The Cause of Poverty in Africa

Africa is often portrayed in stereotypes: either a wild land of exotic animals and people (be they barbarians or of an unspoiled culture, depending on your outlook) or a world where politicians are corrupt and fat while everyone else starves amidst civil wars that make no sense. Charities and NGOs still stress how Africa cannot cope without the west's help, that these poor people cannot function on their own. Those open-minded individuals who try to help Africa and Africans are just as guilty of pandering to that modern social conscienceness as missionaries and Victorian mentalities. There are also those who stress that Africans should not touch western culture at all and remain true to their own culture. Arguments such as this ignore that this may trap people in a less-technological past, as if they should be happy to remain primitive and unmodern for the sake of culture, as if that culture will not take on and add meaning in the modern world. There is a balance between the past and the future that only Africans themselves can solve - and they have every capability of doing so, as humans have done since they became human.

The reason that the westerners came to sub Sahara Africa in the first place was to exploit to take, to extract its minerals, its rich resources from gold to ivory, from palm oil to spices and most of all for hundreds of years its people. In 1645 the first slaves were shipped from Africa and through the years following, 2 million Africans died during Atlantic Ocean crossings. With all respect to missionaries and Albert Schweitzer, the majority of Westerners who came to Africa did not come to make good and worthy people of the Africans, they came to good and worthy people and brought fear, destruction of tribes and kingdoms, of a way of life that even after years of independence has never been regained. The damage that Christian missionaries have done to the psychology of human kindness in Africa over the centuries is untold. Examples would take a litany too long to fit all the walls of any ancient temple. But here are two: missionaries routinely accompanied soldiers who came to steal lands and loot for their home European country. The procedure went as follows: the missionary would stand and read aloud an edict in Latin to whatever villagers had gathered. The edict, completely incomprehensible to the villagers, ordered that each of them must at that moment convert to Christianity or be killed or enslaved. After it was read, the guns and swords went to work. The soldiers felt justified in their murders through the benediction and authority of the Roman church. Through varying interpretations of the works of church fathers, the Roman church developed a system of permissible murder and looting, and it was used routinely. The missionaries would then go to work on the remaining peoples: the children were taught that their parents' intelligent, peaceful beliefs were "from the devil," and that they were to accept poverty "for the good of their souls;" whereas the conquerers were supposedly blessed by God with superior might and wealth, and so must be obeyed.

Having become a territory under his power, around the year 1717 King Ghezo, the King of Abomey at that time entrusted to his friend, the Brazilian slave trader CHACHA Felix de Souzaall, the administration and running of this new annexed country. Instead killing war prisoners, they were made to do forced labour but then the idea arose to send them to work in plantations in Europe and America. From then on prisoners of war, victim of plunders and adulterers were all sold to Europeans in this place. The huge success this slave trader found led him to increase his market, from then on anyone valid was sold, even royalty. The slaves were exchanged for objects, sometimes of very little value (canons, alcohol, guns, mirrors, hats, bits, and bobs…). A mirror for example was worth 40 - 50 a slave. Sometimes all the inhabitants of a whole neighbourhood were sold in one go: like the Brazilian neighbourhood of Ouidah. After the sale, they were chained on the neck and the hands. Their departure for another world started from the auction place, the slaves went towards the "forgetting tree" of for a last ritual.

There were the discoverers who came to find what was there, and soon after them the race for Africa began. At the end of the 19th century, a period of international rivalry, often dubbed the "Scramble for Africa", the European powers laid claim to African territories. The various claims of the nations were settled at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. At this time, most of the continent of Africa was divided into colonies: France claimed the majority of West Africa; Germany received much of the eastern territory that is now Tanzania; Belgium got the Congo region; Portugal retained control of Mozambique and Angola; and Britain received the remainder of the continent. Africans were not invited to attend the conference and therefore received not even an acre of their own land. When the colonial powers left Africa, it handed authority not to traditional rulers, who were viewed as having some legitimacy, but to a horde of literate hustlers who did well in the colonial bureaucracy and or colonial army, and started to make up the ruling class. The Europeans divided Africa; people who did not understand ethnic and tribal territories drew the present boundaries of countries. Tribes, clans and families were divided from each other; they became Kenyans, Ugandans, Tanzanians and the like.

Yours Truly,
Ferdinand Che.