AFRICA
In the late 1800s Africa was still a mysterious continent about which little was known. There were no civilizations there with which the European peoples communicated, there had never been any great armies that had marched out of the interior of that dark land, and there had never been anything on the other side of the continent that would warrant trade routes through it. Africa was largely viewed as a massive land obstacle around which the great European merchants had to travel to reach the wealthy and prosperous people groups of the Far East.
Africa was such a barbarous undeveloped area that upon reaching that continent by ship in the early 1400s the Chinese ceased world exploration because they concluded, after seeing the savage Blacks, that the entire rest of world was filled with naked brainless barbarians.
After squabbling for every other piece of the globe, however, the White empires of Europe had little where else to conquer but the continent to the south of them. Leopold II of Belgium took over the Congo region and consolidated it in 1890. The Scramble for Africa was on. Britain, France, Germany, and Italy began a decade’s long fight to establish their own imperial prestige in Africa.
The African natives were little more than a nuisance along the European path to controlling virtually the entire continent. Once in the hands of the empires of Europe those administrations set about to make the African colonies prosperous for the mother countries and their inhabitants. They built railroads, mines, plantations, and attempted to educate the native tribal peoples so as to make them useful in the new Western system that Africa had been thrust into. Africa was (and still is) practically bursting with natural resources like diamonds, gold, cobalt, oil, and timber that had never been used or developed by the uncivilized Blacks. The Europeans developed these industries and taught the natives how to utilize them.
Only in the 1960s did much of Africa gain its independence from the Europeans. When the African states launched into independence they were the subject of incredible interest. The United States and the Soviet Union attempted to gain influence over every newly freed state, considering each one an invaluable asset. However, after only a few decades of freedom the steadily increasing fortunes of the African peoples, since the days of the first European conquerors, were dramatically reversed as ruthless egomaniac dictators rose to power, AIDS ravished the continent, starvation set it, and civil wars ripped the region apart.
Today Africa is a far cry from what it was when the European empires released those new ‘nations’ into independence. Africa has nearly become synonymous with unfathomable underdevelopment, misery, and death.
I just recently went to my grandmother’s house and the topic turned to my great-uncle who has been a missionary in Ghana for decades. This uncle sends emails to my grandparents about life in Africa. Recently he sent an email about how the natives often times cook parts of chickens for a meal and then days later eat the leftovers by simply scraping the maggots off the carcass. My grandfather said: ‘I Just cannot comprehend how the people in Africa are so far behind?!’ My grandmother chimed in: ‘I just recently saw a website that was saying how many millions of people WE have to feed in Africa this coming year… I just thought ‘don’t these people ever get to the point of being able to sustain themselves?’ Why is it our job to feed them?’ My grandfather replied ‘I’ve come to think they just don’t have the discipline to do it for themselves.’
This family conversation was begun by a reference to the people of Ghana. Ghana was the most prosperous of all the countries when it embarked on freedom in the 1960s. If people in Ghana still eat maggot filled meat and boil giant rats to feed the village, it leaves one to wonder into what depths the rest of the continent has descended.
One Sunday the church I usually attend had a missionary group come in for a demonstration, and to request donations for their well digging projects in sub-Sahara Africa. The demonstration included the typical statistics about how many African children die every week from having no water and was intended to make everyone feel bad for living in a wealthy country. Apparently, African children have to drink out of contaminated creeks and rain puddles. The organization members explained how they had designed a special kind of pipe well that could be drilled into the ground rapidly and efficiently. Near the end of the demonstration my friend leaned over to me and asked something to the effect of: ‘I want so badly to ask him why the Africans can’t just dig traditional wells like natives do in the rest of the world. I mean, I feel like you and I with two shovels could dig a well in a couple of days.’ After I thought about this for a moment I decided I must ask about it… after all, even Abraham and Isaac of the Bible were digging wells, and that was 4,000 years ago.
After the demonstration I went forward and asked the seemingly obvious question. The demonstrator immediately turned sort of confused and vague. He informed me that Africans didn’t usually dig traditional wells because children were known to fall into them and drown, which would cause contamination, and that bats fly over and defecate in the water. All I could think was ‘is this real?’ Are African children really so stupid they can’t avoid falling into a huge hole and drowning? Are these children suicidal? Are the Africans really incapable of covering their wells at night? I posed all of these question to the demonstrator and he couldn’t give me any real answer other than ‘it’s complicated.’ The question must be asked: if Europeans and Mesopotamians can dig traditional wells for thousands of years, until they finally develop machinery, why can’t modern day Africans do it? Why didn’t European children fall into traditional wells and drown? Don’t European bats defecate? The problem is not with the situation… it’s with the people.
In 2005 the historian and expert on Africa Martin Meredith wrote a book about the history of African independence entitled: The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom, To the Heart of Despair. The subtitle of this book is a pretty fair 10 word summery of the history of the African people’s ability to govern themselves. Just look at South Africa since the fall of Apartheid in 1995. The average personal income in that country has dropped around 40% since White rule ended. Today 25% of all of the men in that country admit that they’ve raped a woman! 50 murders occur in South Africa every single day amounting to more than 18,000 a year in a country with a population of around 48 million. Compare that to Germany which has around 2,000 murders a year with a population of 81 million!
The excuse for South Africa is usually that it was under so many years of ‘oppression’ by Whites. Yet Germany was twice destroyed in this century alone and half the country was looted and mutilated by the communists for decades before being absorbed into the other half of the nation. Germany today is one of the strongest economies in the world and, considering its place in the recent debt crisis, is in a position to once again dominate Europe.
Recently Barack Obama’s own brother, George Obama, wrote a book entitled Homeland: An Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival, in which he documents the state of his own country Kenya. Within the pages he describes how Kenya is in disarray. George goes so far as to claim that Kenya would have been better off if the Kenyans had allowed the Whites to rule over them for a longer period of time:
‘…let me tell you something. Look at South Africa they were under the whites until the 1990s, and look where they are now. They’re practically a developed nation. The corruption there is nothing like it is here. So who is better off? Maybe if we’d let the whites stay a bit longer, we’d be where South Africa is today.’
Even a native Kenyon recognizes that White rule was the key to becoming a successful African state. Just think how horrible Kenya must be if George Obama can only dream of Kenya being more like South Africa!
One could fill many volumes with the tragedy that is post-colonial Africa (and some books no-doubt have been written): endless government instability, unheard of tales of corruption, genocides, poverty scarcely imaginable to the Western mind, uncontrolled diseases wiping out millions, never ending civil war, etc etc.
One particular incident that comes to mind is the former ‘emperor’ of the Central African Empire who loved to feed human flesh to foreign dignitaries and only inform them of the meals content after they had consumed it.
Such tales as those that come out of Africa, even from my missionary Uncle, seem too barbarous to be true. How can anyone deny that Africa, post White leadership, has turned into an entire continent of lawless disorder comparable to the American West of the 19th century? In fact, it’s certainly far worse.
Consider the largest country in sub-Saharan Africa: the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This state (if it can be called that) has been more or less at war since 1997 with well over 5 million people left dead so far.
The next largest country in Black Africa is the Sudan. If it’s any indication of the stability of that region the country just split in half in 2011. That separation was the result of the Second Sudanese Civil War which started in 1983 and rages on even as I write these words. The Sudan has been more or less at war for the last 30 years (and counting)!
The third largest ethnically Black government in Africa is Chad. Chad is considered a ‘failed state’ by Fund for Peace. The United Nations has considered Chad to be in a ‘humanitarian crisis’ for the last 11 years. Various armed rebel groups roam around the country. In fact, the only reason that any government exists in Chad at all is that it is currently being artificially propped up by the French. The country is making headlines recently because the latest band of roving Islamic thugs armed with pick axes and Kalashnikovs decided to destroy the ancient tombs in Timbuktu that were formally listed as ‘world heritage sites’ by the United Nations.
Although we could go on evaluating the catastrophe that is post European ruled Africa it would only become redundant. The whole sub-Saharan racially Black region is home to bands of roaming lawless armed tribes of thugs, rapists, and bandits unconcerned with order or stability. Even the officially recognized ‘leaders’ routinely rob their people and foreign aid groups for the sake of their own greed. The Council on Foreign Relations states on its website that Africa loses over $150 Billion to corruption every year. That number makes the $22.5 Billion that they receive (in the same amount of time) from Western generosity appear measly. One might even wonder why anyone would bother to throw their compassionate gifts down into the black hole that Africa has become. Black African governments currently steal more from their own people now that their free then the White Europeans colonialists ever did.
In Africa: A Biography of a Continent the author, John Reader, sums up the post-colonial post-White rule of Africa with this introduction to the final chapter:
‘The Dreams of Africa Becoming a continent of peaceful democratic states quickly evaporated [after independence]. More than 70 coups occurred in the first thirty years of independence. By the 1990s few states preserved even the vestiges of democracy. One-party states, presidents-for-life, and military rule became the norm; resources were squandered as the elite accumulated wealth and the majority of Africans suffered. Nigeria and Rwanda exemplify the nightmare; South Africa preserves a flickering hope of transforming dreams into reality.’ (pg. 663).
Reader wrote these words in 1998 only 3 years after South Africa’s rebirth as a Black ruled nation. The hopes he put in South Africa redeeming the continent would be misplaced. As we now know in 2012 South Africa has and currently is still descending rapidly down to the level of corruption, poverty, and chaos that characterizes its fellow Black ruled African states. The whole of the continent is being enveloped in the nightmare.
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