africa

I want to defend Ben Bella just as I am going to defend Boumedienne. Ben Bella was not the 'demon' that the nervous, demagogic communique of 19 June accused him of being, no more than Boumedienne is the 'reactionary' that L'Unita wrote about. Both are victims of the same drama that every Third World politician lives through if he is honest, if he is a patriot. This was the drama of Lumumba and Nehru; it is the drama of Nyerere and Sekou Toure. The essence of the drama lies in the terrible material resistance that each one encounters on taking his first, second, and third steps up the summit of power. Each one wants to do something good and begins to do it and then sees, after a month, after a year, after three years, that it just isn't happening, that it is slipping away, that it is bogged down in the sand. Everything is in the way: the centuries of backwardness, the primitive economy, the illiteracy, the religious fanaticism, the tribal blindness, the chronic hunger, the colonial past with its practice of debasing and dulling the conquered, the blackmail by the imperialists, the greed of the corrupt, the unemployment, the red ink. progress comes with great difficulty along such a road. The politician begins to push too hard. He looks for a way out through dictatorship. The dictatorship then fathers an opposition. The opposition organises a coup.And the cycle begins anew.

The unschooled European mind, inclined to rational reduction, to pigeonholing and simplification, readily pushes everything African into a single bag and is content with facile stereotypes.

It's a lot like the Wild West out here... just with tea shops instead of saloons. Wild West Sahara, that is.

Africa is a huge continent; it would take several lifetimes of thousands of researchers testing in hundreds of languages to collect a valid sample of anything, especially IQ. Most Africans do their schooling in a second language, not their mother tongue. How many people would accept to be tested for their IQ level not in their primary language?

By the Middle Ages_ the introduction of the Trivium was well-known: S_DI, an educated black from Tombouctou, author of the well-known work entitled, __arikh es-Soudan_ cites amongst the subjects that he mastered, logic, dialection, grammar, rhetoric, not to mention law and other disciplines...the long lists of subjects studied and the lettered African intellectuals who taught them at the University of Tombouctou_

You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name. They__l believe all kinds of shit about Africa.

It__ not that easy living with malaria. The reality of the high annual death toll should make that very obvious.

If I had not grown up in Nigeria- and if all I knew of Africa were of popular images- I too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting sensless wars, dying of poverty and aids- unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner.

As it was, being a Zimbabwean immigrant was the worst thing a person could be in Southern Africa. They were the new Hebrews _ homeless.

If one could speak two languages well and was raised on tea and baguettes for breakfast,in places where the most mundane daily business on the street is conducted in four languages, where horse carts park at cyber cafes, where would one go? Where could one go? Why,with a smile and a handshake, very far, indeed!

AFC Leopards were as thrilling a side as ever took the pitch and they dominated East African football in the eighties. That Kenyan players were an excitable bunch was attested to in one memorable Leopards match, with the opposing goalkeeper being handcuffed and dragged away to jail by police.

If people's night fears of sorcery - which negatively influences their decision to use mosquito nets - fail to impress the outsider, the brute everyday reality remains; in a number of rural African villages it is still much too common for very real hyenas to snatch people, especially children, out of their own homes as they lie sleeping at night, because of the lack of a good front door.

Indeed, there is something in this valley, some spirit and some life, and much to talk about in the huts. Although nothing has come yet, something is here already.

If you are stealing something it__ better if it__ small and hideable or something you can eat quickly and be done with, like guavas. This way, people can__ see you with the thing to be reminded that you are a shameless thief and that you stole it from them, so I don__ know what the white people were trying to do in the first place, stealing not just a tiny piece but a whole country. Who can ever forget you stole something like that?

When an entire segment of the world is burned and reduced to a lawless battleground for thugs and mercenaries, a land where government does not exist, where the slate of history is being wiped out and hope has drowned in gallons of innocent blood, the only respite comes in the form of the open seas and what lies beyond the horizon. So ships are boarded and pain is tolerated just a little while longer.

To understand what happened in Zimbabwe its worth trying to see things through the Zimbabwean people prism for a moment. Immune from the propaganda and the western media mind- bend. The real issues started a long, long time ago before the current regimes. Those who came bearing greed and seeking to rip off the cradle of Sub-Saharan Africa orchestrated the demise the people of Zimbabwe found themselves reeling in

According to Okonkwo, the British via its indirect rule system ensured that Africans saw their native leaders as the demons who betrayed their people. He called it a demonocracy and that was the first time I had seen him become so passionate about issues that affect Africa as a people and continent.

How can I explain this? Why is it you can never hope to describe the emotion Africa creates?You are lifted.Out of whatever pit, unbound from whatever tie, released from whatever fear. You are lifted and you see it all from above. Your pit, your ties, your fear. you are lifted, you slowly rise like a hot-air balloon, and all you see is the space and the endless possibilities for losing yourself in it.