I have a bunch of notebooks filled with my impressions of my trudge across the dark continent, and I look forward to sharing them wih you- but I have to let them sit there and ruminate a while, because it’s stil too close to the actual trip to be as clear on my experience as I’d like to be. <\/p>\n
There are a few things that come bobbing to the surface, though, and they are persistent in their vision. The first is the impression that the Africans with any ambition left the continent a million years ago. They moved to europe and russia and other places, and because the challenges were greater in those places they adapted and became more mature as a race. Those who stayed behind were the descendants of the people who liked it just fine the way it was, and were unwilling to do anything to improve their lot. <\/p>\n
So a million years of “fuck it” attitude. And now everything that happens in Africa, be it by the British, the Chinese, Americans, whomever- it all looks like exploitation, because the Africans won’t do ANY of this theirselves. There is no native African industry. None. Everything there, be it a bicycle, a telephone, a desk or a door, is either made outside the country, or made inside the country by people poorly adapted to do so, on machinery imported from someplace else. The things native to Africa are agriculture (and it’s nothing but crude) fishery (and that’s even cruder) beekeeping (the crudest) and some livestock farming. The first industries that Man ever created. it’s as if the Africans are stuck there, and anyone who developed the ambition to do better or more, left the country untold generations ago. <\/p>\n
Also: Cellphones. Everyone in the country has a damned cellphone, and they’re all from China, and they all have lots of wierd porn loaded onto them. People who don’t have a decent pair of pants will show up with a blackberry (or knockoff). Kids in villages with no water or sanitation have flip phones. You “charge” the phone with minutes at any store. Everyone has a solar charger or a place where they work that they can plug in their phone to charge the battery. <\/p>\n
Talk about a cargo cult. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have a bunch of notebooks filled with my impressions of my trudge across the dark continent, and I look forward to sharing them wih you- but I have to let them sit there and ruminate a while, because it’s stil too close to the actual trip to be as clear on my experience as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2761"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}