A continent to cry for

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them to Carisbrooke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys in Africa.

So began the first chapter of the novel Cry, the Beloved Country. The first three paragraphs were enough to catch my breath. When I read them I was a teenager who had recently read two stirring real-life adventure books (Hunter and Jungle Man) set at the turn of the 20th century when the authors were able to describe raw nature in which there seem to be animals everywhere.

The Africa of my teenage imagination was magic - great jungles, great mountain ranges, great rivers and great deserts. But it was its animals which added most to the magic - by far the greatest number and the greatest variety of any continent.

But even then, when I read the books over 60 years ago, the unspoiled land of my imagination was no longer there.

From one century to the next, the change across the continent was imperceptible. Now dramatic change occurs in the span of one full lifetime. The annual flooding of the Nile which was responsible for humanity’s first real civilisation is no more. The perimeter of the desserts are rapidly expanding due to unsustainable agriculture on marginal land. Tourists on their bus "safaris" in East Africa can only experience the fragments of a lost wonderland. And, how far are we away from the last gorilla remaining becoming the victim of a poacher?

A South African high school teacher, Alan Paton, wrote Cry, the Beloved Country in 1948. It is now recognised as one of the best novels of the century. The year 1948 was also the year that apartheid was initiated. Paton’s focus was on the gap between black and white in his native country which was the tragic outcome of what was called in the previous century;"The rush for Africa".

In his second paragraph, Paton described the grass where he stood as lush and green, and he implores whoever may go this way to;

Stand unshod upon it for the ground is holy, being as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.

What a beautiful piece of writing. Sadly, it no longer has any relevance. It is too late. Africa is destined to be destroyed by greedy multinational companies, self-serving governments manipulated by multinational companies and a great population desperate to survive regardless of the damage done to the land that they should be keeping, guarding and caring for.

The greed-driven grab for Africa

In the 19th century, Belgium, Italy, Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Portugal grabbed bits for themselves, or tightened the grip on what they already had claimed in previous centuries. Holland as a nation did not, but many Dutch farmers did.

In the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the Indigenous people in all of the colonies envied what the Europeans possessed and abandoned their traditional life for piddling wages - because the piddling wages were one step ahead of the fragile subsistence of tribal life.

The jobs were made possible by the white’s technology. It is a cast-iron law that wherever high-tech goes, it displaces low-tech. That displacement sweeps aside whatever cultural richness the low-tech society has. A few pennies of European money into each man’s hand has had a disastrous effect on a tribal structure that was centuries old.

A few pennies of European money into each man’s hand has also had a disastrous effect on the natural environment - and every species in it with an ancestry that went back to before even hominids emerged out of the Rift Valley.

Now Communist China, acting as rapaciously as any Western multinational company, has joined the list of exploiters. Its intrusion can only accelerate the social and environmental degradation.

Africa is in the process of eating itself alive

A brief war occurred in Rwanda in 1994 which cost the lives of many. (Was it 800,000 or 1,000,000? Who knows in a continent where human life has become too cheap to record accurately? How different to the 2,982 victims of 9-11 who are having their names etched in brass at Ground Zero.)

Today, the mutilations, rapes, tortures and murders, and the number of refugees moving from one place to another over much of the continent is almost beyond our comprehension.

There is no government anywhere on the continent outside of South Africa which is not grossly corrupt or a tyranny - or both. Even South Africa, a country we identify closely with culturally, has a per capita murder rate that is over 33 times our own and more HIV victims than any other country in the world.

Added to the perennial mess in the Arabic north is the threat of a fundamentalist Islamic takeover.

Conclusion

Many, if not most, Africans are hungry or sick or live in fear. In the not-too-distant future, almost all Africans will be in one or more of those three miserable situations. There is no reason to believe that there could ever be any other outcome.