Gambia-L:
    This is an opinion by Andrew Marr, a political columnist with the 
Observer, the stablemate of the Guardian and also with the Express. i found 
his optimism of Africa very very refreshing and challenging. hope some-one 
finds it useful.
Hamjatta

***********************************************************************

Our debt to Africa 

Once it was our greed that bled a continent dry - now we could kill it with 
our boredom 

Andrew Marr 
Sunday April 2, 2000 

About time. Today in Cairo leaders from scores of countries are gathering for 
the first-ever summit between the European Union and the nations of Africa. 
Strip away the flannel and what you see going on is a strange, 
continent-sized act of barter. The Africans want Europe's money - cancelled 
debts, direct aid, investment. In return for listening, Europe gets to tell 
the Africans to be more democratic, less murderous and so on. The Portuguese, 
holding the EU presidency, have proudly announced that Cairo will be historic 
- a turning-point, no less, in the intertwined story of Europe and Africa. 
It could do with a turning-point. As it happens, the first turning-point also 
involved the Portuguese, when doughty captain Diogo Cão arrived at the mouth 
of one of the world's great rivers in 1482, and proclaimed, with a sublime 
impertinence other Europeans would mimic later, that the long-established 
Kingdom of the Kongo had been 'discovered'. In the following five centuries, 
our record of slave-trading, economic exploitation, massacre, racism and 
empire has helped turn the world's least-developed continent, Antarctica 
aside, into a sprawling disaster, from which today's Europeans tend to recoil 
with distaste. 

There are the moments of exhilaration and hope, such as Nelson Mandela's 
release and subsequent presidency, but they are few. Last week's African 
stories - the insane rantings of Mugabe about 'very, very, very severe' 
violence against white farmers, the awful discovery of almost 900 corpses in 
Uganda's cult massacre - are more what we're used to. 

The West's populace is coming close, once more, to regarding Africa as the 
dark continent, where every bright idea, from market reforms to Marxism, is 
doomed to end in corruption and violence. Before Cão, medieval Europe 
regarded Africa as a no-go area, guarded by hostile Arabs in the north, and a 
place of monsters, ogres and danger further south, petering out in a sea of 
'vapours and slime' at the end of the world. Today, with BBC World and CNN, 
Le Monde, and safari tours, Europeans are a little more knowledgeable. But 
the emotional response is not so different. Ogres and danger, slime and 
starvation. Most simply flinch and look away. 

In his recent Commonwealth lecture, the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, 
spoke bitterly of the West's 'callous indifference' to the victims of 
Africa's wars - conflicts which, he noted, are barely reported now in Western 
media. But these wars are only part of the current story. There's famine and 
Aids - of 36 million sufferers worldwide, 23m live in sub-Saharan Africa - 
and the environmental disasters, most recently the floods of Mozambique, a 
country which had previously been singled out by the Economist Intelligence 
Unit for the largest growth rate in Africa this year. 

The truth, Annan said, is that 'Africa is suffering from multiple crises - 
ecological, economic, social and political. Fresh water, forests and arable 
lands are under unprecedented stress. Billions of dollars of public funds 
continue to be stashed away by some African leaders, even while roads are 
crumbling, health systems have failed, schoolchildren have neither books nor 
desks nor teachers, and the phones do not work.' 

Why? Why Africa and not us? You could say that a continent which brought the 
world Ypres and Treblinka, the Gulag and Dresden, isn't in a strong position 
to point the finger about violence, never mind corruption. But this is no 
longer the point. India, China, many other Asian countries, and most of South 
America have joined the world economy. Why not Africa? 

Taking a longer perspective, the difference between Europe and Africa is easy 
to explain. It is the contrast, between a heavily-indented peninsular 
irrigated by constant migrations, useful cereal crops and internal 
competition between human societies (Europe); and a closed-off mass, with 
fewer useful indigenous crops and a smaller land area suitable for 
agriculture (Africa). 

The factors which stopped the continent where humans first started becoming a 
driving force in world civilisation are well understood by historians. They 
include pure bad luck - for instance Africa, unlike Europe and Asia, did not 
have enough large wild animal species, such as horses, cows and pigs, that 
were suitable for domestication. As Jared Diamond put it in his book Guns, 
Germs and Steel : 'Had Africa's rhinos and hippos been domesticated and 
ridden they would not only have fed armies but also have provided an 
unstoppable cavalry - Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown 
the Roman Empire. It never happened.' 

Instead, though Africa had her rise and fall of empires, her inner migrations 
and her religious shifts, she missed the critical centuries of agricultural 
and social advance. By the time Europe was expanding, the technological gap 
was so great that modern Africa was doomed to be Europe's backyard - one, 
like many backyards, full of strange, half-completed projects, and now 
deserted by its former owners. 

One example will do. The worst single event in the last decade was the 
genocidal machete slaughter of the Rwandan Tutsi people, perhaps a million of 
them, in 1994; and the callous inaction of the West, which could have 
intervened and did not, leading furious and ashamed Belgian soldiers to shred 
their UN berets in protest at the cowardice of their masters. (Or, since 
Madeleine Albright was particularly culpable, their mistress.) 

The stories of the slaughter - families who heard soldiers explaining that 
they should sit down together in a group, so that grenades could be thrown at 
them, and who quietly did so; polite requests to buy a bullet for death, 
rather than suffer the machete - recall Nazi Europe. But, with Rwanda and 
much else, we mentally distance them; these massacres, the West decided, were 
African, tribal, unconnected to ideology and therefore to history. They had 
no meaning. 

And certainly in the Rwandan case, it is entirely untrue. Rwanda's war 
between Hutu and Tutsi, groups who had intermingled peaceably for centuries 
before the Europeans arrived, had its origins in Belgian 'scientific' ethnic 
policies, when they elevated the 'aristocratic' Tutsis above the 'bestial' 
Hutus, according to the latest European racial theories. This, in turn, was 
based on the wild and ignorant race thinking of the Somerset-born explorer, 
John Hanning Speke. The story can be found in Philip Gourevitch's 'We wish to 
inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families'. 

Far from being uniquely African, the Rwandan genocide - like apartheid, 
Zimbabwe's struggles today, the Marxist 'experiments' that went so 
disastrously wrong in the Seventies - was a European story, born in Belgian 
politics and European pseudo-science. Nor were the grim details of the 
massacres uniquely 'African'. The barbarous habit of collecting severed hands 
was being used nearly a century earlier by the European mass killers of 
Leopold II's Congo, next door, where millions died. Conrad's heart of 
darkness had a white skin. 

From Cape Town to Eritrea, European visions are central to the African story. 
Even the climate change, which probably brought the Mozambique floods - where 
did all that come from? Chemical emissions from the leather-working stalls in 
downtown Maputo? I don't think so. 

So what's the point of all this? Not ghoulishness, nor a ritual piece of 
Sunday morning liberal self-flagellation. It's not even that the sins of the 
European fathers are being carried by their sons and daughters. It is because 
we forget so very easily and in forgetting, make further mistakes. Today, the 
seemingly relentless wash of bad news from Africa is creating a kind of 
submerged liberal racism, the feeling that it's all hopeless (and maybe 
always has been); that nothing will work there because - well, because it's 
Africa. Because - whisper this, to yourself - it's them. Behind bland phrases 
like 'compassion fatigue' is something worse, a steadily coarsening, 
increasingly stubborn indifference. 

And it's ignorant, unhistorical, an act of murderous pessimism. As Annan also 
said recently, Africa is full of countries that are starting to work, of 
border disputes resolved, governments voted out and going quietly. Even 
Mugabe is losing. What Africa needs is practical, constant and energetic help 
from Europe, financial, personal, not too ambitious - a humble 
beginning-again. Once we killed with our visions and greed. This time, we can 
kill with our boredom. Mistah Kurtz? He not dead. He just plays golf and 
doesn't read the foreign pages. 

 

  

   

  


hkanteh

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L
Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------------