Africa, such an interesting topic! I have four main, albeit disorganized, thoughts about Africa:
1. It's the craddle of mankind. Simple as that. Just for that, it shouldn't be forgotten. I also have an unexplainable hunch that if it wasn't for our african heritage, we'd still be thinking dancing is something that can only be done in a ballroom, listening to Vivaldi with weird powdered wigs and monocles.
2. I remember fondly a very intensive but interesting 8th grade that was entirely focused on Africa. I was fascinated. That course made me realize how uninformed we really are about a continent with such a long history, such magnificent geographical features and such a vast amount of different cultures and peoples. Around that time, on English class, we read some folk tales from Uganda (which seems weird coming to think of it), and I remember they were as charming a cultural product as anything America or Europe has ever done.
3. My ex-girlfriend loved the subject of Africa. I'm still bitterly hurt at what she did to me and thinking about Africa gives me simultaneous pains in the chest, the head and the groin. Listening to "Africa" by Toto makes me want to go in a murderous rampage.
4. It's been the subject of an unbelievably unfair attitude from the rest of the world. For instance, in this day and age, I had to listen someone say "I honestly think negros haven't evolved". Don't worry, calling somebody negro isn't offensive here...but saying that they haven't evolved is such a blatant idiocy I had to call that guy in front of his parents and told him my head hurt from so much idiocy I was hearing. Mind you, that someone was a cousin of mine, a guy with whom I share my second surname. A doctor. A doctor whose parents payed around $150,000,000 pesos for his education. A doctor whose mother was born in the middle of the Andes mountains and whose father was born in the teeny-tiny village of Yotoco near the valley of the Cauca river...basically 6 foot tall, white, blonde, blue-eyed Nords. To think that today this kind of opinions exist among those who have lived with all kinds of privileges and received the best education! A couple of nights ago I discussed this with a friend of mine who's attending law school and we read a bit about the differences between world maps: it's mind-boggling to consider we've been raised with a completely wrong conception about the very shape and proportions of the planet we live in! How can we've tried to undermine Africa even representing something as objective as it's physical dimensions?
Having born in a country that was also colonized by Europeans, I can relate and understand how damaging being a colony attitude can be to a population: like Africans, natives here were treated as sub-human and massacred just to take shiny pellets of 🤬 from them. Spaniards in particular were quite brutal as conquerors and had no interest in treating the New World as a place to settle or develop civilization. Like Africa, Colombia was just a virgin land full of gold, emeralds and subhuman negros that were considered to be made by God as animals: just take what you want, kill as many indios as you please and be on your way back to your homeland like a rich man! And we got off the hook lightly, at least we didn't get our national borders drawn with a ruler like poor ol' Africa, leaving tribes and peoples that had either never known each other of hated each other forever stranded in artificial national frontiers. At least we fought for an independence at a relatively early stage and it was an indepency led by people who had at least a vague idea of who Diderot or Rousseau were. Tell me, how are you supposed to end up with a nation that embraces democracy and defends everyone's fundamental rights with such history? Even today, people here feel resentment towards anything spanish and, mind you, the next year we're voting a referendum to overturn the Supreme Court's ruling allowing same-sex marriage, and this being in a country not as :censored:ed up as most African nations in terms of poverty and violence. You could argue that South Africa did it, but we're talking about a country that a few decades ago still treated black people as inferior.
Boko Haram and Robert Mugabe may seem to you as completely baffling things that shouldn't exist. It's easy to forget how easy life has been for most of us and forget how low can mankind go when the going gets rough. Here, even though half the country is way better off than many african nations, we elected TWICE a president that sponsored a rewards program for the army which resulted in thousands of extrajuditial civilian deaths that were presented as enemy combatants. This year we voted "No" when the goverment asked us, "Do you want to end the civil war that has gone on for almost a century through negotiation?" and our GDP is 7 times that of Zimbabwe. Kids still die of starvation in some regions of Colombia and the minimum wage is around US$200, if you're lucky enough to be formally employed, and we haven't had it as rough as Africa. For 🤬's sake, we were an independent nation more than a century before Libya! What's wrong with Africa? Corruption, instability, violence, poverty, dogmatism and authoritarism. The same things that would be wrong with your country if it had suffered the same :censored:y history.
Wanna help? Donating change to "sponsor" a child does nothing. Über-politcally correct hype and pretend concern a la Koni 2012 does worse than nothing. Realizing the true, complex roots of the matter and sharing with everyone you know a different way of relating to the problem seems like the only reasonable thing to do but, as always, it's not the definitive solution we'd love to have. Will we miraculously fix the third world that way? Nope. Would we at least challenge the hordes of dumb:censored:s that think Africa is as in bad shape as it is because "negros haven't evolved" and begin to change the way our societies thinks about Africa's problems? Dunno, maybe, it's worth a shot!
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Oh brother, reminds me of those kids who left college to join greenpeace. Can Iz make difference?
