In the most recent State of the Union address, Bush urged members of Congress
...to serve the interests of America by showing the compassion of America.
Since this followed on a paragraph that mentioned the problems of AIDS and malaria, many took this as aimed at the health crisis in Africa. But it's a huge step back from where Bush has gone in the past.
In the 2003 SOTU, Bush dedicated the middle section of his talk to the discussion of AIDS in Africa and finished with this statement.
I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.
Why was Bush so explicit back then and not today? Well, likely because he never followed up on delivering the aid that he promised.
But there's a better question: why does Africa need our help in the first place?
The Cradle
We are all Africans. African-Americans, African-Europeans, African-Asians, African-whatever.
The African plains, the tropical forests, and the jumbled landscape of the Rift Valley served as mankind's womb, incubator, and cradle. By two million years ago, Homo erectus left Africa and spread across Europe and Asia. "Upright Man" was followed by other species of hominids, and around 500,000 years ago the first Homo sapiens slipped away from Africa and started spreading across the Old World. Around 40,000 years ago, a particularly astute, sophisticated group of humans established themselves in Africa, and then quickly moved on.
The history of man on Earth is not just of one African Diaspora, but many. So the question remains, if Africa is the source of man -- not just as a species, but the root of all the cultures we know today -- then why isn't modern civilization centered on Africa? Why wasn't Europe divided up among Africa states? Why wasn't it ships from Africa that sailed into the Caribbean and raised African flags among the islands they found there? For that matter, why wasn't it African nations who brought their European and Asian slaves to work the fields of their new American colonies?
The World You Know is a Lie
The world is round. You probably already suspected as much. Actually, the world is an oblate spheroid, slightly squashed in at the poles and bulging a bit around the middle (just like me), but for most purposes, round is a good description.
At some time in your life, you've probably spent some time spinning a globe around and staring at the multi-colored wonder of the political boundaries and all the tiny place names. However, in all likelihood, you've spent much more time looking at flat, rectangular representations of a spherical planet.
Does this world look familiar to you?
This is the
Mercator Projection, by far the most common representation of the Earth. It was designed in 1569 by a guy named, not surprisingly, Mercator. The map was designed in a way that was particularly useful to sailors of the time. It preserves the relationship between angles, so that east-west and north-south are scaled the same at any point on the map.
If you're a sixteenth century sailor plotting out a course for Zanzibar, this type of map has definite advantages. However, for all the generations that have come after, the wide acceptance of Mr. Mercator's map has left us with a very distorted view of our planet.
Take a look at that map again. From referencing this map you can see that North America is around twice as big as South America, with Alaska being around half the size of the lower 48 states. Greenland is roughly the same size as South America. So is Africa.
All of this is wildly wrong.
How about this planet? Seen it anywhere? This is the Gall-Peters Projection, and for people accustomed to seeing a Mercator world, this place seems horribly distorted.
The difference is, the Gall-Peters map, first proposed in 1855 (and the subject of some interesting history and political infighting ever since), was made for very different reasons. Where Mercator preserves angles, Gall-Peters preserves area. Looking at this map, you can see that Greenland is not really the dominating peninsula that it seemed on the Mercator map. Instead of being the equal of Africa, it's 1/13th as large. North and South America are actually quite well matched in size. Alaska, though still big, is not all that big. Africa, on the other hand, is enormous. It's nearly a match for the whole of Europe and Asia.
Why the big difference? It's an unfortunate side-effect of Mercator's system that geography close to the equator gets reduced and that nearer the poles gets expanded. For a world dominated by cultures centered in the "plumped up" areas, this has generally suited everyone just fine. But it's a lie. The equator cuts into the northern edge of South America, which accounts for its reduced size on a Mercator map. Africa is practically bisected by the equator, so it's more abridged than any other continent.
That closeness to the equator is important for other reasons, as well.
Why is Africa Not like America?
Let's go back to the map again. See that little spot over there that constitutes England? See how amazingly far north it is? Warmed by air passing over the Atlantic (at least until we screw up the Gulf Stream) Europe enjoys a considerably more clement climate that its location on the map might suggest. London lies north of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, but it's unlikely they'd be willing to trade winter temperatures. Balmy Rome is nearly aligned with chilly Boston.
Even so, the spread of climates in North America matches up well with the zones available in Europe. The American side is just shifted a bit to the south. Cultures, crops, and critters attuned to a European environment also have a good chance for survival in North America.
In his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond made the case for how geography gave civilization a leg up from the Fertile Crescent into Europe, and from there helped to promote the spread of European influence around the world.
Blessed by a "kit" that included the best food crops and farm animals in the world, European settlers were able to make their home anywhere that their food and animals could thrive. Settlers were able to make their homes in all of North America, most of Australia, the southern half of South America, and in the southern tip of Africa, all using these same tools. They didn't go to America, or South Africa, or Australia and become locals. They came to those places and made them into new versions of Europe. Using the 8,000 year head start given to them by their crops and animals, and the devastating combination of technology and disease they carried along with them, they pushed aside native populations and moved in to stay.
But there's a part of the globe where that didn't work. It's hard to see, but look again at the Gall-Peters map. See the doubled-up lines circling above and below the equator? Those lines represent the tropics, and the tropics might as well be a No Go Zone for European settlers. Sure, a handful of such folks moved in and wax lyrical over their coffee plantations, but the plants and animals they grew elsewhere couldn't stand up to the tropical heat and the change from a four season environment to one where the only seasons were wet and dry. The wheat molded in the fields. Cows -- and settlers -- died of tropical diseases. Instead of the natives dropping from European diseases as the settlers encroached on their land, in the tropics, the direction of illness was reversed. For that reason, the tropics never became new versions of Europe.
So, does that mean Europeans left them alone? Hardly.
Back To Africa
Like the humans of pre-history, several paragraphs ago I wandered out of Africa and started following the history of European conquerors. But instead of looking at the well known conquests of the Europeans, let's peek into the heart of the giant continent.
While the crops and animals that had originated in the Fertile Crescent and gone on to trigger population booms across Europe would not grow in the African tropics, that doesn't mean the continent was trapped in a hunting and gathering stone age. Other crops -- including millet and sorghum -- began to be cultivated in Africa. African cattle, which had developed in the tropics and were much more resistant to that deadliest of African diseases, malaria, were kept. Just as in the Middle East and Europe, the development of agriculture in tropical Africa led to the development of settlements, and from there, to civilization.
Sometime around one thousand BC, an African civilization based on cattle-herding and agriculture began to spread across the continent. By 500 AD, most of tropical Africa was dominated by this group. The language spoken by many of these people was what's now called Bantu, and we can hear the echo of this expansive civilization in the languages of many Africans today.
Over the next two thousand years, these people built not just settlements, but a civilization. It's tempting to think of it as a "primitive," civilization, especially when images of poverty and destruction are all that we seem to get on our televisions when the news pays a rare call on humanity's home continent. But African civilization wasn't primitive. It was different.
What the Bantu people built was a tropical civilization, a society engineered around the problems that face any people living in the tropics: poor soil, long periods of drought, and disease. Most of all, disease. Everything from dietary guidelines to the locations of towns was designed to combat disease. These tropical civilizations were constructed with small scattered communities built in dry upload areas -- which kept them away from the swampy river bottoms where mosquito-spread malaria was at its worst, and made it easier to isolate and restrict any outbreak. Even such government and trading hubs as Great Zimbabwe rarely held more than 10,000 people. However, a complex web of trade routes allowed the small communities to produce specialized goods and work together like the parts of a larger city.
Don't think from any of this that the tropical empire was some sort of Eden. There's no indication that people there were any less greedy, violent, or selfish than their temperate neighbors. Dynasties rose and fell. Power shifted among communities and clans. The fortunes of the tropical world were affected by climate changes and by wars both external and civil. Even Great Zimbabwe was abandoned. Except for the interaction with traders (including the not inconsequential effects of the slave trade), all this happened in isolation.
By the start of the nineteenth century, the tropical empire was controlled by a collection of clans held together by shifting alliances. Through skill as a warrior -- and a politician -- a man named Shaka took control of the small Zulu clan and gradually brought more and more clans into a military alliance. By 1825 the Zulu controlled an empire reaching from the sea to the mountains in the west, an area estimated at between 20,000 and 30,000 square miles.
Shaka was more than just another clan leader, he was an African renaissance man. He changed the weapons that his people used, introducing a weapon that combined features of both spears and swords and augmenting it with a new shield design. He taught his men new tactics for these weapons, gave them extensive training, and built a force that could march fifty miles in a day to defeat all rivals. He developed novel solutions to the problem of supplying an army in the field, and revised the strategies that the clans had long used, adopting pincer-like formations and a system of employing reserve troops that would have been very familiar to Alexander the Great.
Outside of the military field, he reorganized the system through which the clans cooperated, building a much stronger central government. He ended long-standing practices of nepotism, creating a merit-based system for promotion. Shaka was so efficient at conquering and incorporating other clans (and without a doubt, so brutal at crushing his enemies), that entire groups took flight to avoid the reach of the expanding Zulu empire. The chaos of this Mfecane, or "scattering," helped to bring clans from the tropical empire into more contact with European settlers.
For his part, Shaka was well aware of the Europeans. Unlike the rulers of the Aztecs or the Inca, who were oblivious to the Spanish until the conquistadors appeared on their doorsteps, Shaka had been visited by European explorers and traders. He knew that the Europeans were out there, that they were expanding their range, and that they had technology that even his efficient Zulu army could not match. By 1825, he had started planning for an extensive education system to be managed by his new central government. He hoped to propel his people forward, giving them the knowledge they would need for a conflict he saw on the horizon.
In 1828, Shaka was assassinated by his half brother.
Into the Tropics
By the time Shaka started his rise in the tropics, Europeans had occupied South Africa for two centuries. The tip of the African continent was well outside the tropic latitudes, and Afrikaner settlers had preformed their "Europification" trick well, driving out the small tribes of Khoisan hunter-gatherers and bringing in their foreign crops and animals.
Just as American settlers had tackled the plains in one or another "Land Rush," the Afrikaners of the early nineteenth century started to look toward the interior as a place that promised land for those crowded in along the coast. When the British took control of the colony, that was the last straw for many of these people. Especially odious was a British law that gave equal rights to "free persons of color." By 1835, the Great Trek was solidly underway.
As the trekkers moved in ever greater numbers into the tropical areas, they increasing came into contact with local clans and with the still expanding Zulu empire. Depending on whose account you believe, either the same leader who had killed Shaka offered a group of settlers a false promise of a treaty and lured them into a trap, or the Zulus simply surprised the trekkers. In either case, the initial result was hundreds of settlers killed. The second result was The Battle of Blood River.
This battle demonstrated that the rules which had determined the outcome of European vs. native conflicts in the New World still held in the old. Despite the new weapons introduced by Shaka, despite the fearsome reputation of the Zulu warriors, the Europeans still had guns on their side. The same horrible math that had allowed Pizarro to dominate 80,000 Inca at the Battle of Cajamarca, came into effect at Blood River. At the end of the day, 3,000 Zulu warriors were dead. On the settler side, only a few had been wounded. Not one warrior had breached the settler's defenses. Though the Zulus managed to win a few engagements against the settlers or outnumbered British troops, Blood River was the signal for what was to come, both for the Zulu and for other tropical nations. Within a few decades, both the railroad and the machine gun came into play, and the results of battles became even more lopsided.
The Europeans moving into tropical Africa might not have had the "germs" part of Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel triad, but guns and steel proved more than adequate to bring the continent under their heel.
However, guns and steel couldn't hold off malaria, and it couldn't make wheat grow in an area where it rained half the year and baked the other half. Having conquered Africa, the Europeans found they couldn't live there.
So they decided, in the best tradition of kindergarten bullies, if they couldn't have it, no one else could either. Unable to turn Africa into anther Europe, they set out to build an infrastructure dedicated to a single purpose: to extract every last ounce of wealth and ruin the place for anyone else.
A Currency of Hands
What does it mean to be part of the "first world?" What makes a nation into a "third world country." We often here the terms thrown about to represent nations at various positions on the economic scale, or various degrees of "development."
However, instead of the usual designations, here's another: first world countries are those outside the tropics where European settlers imposed not just their will, but their system and themselves; second world countries are those where the Europeans did not come to stay but instead built a system around one word -- extraction. First world=settlement. Second world=exploitation.
As an example of how these second world countries fared, consider the Congo Free State. Starting in 1877, this area (around the area where Livingston and Stanley met) was controlled, not as a European colony, but as the private property of a single man -- Belgium's King Leopold II. Leopold was one of the richest men in Europe, and he was determined to extract even more riches from the Congo.
He established the principle of terres vacantes -- "vacant" land, by which he meant any land not occupied by Europeans. This land was declared property of the state, and any white man working for Leopold was free to do with this land as he liked. Concessions were sold on ivory, rubber, copper -- anything of value. For much of this area, every penny collected went directly into Leopold's pockets. And though the money he raised was a fortune unparalleled since the Spanish exploitation of the New World, it wasn't enough.
Leopold created an army, the Force Publique, with a singular purpose, not to defend his country, but to terrorize it. He burned African towns and villages and forced the inhabitants into labor camps. When men refused to cooperate, their wives and daughters were raped, whipped, and brutally tortured. Those who opposed the Force Publique were dealt with through tactics that seem to have come from a horror novel.
The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber... They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace... the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.
Eventually, even the Belgian public would not put up with Leopold's depravity in the Congo (just as
Uncle Tom's Cabin had helped to highlight the brutal nature of American slavery, Joseph Conrad's
The Heart of Darkness made people aware of the horrors going on in the Congo). But while the Congo may be an extreme example, in many ways it's the template.
In "colony" after colony, Africans were driven from their homes and moved to locations where they could work mines for diamonds, copper, gold, and other minerals. Or they found their own fields left fallow while they were forced to produce coffee, chocolate, and rubber -- crops that were exclusive to the tropics, but whose market was in the temperate world. Railroads were built, not to bring settlers in, but to take riches out. New settlements were created along the rivers, where it was easier to conduct trade.
The tropical civilization, designed to take advantage of the region's resources, and minimize the terrible effects of drought and disease, was destroyed.
All of this happened not in some distant past, and not more than a century ago. In many ways, it's still happening today. Even when these nations began to be freed of their colonial overlords, they found themselves saddled with infrastructure dedicated to extraction. Railroads and highways weren't located where they could effectively move foodstuffs around within the nation; they were built to take wealth away. Cities weren't located where they would be well away from disease infested swamps; they were built where they could be used to run the mines, plantations, and trade operations of the extraction regime. Populations that used to be scattered in regions relatively low in disease, were now concentrated in the more disease-prone regions. Most of all, governments weren't designed to help the people, promote democracy, improve health or education. Governments were designed to brutalize the people and keep the wealth flowing in one direction: out.
Most former African colonies were handed a pretense at Democracy, a government never designed to help the people in the country, and a rusting extraction system that offered simultaneously the only source of income and sure source of ultimate collapse.
What's the result of this infrastructure of extraction? That finally brings us back to the original question.
In this image, the two blue lines are the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Those nations colored in orange are the poorest of the poor, countries where the average annual income is less than $1,500.
The Temperate Man's Burden
So what's the matter with Africa? Is it that Africans are lazy, or inherently less intelligent, unable to manage a "civilized" nation? Did struggling with winter create in Europeans some greater, or some more intricate social bond? There's no evidence of this whatsoever.
There's nothing wrong with Africa's people. The inhabitants of tropical Africa are as smart as people anywhere, as adaptable as people anywhere, as caring and kind -- and as stubborn and cruel -- as people anywhere. We are all Africans, and we are all the same.
What's wrong with Africa is that it was wrecked, ravaged, and set up to fail. The governments of Africa are saddled with massive debt related to that unwieldy, outward-facing infrastructure and the inordinate amount of disease that comes from a displaced population concentrated in areas that are poorly suited to handle them. There's been no serious effort to support functional democracy in Africa, because the temperate nations don't want democracy in Africa. An Africa not groaning under debt and strictly beholding to organizations of the temperate world might be tempted to address its own problems, instead of pouring every ounce of wealth into the out-bound pipeline just to tread water. An Africa not dominated by corrupt militias might spend its wealth improving its own health care (a map of those places where malaria is endemic would look remarkably similar to the one above showing income, and there's no doubt that the two factors -- poverty and disease -- exist in a reinforcing cycle.) So the temperate world does everything it can to see that Africa remains weighed down and driven by the whip.
Does all of this mean Africa is hopeless? Of course not.
Does this mean that people in temperate nations are to blame for Africa's condition? Is this whole continent the ultimate victim?
I'm not a believer in ladling out guilt for actions a generation or more in the past. I feel no personal guilt over the measures that were taken in America during the period of slavery, and I feel equally guiltless for the brutality of Leopold and men like him. I simply wasn't here to do anything about it.
But I'm here now, and like everyone in the temperate world, I continue to benefit from the system of extraction and exploitation that is applied to the tropics. We, all of us outside the tropics, are the beneficiaries of a system that has left us inordinately wealthy. The cost for that -- from the time Spain began shipments of gold from Central America right up to the diamonds sparkling in the stores this Valentine's Day -- has been the destruction of the nations that couldn't be made to look like "us." We are living on, walking on, typing on, eating, and wearing the wreckage of the tropical world.
So what can we do? As with most things, being aware and staying aware is the first step. Don't get sidetracked by the idea that Africans are the author of their own misery. Don't let the pittance that gets sent back to the continent seem more important than the fortunes than have been, and continue to be, taken out.
Repairing Africa is going to take time, commitment, money, and a realization that the final chapter has to be written by tropical people picking up again the story of the tropical world. It's going to take a lot of money. It's going to take a lot of time.
It's going to take a lot more than some hot air from George Bush.