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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: The Audacity of Africa Amid new images of starving Africans we are told the United Nations is using a word it rarely utters—famine. It is the next supposedly global crisis, though no one ever explains how a succinctly regional matter can also be a global one. UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Baroness Valerie Amos has called on would-be donors to “dig deep for Africa.” Only a (so-called) baroness would ask Western nations with high unemployment rates to give to someone else. In response, the author will now utilize a phrase which seems to roll all too frequently off the tongue these days—go to hell. Harsh? Not particularly. Although Africa has a new famine every few years, it yet cannot seem to put together the pieces of the simple equation: Constant Sexual Activity + Desert + Tribal Warfare = Starvation. It is not a lone locale or a single nation which is affected—it is a large chunk of an entire continent. This most recent racial roundup of your meager money is brought courtesy of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya. In total, the United Nations estimates more than 12 million people are in “urgent need.” Is it not reasonable to inquire about what these people failed to learn from famines in Biafra (1967-70)? Or Uganda (1980)? Or Ethiopia (1984-5)? Or Somalia (1991-93)? Or Sudan (1998)? Or the Congo (1998-2004)? Or Rhodesia (AKA Zimbabwe 2000-09)? Or Sudan again (2003)? Or Malawi (2005)? Or Niger (2005-06)? Or Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya redux (2006)? Or Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya yet again (2008)? Or all of East Africa (2008)? Or Kenya still once more (2009)? Worse, these aid agencies have the gall to call it “food assistance.” Food assistance is when one must request horseradish a second time from a negligent waiter. This is food coddling, overpopulation production, or at a minimum, massive nutritional welfare. While it is difficult to observe emaciated Africans, a piquant preventative is to not notice them in the first place. For those who recoil in horror at my words, the author humbly advocates that any African donations be immediately redirected to him in care of this publication, whereupon your hard-earned income will promptly be squandered toward supporting a bevy of lovely beauties (post-adolescent, unlike many African “brides”) to be licentiously entertained in St. Tropez or Las Vegas, location at the donors’ discretion. As a Western concession, taking potshots at any passing fellow tourists will be forgone. While the parable is absurd, the principle is not. Who among us would not enjoy interminable, consequence-free intercourse? A recent TV news report broadcast an interview with an African woman who arrived at a refugee camp after nearly a month of walking…with her five children. She was joined by other families of similar expanse. Aside from Gypsies and Mormons, with how many families is the average reader acquainted that has five children? The difference between these Africans and Westerners is that very few of us have had the privilege of enjoying five children. In the West we have to pay for them ourselves. We don’t rely on others to provide basics such as food for us. Most lamentably, ours are never born to begin with—and the world is much the lesser for it. The cost of welfare in the United Kingdom for 2011 is judged to be almost £110 billion. In the United States it is estimated in 2011 to be around $700 billion. There are also highly disproportionate costs for housing assistance, healthcare, and educational aid (as in the US, where public schools frequently receive significantly higher sums per child in “urban districts” than those spent on their pigment-deficient counterparts). Similarly large charges accrue throughout the West. The greater loss in the particular genius, not to mention overall genus, of squandering such spectacular sums rather than investing in our best and brightest is impossible to tally. These costs are our reparations for the “sin of slavery” and nature’s incorrigibility. Fair enough: We are responsible for our actions and perhaps those of our ancestors. Yet one wonders why the Africans who were never carried off from the continent need be our perpetual dependents. After caring for our own Africans brought here to home, we apparently must also pay for those left behind to endure the Great Scramble a century later. And what has an African colonial period of roughly two generations cost the West? No less than six generations of reparations payments and likely more to come. What has been our debt on a few hundred million dollars taken for useful purposes from interior lands in those scant years? Over a trillion in aid, resettlement in our own homelands by virtual unassimilables, and the contagion of crime which the Third World ever infects upon the First. Africans were carried complete from the Stone Age to the Technological Age and given a wholly developed continent-wide infrastructure which they merely had to operate responsibly. In just over a quarter-century without supervision, these modern benefits have either decayed, atrophied, or been Orientalized. If anyone need be caring for the Africans now, should it not be their new masters, the Chinese? While this recent catastrophe may not be the fault of those who suffer from it, another salient and seldom-made point is that neither is it the fault of the writer, the reader, nor most of the other millions living a half-globe away but are forced to foot the bill. We had nothing whatsoever to do with the crisis, yet we pay to alleviate it. Already we hear conditions in Africa are worsening and the famine is spreading and, frankly, one simply ceases to care. Were these people left to their devices, one could hope for a reprieve of the tragedy for their sake. As they are wholly beholden to us, one only hopes that we will be granted a reprieve of them for our own sake. If any of this aid truly made the slightest impact on Africa’s enlightening, so be it. One would tighten the belt, pull up the boots, and set shoulder to boulder. Yet it never does. Africa is today what Africa has always been: a desperately poor money pit which swells in everything we provide and in return provides us with nothing but another tale of mortal woe approximately once every half-decade. For the current and all future famines in Africa, one suggests they peddle their pathos elsewhere. Go East, Young African! After a literal half-century or more of taxation-theft, wealth-redistribution, and colossal opportunity-costs for your benefit, the West has had enough. As every taxpayer from Krasnodar to Kansas City already knows from perusing their compelled-compassion curtailed paycheck, when it comes to Third World beggary, we already gave at the office whether we wanted to or not.
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#5. To: Dakmar (#0)
(Edited)
Maybe so, and maybe there are no good choices left today -- just different ones bad in different ways -- but it wasn't China that fed the nogs and caused the nog population boom. I found a 1962 article in a Wisconsin paper on Africa's nutrition problems. My first reaction was laughter, at both the author's misunderstandings and innocent un-PC comments, but it's funny/sad. What a tragedy, for everybody. Except for China, for which it may be entertainment.
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