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General Topic Essays Home: Daily Rant Home: General Topic Essays General Topic Essays Crossing America Cry Havoc: Taking Off The Gloves Let Africa Sink Protecting Your Livelihood Putting Out The Welcome Mat-With Reservations Soccer, The Beautiful Game The Chicago Cubs: Baseball Team or Marketing Exercise? The Pussification Of The Western Male Traitors Within Our Walls Where Is Washington? Zoning Free Speech General Topic Essays Archives View General Topic Essays by Date Home: Daily Rant Reader Mail Gratuitous Gun Pics The Gun Thing General Topic Essays Life Among the Liberals Kims Lists Search Site Advanced search Hits: 0012442692 2002 Kim du Toit . General Topic Essays Let Africa Sink Kim du Toit May 26, 2002 When it comes to any analysis of the problems facing Africa, Western society, and particularly people from the United States, encounter a logical disconnect that makes clear analysis impossible.
At one time, crocodiles accounted for more deaths in sub-Saharan Africa than gunfire, for example. Now add the usual human tragedy murder, assault, warfare and the rest, and you can begin to understand why the life expectancy for an African is low-in fact, horrifyingly low, if you remove White Africans from the statistics they tend to be more urbanized, and more Western in behavior and outlook. Finally, if you add the horrifying spread of AIDS into the equation, anyone born in sub-Saharan Africa this century will be lucky to reach age forty. Growing up there, I was infused with several African traits-traits which are not common in Western civilization. So because of my African background, I am seldom moved at the sight of death, unless its accidental, or it affects someone close to me. Of my circle of about eighteen or so friends with whom I grew up, and whom I would consider close, only about ten survive today-and not one of the survivors is over the age of fifty. Two friends died from stepping on landmines while on Army duty in Namibia. Three died in horrific car accidents and lest one thinks that this is not confined to Africa, one was caused by a kudu flying through a windshield and impaling the guy through the chest with its hoof-not your everyday traffic accident in, say, Florida. Another also died of heart failure, but he was a hopeless drunkard.
My situation is not uncommon in South Africa-and north of the Limpopo River the border with Zimbabwe, I suspect that others would show worse statistics. When I was still living in Johannesburg, the newspaper carried daily stories of people mauled by lions, or attacked by rival tribesmen, or dying from some unspeakable disease and this was pre-AIDS Africa too and in general, succumbing to some of Africas many answers to the population explosion. Add to that the normal death toll from rampant crime, illness, poverty, flood, famine, traffic, and the police, and youll begin to get the idea. My favorite African story actually happened after I left the country. An American executive took a job over there, and on his very first day, the newspaper headlines read: Three Headless Bodies Found. As a result, death is treated more casually by Africans than by Westerners. I, and I suspect most Africans, am completely inured to reports of African suffering, for whatever cause. Yep, been happening there for millennia, long before Whitey got there. Governments becoming rich and corrupt while their populations starved? And Europe doesnt teem with crocodiles, ultra-venomous snakes and so on. Apart from a couple of examples of massive, state-sponsored slaughter Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Europe since 1700 doesnt even begin to compare to Africa today. Casual slaughter is another thing altogether-rare in Europe, common in Africa. More to the point, the West has evolved into a society with a stable system of government, which follows the rule of law, and has respect for the rights and life of the individual-none of which is true in Africa. Among old Africa hands, we have a saying, usually accompanied by a shrug: Africa wins again.
Materiel is broken, stolen or sold off for a fraction of its worth. The result of decades of foreign aid has resulted in a continental infrastructure which, if one excludes South Africa, couldnt support Pittsburgh . This goes against the grain of our humanity-we are accustomed to ridding the world of this or that problem smallpox, polio, whatever, and accepting failure is anathema to us. But, to give a classic African scenario, a polio vaccine wont work if the kids are prevented from getting the vaccine by a venal overlord, or a frightened chieftain, or a lack of roads, or by criminals who steal the vaccine and sell it to someone else. If a cure for AIDS was found tomorrow , and offered to every African nation free of charge, the growth of the disease would scarcely be checked, let alone reversed. Basically, youd have to try to inoculate as many two-year old children as possible, and write off the two older generations. So that is the only one response, and its a brutal one: accept that we are powerless to change Africa, and leave them to sink or swim, by themselves. It sounds dreadful to say it, but if the entire African continent dissolves into a seething maelstrom of disease, famine and brutality, thats just too damn bad. We have better things to do-sometimes, you just have to say, Cant do anything about it. The viciousness, the cruelty, the corruption, the duplicity, the savagery, and the incompetence is endemic to the entire continent, and is so much of an anathema to any right-thinking person that the civilized imagination simply stalls when faced with its ubiquity, and with the enormity of trying to fix it. All that does is arouse our feelings of horror, and the instinctive need to do something, anything -but everything has been tried before, and failed. All we should do is make sure that none of Africa gets transplanted over to the United States, because the danger to our society is dire if it does. I note that several United States churches are attempting to bring groups of African refugees over to the United States, European churches the same for Europe. Mark my words, this misplaced charity will turn around and bite us, big time. Even worse would be to think that the simplicity of Africa holds some kind of answers for Western society: remember It Takes A Village? Trust me on this: there is not one thing that Africa can give the West which hasnt been tried before and failed, not one thing that isnt a step backwards, and not one thing which is worse than, or that contradicts, what we have already. So heres my solution for the African fiasco: a high wall around the whole continent, all the guns and bombs in the world for everyone inside, and at the end, the last one alive should do us all a favor and kill himself. Inevitably, some Kissingerian realpolitiker is going to argue in favor of intervention, because in the vacuum of Western aid, perhaps the Communist Chinese would step in and increase their influence in the area.
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