President Kagame Sounds so American

A Comment to the article "Why the U.S. Needs Africa" published in The Washington Post on September 21, 2009.

By Elainedatter2
September 21, 2009

I was quite surprised after reading the article, to see that it was written by the President of one of Africa's 54 sovereign countries. Surprised because he used the term Africa in exactly the way less informed people on this side of the Atlantic use it as if Africa was one country.

He has thus legitimized the bulking together of Nigeria's oil rich but mismanaged economy, with the redemption offered to Gaddafi by the presidency of the African Union.

He is lumping together the earliest universities in the West- University of Fez in Morocco, El Azhar in Cairo and Timbuktu, with those countries where there are hardly any schools and no free public education.

He is also lumping together the ancient proud cultures of Ethiopia, with the country of Angola, also proud, but where I understand from a friend who has been there, that the road from the airport into the city is lined with one- legged beggars, from the use of land mines in recent wars.

Thus, Mr. President sounds so American.

No one with any real sense would lump all of these vast regions, in a continent that can absorb the USA three times over, and still have a lot of spare land, into one "Africa" as if he was speaking of the area recently retaken from the Tamils by the government of Sri Lanka.

African thinkers, from even pre-independence times, have been talking about African solutions to African problems, but they were and are recognizing the commonality of problems in some areas, and the uniqueness of specific regions.

Africa's single unified specific need may well be renegotiated contracts with all the mining companies ripping off the continent in Mauritania-French iron ore mining, Congo-All of the minerals found anywhere else in the world, Angola, Algeria and Nigeria and Darfur in Sudan-oil interests including every western oil conglomerate and now China.

The problems of desertification in the Sahel, is unique to that area, and people of the lush highlands of Uganda may not at all be interested in the sort of environmental issues facing Niger, Chad, Dahomey (actual Benin) and northern Nigeria. It is not immediate to them.

The recent case of the pollution of the city of Abidjan in Ivory Coast, by a British oil conglomerate, resulting in the death of sixteen people, and the sickening of about 30,000 should be a cause for concern, since it demonstrates the First World attitudes to the continent- which can be summed up as "rip off its people, resist their immigration to Europe and North America, and use the continent as a dumping ground for expired medications, rotten meat, defective hardware, and toxic chemicals needing to be dumped somewhere, but not in our backyard".

There is the need for European and North American business people to develop a code of morality in dealing with the environmental issues of industrialization that would govern their behavior in mining areas. (Small boys living near the Ashanti Gold Fields in Ghana, piss blood from the poisonous chemicals let out into the air and water).

In those cases, there is the need for broad policies governing behavior on the African Continent. This should be binding on African companies doing explorations in African countries also. Lumping all of them together is childish, ignorant and perpetuates the system of seeing Africa as a problem.

If we are going to mine the last great resources of minerals on the planet, Coltan (columbite and tantalite) being unique to the continent, we need a protocol for treating the people as human.

However, first, we need to look at a map, and recognize the unique nature of the world's largest inhabited continent, if you did not consider Euroasia as one. AFRICA IS 11.6 MILLION SQUARE MILES OF LAND.

We need also to provide western leaders, including the USA with more accurate maps. The one popular in the west, Mercator's projection, shows Africa and Greenland (0.8mile square) as having the same size.

Peter's projection, a more accurate map, was developed more than twenty years ago, and our US schools still use Mercator's.

This may be the root of the problems of portraying "Africa" as one country. It is difficult to comprehend that Nigeria is bigger than the state of Texas, Rhode Island and a few others thrown together, and had 400 spoken languages.

In the sense of all that I said here, His Excellency the President of Rwanda is a westerner who has no idea of what he is talking about, but his speech sounds nice- which may be all that America needs to hear.

No Hugo Chavez here, to provide a book documenting grievances, but nice words and smiles all around.

Sir, please feel free to use any facts in this essay to improve yours for Africa's sake.