Africa rising
Source | Google photo of a majestic baobab tree in Africa
Synopsis: A time comes when all tyrants and looters fall and start to fade away when people get the courage to say no to them. This is what is happening now in Africa. It is a start to a brighter future for all Africans that will uplift the poor and downtrodden who have long aspired to get rid of their oppressors so that they are free to decide their own future. The Oppressors will fight back so the Africans should be ready to make many sacrifices before they can achieve their goal. The blog looks at the leadership in Burkina Faso who has dared to take the bold step to develop his country with its resources.
I always had a soft spot in my heart for Africa, but this soft spot developed over the years after I had spent nearly 9 years of my professional life in various countries like Mali, Algeria, Burundi and Sudan where I had the privilege of observing Africans closely to learn about their culture, their values and their resilience.
The more I learned about the Africans, more I was convinced that someday the continent as a whole will rise and take its rightful place among the nations of the world as a vibrant and dynamic economy that will lift its various countries out of poverty and bondage to the so-called developed nations that exploit its enormous natural wealth while leaving the Africans poor and downtrodden.
If you read the pages of history, you will learn how the European countries like England, France, Belgium, Germany, Netherland and Italy colonized various parts of Africa where they ruthlessly exploited the minerals and other resources like diamond, copper, silver, uranium and its beautiful ebony of its forests to enrich their countries while leaving the Africans only scraps.
They decimated the large herds of elephants just to get the ivory to make billiard balls and killed the wildlife for the pelts to make coats for their women. The list of their crimes is a long one and more are added to it even today. Under their colonial rule, they treated the Africans as slaves to work in their mines, their coffee plantations and their other labor-intensive industries so that they could live in luxury in homes built by the poor Africans. They became rich at the expense of the Africans.
Once a reporter went to the Ivory Coast to interview the cocoa farmers and was shocked to see them in rags and living in poverty. He gave them some Swiss chocolate that they ate for the first time and told them that it is made from the cocoa they produced and were paid a pittance, but the Swiss company made enormous profit from the sale of the chocolate worldwide. This story is repeated a hundred times all over Africa. The European countries bought uranium from Niger at 1 Euro per pound while they sold it for 200 Euro to those who needed it to run their nuclear power plants.
When this was not enough, the Belgians brought in their anthropologists to study the difference between the Hutus and the Tutsis in Burundi who then measured the nose and the lips using cardboard cut outs and declared that the Tutsis were a superior tribe than the Hutus who had flatter and wider nose and thicker lips. This poison destroyed whatever good relations these two tribes had in the past that led to the genocide at a scale that shocked me to say the least, but the arrogant Belgians never apologized for making such mischief.
I have seen this arrogance of the Europeans in Mali, Kenya, Burundi Burkina Faso and Rwanda who treated the Africans as low life being who were not worth anything and who were incapable of running their countries without their help. One Canadian asked the help of a Malian to find a place where he had to have a meeting, so this gentle Malian brought us to the place but was kept waiting until the Canadian finished his meeting. I was very annoyed at such treatment of an African, so I brought him home and apologized to him for the rude behavior of the white man.
The same thing happened in Rwanda where an American kept a driver waiting until he finished his long meeting keeping the poor driver hungry who needed to go to a toilet. I rescued him and brought him to a restaurant and fed him to his surprise and delight. But these are not the isolated cases. It happened all the time in many countries where the Europeans and the North Americans treated the locals badly.
The same fellow went to a village in Mali where he started asking the villagers what their problems were and what they needed to overcome them. It raised the hopes of the poor villagers who did not know that the Canadian fellow was just making baseless conversations without an iota of intention to solve their problems. I was shocked at his calumny and said so to him, but he just shrugged it off.
Once I was in Niamey, the capital of Niger where two Europeans wanted a meeting with the director of an agricultural program so asked me to interpret for them because they could not speak French. It turned out that these toubabou meaning white foreigners wanted to impose their strict terms on the use of funds in the project and insisted that only their candidate would handle the money showing that they did not trust the locals. The director flatly refused so the meeting ended but I noticed how the director challenged the notion that only the foreigners could run their project and decide whom to trust. So, I thought that the time has come for the Africans to stand up to these outsiders and show them the door. It was a positive change that was sure to come.
I have seen the extreme poverty in Mali, Burundi and Burkina Faso where poor people wore tattered clothes and their children with flies on their face and malnourished bodies stretched their thin arms to beg for whatever the Toubabou could give them. All foreigners are called Toubabou meaning white foreigners, but I was ashamed that it included me.
In Burundi the poverty was widespread. The Hutus, who are mainly the farmers, wore tattered clothes and their kids looked malnourished because they could not afford milk or meat. The Tutsis who felt superior to the Hutus thanks to the Belgian anthropologists, only made the matter worse until it exploded in Rwanda where the Hutus who were in majority rose up to take revenge on the Tutsis and slaughtered them en masse just before I arrived in Burundi. It was the same in Burundi where the Tutsis took revenge on the hapless Hutus there.
A Spanish nun whom I had known in Mali wrote to me that she was now working in Rwanda so I asked her to leave Rwanda immediately because I could sense that something very bad was about to happen. I could feel the tension there between the Hutus and Tutsis and decided not to work in Rwanda although I was offered a job and went instead to work in Burundi. But it was the same situation there that led to massive bloodshed in these two countries while UN just watched it passively and took no measures to stop the genocide.
Please read my biography Chapter twelve : The blood soaked hills of Burundi -1988 to 1990 to learn more.
But the first country in Africa where I worked was Algeria that had gained its independence from France only some 10 years ago in 1971 at a great loss of over a million people in their long fight. Today Algeria is a shining example of what freedom from oppression has brought to Algeria in terms of development of the country.
I lived in Sikasso in Mali that was close to Burkina Faso, so I used to go to Bobo Dioulasso or even their capital Ouagadougou, but the roads were just dirt roads that were blocked when it rained because it was difficult to drive on very muddy road. The villagers lived in isolation in huts made of mud with thatch roof which was just like in Mali, but they worked hard to raise corn and sorghum for their sustenance while the Fulani tended their animals like cows, goat and sheep.
Please read my biography on Mali in Chapter eight The abject poverty of Mali to learn more.
But I did not know at that time how rich Mali and Burkina Faso were because they had gold deposits and other valuable minerals that the French and Canadian companies exploited and left very little to the country where the miners remained poor and malnourished. It was the same for the poor farmers who worked very hard to grow cotton that the cotton mills run by the French declared of poor quality so gave them a lower price and deducted the cost of seed and fertilizer from it leaving very little to the farmers. It was then transported to France to enrich their economy and its textile industry. I was shocked because the cotton produced in Mali and Burkina Faso was the very best.
This was the pattern throughout Africa where foreign companies got the resources out of Africa to enrich their countries while leaving Africans in poverty.
The Belgians were probably the cruelest of the colonialists in Congo where the poor Africans dug out the copper from the deep mines working under appalling conditions that led to a revolt causing widespread violence and loss of lives in Katanga province in the sixties.
You have heard of the history of exploitation in South Africa where the De Beers company controlled all the diamond mines where miners were made to work like animals paying them pittance while the foreigners took the diamonds to other countries to sell and get super rich. The South Africans remained poor while watching the foreigners looting their diamonds and gold helplessly. When they protested, they were beaten mercilessly or killed.
One African king of the Matabele tribe who was very fond of diamonds, sent his people to work in the mines and steal some diamonds for him now and then. So, one day a miner found a huge diamond that he somehow brought out in spite of very tough security checks only to smash it completely before he was caught. He took the stance that if he could not have it, no one will. The diamond was worth millions of dollars when cut and polished.
James Michener wrote a novel on South Africa where he mentioned about the king who was very fond of pasting raw diamonds on his body. He also wrote about the Dutch settlers called the Voortrekkers who later created the apartheid system to prevent the Africans to improve themselves. They were racists to boot and ruled over them with iron fist. It took the sacrifice of patriots like Mandela, Sisulu and Biko to dismantle the apartheid. The so-called Mahatma Gandhi who lived in South Africa also was racist and made many nasty comments about the Africans like they were lazy and subhumans of bad habits.
It is hard to believe that the Bank of England financed the slave traders for the ships they needed to supply the slaves to America. Needless to say, that the bank and the slave traders got enormously rich, but it was not the only bank to do so. Other banks in Europe did the same because to them it was just a good business, so it continued until a missionary like Dr. Livingstone started to raise the issue in England to stop this shameful slave trade. Finally, the trade was abolished but not before several millions of Africans were captured and traded like commodity.
The loot and exploitation of Africa started long ago when the Romans captured slaves to build their infrastructure and used them as gladiators to amuse the Romans in coliseums in their empire. It got worse when Quran told the Moslems that slavery was permitted so the Arab slave traders saw it as an opportunity to make a lot of money. They captured the Africans from the hinterland using extreme violence and brought them out to Zanzibar from where they were sold to the Europeans and others who wanted them. Arab slave traders did not feel any guilt because their Quran permitted it. When the captured Africans resisted, they were given the choice of becoming a Moslem or a slave so the forced conversion to spread Islam in Africa started. Those who still resisted were killed.
Often the African kings or the chief of a tribe colluded with the slave traders to get them from a rival tribe with whom they had enmity. In Mali as late as 1970, there were slaves but finally it ended after a lot of protest. I know that even today slavery is practiced in Mauritania and among the Sahara Bedouins like the Tuaregs who have now become full time terrorists creating havoc in the Sahel.
This gave the French an opportunity to enter the Sahel countries like Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger and set up its military bases in the guise of protecting them from the insurgents and the Moslem Tuareg raiders but failed to curb them. Their military helped France to keep these countries in their power so that they could control the economy and loot their gold and other resources to enrich France. I have many good friends in France, but I doubt they are told how their government treats the Africans and exploits their resources.
You will not be surprised to learn how the IMF and the World Bank give loans to poor African countries under the strictest terms in the name of development that push them in debt traps they find very difficult to get out of, so they keep borrowing more money. The Western countries use these institutions to keep African countries in perpetual state of poverty so that they can advance their evil exploitation of its natural wealth.
When the American mafia was kicked out of Cuba after the revolution, the American government put severe trade sanction to isolate Cuba and bring it to its knees. This sanction has not been lifted but Cuba is still alive and making progress. Soon it may join BRICS that will expand their trade dramatically. The Americans use the same tactics in Africa. Any African country that tries to defy the Western countries, they threaten them with sanctions and try to assassinate their leaders using fake narratives.
Remember Col. Gaddafi? He was a leader who stood up for the Africans and tried to stop this exploitation of them by the Western countries. He brought tremendous development to his countrymen and made the Libyan currency gold based to be traded in most countries in Africa but the Western countries including France and the NATO countries could not accept it so invaded Libya to kill Gaddafi. They destroyed a rich and developed country so that they could continue to loot its resources. They left behind a ruined country still in chaos.
France has now tried to assassinate Col. Traore in Burkina Faso some 19 times because he has ordered the French to leave his country and stop the stealing of its gold. Niger has done the same thing and now Mali has joined them to become free of the Western domination of their economy and stop the loot. Recently Mali ordered the Canadian gold mining company to leave Mali and confiscated 4 tons of gold from them. Senegal, Rwanda, Ghana and many other nations are now encouraged to protect their country and its resources from the depredations of the multinational corporations that are active in many fields to serve their masters.
If you look at what has happened in Burkina Faso since a bold and pragmatic leader like Traore emerged who is not afraid of France or any other country has certainly showed many African nations that they need to wake up from this long slumber of servitude of the Western interests and use all their energy to bring their countrymen and women out of poverty by developing their infrastructure that creates jobs for them. Traore has paid off his national debt of several billions of dollars that surprised the World Bank and IMF. Now Chad has also declared to do the same.
He has promised that the wealth of Burkina Faso will stay in his country to help uplift the living standard of all his citizens by giving them job opportunities, building 50000 new and modern houses in his brand-new Renaissance city under construction. A most modern hospital has been built where the poor will get free treatment. The farmers are given tractors to plow their fields and use modern agricultural methods to increase their productivity. Traore has built modern food processing factory to stop the waste of farm produce and increase the farm income. Brand new buses are making life easier for the people to travel anywhere in their country at a cheap price.
The Burkina gold is now processed in their own processing plants and numerous such projects that are reshaping the future of Burkina Faso. The new highways, railways to join it to Ghana, new airport, new schools and facilities to bring education to everyone. They will then be trained to work in various government or private enterprises. This is a sea change in Burkina Faso that is well on its way to emerge as a developing country using its own resources that is a first time in the continent that other countries can now follow and make Africa no longer a land of the poor but a land of development and bright future for everyone.
One Indian girl in her teens travels all over Africa alone and makes vlogs to upload to the U tube. She describes each country she visits very accurately and has noticed that the poorer the country, more the thievery, domestic violence and social chaos. This is nothing new. I know that young and not so young people aspire to have a better life in any country, but they are desperate because their government fails them to create jobs for them, so they take to thievery, small crime and drug addiction.
When she was in Malawi, she noticed it and sent videos from there. In South Africa, the young people who are jobless become social deviants. Young girls get into prostitution in order to earn some money to feed their family. Others sell illegal alcohol and drugs, so it is for them a survival strategy. It was the same what I saw in Burkina Faso 40 years ago.
But now a new day has arrived with a brighter future because one young man called Traore has dared to stand up to the Western colonialists and showed them the door at a great risk to his life, but Africa needs strong leaders like him. I have a feeling that the Africans are now fully awake and are joining hands to make their continent to reach its full potential in the future. Surely, they have to make some sacrifices and work hard to achieve what most Africans thought impossible in the past.
The Western economies that got rich by looting Africa are on a decline because they are losing their ground in a fertile continent that was their source of income and slaves since a long time. But the Africans have stood up to say that they are no one’s slaves anymore and are perfectly capable of developing their own countries using their own resources.
I wish them all the success and believe that they will succeed because I know that the Africans are very hard-working people who will bring back their glory days of Kush kings who ruled their empire that once ruled from Meroe to Egypt. Remember that we are all descendants of Lucy in Ethiopia no matter where we live in the world. So, we should all help Africa in our own ways to develop and become the shining continent that it deserves to be.
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