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Author Topic: Why Africa? By Bob Geldof
VanLuke
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Babbler # 7039

posted 18 November 2004 02:10 PM      Profile for VanLuke     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
An article well worth reading.

Why Africa?
By Bob Geldof
"After a trip to Ethiopia in 1985, Boomtown Rats singer and former Georgia Straight editor Bob Geldof organized Live Aid, a concert in July of that year that raised awareness and more than US$245 million for famine relief in the African country. After a recent visit, Geldof urged Prime Minister Tony Blair to set up a commission to address the problems throughout Africa. The following is excerpted and adapted from a speech Geldof gave to Britain's Bar Human Rights Committee in April regarding the challenges that commission, which Blair agreed to, will face.....

But in those 20 years things have got worse. Africa has, uniquely, grown poorer by 25 percent. A typical African country today has the GDP of a town of 20,000 in the U.K. Half of its people subsist on 65 pence or less a day, this at a time when we grotesquely pay each individual cow in the EU $2.50 per day in subsidy......

To establish a type of nationwide government, colonial administrators effectively set about inventing African traditions for Africa that would make the process more acceptable to the indigenous population. The most far-reaching inventions of tradition in colonial Africa occurred when the administrators believed they were respecting age-old African custom, where, as a commentator notes, "What were called customary law, customary land rights, customary political structure, and so on were in fact all invented by colonial codification."

By creating an image of Africa steeped in unchanging tradition, the colonizers condemned the continent to live in a reconstructed moment of its past: a vast continental theme park, Africaland, that hindered development for decades. But perhaps the most pernicious of the traditions that the colonial period bequeathed to Africa was the notion of tribalism. Just as every European belonged to a nation, every African must belong to a tribe, a cultural law. In Zambia, the chief of a little-known group once remarked, "My people were not Soli until 1937 when the Bwana D.C. told us we were." The concept of the Zulu as a discrete ethnic group did not emerge until 1870. ....

Of the 107 African leaders overthrown between 1960 and 2003, two-thirds were murdered, jailed, or slung into exile. Up until 1979, 59 African leaders were toppled or assassinated, only three retired peacefully, and not one was ever voted out of office. No incumbent African leader ever lost an election until 1982.....

The policies we pursue in the First World are almost perfectly designed to ensure our economic and therefore political supremacy. We are unlikely to sacrifice these time-honoured mechanisms of achieving economic success; when successful, we prevent others from joining us by kicking away the ladder that we have so recently scrambled up.

http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=6362


From: Vancouver BC | Registered: Oct 2004  |  IP: Logged

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