posted February 22, 2006 08:34 PM              

Haunting images typecast Africa

Pictures of starvation, conflict and the fly-filled faces of children foster a sense of hopelessness and dependence on the continent that serves the purpose of wealthy states, says Kennedy Jawoko

Feb. 15, 2006. 01:00 AM

Last summer at the height of the "Make Poverty History" campaign, British television station Channel 4 broadcast a documentary titled The Empire Pays Back, in which it estimated Britain's debt to Africans, both on the continent and in the diaspora, to be in the trillions of pounds sterling.

But it is not only the United Kingdom that owes a debt to Africa and Africans.

Almost every Western European nation and the United States, which participated in and benefited from slavery and the 19th-century scramble for African territories and its wealth, owe the continent something.

Canada, a former settler colony, is guilty by association with Britain because of the trickle-down effects. But these facts are not mentioned in the anti-poverty and development debates that rage on in five-star hotels in western cities. Instead, the haunting images, shown on prime time, of starvation, conflicts, fly-filled faces of children and AIDS, help to maintain a sense of hopelessness and dependence, which serve the purpose of wealthy states.

Taking these images at face value, it is easy to believe that Africa is the face of a dying man (or woman) who needs to be put on a drip and rushed to ER for immediate surgery by the West. It also reinforces the stereotype that Africa contributes nothing to global coffers.

But as Antoinette Ntuli, director of the South-Africa based Health Link, argues, "In order to understand Africa's relationship with the developed world, it's important to look at figures which show that far from contributing nothing to the developed economies and taking everything in return, Africa's contribution to the developed countries could be considered as its own form of development aid."

The brain drain from Africa to the West is rampant. A 1999 study by the United Nations Development Program estimates that between 1985 and 1990, Africa lost 60,000 highly skilled workers to the West. That number has increased since then.

Although a sizeable number of highly skilled Africans leave the continent for political reasons, the Western media and governments have ignored the other important reason: Western-led development initiatives, in the name of structural adjustment programs introduced by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the 1980s demanding that developing countries open their markets to globalization and privatize their basic utilities in order to receive aid.

They also demanded state expenditures be tightened and currencies be devalued. It led to the end of free health care, education, and the privatization of water and electricity.

Ntuli asserts that the withdrawal of resources from education and health instigated a circle of deprivation in which working conditions and salaries deteriorated, triggering an exodus of staff and further weakening services.

The cutbacks for funding for academic institutions also contributed to the massive fleeing of the crème de la crème from Africa.

According to the 2000 U.S. census, immigrants born in Africa have the highest level of educational attainment in America when compared to other immigrant groups. The census figures show that 49 per cent of African immigrants 25 years and older possess a BA or higher compared with nearly 33 per cent of Europeans, 45 per cent of Asians, 6 per cent of Central Americans and 25 per cent of South Americans.

The impact of IMF/World Bank policies has stripped Africa of its social capital and created a vacuum of skills while conveniently providing jobs for Western expatriates.

According to one estimate, a third of Africa's skilled professionals in recent decades have been replaced with expatriates at a cost of $ 4 billion U.S. a year. Ironically, elite African immigrants have been reduced to filling low-paying jobs in the West.

This exodus from Africa is not new. It started during the period of the slave trade. Slavery created enormous wealth.

"It's clear that African (slave) labour was key to plantation expansion but in terms of the dollar value, I'm not sure how to quantify it," says Joey Power, a Ryerson University professor of colonial and post-colonial African history.

In his book, Africans and The Industrial Revolution in England, Joseph E. Inikori argues that international trade was crucial to the success of the revolution, in particular trade within the Atlantic Basin (between Africa, the West Indies, and the Americas); and that Africans on both sides of the Atlantic were central to this process, "both as consumers and producers."

For example, West African palm oil was central to the production of oil for industrial lubricants and soap during the Industrial Revolution.

Ali Mazrui, a leading African scholar at New York State University of Binghamton explains in his article titled, From Slave Ship to Space Ship that, after slaves, African minerals became the next major contributor to Western economies and technology.

Uranium from the Belgian Congo was part of the original Manhattan project, which produced the first atomic bombs. Other minerals, like cobalt, became indispensable for jet engines (and recently chips for cellular phones). Africa's minerals enriched other economies rather than Africa.

Nowadays, Africans, like their counterparts in other parts of the Global South, continue to contribute to developed countries' economies by exporting raw materials and providing cheap labour. In turn, the West lowers interest rates and inflates the value of its currencies, enabling consumers to pay peanuts for goods imported from the South.

The fact that Africans helplessly look on while Africa continues to grease the wheels of Western economies says a lot about the current generation of Africans.

However, a few prominent Africans, like the scholar Mazrui, continue to demand reparations.

Will the fallen empire and countries that benefited from the spoils of slavery and colonization pay back? Maybe it's too idealistic to ask them to, but the first thing to do is to apologize to Africans and stop the continuous barbarization of Africa.

Yes, some African nations have experienced untold suffering, both self-inflicted and imposed, but the West needs to wear sackcloth and do some serious soul searching.

The least it can do is to stop behaving as if Africa is cursed and doomed to be forever a panhandler. By "receiving foreign aid," Africa is simply getting back what was stolen (and is being stolen) from her.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kennedy Jawoko is a Ugandan third- year journalism student at Ryerson University.

posted February 23, 2006 02:03 AM            

As for that pic above.It's a crying shame what Africa goes through everyday.How many people out there think that the money from Live8 goes to support the people of Africa?.Sometimes I wonder.

posted February 23, 2006 02:52 AM              

I thought you were addressing black people only, when
you asked your question....so that's why I remained silent....

From my perspective on the soul brother, soul sister
question.....

I think it's a very deep connection that certain people
feel for each other.

It might be among certain races exclusively, though not
necessarily among blacks exclusively, as I know there's a
certain "soul" connection between Native Americans too
(as I explained to someone else on different thread...), but I
also think it can be between people of
all races....as sometimes there are certain people
with whom you feel a deep bond, no matter what
color they are...

...and they could be your "soul brother" or "soul sister."

And that's my definition...

posted February 25, 2006 09:37 AM            

Hawaiians:Braddah,bruddah

posted February 25, 2006 12:40 PM              

What did you think of the article?

posted February 28, 2006 11:54 PM              

By Melanie Eversley, USA TODAY
Tue Feb 28, 8:04 AM ET

The statue crowning the U.S. Capitol is called "Freedom." Yet it was a black slave who figured out how to coax apart the 19½-foot, 15,000-pound plaster statue so it could be cast in bronze and rejoined atop the dome.

Slaves, in fact, helped build much of the building and grounds of Congress, their owners earning $5 per month for their work. Ed Hotaling, a retired TV reporter in Washington, was among the first to widely publicize this in a report in 2000.

Following Hotaling's lead, a task force is planning a permanent memorial to the hundreds of slaves who helped build the Capitol from the late 1700s until the mid-1800s. The group will make recommendations to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Sen. Ted Stevens (news, bio, voting record), R-Alaska, president pro tempore of the Senate.

During February, Black History Month, task force members have been particularly focused on their role and have shared ideas by telephone as they prepare to meet.

The final cost and form of the memorial is still undetermined. It could be a site on the Capitol grounds or a living memorial such as an annual traditional African ceremony to honor the slaves.

"I don't think the story of the Capitol would be fully told until we have something depicting the lives of the people who helped build it," says Rep. John Lewis (news, bio, voting record), D-Ga., a student leader during the civil rights movement. Lewis and J.C. Watts, a Republican former member of Congress from Oklahoma, set up the task force.

Currie Ballard, a historian at Langston University in Oklahoma and a task force member who favors a living memorial, says it is fitting that the effort also inform people about the country's African- American heritage.

"It's so apropos that America says, 'Yes, a wrong has been committed, and let's educate people that black people have made a significant contribution to America,' " Ballard says.

Slavery in Washington was different from slavery in the rural South, says Walter Hill, senior archivist and African-American history specialist with the National Archives. Households had smaller groups of slaves, eight or nine, and the men and women often were skilled artisans. Owners hired out their slaves to earn money.

In the late 1700s, when a federal commission began planning to build the Capitol, it hired slaves to work alongside free black and white workers. The idea was to keep free workers from complaining about their conditions by bringing in competition, says historian Bob Arnebeck, an expert on the construction of the Capitol.

Decades later, Congress decided it wanted a Statue of Freedom placed atop a new Capitol dome, and commissioned Thomas Crawford, an American sculptor who lived in Rome, to create it.

Crawford initially wanted to model the statue's headdress after freed Roman slaves. But Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy who headed the construction of the Capitol as secretary of war, objected to the slavery reference. Crawford instead created a helmet with eagle head and feathers, according to the U.S. Capitol Historical Society.

Washington-area sculptor Clark Mills was hired to cast the statue - which arrived in five plaster parts from Italy - into bronze.

Mills' foundry foreman first put the plaster pieces together for exhibition, according to the Architect of the Capitol, but demanded more money to take it apart for the final casting. Mills refused and instead put Philip Reid in charge of the casting.

Reid was about 42, small in stature and respected for his work, according to C.R. Gibbs, a Washington historian. While working on the statue from 1860 to 1862, he figured out that by hooking a rope into an iron eye on its crown and instructing men to gently pull on it, the statue would come apart in its original sections, according to records at the Capitol.

Reid and others then were able to cast the parts in bronze.

In 1863, a year after President Lincoln freed Washington's slaves, the bronze parts were hoisted atop the Capitol and assembled. Some records indicate Reid played a role in that operation, too, although he would have been free by then.

Hotaling discovered the history of the slaves while researching the 200th anniversary of the Capitol.

"It was seeing history in the form of discarded old faded photostats lying on top of filing cabinets, and saying, 'My God, this is incredible. Why hasn't anybody done anything about it?' " Hotaling says.