Times Series on Africa

Powers draws some interesting conclusions about the continent. Africa is a vast land mass (about four times the size of the United States), with stupendous problems, but with a tremendous potential as well. To reduce its complex problems to simple terms hardly surprises me. The American proneness to impatience often lends itself to a reductionist analysis and the quick remedy that usually fails.

As a Euro-American revisiting the “ruin” wrought by his forbears in Africa, Powers’ jeremiad is nothing but the expression of a collective, racial point of view, long hackneyed.

The Europeans committed the most barbaric atrocities on our people and land. For a warped sense of sport and fun the pre-World War I Germans used to “hunt” our people, thereby decimating the population. The bones of their victims lie scattered all over South-West Africa (Nambia), even till today.

Talking of rationalization, yes, we Africans are not alone in making excuses for our failures. But some of those excuses were and are still beyond refutation--slave trade on a massive scale, the concerted plunder of the land for Western interests, the support of totalitarianism in South Africa by the West, the naked attempt to subvert and destabilize the embryonic governments on the continent, and the price-fixing for the raw materials on which the economies of the governments largely depend.

Racism--the lethal weapon of the British and the Germanic people--the aboriginal Anglo-Saxon tribe, has always been the vicious means of their global expansion and dominance. And Africa has been the worst recipient of this diabolical policy.

I never knew I was a “black” African until I came to the United States. In this country “race” is invested with variegated, sociological complexions with its insidious and tragic implications. Why no reference to the white, or the cadaverous European, the yellow Asian, and the brown South American in your various media. Isn’t a uniform application of your racial categories in order when you steadfastly depict all races thus?

Of all the people Powers selectively interviewed, Peter Enahoro best sums up the mood and direction of Africa--”Africa is going to take its place in the world eventually . . . in a confused sort of way we are moving.” Much of Africa is only 20 years removed from colonial rule. The United States is over 200 years old, and Mexico over 150 years. Most of the countries in Latin America have been politically independent for well over 100 years. On a comparative basis, how many of them are doing better than Nigeria, barely emerging from the British Empire (1960)?

However shallow his analysis, safari-like his observations, artificial his conclusions, Powers is to be commended for his effort.

EJIOBI KONYE AGBAHIWE

Los Angeles