A continent to cry for

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.