Helping Africa

Everyone wants to help Africa. Every advanced country in the world thinks it's a duty, to help Africa. Africa was colonized by European countries, dividing it into little vassal-dependent states they could extract the natural resources from, spreading their hegemony and presumed international power and prestige. Hold on, it wasn't just Africa now, was it? India suffered under that fate, and Indochina, South and Central America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North America; the list goes on.

Portugal, Belgium, England, Spain, France, Germany and then later the United States all extended their territories by co-opting the geographies of others'. Most countries of the world, once colonial, colonized by imperialist design, have long since matured, become fully independent and more than capable of looking to their interests in good civilized form. It often seems that Africa alone, that great truly dark continent, struggles to find itself in the future.

Famine, and inter-tribal war, along with inter- and intra- country warfare, continue to extract misery from the huge populations in the countries of Africa. Foreign aid keeps pouring into one African country after another; along with a litany of foreign interventions to attempt to halt wars, and worse, genocidal wars where millions of Africans are slaughtered in country after country as wars drag on, all to little avail.

There is a new imperialism slowly leaking its way into Africa, where countries once themselves colonized, now "rent" African agricultural land in countries incapable of feeding their own indigenous population, allowing Chinese and Saudi Arabian, Qatari, Kuwaiti and Abu-Dhabian and Turkish farmers to work the land, export their produce to the renting countries for home consumption.

Chinese farm workers have been known to have torrid little 'love' affairs with trusting young African women, then leave them to care for the children that are produced while they return back to the home country. These women are then un-marriageable, left to the care of their families. And usually those families are poor ones, working a hardscrabble existence in marginal farming.

Sudan, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Malawi, Ethiopia, Congo, Zambia, Uganda, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Mali, Sierre Leone, Ghana and other African countries whose people have insufficient food themselves, are renting out arable land to foreign interests. Ethiopia, whose indigenous population struggle to find enough food, has approved no fewer than 815 foreign agricultural projects since 2007; leased for $1 annual, per hectare. Who profits from that? The ruling elite, not the people.

And the truly obscene spectacle here is that countries like Kenya, suffering from drought and food shortages, will not accept food shipped to it, tonnes of corn from a neighbour, South Africa, because it has been genetically-modified. The official reason is fear of contamination of Kenyan soil and crops - and for the 'greater good' of the country, people can starve, but land that is not currently productive will not be 'contaminated'.

Africa has a habit of doing this type of thing. Sudan's ruling elite, thunderously blamed by the international community of indulging in crimes against humanity in Darfur, shut out all international humanitarian aid groups as a kind of revenge against the world, while thousands of Darfurians starve. This is precisely what occurred in Somalia in the early 1990s when aid agencies tried to protect food shipments from armed warlords with the aid of western troops and then all hell broke loose.

And now, Canada is thinking of sending its Afghan-battle-hardened troops to Republic of Congo at the request of the United Nations to aid in peace-keeping there. How can this be possible, when there is no peace in Congo, when both radicalized African-tribal militias and the government forces as well use mass rape as a tool of war, and slaughter thousands upon thousands of tribal people in the Congo?

If Canadians thought Afghanistan to be a medieval-era dysfunctional quagmire of brutally competing warlords, there will be no sigh of relief if, on withdrawing Canadian troops from Afghanistan they are deployed in Congo. There appears to be no universal African will to help itself, one country after the other. Tribal antagonisms of the most virulent kind as witnessed in Rwanda resulting in mass slaughter is the African way.

And past time for Africa to turn itself around, to become a law-abiding, civil place of security, advantaging its people. Outside intervention cannot produce that. Only internal resolve to displace all the tyrants and the oppressors. But then that supposes that honest, dedicated national figures that could be trusted to act on behalf of the people will arise to deliver Africa from its bondage to chaos and mayhem.