lihong who he had asked to teach him Chinese. Sooma was studying at Tsinghua University in Beijing and Wang used to pass by the university get with a beautiful red bicycle.

"She used to pass around the gate to go and see her grandparents. She looked so special," said Sooma while holding Li's hand at their house.

It was a shock to both their parents when they broke the story that they love each other. While Wang's parents tried so much to separate them, Sooma's relative saw Wang as a young girl who was not ready for marriage. Wang then was small bodied and in Africa a woman had to be big bodied to be seen as mature for marriage.

"It was like a nuclear bomb, my parents did not know how to handle me. It was very difficult for them to accept a different color. When you fall in love you don't mind about color, culture background," Wang said.

When Sooma's and Wang's parents got to see how deep their children loved each other, they had no option but to bless them. Sooma and Wang got married and it is this unison that is rekindling the people to people relation between Chinese and Ugandans

Wang gave up the life in Beijing and followed her husband to Africa.

Over the years, the couple that have now four children strived to promote the people to people relations between the Chinese and Ugandans.

They own a secondary school located on the outskirts of the capital Kampala. Luyanzi College is the first privately owned secondary school in Uganda to offer Chinese culture lessons.

At the school's campus students easily hold conversations in Chinese. The school's administrators say the students are taught elementary Chinese language, phonetic system, Chinese characters, grammar and conversation. It takes an average of about three months to master the elementary stage.

The school's drive to teach Chinese lessons has been an inspiration to many. The country's top university, Makerere University hosts the Confucius Institute. Figures from the Institute show that there are close to 700 students attending the Chinese language lessons.

The Uganda government now argues that learning the Chinese language and way of doing business is critical in boosting the trade relations between the two countries. Officials argue that China being an economic power house, Uganda cannot lose tapping opportunities from the Asian country.

Government is now working on plans to introduce the Chinese language as the latest foreign language in the country's syllabus. If implemented, Chinese would be taught in secondary schools and students would later at a higher level opt whether to master in it or not.

Sooma and Wang are also involved in this process of including Chinese in the school syllabus. Although still in the preliminary stages, they are working with the Confucius Institute and the National Curriculum Development Center, a government agency.

The plan is first to train 100 teachers who will then form a backbone of teaching Chinese in secondary schools all over the country.

While these talks between Uganda and China continue, Sooma and Wang have something up their sleeves. They have a dream of replicating something similar to Tsinghua University back in Beijing which has nursery, primary, secondary and university.

They already purchased a huge chunk of land and they believe in their life time they would have actualized their dream, a dream that would deepen the people to people relation among the Chinese and Ugandans. Enditem